August 2019: first target reached!

I have reached my first target, wow! More than 1,000 euro interest in a single month. One of the projects at Crowdestor paid the interest for the first 6 months at once, so next months a will be a lot lower. Hopefully it won’t take long before it stays above this target!

This month I will be in Tallinn, Estonia, and on September 16th and 17th I will visit several platforms. I have chosen Bondora, Crowdestate, EstateGuru, and Reinvest24. Do you have questions you would like to ask these platforms? Send them to me and I will ask them for you.

I have added 2 platforms to my portfolio: Robocash and Viainvest. I’ll introduce them shortly in this update, next month I’ll have some numbers for these new platforms. It always takes a while for the first interest to return.

Portfolio overview August 2019

Last month the interest payments I received totalled € 1,155.26 and my average rate of return over all platforms is 12.2%. The table below shows the details for each platform.

The XIRR column contains the annualized rate of return since my first deposit into that platform. Click on a column header to sort the table by that column, twice to reverse the sort order. I have an overview page for each platform, you can click on the magnifier glass to visit that page.

Interest income per month

Activities

To show you how little effort is involved when investion via crowdfunding and crowdlending I have added an overview of the manual actions in the last month:

I did check the platforms every now and then, but this was purely for fun. It wasn’t necessary to get these interest payments and return rates.

Platform updates

 Bondora

On September 17th I will be visiting Bondora in Tallinn, Estonia. If you have questions regarding them, or for them, send them to me and I’ll ask them during my visit.

This month you can win a prize at Bondora. Make a deposit and invest and you are automatically entered into the prize draw, the prize is amount you invested yourself.

Only one person can win though and Bondora has almost 40,000 investers, so the odds are against you. On the other hand, these odds probably beat most lotteries.

This month I withdrew 1,100 euro from Bondora, the amount I added after my initial investment of 5,000 euro. Not because I have problems with Bondora Go&Grow, I still like it, I wanted to invest in a few new platforms. The money was deposited into my own bank account super fast: the very same day!

My investments at Bondora returned € 27.00 last month, and my average return rate is now 6.8%.

When you register through this link you’ll receive a 5 euro bonus. Just give their Go & Grow option a try for a few months, and don’t try the other advanced options.

 Bulkestate

There are not a lot of new projects added on Bulkestate, but I don’t mind. I plan to invest a little into a new project each month. Most projects run for a year and pay interest at the end of the investment period, so investing a little into a new project each month will result in regular monthly interest payments after 12 months.

The is a group buying project available, which offers appartments in Riga with a 15-33% discount:

Prices range from 50,000 to 160,000 euros for a 50 to 260 square meter appartment in a lovely city. Some appartments have tenants with a rental agreement that still lasts for a few years, on the other hand income is income right?

My investments at Bulkestate haven’t returned any interest yet.

 Crowdestate

I’ll be visiting Crowdestate too this month, on September 16th. Place a comment or send me a message if you want to ask them something, and you’ll read the answers in my report.

This month one of the projects (Nord Company) should have repaid the principal. I received a message that this will be delayed for a month, as they will be paid by their customer in September. At the same time they confirmed that they will pay the penalty of 0.15% per day:

Another borrower has used its contractual right to extend the loan period by 4 months:

My investments at Crowdestate returned € 113.40 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.6%.

 Crowdestor

My interest graph for Crowdestor has changed significantly now that one project has paid the interest for the first 6 months at once (243 euro). From now on the monthly interest of 40 euro will be paid every month. I expect another peak in december, when another project pays the interest for their first 6 months.

These large payments also have an effect on my return rate. Receiving no interest for the first 6 months has lead to a XIRR that has been dropping steadily to 8.7%, and now all of a sudden that has been corrected to 13.7%.

7 new projects were added to Crowdestor in August, and most interest rates were around 15% (and even one project with a 19.5% interest rate). This is one of my favorite platforms, even though they do not have an auto-invest function. They have started a buyback guarantee fund in March, and 1-2% of the value of each new project is deposited into this fund. The value was projected to be around 100,000 euro at the end of 2019, but the value of the fund is already 109,000 euro. Not yet enough to cover the larger projects, but is is refreshing how transparent they are. You have to trust most platforms on their word that they can cover the buyback guarantee.

My investments at Crowdestor returned € 274.72 last month, and my average return rate is now 13.7%.

 Envestio

My investments at Envestio returned € 198.16 last month, and my average return rate is now 18.8%.

A new project was published on August 6: Fashion wholesale company financing. This would have been the perfect opportunity to test the auto-invest, if I did not set the minimum interest to 18%. And the interest rate of the new project was “just” 17.3%.. I did hear from several people that the auto-invest worked perfectly and even invested before the announcement email was sent.

The conclusion is that the auto-invest works faster than investing manually, so it gives you a higher chance to invest in a project. It took several hours for the project to become fully funded, so there the days projects were funded within minutes are thankfully over. Of course I changed the minimum interest rate of my auto-invest to 17%.

Envestio now plans to publish new projects less frequently, one per week. The projects will be a lot bigger than before though. Hopefully the interest rates will remain this high, in combination with the auto-invest this will keep us investors really happy.

When you register via this link you’ll receive a 5 euro bonus with your first deposit, plus a bonus of 0.5% over all your investments in the first 270 days.

 EstateGuru

I will be visiting EstateGuru on September 17th. If you have questions for EstateGuru you can send them to me, and I will ask them for you.

EstateGuru has a cashback action until September 30th: 0.5% when you invest 1,000 euro or more, and 1% bonus when you invest 10,000 euro or more. You do have to invest an a project that displays the cashback sign:

My investments at EstateGuru returned € 16.13 last month, and my average return rate is now 8.0%.

 Fast Invest

My investments at Fast Invest returned € 117.18 last month, and my average return rate is now 13.7%.

Fast Invest has published some numbers and the results of their investor feedback campaign. Average return rate has grown to 14.3% in 2018 compared to 12,78% in 2017. I’m glad others have complained too about the received interest not being reinvested automatically, but I would have thought more people would complain. Now you have to manually invest the received interest from time to time, which is a bit annoying. Who doesn’t want their investments to grow more rapid?

All respondents are happy with the buyback guarantee, which is not surprising as it already kicks in after just 3 days! This is really fast compared to other platforms. Fast Invest also offers MoneyBack guarantee: you can sell your investments at anytime, and you will get the invested principal back immediately. You will loose the interest of those loans though, but it is great for instant liquidity and the impact will be less if you mostly invest in short term loans.

 Funding Circle

My investments at the Dutch Funding Circle platform returned € 41.41 last month, and my average return rate is now 8.6%.

 Grupeer

Grupeer had added a new payment type: ‘Balloon’ payments. An addition to ‘Amortized’ (periodic payments during the investment term) and ‘Bullit’ (periodic interest payments, principal repaid at the end of the investment term), balloon payments will only pay the interest and principal at the end of the loan period. They say it is an improvement, but that’s mostly for the borrowers.. We investors want steady income and monthly interest payments, without having to wait for a year before interest is paid (at least I do).

Luckily you can filter on payment type in the auto-invest settings:

My investments at Grupeer returned € 89.08 last month, and my average return rate is now 14.7%.

 Iuvo

Not a lot of news about Iuvo, but they do have published their 2018 financial statement:

The revenue is five times as great as the year before, but there is still an operational loss of 350 thousand euros. Iuvo is partly owned by the loan originators that are active on the platform, so you could consider this part of their normal operational costs. It is a reason though to keep a close eye on this platform. The platform works like a charm, but we want longterm stability too.

My investments at Iuvo returned € 108.64 last month, and my average return rate is now 12.9%.

 Kuetzal

Not much news regarding Kuetzal either. There are 4 available projects, with interest rates from 10% (with buyback guarantee), 18%, 18.5% (with buyback guarantee), and 20.5%. What is surprising is that these projects are open for quite some time now. Projects on platforms such as Crowdestor and Envestio do not take weeks to be fully funded, so maybe investors are a bit more hesitant to invest here. The platform is relatively new, so it could be that investors still need to find this platform.

My investments at Kuetzal returned € 43.35 last month, and my average return rate is now 17.7%.

When you register via this link you’ll receive a 0,5% cashback bonus over all your investments in the first 180 days.

 Lender & Spender

Lender & Spender is a Dutch P2P platform that lets you choose between automatically reinvesting received interest and principal, or having it transferred to your own bank account each month. This month I have decided to enable automatic reinvestment again, so I keep funds in this platform and can keep using this platforms to compare to other platforms in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.

My investments at Lender & Spender returned € 8.87 last month, and my average return rate is now 3.9%.

 Mintos

Worrying news this month, as Mintos notified investors that all repayments and buyback for the Aforti Finance originator were immediately suspended. Apparently Aforti was behind with payments to the platform. At that time Aforti had loans totalling 2.2 million euro on the platform, spread over almost 22,000 investors. 57% of those loans were still regarded as current though.

Mintos expected the payments to be back on track soon, but the notification came as a surprise and left a lot of people worried for another loan originator bankruptcy. And for losing invested money, as it is the originators which give the buyback guarantee and not the Mintos platform itself.

Mintos sent updates every 1 or 2 days, which was very comforting. Investors still had a claim on the original loan between the borrower and Aforti. This only affected loans which were issued before January 2019, as Aforti stopped publishing new loans on the platform in January (Aforti loan portfolio on Mintos was 5.7 million euro in December).

On August 14th, 7 days after the initial notification, Mintos reported all payments were resumed. Apparently the reason was a difference between the Aforti and Mintos systems, which reported loans late while they were still current. This caused the buyback guarantee to come into effect, which resulted in even bigger differences between the two financial systems. One could ask how this is possible, but luckily we do not have to worry about it anymore for this originator as it doesn’t publish new loans anymore. Als all investors are happy: nobody lost any money.

It has been two months since Mintos introduced Invest&Access, so it’s time for an update. 69% of all investers that joined Mintos after the introduction has invested via Invest&Access. The average return rate is 12%, so that’s quite good for a portfolio option that promises quick liquidity. There are some limitations though, loan that aren’t current aren’t sold automatically. More than 80% of cash withdrawals happen within 24 hours, but it is unknown how many investers withdrew money. According to Mintos 49% percent invested more money within 2 months.

Mintos will be lowering the minimum investment amount for Invest&Access from 500 euro to 10 euro. On average the investors’ portfolios are spread over 203 loans, which all have buyback guarantee. It will be interesting to see how this will perform in the future, right now it looks promising.

My investments at Mintos returned € 57.95 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.5%.

When you register via this link you’ll receive a 1% cashback bonus over all your investments in the first 90 days.

 Robocash

One of the two new platforms I added to my portfolio this month is Robocash. The platform started in 2017, but the companies behind it have been active and profitable for 9 years in Spain, Kazakhstan, Russie, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Your money is invested automatically in loans with 12% interest, there is no manual mode. All loans have buyback guarantee which also pays interest, after 30 days. Minimum investment is 10 euro.

 TFG Crowd

This new platform (2018) is running quite wel, projects are funded frequently. One of the last projects was 110% funded in just 2 days! A new project was just added, with an interest rate of 16%. Another project, a real estate project in London, is coming soon with an interest rate of 17%. This platform is growing fast and interesting to keep an eye on.

My investments at TFG Crowd returned € 18.34 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.7%.

 Twino

My investments at Twino returned € 36.19 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.5%.

My XIRR is now 10.5% compared to 10.8% last month, but this is in the normal range of fluctuations. Monthly platform statistics are not updated on the Twino website yet, and there is no other news regarding Twino.

 Viainvest

Viainvest is the other platform I have added to my portfolio this month. Started in 2016, if offers loans with 11% interest from Georgia, Latvia, Poland, Russia, and Kazachstan. All loans are issued by companies from the same group that owns the platform, and buyback is offered for all loans after 30 days.

Next month I’ll add the numbers for Viainvest too.

And finally…

That was it for this monthly update. You can subscribe via the contact page and you’ll receive an email the moment a new update is published. Or just visit again next month, that’s up to you.

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Below you can also find the link to my previous posts, where you can find my tips and results of the previous months.