Table of Contents
April…
… such a great month in terms of sunshine and good temperatures have been. Birds are signing at dawn, seagulls are getting ready to attack tourists enjoying their fish and chip, people wear smiles while having nice conversations about their holidays’ plan, and bills are lower as the temperature is higher. Everyone seems happy, life is good, I love the spring feeling…
We had a nice sunny Easter break, where we visited (finally) the famous Stonehenge and spent one night in Bristol, we loved its independent spirit and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, such a well-designed piece of engineering, indeed. I think that up to this stage I have visited more places in the UK than in Spain, as it’s a hobby I’ve mainly been doing since my move to England!
By the way, we use Airbnb sometimes for our travels and short breaks, we paid only £25 for our stay in Bristol. We were hosted by a friendly Bulgarian couple and slept in a double room. When booking, I realised that Airbnb has a referral program, but it is only available for friends and family. I am not allowed to share the link on the blog, but if interested feel free to send me an email and I will forward it to you (reward is £25 travel credit).
The welcoming sunny spring and time off from work haven’t been the only causes of my good feelings this month though:
- I let go of some memories and thoughts I had stacked in my mind for several years by writing about them on the new Cashflow Cops’ HumansofFI series, after being arrested due to my bad financial habits 😉
- I interacted and met great new people on twitter and personal blogs.
- I earned my first side hustle income (£85) with match bettings (thanks weenie for introducing me).
- I’ve spent quality time with other more often.
And finally:
I haven’t lost any money and my investments haven’t dropped!
I am no longer a firebug and the fire brigade seem to have extinguished the fire out of my vault successfully, for now… – fingers crossed.
There was not much I needed to be content with in terms of monthly returns, even a 0% return on investment would have been happily accepted 🙂
Game Over
My trading account with Algotechs vanished completely on the 7th of April, funnily just after a few hours of posting my full investing I posted the final screenshot of my account on the forex peace army forum, in account value, LOL
I knew this would happen and that’s why I considered the whole lot as money on my last net worth and portfolio update. I am glad I did so, otherwise, I would have had a second consecutive month of
unrecoverable loses, which isn’t especially rousing!
The FCA seems to have updated its database thanks to the great work that The Financial Telegram has been doing. Details here.
For those that are curious about how this sort of financial organizations are structured from the background, visit The Financial Telegram, you will be surprised!
Finally, Algotechs Facebook Page and Website have been exterminated.
The GAME is OVER
via GIPHY
Blog changes
This month I have added a new page on my blog called FI-Ratio – PI with aims of controlling my journey towards FI better and make future updates a bit shorter. There, you will find a chart showing my main streams of passive income and how far I am towards my journey to financial freedom. It possibly needs some improvement though.
Lastly, before I show you the numbers, I’d like to mention that I had some issues with my blog and I had to recover my site from a backup, losing some valuable comments from previous post. I am just mentioning as I don’t want anyone to think I deleted them on purpose.
That being said, it’s time to show the numbers, which are not impressive but at least real! 🙂
Monthly Highlights
- Portfolio value: 74,822€ (+1.5 %)
- Monthly Transactions (Deposits – Withdrawals): -420 €
- Monthly earnings: 1418 €
- Passive income: 451 €(+25%)
My portfolio value has increased by 1.5%, although the withdrawn amount
is larger than the deposited. I am reluctant to continue adding more cash into my current P2P platforms, so I’d like to add a new one to the roaster but I am a bit unsure of what to choose. Possibly a new real estate platform?
Any recommendations?
Passive income
My passive income reaches a new high, YAAY! Mainly due to my latest investments on and Mintos. Income has been increasing generally since May-18 from all type of assets. Only real estate has been lagging over the last two months, mainly because of poor performance.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this chart evolves over time 🙂
My current level of passive income covers % of my average monthly expenses (1200 €). I’ve still got a long way to go but I can somewhat sense the smell of freedom!
More details on my new page – HERE
Monthly earnings by platform
Both of my stocks, AMAT and FSLR increased in value, raising my Trading 212 account over 5%. My ISA has been doing well too, growing +3.2%. Crowd Estate (+0.87%) stands on the first position of my real estate crowdfunding portfolio, and Envestio on my P2P/B lending one (+1.8%).
The GBP/EUR currency ratio stays at the same value – 1.16 as last month.
| Platform | Inception date | Value March | Transactions | Value April | Earnings | Return April | Cumulative Return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanguard (£) | 14/03/2018 | 29,672 (34,419 €) | +500 (580 €) | 31,124 (36,103 €) | 952 (1104 €) | 3.2 % | 9.6 % |
| Property Partner (£) | 21/01/2018 | 5,366 (6224 €) | 0 | 5,398 (6261 €) | 32 ( 37.1 €) | 0.6 % | 7.6 % |
| Housers | 26/03/2018 | 6,661 | 0 | 6,671 | 10 | 0.15 % | 4.2 % |
| Grupeer | 19/05/2018 | 12,003 | -1,000 | 11,160 | 157 | 1.3 % | 14.9 % |
| Mintos | 05/08/2018 | 5,158 | 0 | 5193 | 36 | 0.7 % | 6.5 % |
| Crowdestate | 16/08/2018 | 1,953.7 | 0 | 1,970 | 17 | 0.9% | 6.5 % |
| Envestio | 15/10/2018 | 5,163 | 0 | 5255 | 40 | 1.8 % | 9.3 % |
| Fast invest | 29/10/2018 | 1,054 | 0 | 1,066 | 55 | 1.1 % | 6.6 % |
| Trading 212 | 03/2019 | 1,084 € | - | 1,140 | 56 | 5.1 % | 5.1% |
| TOTAL | 73,722 € | -420 € | 74,822 € | -125,474 € | 1.9% | -43.1% * |
*Includes Algotechs loss
Vanguard
As usual, I paid myself £500 out of my payslip, which I used to purchase some USD Treasury Bond UCITS ETF (VUTY) shares.
Stocks seem to have been doing well lately, as my portion on shares increased up to 54% against 46% on bonds. I rebalanced back to my favourite 50/50 proportion, selling some shares from my S&P500 ETF.
So far this year:
- S&P 500 Index : +15%
- My 50/50 balanced Vanguard ISA: 7.5%
All charts and portfolio details – HERE
Vanguard is a portion of my little British Empire as an Expat
Property Partner
Property Partner has issued the last revaluation and property performance update. The total return since launch is 7.2%, decreasing 0.1% since the previous update. Assets under management increased by £12.3m in the six months to 31 March, reaching £135m. The House Crowd, which I think is its closest competitor stands at 100m and Property Moose at 14m (data taken from their websites)
Some of my property shares have gained in value while others located in London have dropped. My current valuation gains are now £33.58 (£41.96 last quarter). I expected a further drop after all the Brexit noise, so I am quite happy with that result for now.
Normally, the resale market after the revaluation is closed and reopens after a few days with updated trading prices. Agile investors can find good deals and sell or buy shares at a good price. In my case, one of my properties increased by 11% in but decided to keep it in my portfolio as it yields 7% (rental income) from the initial paid price, which is not bad.
The platform has won another award as the Best Property Investment Service 2019 in the Online Personal Wealth Awards (page 22-23), congratulations!
My rental income seems to be increasing month over month, £19.87 in April (£18.82 in March)
On my previous portfolio I mentioned that they charged me fees twice, that was a mistake and they refunded me the money soon after.
So, despite the decrease valuation gains, my portfolio has increased an overall of £32.
All charts and portfolio details – HERE
If you are a first-time reader and feel curious about the platform, you could check out my personal review and results after one year of investing here.
Property Partner is also a portion of my little British Empire as an Expat
Housers
Earning from Housers in April have been the lowest since April -18, getting only 10€ after fees and taxes. Three of my investments haven´t paid out for months now, which are all from the Italian and Portuguese markets… We’ll see how this ends up…
My 50 Estadio Nacional shares are still in the marketplace to sell and will be there possibly forever?
Grupeer
, I continue with my diversification process, withdrawing 1,000€ out of some existed loans in April. I’m getting closer to the 10,000€ target value I had first in mind. A while ago, the platform announced that it had reached profitability and would realise the financial results of 2018 in April. That has now been postponed to the end of spring according to my account manager. These results are especially interesting to me as is still the largest within my P2P portfolio.
It’s been now 12 months since I started investing with and my ROI after this period is 14.9%, can’t complain!
Mintos
If you asked me what’s the P2P platform that I trust the most out of my portfolio, my answer would be Mintos, and the principal reason is because of its transparency. The platform released the 2018 financial statements online recently, archiving another profitable year. However, the total comprehensive income in 2018 has decreased considerably from 2017 – 195K € (2017) against 13K € (2018). I know I am not a stock owner, but this decrease got me wondering whether I should be taking it as a negative symptom.
Is Mintos still growing or is it struggling with the increasing P2P marketplaces available to investors? Statistics in 2018 have in numbers (registered investors, loans funded, loan originators, …), so it seems Mintos is just doing fine, for now?
What caused the drop income? (I raised this one to account manager)
That’s literally their answer:
As a result of the significant growth of the marketplace, our revenue more than doubled from EUR 2.137 million in 2017 to EUR 4.647 million in 2018. We continued to invest into further expansion and future development. Even with all these investments, we remained profitable, with a net profit of EUR 13 thousand at the end of 2018.
The profit for the year includes charges of EUR 51 thousand (EUR 45 thousand in 2017) relating to the fair value of share-based payment benefits which are being recognized over the vesting period. By their nature, these payments are not reflective of ongoing trading performance and they are not considered part of the underlying results. Excluding these charges, the result is a profit of EUR 65 thousand for 2018 and EUR 241 thousand for 2017.
My thoughts
I don’t have a crystal ball and therefore can predict future profitability and stability, but so far, management has consistently proved to be taking the right path, so hopefully, their investment decisions for further expansion (banking account and debit card) will bring long term stability protecting their moat leadership? It’s hard to say, but I have the feeling that their future banking expansion will be well accepted and popular among investors, giving a competitive advantage against others P2P lending platforms.
This is only my personal opinion, what about yours?
Crowdestate
I didn’t deposit any extra money to get rid of the cash drag as I said previously. is my best real estate crowdfunding performer and the one I have been ignoring the most. Time to change that.
Envestio
, record earnings. I doubled the invested amount and as a result, I have doubled on returns, spot on.
Fast Invest
Do you enjoy watching straight lines?
How are my 2019 goals going?
On my first portfolio I set several goals I wanted to accomplish this year, however, after the last hit I’ve lost focus and decided to erase all my goals for 2019, except one. Things have changed quickly and I now have other preferences, like spending more time on researching or getting an extra income.
I am also doing this because I don’t want to add any type of pressure on myself for the time being, and just relax for a while until the algorithmic noise feels a bit more far away.
At some point, I’d like to write about the different emotional cycles that I have encountered after losing a big chunk of money, some day!
The goal I don’t/won’t remove
Earn 25€ and donate it by the end of 2019.
In April I had a blog income of 8.16€, adding a total of 13.16€, all out of my Mintos affiliate program. So far, two people have joined and invested money in the platform, thanks for contributing! As an exception and for my donation purposes, Trading C and Mintos have both authorised me to share my referral income publicly, so there it goes!
I need to earn at least 25€ before I can withdraw any funds.
Savings Rate
My expenses in April are £1249 (1448 €), which are slightly higher than my monthly average of 1200 €. This is because we’ve begun booking for our one week holiday in July and also had more expenses from our Easter break. With the little help of my extra income from match betting, I’ve still managed to to get a nice saving rate of 40%.
As we’ve still got some bookings to arrange, it will be difficult to keep my savings rate above 40% over the next months, so I better get cracking on my new side husle! 🙂
Until next time, I’ll see you around…
… and once again, thanks for reading! 🙂
You can follow me on twitter where I share some thoughts from time to time and connect with other like-minded people.
Disclaimer: Some of the links on this post are affiliate ones and some others are not. If you join to a platform using my affiliate links you will get a bonus or commission and so will I. I’m going to donate any commission I get throughout 2019 to a charity. You can read more about the purposes of this blog here and where this money is going to go here