In January 2020, the GBP Peer to Peer lending sector was relativity quiet with no major announcements or platform news. Not so for the Euro lending platforms with no less than two of them going out of business and being labeled as “scams”. I’m not so sure I agree 100% with that notion as I feel it was more like a social media witch hunt that caused a lot of the problems, but more on that later in the Euro Lending section of the post.
My GBP P2P income was down from December, as it was hit once again by Funding Circle Losses. XIRR fell a little again in the GBP portfolio because of this, and as I continued the rebalancing process started in December. If you take a look at my main Peer to Peer Lending Returns Page, you’ll notice how the distribution between platforms is getting more even. The Euro portfolio also suffered because I pulled half of my money out of Mintos (to pay for new windows in my house in Portugal), and then with the problems in the Euro sector, there was less income from there.
New Lenders
As mentioned last month, I’ve been looking at new lenders in both the Euro and GBP sector and I actually added one new lender in each. Octopus Choice in the GBP sector and PeerBerry in the Euro market. More on each of them further down the post. I am also looking at a couple more lenders and intend to continue adding them in order to further diversify my capital.
Moving On
If you would like to see historical individual Peer to Peer lender account screenshots from my lending accounts etc. You can click on the links next to each Peer to Peer lender update and go to the account page where you can see balances and what I’m actually invested in.
For the current month, I have added thumbnails of account screenshots below the account title. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.
GBP Portfolio Update
Income from the GBP Peer to Peer lending portfolio was down from £633.31 in December to £448.67 in January. Funding Circle again hit me with defaults of £397.86 and came in with an overall loss of £232.80 for the month. Funding Circle is a classic example of a good company ruined by greedy executives (read the review to learn more). Overall Portfolio XIRR was down a little again from 5.51% in December, to 5.40% in January.
You’ll notice now the overall portfolio is starting to look a lot more balanced as far as exposure to any single lender. I’m still slowly drawing down Funding Circle and Assetz Capital as payments come in. Although I’m very tempted to leave Assetz Capital where it is as I think it’s one of the best lenders out there as far as rates, liquidity and asset security.
I finally found the time to send some more capital over to Ablrate and get it invested. Everything has been going great with my previous small investments so I decided to make them a real account! I’ve been lending with Ablrate now for just over a year and I have to say they are a great platform. In the time I’ve been investing with them I’ve had quite a bit of contact with members of their team they are always transparent & professional.
I sent over another £8k taking my total deposited to £10k (will add another £5k as new loans come up over the next few months). I got most of it invested over the month. Some in new loans (they had 3 this month) and the rest I purchased from the secondary market. My strategy there was to take one loan from each borrower (many borrowers on the Ablrate platform have several loans). The only real due diligence I did was to look at historical payments, the LTV ratios and what the asset valuations looked like (just really a guess as I’m no professional in that area). I also Google’d the borrowers company to see what else I could find, as well as the locations of any assets to see if I could identify them on Google earth (just inquisitive). Then I put around £500 into each loan (one from each borrower as I mentioned previously). I could have diversified more by putting a smaller amount into multiple loans from each borrower. I figure if the loan I’m in goes bad, the lender will likely cover any losses providing they are still in business. If not, then I’m guessing being in a lot of loans would help to diversify, but I just didn’t have the time to check out every loan. There are a lot of them. You can see the list of my current loans on the screenshot above.
XIRR jumped a little bit from 13.11% in December to 14.03% in January. I’m guessing this is because of all the loans I purchased from the secondary market as I bid on most at lower percentages than they were originally issued at. When bids are accepted lower than the original loan value on the secondary market, the XIRR goes up to reflect this.
I’m very happy with Abrate at the moment. Seems like one of the last companies offering these kinds of returns which are very good for the perceived risk.
Ablrate Signup & Cashback Offers
Ablrate offer £50 cashback on your first £1,000 investment for readers of ObviousInvestor.com
Assetz Capital are still going strong. They are getting a LOT of attention on social media lately, which is in-turn bringing them a lot of investment capital as the attention is all postitive. After working with them for a few years now, I have to say they deserve the success. Great company.
XIRR increased a little again from 5.93% in December to 5.96% in January. I may actually break my diversification rules with Assetz Capital as I see no real reason to withdraw capital at the moment. Unless I can find other lenders as safe to diversify into and get back to my £15k per account limit, then I’ll leave the money here for now. Assetz Capital seem to be as solid as solid gets and I just can’t have my capital sat in a bank making nothing.
Assetz Capital Signup & Cashback Offers
No current cashback offers from Assetz Capital (unfortunately).
I keep picking up loans from CrowdProperty who are a new lender I added to the portfolio in October. In short; a first charge, secured property lender with an excellent track record offering 7%-8% returns on medium term (12-24 month) loans. Rather than go through everything in this update, I decided to write an initial review here for anyone interested in taking a look at them.
Instead of using the auto-invest, I’ve been investing manually into new loans as they are issued. CrowdProperty have good loan flow, with 3 to 5 new loans per week on average. The auto-invest is only allowed to take up about half of the value of each loan. Then it puts a percentage of each lenders capital into each loan. I found I wasn’t getting enough invested, so I decided to invest manually. It seems the way to get money lent out faster is to be in front of the computer when a loan comes live as I’ve found I can get the full £500 I like to have per loan if I’m fast (the loans sell out in a couple of minutes as they are very popular).
Returns
My CrowdProperty account won’t begin to show much return for the first few months as most of the loans I’m invested in don’t pay until the loan completes. All capital and interest is paid back in one go. This is normal with some development loans as it allows the developer to complete the project and sell it before having to worry about large loan payments while the project is ongoing. Obviously this adds some more risk to the loans, but that’s why most are paying around 8%. I feel very comfortable with CrowdProperty at these rates as all loans have first legal charge on assets, which should make it easier to get all capital back if a loan was to default.
If you’re looking for higher returns in GBP lending, definitely worth checking CrowdProperty out. Please consider using the link below so CrowdProperty will know that I sent you.
As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of Obviousinvestor.com, I’ve been trying to get out of Funding Circle since July 1st 2019. It’s taking a while but I’m slowly getting there.
XIRR declined AGAIN from 3.75% in December to 3.08% in January. I’m still showing an overall profit with Funding Circle at least, but again there were defaults. Funding Circle defaults for January were £397.86 and came in with an overall loss of -£232.80 for the month.
I did manage to withdraw £2,200 in January (from repayments & loan sales).
Funding Circle Signup & Cashback Offers
For anyone considering investing in Funding Circle, I would suggest you wait and see how things pan out, there are better lenders to invest with at this time.
However if you’re a new investor, and do still want to invest with Funding Circle (bad idea), the cashback offer for new investors is: Invest £2000 and receive £50 Amazon Gift Certificate. If you are hell bent on investing with Funding Circle, you may as well get the bonus.
Seeing my income drop so much with Growth Street really makes me sad, but rebalancing had to be done to stick to the diversification rules.
I am currently looking for new lenders to diversify into, but I have to say that if I don’t find enough, Growth Street will be getting some more of my capital back. I know if sounds contradicting after all the preaching I’ve been doing about diversification, but 5.3% return with (almost guaranteed) access to capital within 30 days really does take some beating, especially as safe as I believe Growth Street are.
XIRR up just a tick from 5.10% in December to 5.11% in January.
Growth Street Signup & Cashback Offers
For new investors, Growth Street have a very decent cashback offer: Invest £5000 or more for 1 year for £200 cashback.
After increasing my investment with Kuflink in December to the £15k mark, I managed to get it all lent out. Some in to new loans, and I also increased my investment in loans I already had by purchasing more from the secondary market. .
XIRR dipped a bit again from 6.52% in December to 6.44% in January. This was due to a bit of cash drag while I was waiting to get invested into new loans. No problem though, fully invested now so we should start to see it rise again in the coming weeks.
Kuflink Signup & Cashback Offers
Kuflink have a great cashback offer right now which is well worth taking advantage of if you are thinking of investing with them. You can get up to £500 in cashback bonus (depending on how much you invest).
New Kuflink customers receive the following Kuflink cashback on an investment of £100 or more when they use signup links from obviousinvestor.com. Must invest into loans within 14 days of first investment to qualify for cashback.
LendingCrowd had a few defaults in January but nothing serious. Their monthly income is not as consistent as some other lenders, but they still do well over time with XIRR sitting at 7.19% in January. Loan flow has been down for the last few months but I did manage to buy a few loans from the secondary market in January which should help keep the cash drag down. Hopefully the loan flow will pick up soon. You can also see in the second screenshot above, there are only 7 loans in default out of almost 400. Not bad at all.
LendingCrowd Signup & Cashback Offers
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!
New Customers receive £50 LendingCrowd cashback when they join LendingCrowd and invest £2000 or more using the links here on ObviousInvestor.com.
Old reliable Lending Works keeps delivering the income. Unfortunately not only did they reduce their returns in December last year, but I also halved my account value as I rebalanced and diversified my portfolio. So now income from Lending Works has shrunk down significantly. Oh well 🙁
Lending Works XIRR decreased again from 5.58% in December to 5.55% in January, which is around where I expect it to stay.
Loanpad XIRR came down a bit from 6.14% in December to 5.89% in January which is right around where it should be. The 5% 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.
I’ve been lending with Loanpad for over a year now and I feel like they are a very good option for investing capital with the best asset protection in the industry. I like their focus on safety and assets with low, low LTV’s (you can see some of them highlighted in the screenshot above). I’m very happy I decided to lend with them early on. I think they are growing fast now and they’ll go on to do great things.
Loanpad Signup & Cashback Offers
Loanpad have a great cashback incentive for readers of ObviousInvestor.com if you’re thinking of joining:
£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.
£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.
I’m still having to withdraw GBP capital from Mintos because GBP MoGo car loans have gone away for good it appears. Unfortunately it looks like I’ll need to keep drawing it down without any more GBP loans available.
XIRR actually increased a bit again from 9.68% in December to 9.73% in January. Sad to have to withdraw GBP from Mintos, but on the bright side I still have a good XIRR return on Mintos Euro loans and the loan flow is much better there.
Unfortunately Mintos are still saying that UK residents can no longer invest in Mintos loans for now. Hopefully that will be ratified soon.
Mintos Signup & Cashback Offers
If you are NOT a UK resident, Mintos have a wonderful cashback bonus, one of the best in fact. Mintos offer 0.50% of the value of your investments cashback for the first 90 days you are investing with them!
I added a new lender in January. Octopus Choice are a well know, profitable company. I have looked at them several times before, but their target return rate is only 4% which wasn’t enough to entice me before. Now that RateSetter & Lending Works have lowered their rates, Octopus Choice has become a viable option for diversification.
Rather than go in to all of my reasons for investing here, I wrote an initial review if you are interested in Octopus Choice.
As of December 2nd RateSetter rates dropped significantly. “Access” still pays 3%, but “Plus” has been lowered from 4% to 3.5% and “Max” has been lowered from 5% to 4%.
I’m not particularly impressed with RateSetter at the moment because of the low rates, but I feel like they are safe enough so a good place to park capital at a measly 4%. I miss the days of when I could get in at 6% or more!
RateSetter Signup & Cashback Offers
RateSetter is offering £20 cashback for investing £10.
Still getting about 10% cash drag on Unbolted unfortunately. Their new loan flow has dropped quite a bit so I still have just over £1,200 that is not invested. Hopefully that will change soon as I really like Unbolted. I would like to get the balance up to the target £15k ASAP. Can’t do that if there are no loans though.
XIRR down a little in January to 8.01% because of the cash drag. Still, 8%+ is nothing to sniff at so no complaints here with that.
Unbolted are not like the big Peer to Peer platforms such as Funding Circle or RateSetter, and I like that. I like Unbolted’s spin on asset secured pawnshop style loans, and I certainly like the 8%+ return rates. When Unbolted loans default, assets are sold very, very quickly. Unbolted typically recover more than the item was worth. The average at the moment is 117% of the loan value is recovered! I regularly get emails saying that a defaulted asset has been sold and capital recovered, and the amount has been credited to my investment account. Zero losses in almost 2 years so far. See my Unbolted Review for more information on this unique lender.
One last thing that struck me about Unbolted over the last few weeks with all the media touting an upcoming recession: in a recession, pawn shops typically do better than in a good economy. When people don’t have money, they often need to borrow money to get by. If banks won’t lend them money, an option is to lend money against personal assets. Basically Unbolted is high-tech pawn shop, so in theory they should do just fine in a recession, if not even better.
Unbolted Signup & Cashback Offers
Unbolted has a cashback bonus for ObviousInvestor.com readers – £50 cashback if you invest just £1,000 by using the the link below.
Interesting month in the Euro lending sector. It all started when a blogger started digging into Kuetzal’s loans (a small Euro platform) and found that they weren’t as solid and well documented as they seemed. Even suggesting that Kuetzal was some sort of Ponzi scheme which was just trying to get people to invest so they could run off with their money. Of course with social media, things got warmed up very quickly and people started to panic and began trying to withdraw their capital from Kuetzal, creating a real live bank run. Whether it was a Ponzi scheme or not, Keutzal couldn’t fulfill all of the requests for capital to be returned so they proceeded to close down the platform. I actually looked at Keutzal about a year back but didn’t like the loans they were putting out, or the way the website was designed. Just didn’t “feel” right to me, and sometimes you have to trust your gut.
Next the panic moved to other platforms. Envestio being the next victim. Investors started scrutinizing their loans, some of which looked questionable but I personally don’t think were scams. More just lazy due diligence and shoddy paperwork. I could be wrong though, time will only tell. Unfortunately, the panic spurred some investors to start asking Envestio to buy out their loan parts in order to withdraw capital, and of course when it got to a certain amount, Envestio couldn’t meet their obligations either, and so they closed their platform down too. The way they did it was ghastly though. Envestio just sent out an email to investors, and then took their website down and stopped answering investors queries, which was wholly unprofessional. Now they have the local police & Interpol involved, so I have a feeling they’ll regret not being a little more professional about it.
As you may be aware, I invested about €6k Euros in loans with Envestio. So now we’ll have to see if I can get some of that back in the future. There has already been a class action lawsuit initiated by investors (of which I am one) to try and ensure capital is returned to investors, as it is paid back by the borrowers. All of the loans were (supposedly) secured by assets, which is a positive thing. Who knows how much of our capital we’ll get back in the end though. I knew when I invested in Envestio that it was a more risky venture than other platforms I invest in. That’s why I only had €6k invested with them. I also gave it the riskiest rating of all the platforms I invest with and review here on the website. Any investment comes with risk. If you don’t understand those risks and are prepared for the worst, then you shouldn’t invest. Too many people had a LOT of money in these small Euro platforms. Many of whom were relativity new investors and had never been through a 2008 type crisis so have never seen any significant losses until now. I’m sure they’ll be more careful moving forward, but that doesn’t make this situation any better. As I understand it, when Envestio closed shop, they had around €30m Euros in outstanding loans. Ouch!
The good news about this situation is; most Euro platforms have now been heavily scrutinized by investors & social media groups, so the platforms that are left should be the stronger ones (in theory at least). It hasn’t scared me off investing in Euro platforms. Quite the opposite actually, in fact I added a new Euro lender in January. PeerBerry who you can read more about below.
These smaller Euro lenders are (in theory) more risky than the GBP lenders, mainly because of regulation by the FCA which dictates how they do business. Although on the flip side, regulation can stifle a business and restrict it unnecessarily, which can also nave a negative effect. I still personally feel that Euro lenders like Mintos and Grupeer are fairly safe bets though, just because of their history and size. But all investments carry risk, whether they are regulated or not.
Back to the Euro Portfolio
XIRR from the Euro Portfolio was down a bit for the month of January to an overall 13.44%. I think this was mainly because there was zero income from Envestio (obviously) and because Robocash has had some serious cash drag. Income was also down to €290.31 for the same reasons.
Crowdestor was one of the first platforms scrutinized after the Envestio situation, and so far they have seemed to handle things very well and professionally. The difference here is that Crowdestor doesn’t have a secondary market or buyback guarantees (they do have a buyback “fund”, if the loan defaults, but they don’t purchase loans back just because someone asks). So in effect Crowdestor can’t be victim to a bank run as investors must wait to withdraw their capital providing their loans are current and not in default. The problem will be here is if investors don’t invest into new Crowdestor loans, as that would minimize profits for the platform in the long run. Hopefully that won’t happen
XIRR was down a little bit from 16.08% in December to 15.75% in January. This was just because I had a huge jump in income in December due to a project I invested into in March called “Biomass Boiler House” which paid a balloon payment of €93.16. Now things are back to normal I expect XIRR to come down again to around 15%.
***** The text below on Envestio is just copied from the above beginning section *****
The Envestio Story: It all started when a blogger started digging into Kuetzal’s loans (a small Euro platform) and found that they weren’t as solid and well documented as they seemed. Even suggesting that Kuetzal was some sort of Ponzi scheme which was just trying to get people to invest so they could run off with their money. Of course with social media, things got warmed up very quickly and people started to panic and began trying to withdraw their capital from Kuetzal, creating a real live bank run. Of course whether it was a Ponzi scheme or not, Keutzal couldn’t fulfill all of the requests for capital to be returned so they proceeded to close down the platform. I actually looked at Keutzal about a year back but didn’t like the loans they were putting out, or the way the website was designed. Just didn’t “feel” right to me.
Next the panic moved to other platforms. Envestio being the next victim. Investors started scrutinizing their loans, some of which looked questionable but I personally don’t think were scams. More just lazy due diligence and shoddy paperwork. I could be wrong though, time will only tell. Unfortunately, the panic spurred some investors to start asking Envestio to buy out their loan parts in order to withdraw capital, and of course when it got to a certain amount, Envestio couldn’t meet their obligations either, and so they closed their platform down too. The way they did it was ghastly though. Envestio just sent out an email to investors, and then took their website down and stopped answering investors queries, which was wholly unprofessional. Now they have the local police & Interpol involved, so I have a feeling they’ll regret not being a little more professional about it.
As you may be aware, I invested about €6k Euros in loans with Envestio. So now we’ll have to see if I can get some of that back in the future. There has already been a class action lawsuit initiated by investors (of which I am one) to try and ensure capital is returned to investors, as it is paid back by the borrowers. All of the loans were (supposedly) secured by assets, which is a positive thing. Who knows how much of our capital we’ll get back in the end though. I knew when I invested in Envestio that it was a more risky venture than other platforms I invest in. That’s why I only had €6k invested with them. I also gave it the riskiest rating of all the platforms I invest with and review here on the website. Any investment comes with risk. If you don’t understand those risks and are prepared for the worst, then you shouldn’t invest. Too many people had a LOT of money in these small Euro platforms. Many of whom were relativity new investors and had never been through a 2008 type crisis so have never seen any significant losses until now. I’m sure they’ll be more careful moving forward, but that doesn’t make this situation any better. As I understand it, when Envestio closed shop, they had around €30m Euros in outstanding loans. Ouch!
The good news about the situation is that most Euro platforms have been heavily scrutinized now, so the ones that are left should be the stronger ones (in theory at least).
Grupeer income is steady and regular. I see all of my Euros have pretty much been invested for the past couple of months with no cash drag at all. Nothing more to say for Grupeer. Easy auto-invest with great returns and they are now obviously even more credible after weathering the Keutzal/Envestio storm.
XIRR down a little to a very reasonable 13.79% in January from 13.85% in December.
Mintos short term loans are starting to pick up a little bit with rates moving up to 12%-13%. The lower rates previously are reflected in the XIRR which decreased a little again from 13.10% in December to 12.95% in January. This is still more than the Mintos target rate of 12.32%, and who can complain at that? Hopefully things will pick up soon and we’ll start seeing some of those 16% – 30 day loans again as we did last year! I like those. If rates do start and rise, I have my Mintos auto-invest strategies set to pick up the higher paying loans first. You’ll notice if you click on the images above, there are screenshots of my auto-invest pages for anyone interested in how I pick up loans automatically.
I really like Mintos. As of today, they have facilitated lending out €4,690,000,000.00 (€4.69 billion) from 254,000 investors in 32 countries. And above all they are a profitable business.
Mintos Signup & Cashback Offers
Mintos cashback bonus; 0.50% of the value of your investments cashback for the first 90 days you are investing with them (Not open to UK residents unfortunately).
PeerBerry is a new Euro lender I added in January. I decided to add them for a couple of reasons; the first is that I was getting a lot of cash drag in Robocash, so I wanted to get the money invested somewhere. Secondly I have been looking at PeerBerry for a while. They are like a “mini-Mintos” inasmuch as they have multiple loan originators they work with and the platform is a loan market, instead of the platform actually being the lender themselves. Mintos, Grupeer and Robocash are similar as they have the same concept. I’ll write an initial review later in the month but I like this “loan market” concept as it offers a lot of choice, liquidity and more importantly the ability to diversify between lenders even more though a single platform.
PeerBerry Signup & Cashback Offers
No cashback offers with PeerBerry this month, however if you would like to take a closer look at their platform, please;
Robocash was having a lot of cash drag (un-invested cash) in January so I finally decided to withdraw some Euros and try out another platform (PeerBerry). Of course just after I did, they got an influx of loans from Singapore at around 10%-11% so if I would have waited a bit more the cash drag probably would have subsided. Oh well, at least I got to try another platform.
XIRR dropped a bit again from 12.36% in December to 11.99% in January because of the cash drag. Still right at the the lender target rate of 12.00% though, so no complaints here. Another easy auto-invest account which requires no maintenance at all, provided they can keep the new loan flow up of course.
Little bit of cash drag with Swaper as well in January. XIRR showed this by falling from 10.71% in December to 10.54% in January. This should keep increasing moving forward as repayments are invested, although we need to get away from the cash drag in order to do that.
Another short update again this month. Hopefully I was still able to get across what I’m doing and why for each account without boring you with too much waffle?
If you have any comments or suggestions, please comment on the post or email me, I’m always open to feedback!
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 with each of them.
Finally I hope the month of February goes well for everyone. 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.
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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 January 2020”
Fatbritabroad
I had a fair bit in p2p and have done well out of it as like you I diversified but for me the sector feels too wild west to risk atm and I’ve withdrawn all but a 500 stuck in ablrate and 1000 in kuflink.
I’m interested why you don’t just lump it all in shares instead?
Assetz certainly seem good but the constant cashback offers make me fearful they are robbing peter to pay Paul
The Euro sector is a bit wild west and still finding it’s feet, but that’s why they have the high returns available. I still think Euro lenders like Mintos & Grupeer are still relativity safe if you pay attention. The new FCA regulations on GBP lenders is making the GBP Peer to Peer a safer bet than Euros in general. Of course, that’s why all of the return rates just went down 🙄
I don’t lump everything in to shares because I’ve sat through some huge market crashes (1987, 2001, 2008 etc.) and I don’t like seeing half of my net worth disappear in a few months, so I have most of my investment capital in my Growth Portfolios in (shares, bonds, gold, REIT’s etc.). The rest I split 50/50 between cash and P2P. It’s not sensible (in my opinion) to have everything in growth assets as when the portfolio pulls back, I don’t want to be selling anything and taking a loss, so I need to make sure I have several years of living expenses in case the markets take a long time to come back. Cash I can obviously use instantly, and much of my P2P stuff I can access within 90 days if I need it (but not all of it). Combined cash & P2P would give me many years of living capital if I ever needed it so as not to sell a mixed asset portfolio that had pulled back.
Hope that makes sense? Not everyone agrees with my strategy, but I sleep at night (most of the time) 😀
Hi Mark,
I just want to congrats on your blog. I have been following it for a while. It seems to me that your the only one who is still posting about P2P lending these days and stayed sane 🙂 due to the latest turmoil caused by Envestio and Kuetzal. And I must say that I agree with your last sentence in your comment above. If you sleep well at night it means that you know what you are doing and why.
Thanks for the note, I understand what you are saying. The “witch hunts” have shown a lot of craziness out there. I’ve been investing for a LONG TIME though so seen it all before (unfortunately).
Hopefully the panic merchants will learn by the experience (losing money has a way of being a very quick educator).
I always live by the mantra “hope for the best, but plan for worse”. It’s always worked well for me so far 😀
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I had a fair bit in p2p and have done well out of it as like you I diversified but for me the sector feels too wild west to risk atm and I’ve withdrawn all but a 500 stuck in ablrate and 1000 in kuflink.
I’m interested why you don’t just lump it all in shares instead?
Assetz certainly seem good but the constant cashback offers make me fearful they are robbing peter to pay Paul
The Euro sector is a bit wild west and still finding it’s feet, but that’s why they have the high returns available. I still think Euro lenders like Mintos & Grupeer are still relativity safe if you pay attention. The new FCA regulations on GBP lenders is making the GBP Peer to Peer a safer bet than Euros in general. Of course, that’s why all of the return rates just went down 🙄
I don’t lump everything in to shares because I’ve sat through some huge market crashes (1987, 2001, 2008 etc.) and I don’t like seeing half of my net worth disappear in a few months, so I have most of my investment capital in my Growth Portfolios in (shares, bonds, gold, REIT’s etc.). The rest I split 50/50 between cash and P2P. It’s not sensible (in my opinion) to have everything in growth assets as when the portfolio pulls back, I don’t want to be selling anything and taking a loss, so I need to make sure I have several years of living expenses in case the markets take a long time to come back. Cash I can obviously use instantly, and much of my P2P stuff I can access within 90 days if I need it (but not all of it). Combined cash & P2P would give me many years of living capital if I ever needed it so as not to sell a mixed asset portfolio that had pulled back.
Hope that makes sense? Not everyone agrees with my strategy, but I sleep at night (most of the time) 😀
No makes sense and with you living off it makes total sense.. For me at 39 in thw accumulation stage not so much
Hi Mark,
I just want to congrats on your blog. I have been following it for a while. It seems to me that your the only one who is still posting about P2P lending these days and stayed sane 🙂 due to the latest turmoil caused by Envestio and Kuetzal. And I must say that I agree with your last sentence in your comment above. If you sleep well at night it means that you know what you are doing and why.
Hi Laszlo,
Thanks for the note, I understand what you are saying. The “witch hunts” have shown a lot of craziness out there. I’ve been investing for a LONG TIME though so seen it all before (unfortunately).
Hopefully the panic merchants will learn by the experience (losing money has a way of being a very quick educator).
I always live by the mantra “hope for the best, but plan for worse”. It’s always worked well for me so far 😀
Happy you like the blog!
Cheers,
Mark