In August 2019, income from the Peer to Peer Portfolio again took a small dip. The problem this time was all Funding Circle which once again hit my account with big default losses to the tune of £206.81. So instead of the usual £170+ income, I ended up with a £86 loss for the month.
On a more positive note, total GBP XIRR rose to the highest level yet from 5.73% in July to 5.85% in August, getting closer to that 6% level I one day hope to achieve.
EURO Portfolio Overview
XIRR for the Euro Portfolio this month increased to an overall 14.90%. I increased my investments a bit in Crowdestor and Envestio, and also added a new euro lender, Swaper. More on that later in the update.
Moving money
I moved some more capital from Funding Circle in August (just repayments, I didn’t actually sell anything yet but the sell order has been in for 60 days now). The plan I mentioned again last month to redistribute some of my Funding Circle capital along with capital from some of my other larger accounts is still in play. Luckily this month I didn’t need to move any GBP’s out of Mintos as the it appears MoGo car loans are coming up more on the secondary market so my auto-invest rules are picking them up from there and keeping me invested. I had to move £500 out of Lending Crowd as their loan flow has become significantly less and there are so many investors that it’s not possible to get the higher rates I like. Loanpad got most of the money moved, plus a bunch more.
August 2019 Lending Update
On to the individual updates!
First though, the usual “affiliation & cashback” disclaimer:
There are some great cashback incentives for new investors right now. I have listed them at the end of each lender update, or you can always see my cashback page for current offers on all lenders.
If you are considering investing in any of the lenders I write about, and you think my website is helpful in your research, please consider using my links as I can sometimes get a small commission from the lenders which costs you absolutely nothing and helps me continue to run the website.
You’ll notice the charts below are only showing 12 months of data. This is because the table was getting too big so moving forward I’ll just be using the floating 12 months which is really the most relevant data. You can always get a copy of all of my lending data by downloading a copy of the spreadsheet I use to track my investments.
You may also notice I have changed the spreadsheet and charts I use to display figures on my site. This is because I was having trouble with the plugin I was using (it wasn’t able to handle all the data I had in there) so I went to Google Sheets for everything and it seems to be working better. If you experience any issues with viewing charts or sheets on the site please let me know so I can fix it.
Monthly GBP Lender Tables (only last 12 months shown,). CLICK TO ENLARGE.
I sent just another £100 over to Ablrate this month to pick up a new loan that came in at the beginning of the month. Interestingly there were another 3 loans in August which was the most I think I’ve seen from Ablrate in a month. I didn’t bother with the other 3 as I had the capital tied up elsewhere.
XIRR jumped back up to 14.48% in August from 13.58% in July, so again back to beating their target rate. You’ll note that the XIRR on Ablrate is huge (for a UK lender). 14%+ which I believe is mostly due to some secondary market loans I bid on. When bids are accepted lower than the original loan value on the secondary market, the XIRR goes up to reflect this.
Here are a few of the new loans that came in this month.
Here are my current investments.
Ablrate Signup & Cashback Offers
Ablrate offer an exclusive cashback offer to readers of The Obvious Investor – when you sign-up with Ablrate and receive 0.5% cashback on your first investments.
Assetz Capital have just become my top lender by return value in August, just taking over Funding Circle because of the bad debt hit. Assetz have returned a total of £2,040.47 since I began with the public portfolio.
I really would like to send over more money to Assetz Capital and I will once I sell out some of my Funding Circle account. Assetz really are one of the top lenders in the UK right now. Asset security and great return rates can’t be beat!
On top of all that, Assetz Capital has launched a great new cashback offer for September! £150 cashback for investing £5,000. Here are the details;
Open to new customers to the Assetz Capital platform from 1st September
Customers must complete their registration by midnight on 30th September
They must invest £5,000 or more by midnight on 7th October
If they keep the funds invested for 12 months, they will receive £150 cashback
Soooo, Funding Circle….. After my disgust with the defaults last month, Funding Circle again hit me with some more defaults in August, £206.81 to be precise. Not as bad as the £251.45 hit last month, but still not pretty. This really once again skewed the overall total GBP portfolio income keeping it below £1,000 for the month. Actual XIRR also took another hit from 6.50% to 5.96%. I withdrew another £1,000 over August which just came from repayments, nothing sold yet. The number of loans marked as “Late” increased again on top of the defaults from 23 last month to 27 in August. Not a good sign.
Now, this might sound silly but I’m not freaking out yet. Once I’ve sold half of my holdings (which are now taking an average of 94 days to sell), I’ll reevaluate and see how Funding Circle’s financials are looking then. They raised £300 million in their IPO last year, and they still have most of that left in cash as I understand it, so they are still looking quite healthy as a company. You can read their latest Annual Report here if you need something to read.
So, although they are experiencing high defaults, as a company I believe they are still strong. If what I’m reading about the defaults is true (they are coming from a lapse in credit criteria because of their IPO, trying to get turnover up to boost the value), things may pick up in a few months. True though if FC were a smaller company, I might be a bit more concerned.
For anyone considering investing in FC, I would suggest you wait and see how things pan out. However if you’re a new investor and do still want to diversify with Funding Circle, they currently have a cashback offer for new investors: Invest £2000 and receive £50 Amazon Gift Certificate. Click here for more info. Use this link to qualify for the cashback.
Lenders like Growth Street make a lot of sense for anyone listening to the news about possible recession and all the negativeness out there right now in my opinion. The ability to make a short term investment, but have the ability to get your capital back in 30 days at 5.3% annual return if you get nervous, or if the economy pulls back and looks like recession and you want to lower your exposure to P2P.
August was just like every other month with Growth Street. Nothing to do but log in and check the account once per month and see how much income I’ve made so I can enter it here on my site for the monthly P2P update.
XIRR rose a again this month to 5.14% (up from 4.94%) bringing the number ever closer to the 5.30% target rate they suggest. I have no doubt the account will hit this target rate in the next couple of months. 5.30% is really very good for only having your money tied up for 30 days at a time.
I didn’t send any more money over to Kuflink this month. I decided I wanted to increase my Loanpad investment more so I sent capital over there instead. Kuflink income was a little better this month at least, getting back in line with normal income at £47.31 which is the second highest month’s income with them.
XIRR normalized again after the dip in July going from 5.65% to 6.15% in August.
Kuflink have a wonderful cashback offer right now which is well worth taking advantage of if you are thinking of investing with them. It equates to 10% at the lower level, and 5% cashback when you get to £5000. Not half bad for asset secured loans with these kind of low LTV’s.
Landbay are still plodding along. Nothing to see here. XIRR is now almost right at the target rate of 3.49% sitting at 3.45%. Landbay is about the closest to a bank deposit in my opinion because of the safety factor. Of course bank level (=low) annual returns come along with that safety (see my Landbay Review for more info).
For the said-to-be-safer option for your money, or just for some diversification, Landbay currently have an incentive for new investors: £50 cashback when investing £5000 or more. Click here for more information. Taking this cashback offer increases your income on this investment by 1% for the first year which helps.
One of the reasons I’m not freaking out about the Funding Circle defaults right now is because of what happened with Lending Crowd earlier in the year. If you remember, they were seeing a high rate of defaults, but they got it back in hand and now loans in arrears and defaults are pretty much exactly what is expected. There always seem to be between 7 and 12 loans in arrears (10 this month) and typically around half of them catch up with payments and become current again. This is credit to the Lending Crowd customer management team and how they work with their customers. In fact, many investors are noticing this and now Lending Crowd loans are much in demand. I had to move £500 out of my Lending Crowd account this month because I couldn’t get it invested. Loan flow has been less over the last couple of months, I’m thinking because of the holidays. I’ll keep watching and when it increases again, you can bet I’ll be sending over more capital to bid on those nice, high rate loans.
XIRR jumping once again this month from 7.60% to 7.91%. My targeted annual return is sitting at 8.02% while what Lending Crowd say is my actual return is sitting at 8.22%.
If you’re new to Peer to Peer lending and would like a shot at some higher rates; take a look at one of the last P2P lenders that still allow bidding on loans so you can get the best rates! Lending Crowd have Up to £400 cashback for £10,000 investment. Click here for more info. See my Lending Crowd Review if you would like to read about bidding on loans.
What is there to say about one of the safest lenders, Lending Works. Constantly deliver what they promise. XIRR keeps slowly climbing from 5.60% last month to 5.81% in August. Lending Works own target numbers for my account stayed the same 6.21%. The reason for the discrepancy between XIRR and the target rate is that the 5 year target rate was only 6.00% when I first invested. Since then it’s grown to 6.5% so my repayments are getting reinvested at the higher rate. But much of my original investment is still at the 6% rate so it will take a while for it to grow to the current target.
You really can’t go wrong with Lending Works. Great rates with the safety of the best provision fund in the business, the “Lending Works Shield“. There’s a reason they are one of my largest lending accounts with almost £32k invested and I’m even considering adding some more.
If you decide to invest with Lending Works (which if you’re getting in to P2P, is a sensible idea), they still have the 6.5% available on the 5 year investment.
I increased my investment in Loanpad again by £2,000 in August. I’m still watching them but I really like thelow LTV’s on ALL of their loans (see screenshot below), plus their loan originators 20% – 60% “skin-in-the-game“. Just as important is the ability to withdraw capital with just 60 days notice on the premium account and instantly on the classic account.
The XIRR climbed significantly to 6.56% in August. That’s on a target return suggested by them of 5.00%. This is because the Loanpad target rate on the account is the actual rate you get, not taking in to consideration investing all of the returns for the effects of compounding. As opposed to the AER (Annual Equivalent Rate) given by most other lenders (both Peer to Peer and Banks/Building Societies) which estimates the rate based on all of the interest being invested back in to the account.
That being said, almost 2% above the target rate is more than expected, and I think it has more to do with the large increase in capital and timing. I do not expect that XIRR to be the norm. I’m expecting Loanpad XIRR to settle somewhere around 5.5% realistically, which I will be totally happy with.
I know I do this every month but I wanted to once again point out the low LTV loans I’ve been automatically invested in. See below, around 5%? Very unlikely anyone will ever lose any capital with asset security like that.
If you’re going to invest with Loanpad (which you should definitely consider if you’re building your P2P portfoio). They have a cashback incentive right now – £50 bonus if you invest into a lending account a minimum of £1,000 within 4 weeks post registration and keep this invested for 365 days; or £150 bonus if you invest into a lending account a minimum of £10,000 within 4 weeks post registration and keep this invested for 365 days.
Luckily this month I didn’t need to move any GBP’s out of Mintos as the it appears MoGo car loans are coming up more on the secondary market so my auto-invest rules are picking them up from there and keeping me invested. The Mintos supplied target rate rose just 1 pip from 9.70% to 9.71% and XIRR rose from 9.09% in July to 9.52% in August. No complaints here about that 🙂
Unfortunately Mintos are saying that UK residents can no longer invest in Mintos loans for now. Hopefully that will be ratified soon. As far as I understand it, Mintos are still talking with the FCA to supply loans to UK residents.
So if you’re a UK resident, hold your horses for a few weeks and hopefully Mintos will be available to UK residents.
If you are NOT a UK resident, Mintos have a wonderful cashback bonus, one of the best in fact. Mintos offer 1% of the value of your investments cashback for the first 90 days you are investing with them!
It appears that RateSetter rates were still hovering around 6% for most of August. Even though the screenshot below says 5.6% on the 5 year, that’s just an average for the month. I have my reinvestment rate set at 6.0% and I am getting very little cash drag so that’s really good news. My XIRR climbed above 5% for the first time to 5.16% which I’m happy with. When I first got in my rate was 5.2% so most of my 5 year investments are still at that level but getting reinvested at 6%.
The rates were down for a few months but for the last few they’ve been pushing above 6% which is very good for a large lender like RateSetter with a good provision fund.
As you can see below, the averages have been climbing in the 3 year but stayed flat in the 5.
RateSetter is an excellent option for diversification and safer lending with a big lender. RateSetter’s very well funded provision fund doesn’t hurt either. As rates are up around 6.0% again, now is a good time to get in if you were thinking about it.
RateSetter is offering £100 cashback for investing £1000 for a year (10% ON TOP OF standard returns, so even if you only want to invest £1k, you’ll get 16%+ back for the first year), it is definitely worth considering, especially if you can get in at the 6%+ level.
I sent another £500 over to Unbloted in August as they still seem to be able to soak up capital. My newly found method for getting capital lent out faster is still working, however it did take a little longer in August. It took about 2 weeks to get the whole £500 lent out but I’m seeing that with most lenders now, I think because of the holidays, new loans seem to be less available.
XIRR made a big jump in August from 7.85% in July to 8.45% in August keeping Unbolted as my second highest GBP account based on XIRR second only to Mintos (not including Ablrate which is mostly from secondary market loans and not sustainable I don’t imagine, although they should still be high. I just need more data from them before I can crown them the top). See my Unbolted Review for more information on how I’m getting more capital lent out.
Still getting reasonable diversification on the loans.
Although there is no cashback on Unbolted right now, they have started a bonus interest rate campaign on their Working Capital Loans. You can read more about it here.
Euro Portfolio Lenders
I added one more Euro lender in August: Swaper. You can read more about them below. I also sent another €1k to both Crowdestor and Envestio. I’m still looking at possibly adding some other Euro lenders to the portfolio, but still doing my research.
XIRR numbers from the Euro Lenders keep getting better. Up again to 14.90% in August from 13.15% in July.
Total income in euros for July was €418.65. The highest month yet, which should be expected since I added significantly more investment capital over the last couple of months.
Monthly EURO Lender Tables (only last 12 months shown,). CLICK TO ENLARGE.
I started to see some more loan payments kicking in from Crowdestor in August. XIRR jumped from 11.73% in July to 13.78% in August. Some of the loan payments still haven’t kicked in yet so hopefully that will rise even more down the road.
I sent over another €1,000 and picked up 2 more loans and reinvested the interest which had come in.
Here is a list of my current investments with the last 2 loans made in August:
See Screenshots & Detailed Monthly Updates From My Envestio Account
Envestio still appear to be the Euro Peer to Peer investors babe. Loans are filled up in just a few minutes of launch which makes them difficult to get. In August however they finally released their auto-invest feature, so I had to send over some money to give it a go. I sent over €1k and set the auto-invest at a maximum of €500. Sure enough a loan came in and I got invested at €500 without having to touch a thing! In August I wrote a review on Envestio where I describe the auto-invest feature if you’re interested.
Unfortunately loan flow has been very slow again in August, just like with some of the UK lenders. Hopefully that will be rectified after the holidays and I can pick up some more Envestio loans.
XIRR jumped to a huge 17.29% in August now some of the newer loan payments are kicking in. That’s up from 14.18% in July.
Grupeer loans are still coming in, and because of the auto-invest feature, I haven’t touched anything on this account since my first investment with them. I’m trying to lean more and more to this type of account with auto-invest. Even though their returns are (only, haha) around 13%, it’s worth the extra few percent for the lower hassle factor of not having to vet loans.
XIRR jumped again this month to 13.86% from 12.06% in July.
I’ll be putting some more euros in to Grupeer soon to diversify a little more. Hopefully I’ll have enough information on them to do a full review soon, they are next on the list.
I’m not going to waffle on about how much I love Mintos this month as I know it’s irritating many potential new UK Mintos investors who can’t open an account right now.
My Mintos euro lending target rate rose to 13.26% in August from 13.24% in July. XIRR jumped this month as well to 15.55% from 14.47% last month. This is still more than the Mintos target. I think this is because Mintos is not taking into account that most of the short term loans are with the loan originator Varks who actually pay interest on delayed loans until they hit the buyback guarantee. Either way I’m not complaining about that.
If anyone is interested in how I have my auto-invest setting with Mintos, I did a more in-depth description in last months update.
Remember, if you are new to Mintos, they have a wonderful cashback bonus, one of the best in the business in fact.
I like RoboCash as it is another account which requires zero time to mange.
Still no problems with the overdue loans. There is always quite a high percentage of loans late, and they just get bought back each day by the buyback guarantee. It does not affect the returns on the account at all.
They are currently showing XIRR returns of 13.20% right now, up from 12.03% last month and quite a bit higher than the 12.00% target RoboCash suggests. No complaints here about that. It seems that most of the euro lenders seem to under promise and over deliver on the returns which I really like.
No cashback offers with RoboCash right now but if you’re interested in investing with them, please use this link so they know I sent you.
Swaper are a new lender added to my portfolio this month. They are much like Grupeer and Robo.Cash as far as auto-invest loans offering around the 12% – 13% target income levels. They have a good reputation with the European Peer to Peer community, however until recently I have held off investing with them because I was reading about investors seeing a lot of cash drag (un-invested funds). Recently however it seems to have been better so I decided I would give them a go.
I’m not going to write too much about Swaper here as I want to watch how they do. I sent over just €2000 initially to see how it gets distributed. I’ll report on Swaper with more detail in coming months.
Another month passed and my Peer to Peer lending portfolio keeps growing slowly. I hope to get back to the £1,000+ per month income on the GBP portfolio, and €500+ from the euro platform in the coming months. Only time will tell though and the GPB income may stay low for a while depending on how long it takes me to sell out some of my funds from Funding Circle and invest the capital elsewhere.
You can always go back and look at the previous updates for more details on why I’m investing in these companies and my ongoing lending experiences.
Finally I hope the month of September goes well for everyone. I wish you all the best of luck with your investments. I will update you on my P2P Portfolio investments around the same time next month.
Thanks for reading my blog! Please feel free to comment below if you have comments, questions, criticisms or suggestions. You can also email me if you prefer. I love feedback!
Please note, most of the cashback offers on this site are for new lenders to a company. I suggest you do your own research before investing as cashback offers change daily.
This page is presented for informational purposes only. I am not a Financial Adviser and therefore not qualified to give financial advice. Please do your own research and make your own investment decisions. Do not make investment decisions based solely on the information presented on this website.
* My opinions, reviews, star ratings and risk ratings are based on my personal investing experience with the company being reviewed. These ratings are personal opinions and are subjective.
** Some of the links on this website are affiliate referral links. When you click on these links, I can sometimes receive a commission, at absolutely no cost to you. This helps me to continue to offer new reviews & monthly portfolio updates here on my website. I don’t receive commissions from all platforms and it has no effect on my ongoing opinions on investments & investment platforms. Income from my investments and capital preservation are my main motivations.
Platforms reviewed on this website I am currently investing with, or I have invested with in the past. You can see with full transparency on my Portfolio Returns page which assets & platforms I am invested with (or have previously been invested with) at any point in time. I am not paid a fee by any of the companies to write reviews, so the reviews are unbiased and purely based on my own personal experiences.
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5 thoughts on “P2P Lending Portfolio Update For August 2019”
Nice reading your blog ! Keep it up! Just started to “share” our financial independence journey and i too invest in P2P. Straight from Portugal!
Mark
Thanks for the message!
Good luck on your FI journey 🙂
Keep up the good work. Let me know if I can help with anything.
Jon
I enjoy this every month. Since I started reading your blog I’ve put 20k into Lending Works, topped up Ratesetter to 7k and popped 10k into Growth St, using your links I might add. I chose Lending Works as the IFISA / 20k based on your advice it is one of the safest (plus other info sources).
I already had an account with Lending Crowd, and setup the auto invest but only 4% has been lent. The amount is quite small – £500 – so perhaps this is causing the drag?
I’m a bit stuck on Euro lenders, as the Pound is not fairing well against the Euro which is limiting my progress right now.
I did open up an account with IUVO but the exchange rate stopped me in my tracks.
I opened an Ablrate account, but as yet have lent nothing. I like their blockchain plans for the back-end, all very impressive, but the platform left me baffled. I just don’t know what loan to choose and did not proceed. Autoinvest would help – unless I missed it.
According to my spreadsheet, my overall average P2P yield is 5.3% – which is not bad at all but could improve!
The overall yield on my entire portfolio is 1.78%. I sometimes imagine if this could be prodded up to 5 or 6% one day, giving me much more income now in retirement at 40+
Cheers!
Mark
Hey Jon,
Thanks for the comments! I’m happy you’re finding the site useful.
On Ablrate, what I did was buy most loans off of the secondary market (you go in and bid on them). Basically all I did was to make sure I only bid on one loan from each borrower (some borrowers have several loans). I did some minor research (just googled the company and read what came up), and also read the remarks on the loans from the admins to make sure they hadn’t missed any payments etc. Then looked at asset security etc. to make sure that made sense. Then I just bid a little less than the amounts being offered on each loan I chose. Took a while but most of the bids got filled.
5.3% not bad at all on the GBP P2P, and I would suggest just giving it a few months on the Euros. I think after we get Brexit out of the way, the exchange rate should get a bit better.
1.78% on your total portfolio certainly isn’t great, but should just about match inflation. What are you investing in to get such low rates? I have most of my money invested in my Growth Portfolio and that averages a little under 10% per annum.
Good luck with everything and let me know if I can help with anything else.
Cheers,
Mark
Jon
I have 47% (it says here) of the overall portfolio invested in GBP cash @ 1.5% (and a smaller amount @ 2.4%). It’s FSA (FCA?) protected, unlike P2P as you know. Sometimes I wonder if Growth St looks a reasonable non-FSA option, with the short maturity, instead of these poor rates.
I have some funds / shares @ 4.5 & 5.6% average yield. SIPP shares @ 4.3% yield.
I have gold yielding nothing (!) but an essential GBP hedge, especially in the last 3 years.
Comments are closed.
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Nice reading your blog ! Keep it up! Just started to “share” our financial independence journey and i too invest in P2P. Straight from Portugal!
Thanks for the message!
Good luck on your FI journey 🙂
Keep up the good work. Let me know if I can help with anything.
I enjoy this every month. Since I started reading your blog I’ve put 20k into Lending Works, topped up Ratesetter to 7k and popped 10k into Growth St, using your links I might add. I chose Lending Works as the IFISA / 20k based on your advice it is one of the safest (plus other info sources).
I already had an account with Lending Crowd, and setup the auto invest but only 4% has been lent. The amount is quite small – £500 – so perhaps this is causing the drag?
I’m a bit stuck on Euro lenders, as the Pound is not fairing well against the Euro which is limiting my progress right now.
I did open up an account with IUVO but the exchange rate stopped me in my tracks.
I opened an Ablrate account, but as yet have lent nothing. I like their blockchain plans for the back-end, all very impressive, but the platform left me baffled. I just don’t know what loan to choose and did not proceed. Autoinvest would help – unless I missed it.
According to my spreadsheet, my overall average P2P yield is 5.3% – which is not bad at all but could improve!
The overall yield on my entire portfolio is 1.78%. I sometimes imagine if this could be prodded up to 5 or 6% one day, giving me much more income now in retirement at 40+
Cheers!
Hey Jon,
Thanks for the comments! I’m happy you’re finding the site useful.
On Ablrate, what I did was buy most loans off of the secondary market (you go in and bid on them). Basically all I did was to make sure I only bid on one loan from each borrower (some borrowers have several loans). I did some minor research (just googled the company and read what came up), and also read the remarks on the loans from the admins to make sure they hadn’t missed any payments etc. Then looked at asset security etc. to make sure that made sense. Then I just bid a little less than the amounts being offered on each loan I chose. Took a while but most of the bids got filled.
5.3% not bad at all on the GBP P2P, and I would suggest just giving it a few months on the Euros. I think after we get Brexit out of the way, the exchange rate should get a bit better.
1.78% on your total portfolio certainly isn’t great, but should just about match inflation. What are you investing in to get such low rates? I have most of my money invested in my Growth Portfolio and that averages a little under 10% per annum.
Good luck with everything and let me know if I can help with anything else.
Cheers,
Mark
I have 47% (it says here) of the overall portfolio invested in GBP cash @ 1.5% (and a smaller amount @ 2.4%). It’s FSA (FCA?) protected, unlike P2P as you know. Sometimes I wonder if Growth St looks a reasonable non-FSA option, with the short maturity, instead of these poor rates.
I have some funds / shares @ 4.5 & 5.6% average yield. SIPP shares @ 4.3% yield.
I have gold yielding nothing (!) but an essential GBP hedge, especially in the last 3 years.