Investments are steadily increasing | Portfolio October update

Investment changes in October

This month I invested mostly into peer to peer, a little bit into startups, and actually did not buy any new ETFs, although I do have an automatic payment set to my bank account from where I buy them, but I am waiting until the amount there is a bit bigger so the costs become relatively smaller

Legislation changes Belgium

There have been a few legislation changes in Belgium since we had a new Flemish Government. Firstly the tax withdrawal disappears that you get when you buy your first house. I actually already own an apartment, and my plan was always to buy a second place so it will not really affect me.

The second change is that you will no longer be able to loan the full amount if you buy a new house. Actually you can only loan 90%. Its still very high but I am hoping that this will cause the housing prices to drop.

My Portfolio

There have been no shocking movements in my Portfolio. My peer to peer investments have continued to grow making them about 30% of my current portfolio. I also invested in additional startups (100 EUR each), but that is not a major investment.

Lets look into more detail for each of these investment types shall we.

Peer to Peer

Name	Inception date / start of tracking	Current Value	% Gain / Loss	Unrealized Profit / Loss
Peer2peer Portfolio	30/09/2019	20030	-0.05%	-10

In my Portfolio I invested in 9 p2p sites. Grupeer and Mintos have the biggest shares, followed by Crowdesector

Compared to last month Grupeer has gained a bigger share as did Crowdesector, mainly at the expense of Mintos (only lost percentage, I did invest extra there). Newcomer is Envestio, where I wanted to invest for a while but I had to wait for projects showing up.

It hasn’t been easy to invest 20.000 EUR of my money in peer to peer lending, but peer to peer lending has been around for a while now, so I decided to trust some part of my investments there.

Investment strategy:

• Preferably Short term loans (24 months max), so I can still get my money out in a reasonable time if needed
• Where investing in consumer loans always with buy back guarantee or some insurance. In this case try to spread over as many loans as possible (e.g. 1000 euro invest 10 EUR in 100 loans)
• Some sites you can invest in real estate or businesses then try to make sure there is always some guarantee behind it, preferably from the site. Limit investments in these to 100 – 200 EUR per loan to spread as much as possible.
• Spread over multiple sites, but at the same time do not sign up at every site you can find
• Try to automate investing where these sites allow it

Passive income

What we can see now is that most sites are starting to give a passive income.

The big difficulty was NeoFinance. Having to pay a 155 insurance for the loans I got there has been an expensive matter. Additionally I was charged taxes, which is odd since I don’t live in the country they are located and the amounts are just to small, so I wrote about this. At this rate it would take me a year to get the investments back. It makes me doubt both to re-invest there and I will consider to even pull out the money inthere.

	September 2019	October 2019
Crowdestor	0.55	14.54
Grupeer	2.1	39.32
Kuetzal	0	6.16
TFGCrowd	0	3.27
Mintos	-0.77	28.1
NeoFinance	-155.95	-142.83
PeerBerry	0.41	19.03
Monethera	7	15.33
Envestio	0	7.86
Total profit	-146.66	-9.22
Passive income this month	0	137.44
ROI this month		0.83%

Detailed list of platforms I have invested in

Grupeer

• Good auto-invest strategy options
• Option to invest only in buy-back guaranteed loans
• Decent return (up to 13,5% at time of writing)
• Two factor authentication will be implemented early next year

Kuetzal

• High returns (16-20%)
• More risk
• No buy back guarantee
• Make sure you invest in things that are at least backed by the lender, such as real estate
• Your account is only protected by a password (the reason I only invested 100 euro here, and won’t invest extra for the time being)

Mintos

• Older, platform, so more trustworthy
• All loans have buy back guarantee
• Secondary market
• Good auto invest options
• A little lower returns (around 10-12%)
• Two factor authentication

Neo Finance

• Quite a new platform
• Very high yields (up to 26%)
• Option to buy some guarantee for a part of your interest
• However the guarantee is quite expensive and will take you a long time to pay back
• You pay that guarantee right away, so in the short term you will have a loss
• They charge taxes on your interest
• Despite being quite new there is a lot of options
• Google login accepted

Monothera

• High interest rates (15-22%) usually with a collateral
• Two factor authentication

Crowdesector

• High rates
• Buy back fund but quite small atm (145.000)
• So High risk
• Google / Facebook authentication
• No Auto invest

Peerberry

• Good rates (around 12-13%)
• Good Auto invest
• No Two factor authentication (but this is on the roadmap and has a high priority)

Envestio

• You can invest in real estate or businesses
• First site I found like this with an auto invest option
• Projects are filled very fast

ETFs

Name	Inception date	Current Value	% Gain / Loss	Unrealized Profit / Loss	Average (Yearly)
Vanguard S&P 500	30/09/2019	1398.76	-0.45%	-6.3

My ETFs did not change much, I have not bought extra to my investments in Vanguard SP 500 Didivend ETF remain stable for now.

I currently have an automatic transfer of 350 EUR / Month that I could use then every few months to buy some new ETFs. I do think of increasing this number as 350 EUR is not so much..

Change compared to September

	September 2019	October 2019
Vanguard S&P 500	1389	1395
Divident Vanguard S&P 500		3.76
Total	1389	1398.76
Profit / loss this month		9.76
ROI this month		0.7%

Keytrade Funds

Name	Inception date	Current Value	% Gain / Loss	Unrealized Profit / Loss	Average (Yearly)
Keyplan	30/04/2016	20069	10.25%	2057	3.08%

My keytrade portfolio has grown a little but generally remains stable. I invested 25 EUR additionally, and the rest grew naturally as the stock market increased.

Change compared to September

	September 2019	October 2019
Keyplan	20002	20069
Total	20002	20069
Profit / loss this month		0.2%

Retirement funds

Name	Inception date / Start of tracking	Current Value	% Gain / Loss	Unrealized Profit / Loss	Average (Yearly)
KBC Pension funds	30/03/2013	7788	16.27%	1267	2.47%
First job Pension plan	01/01/2019	1467
Second job Pension plan	01/01/2019	592
Third job Pension plan	01/01/2019	12084

Change compared to September

My Retirement Funds has not moved much (as expected), but did grew a little bit

	Sept 2019	October 2019
Current job pension funds	12686	12676
First job pension funds	1467	1467
Personal pension funds	7704	7788
Total	21857	21931
Increase / Decrease this month		74
ROI this month		0.34%

Startups

One startup I invested in no longer qualified for the Tax Incentive. I had invested 300 EUR there. I decided to get a refund and spread it over 3 different startups: O’Live, Immo IQ, and Neutraceutical food patent company. My current plan there is to invest 100 EUR in most startups I see there, in order to get the maximum spread over my investments, and this for 1-2 startups / month.

For more details on what startups I invested in check out my startups blog post.

Wins / losses this month

• My passive income has reached 141 EUR this month
• My Funds / ETFs / Pension funds increased by 121 EUR
• My Investment Portfolio grew with 3706 EUR

Recap on my Plan for the remainder of the year

• Passive income of 100 EUR / Month – I set this goal for this year, and now I realize it was not ambitious enough. Nevertheless I met it

• Continue investments in Startups

• Search for a long term investment (= House) , at Risk due to Tax changes at the Government side
• Invest 4k in ETFs is at risk right now
• I wanted to buy off my study years as working years, but due to huge delays at the Belgian government side this goal is now at Risk
  

What is next?

I will continue to make peer to peer my most important investment but at the same time remain to invest in ETFs and Startups as well.

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