In July 2019, income from the Peer to Peer Portfolio took a bit of a dip. I was trying to figure out why this was. The income from Funding Circle, Lending Crowd, and Kuflink were all off in July for starters. Looking closer I realized that I took the numbers for the June update on July 1st, and it appears that it makes a huge difference to the income figures as many of the repayments come in on the 1st of the month, so the stellar figures in June it seems included some of the repayments for July.
In the future I need to take the numbers on the last day of the month in question. Hopefully Funding Circle, Lending Crowd and Kuflink will perform better in August. More on each below in the individual updates.
Total GBP XIRR actually dipped a tiny bit for the first time from 5.79% to 5.73% in July. Again I believe this has to do with the numbers from my accounts being taken on the 1st of July instead of June 30th, plus the default hits from Funding Circle.
EURO Portfolio Overview
XIRR for the Euro Portfolio this month increased to an overall 13.15%. I bought some more euros at the end of the month when the EUR/USD exchange rate dipped below 1.11 and sent them over to Mintos, which incidentally became my largest lending account now with 20k Euros and 15k GBP’s.
Moved money
I moved some more capital from Funding Circle in July (just repayments, I didn’t sell anything yet). 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. It was delayed a little last month because of the increased returns from Funding Circle, however this month FC hit me with some more defaults which didn’t look so good, so I initiated the sell. I also moved some money out of Mintos as the lack of MoGo car loans is leaving me with cash drag. More on that on the individual updates.
July 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.
Nothing exciting to report with Ablrate this month. Still just watching for now until I decide to move a larger amount of capital over there.
XIRR dropped a little this month from 14.17% last month to 13.58% in July which is to be expected as I haven’t bought any more loans on the secondary market for a couple of months. You’ll note that the XIRR on Ablrate is huge (for a UK lender). 13%+ 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 my current investments.:
And bids on new loans (just reinvesting interest and repaid capital):
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’s stated rate for my account has again increased in July to 6.13% from 6.12% in June. XIRR is up to 5.76% from 5.72% last month, so everything is proceeding nicely.
Once I sell out some of my Funding Circle account, I’ll likely increase my Assetz Capital account as it has to be one of (if not the) most reliable lender on a month-to-month basis. Add to that most loans are secured by property and Assetz just makes a lot of sense.
Assetz Capital’s cashback finished at the end of May so there is none currently. It won’t stop me from investing more money with them soon though, cashback or not.
After my rave last month about how well Funding Circle were doing for me, they hit me with some more defaults in July, £251.45 to be precise. This really skewed the income from Funding Circle (and the portfolio) in July taking FC income to a negative. I really shouldn’t complain as my targeted annual return is still above the 7.20% they originally quoted (that’s FC’s figures, not my figures). Actual XIRR also took a hit from 7.12% to 6.50%.
The number of loans marked as “Late” increased on top of the defaults from 21 last month to 23 in July.
With all this in mind, I withdrew another £1000 from repayments, and I decided to stick to my original plan and sell half of my Funding Circle holdings.
It appears currently, selling out of FC is taking around 77 days. This used to be achieved in a couple of days. So, obviously the bad press they’ve been getting and the increased defaults have affected their investor base.
I read somewhere that it’s thought the reason for all of the defaults is because Funding Circle relaxed their lending criteria to get more business in before they went public, which makes sense, companies do try to make themselves look the best they can when they float on the open market. Hopefully if that’s the case, the defaults should subside once they get back to their normal lending rules. Funding Circle are a huge company so I don’t think they are going anywhere for now. Always good to be prudent though, so I think selling some out and diversifying my investment here is a good idea.
Personally I would wait to invest with Funding Circle if you don’t currently have an account with them. Wait until the defaults flatten out a bit. 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.
Growth Street are just one of the easiest investments in my opinion. The ability to get your capital back in 30 days also makes them an agile account where you can store your money at 5.3% return, but sell out in 30 days or less if you need it. Or if the economy pulls back and looks like recession and you want to lower your exposure to P2P.
They paid me the cashback from my initial investment this month at £200. This is because it was my 12 month anniversary with this lending account. Important to note that this amount is NOT reflected in my return calculations as this is a one-off so can’t really be looked upon as reliable income. I just entered it into the figures as a capital deposit.
XIRR rose a tiny bit again this month to 4.94% (up from 4.92%) bringing the number 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.
After a stellar month in June from Kuflink, things dipped a bit this month. This is mainly due to the fact (as previously mentioned) that I took the numbers on the 1st of the month instead of the last day of the previous month. The XIRR went from 6.93% in June to 5.65% in July. A noticeable decrease. Interesting to note here though, as I’m writing this on August 1st, I just looked at my Kuflink account and now the XIRR is 7.10% proving that the issue last month was indeed to problem.
Having moved some money from Funding Circle and Mintos, I increased my investment with Kuflink by another £2000 and picked up some more of their nice low LTV loans in July.
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 – Oh, wait, I still have a Landbay account? It would appear so! It’s easy to forget that I have money in Landbay as it really requires no maintenance. And I don’t worry about it at night as of course it is (said to be) the safest lender out there. For 3.49% returns it had better be (yawn).
As I mentioned last month, if I was really risk adverse, this is probably where much of my capital would be sitting. That being said though, I think there are some safe options out there now with risk similar to Landbay but better returns. As previously mentioned Kuflink’s‘ low LTV loans I consider to be fairly safe, as well as the new lender Loanpad who also have loans with very, very low LTV’s and pay 5%+ with a 60 day notice window. Assetz Capital’s QAA account pays 4.2% on (mostly) asset secured loans with instant access to your money. Or Assetz Capitals Property Secured Account (PSA) is also a good option for asset secured investing and pays 5.5%.
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.
Everything is still as it should be with Lending Crowd, they are still delivering with XIRR jumping again this month from 7.48% to 7.60%. Even my targeted annual return jumped a bit again from 8.02% to 8.04%.
The only problem I’m having is that I’m getting a bit of cash drag. I even dropped my auto-bid percentages a bit to accept lower rates, but I’m still not getting into a lot of loans. On top of that the loan supply has dropped a bit and it also seems like there are a lot more investors bidding on loans. That in itself is a good sign, but it makes it difficult to get the high-paying loans at such good rates.
As I mentioned last month, there are always between 7 and 12 late loans, but a lot of them come current again. On almost 400 total loans in my portfolio, that is very, very good (in comparison to Funding Circle with 23 late loans). Right now we have 12 late.
Lending Works is one of the lenders I am actually going to increase my investments with. Once I get the capital sold out from Funding Circle, I’ll likely be putting some here.
XIRR keeps slowly climbing from 5.49% last month to 5.60% in July. Lending Works own target numbers for my account rose a tiny bit once again from 6.20% to 6.21%.
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 not a bad idea), they still have the 6.5% available.
Loanpad seem to be doing well as a new lender. So much so in fact that I sent over another £500 to them in July. I really like thelow LTV’s on ALL of their loans (see screenshot below), plus their loan originators 20% – 60% “skin-in-the-game“.
The XIRR is at 5.60% this month (the same as my Lending Works XIRR). 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.
So, because I’ve been investing all of the interest back in to the account, my XIRR is higher than the Loanpad target rate. 5.60% actual XIRR is darn good for loans with this kind of security.
The interest comes in every day. Also Loanpad now have auto-invest which really does make this account a safer, hands off investment account in my opinion.
If you’re going to invest with Loanpad, 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.
Mintos GBP MoGo car loans have dried up in the marketplace for now unfortunately, so I decided to withdraw some capital in July (£1000) as I’m just getting cash drag now which is not making any return. I’m thinking we probably won’t see any more GBP loans now until Mintos get the approval from the FCA to offer loans to UK residents. Then there will likely be a lot of loans. I hope they are still able to offer the higher returns.
I currently have my auto-invest settings as below for GBP:
But unfortunately, this is all it netted me in July, and these loans were from the secondary market. Not enough to keep all £16k invested, so some of it had to be moved. I had £1000 sat doing nothing so I withdrew it and invested it elsewhere. I will continue to withdraw if no more loans show up. Especially as I just invested another €10k euros into Mintos taking that side to €20k.
Unfortunately Mintos are saying that UK residents can no longer invest in Mintos loans for now. The good news is that this is because Mintos are setting up a UK loans division which will no doubt be regulated by the FCA and have lots more GBP options!
So if you’re a UK resident, hold your horses for a few weeks and hopefully Mintos will be available as a UK based, FCA regulated investment. When this happens, Mintos are going to absolutely kill it if they offer the same rates they offer now along with “Buyback Guarantees” as they offer on most of their current loans.
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!
RateSetter rates were still rising in July. The rates were down for a few months but for the last couple they’ve been pushing above 6% which is very good for a large lender like RateSetter with a good provision fund. You can see in the screenshot above it’s sitting at 6.0% average on the 5 year. My reinvestment settings are still sat at 6% and are still getting filled at that level.
As you can see below, the averages have been climbing.
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.
Unbloted still seems to be able to soak up capital, so I sent over another £1000 (in 2 £500 lots, one at the beginning and one at the end of July). My newly found method for getting capital lent out faster is still working. The first £500 got lent out in about 3 days, the 2nd is taking a little longer but it’s getting there.
XIRR rose again this month from 7.76% in June to 7.85% in July making Unbolted my second highest GBP account based on XIRR (not including Ablrate which is mostly from secondary market loans and not sustainable I don’t imagine). See my Unbolted Review for more information on how I’m getting more capital lent out.
I’ve had some recoveries from defaulted assets which have been sold at auction. It’s nice to see the assets up for sale one day, and my account credited a couple of days later for the capital and interest. Much different than having to wait a couple of years for a house or office complex to be sold. Although I’d still rather have that than lend on unsecured loans as you are still most likely to get your capital back eventually.
Still getting reasonable diversification on the loans.
Euro Portfolio Lenders
No more Euro lenders added in July, but I did change some more euros. I sent €10k more to Mintos (because I trust them with more, and it’s hard to beat the safety of a big lender like this with 13%+ income). I’m still looking at adding some other Euro lenders to the portfolio, but still doing my research.
XIRR numbers from the Euro Lenders keep getting better. Up this month to 13.15% from 12.62% in June. More than double the GBP portfolio. Is it double the risk? Personally I don’t think so, but time will tell.
Total income in euros for July was €347.71. Not quite as much as last month but still up there considering an investment of only €30k for most of the month. The added €10k should increase that a bit more next month.
Not much to report on Crowdestor in July, although I did write an initial review on them if you’re interested in taking a look.
I reinvested a little bit of interest which had come in, but I didn’t send any more euros over there yet. I didn’t really have chance as I only changed some from USD right at the end of July. I’m still watching them but so far, so good. I’ll likely send a few more Euros over there soon and pick up some more loans.
XIRR on Crowdestor has gone from 10.80% in June to 11.73% in July which is promising, although I expect it to be a lot higher once some of the loans are repaid. Remember that a couple of the loans don’t even start paying interest for 6 months.
Envestio interest is still coming in every month. Again I didn’t invest any more here just because I didn’t have any more euros to invest.
They’ve only had a couple of new loans in July but wow, do they go fast, in just a few minutes. Very, very popular lender is Envestio. Actually they are just in the process of launching an auto-invest facility which should make getting into loans easier for people who are not glued to the computer 24/7.
XIRR is running 14.18% in July, up from 11.96% in June. I still expect it to keep climbing based on the loans I’m invested in.
Grupeer are still ticking along. I haven’t touched anything on this account since my first investment with them. The way they manage investments, I think they’ll go on to do great things. Solid company, solid team.
XIRR is at 12.06% up from 11.24% last month.
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.
As regular readers of my blog know, I just love Mintos. To put my money where my mouth is, I sent another €10k over to them making them my largest lending account (if you include the GBP loans I also have with them).
My Mintos euro lending target rate rose from 13.22% to 13.24% in July. XIRR is still showing 14.47% which is down a touch from last month but 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.
For anyone interested, this is how I have my auto-invest set to catch the different loans as they are added. As you can see the highest I caught was 15% loans in July. If those 17% short term loans come back in August, I’ll hopefully catch some of those as they are from Varks so the risk is no more than the 13% loans with the same company as they all have buyback guarantees.
For the lenders I have set as “Top Lenders”. I look for Mintos ratings of B or above, and then I research the originators through some other sites which help me make a decision on the ones I am comfortable using. They actually do change from month-to-month based on their ratings.
Here are some of the loans my auto-invest picked up this month:
Remember, if you are new to Mintos, they have a wonderful cashback bonus, one of the best in the business in fact.
RoboCash is another account which requires zero time to mange. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezey. I have no idea what that means but I knew a friend who always used to say it so it’s stuck in my head.
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 12.03% which is right where it should be and a little higher than the 12.00% target RoboCash suggests. No complaints here about that.
Just a short update this month. I was having trouble with the plugin that I use for displaying the lending figures, growth and income charts as I mentioned at the beginning of the post. It decided it didn’t want to work after an update so I spent a bunch of time messing with that and then 2 days replacing it on my site. 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 August 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.
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5 thoughts on “P2P Lending Portfolio Update For July 2019”
Jon
Can I say the Ratesetter dashboard is not helpful. I have to email them to get anything done, as the website is just bonkers.
I agree, it’s not the easiest to use, but luckily I’ve managed to make it work without needing to email them. Once you get used to where things are it’s not so bad. Until they move everything around again of course 🙂
Thanks for sharing your stats again 🙂 I have 15k€ invested on Mintos, but my late payments are amounting to about 5k. Do you have a special setting which helped you in have most investments as current? Like the Mintos rating or the investment duration?
If you read my latest update above, I give screenshots of my Mintos settings and an explanation of why I use the originators I use. Loan arrears and defaults are just part of lending. Providing you use originators who provide buyback guarantees then they shouldn’t matter so much. The other thing to look at is if the originator pays interest on delayed loans. Varks for instance pays even if loans are in arrears right up until they buyback the loan. This can make a big difference to returns. Another reason most of my investments are current is because they are mostly short term loans at the moment 🙂
That makes total sense! I only invest in originators that pay interest on delayed loans. Currently, my XIRR is at ~8% whereas my Mintos dashboard tells me I have a net annual return of 14.1%. Maybe I just need to give it more time and then those two numbers will come closer together. Also most of my investments are long-term currently. Let’s see 🙂
Thanks again for your transparency, it has helped me a lot in learning about these types of investments!
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Can I say the Ratesetter dashboard is not helpful. I have to email them to get anything done, as the website is just bonkers.
I agree, it’s not the easiest to use, but luckily I’ve managed to make it work without needing to email them. Once you get used to where things are it’s not so bad. Until they move everything around again of course 🙂
Hi Mark
Thanks for sharing your stats again 🙂 I have 15k€ invested on Mintos, but my late payments are amounting to about 5k. Do you have a special setting which helped you in have most investments as current? Like the Mintos rating or the investment duration?
Thanks for any tip you can share!
Best
Tobias
Hi Tobias,
If you read my latest update above, I give screenshots of my Mintos settings and an explanation of why I use the originators I use. Loan arrears and defaults are just part of lending. Providing you use originators who provide buyback guarantees then they shouldn’t matter so much. The other thing to look at is if the originator pays interest on delayed loans. Varks for instance pays even if loans are in arrears right up until they buyback the loan. This can make a big difference to returns. Another reason most of my investments are current is because they are mostly short term loans at the moment 🙂
Hope that makes sense?
Mark
That makes total sense! I only invest in originators that pay interest on delayed loans. Currently, my XIRR is at ~8% whereas my Mintos dashboard tells me I have a net annual return of 14.1%. Maybe I just need to give it more time and then those two numbers will come closer together. Also most of my investments are long-term currently. Let’s see 🙂
Thanks again for your transparency, it has helped me a lot in learning about these types of investments!