Financial summary: November 2019

November was a big month due to a large amount of dividends I received from the family business.

P2P income

I’ve mentioned in the previous financial summary that I will be looking to add additional platforms to my P2P portfolio for diversification purposes and so I did! Swaper and Grupeer are the latest additions and I’m excited to see how they perform. They both offer over 12% annual returns. However, they are based in the baltic countries, which isn’t exactly what I was looking for.

gosavy.com

I’m moving out of this platform due to a lot of defaulted loans. The returns are “good”, because of late payment interest that I’m receiving for loans that do not show up in the total anymore and are considered “lost”.

finbee.lt

I’ve already invested a lot into the FinBee platform and I think it’s amazing. I would probably invest more, but for diversification reasons I want to split my portfolio a little bit more into other platforms. I also don’t know much about the benefits and trade-offs of diversifications apart from the fact that it’s considered to be a good thing. So will do a bit more reading on that this month.

Also, I couldn’t see any cashdrag at €100 per loan auto-invest amount, which is great.

paskoluklubas.lt

I’m on the fence about this platform due to an increasing number of bad loans and the returns being just below my expected 1% per month. I want to keep some money in just so that I don’t put all of my eggs in one basket, but I won’t be putting in more money for now.

crowdestor.com

My investments range from €500 to €1,000 and I’d like to keep them this low, but currently there’s no auto-invest functionality, which is really annoying. I’m bad at remembering to regularly check-in. However, I’m glad that at least some (not all) projects are big enough so that if I log in a couple of days after the project has been launched it is not fully funded. Other than that, the platform has received an update to looks and remains a pleasure to use. Also, the returns are starting to ramp up, which is always good.

I am not sure if I will put more money in. Will probably observe to see how the platform does over time. May wait until they implement auto-invest functionality.

envestio.com

The projects are very slow to come on this platform and there is no auto-invest functionality, so it’s really frustrating. I will not add any more money to this platform before the number of regularly added projects picks up and/or auto-invest functionality is implemented and/or my circumstances change.

kuetzal.com

The projects are very slow to come on this platform and there is no auto-invest functionality, so it’s really frustrating. I will not add any more money to this platform before the number of regularly added projects picks up and/or auto-invest functionality is implemented and/or my circumstances change.

swaper.com

I’ve started investing here thanks to the high potential returns and good reviews found in thewealthyfin.com and financiallyfree.eu blogs. My initial experience was a bit rocky as I had to talk to support to set up auto-invest properly, which seemed to be intuitive, but then didn’t work even when I followed the set up steps described in the thewealthyfin.com post! One can’t see the loans that are available for investment, so you can only invest using auto-invest, which is… odd. I’ve added €5,000 and set up auto-invest to invest in any loan above 12%, but the money hasn’t been fully invested in the 3 weeks time that has passed since I’ve started auto-investing. So yeah, rocky start. The good thing is that all of their loans are for 30 days or less, which makes for a good emergency money storage.

Will keep it at €5,000 for now to see whether the cashdrag disappears. May add a bit more money in December.

grupper.com

I’ve started investing here thanks to the high potential returns and good reviews found in thewealthyfin.com and financiallyfree.eu blogs. My initial experience was really good. I’ve deposited €2,000 and setting up auto-invest was a breeze. I particularly liked that when tinkering with the auto-invest portfolio settings you could see how many loans would be invested in with the particular settings, which is a great user experience. I’ve set it up so I invest in loans with less than 12 months loan term. It made little sense to invest in longer term loans as the returns are about the same, but with shorterm term you can get the money out quicker if needed.

Will probably add more money in December.

mintos.com

I’m moving out from this platform because I no longer have additional pounds to invest due to my recent change in income (more on this here). The platform was also struggling to generate enough pound loans and eventually completely stopped issuing them.

fundingcircle.com (ISA and non-ISA)

I’m moving out from this platform because I no longer have additional pounds to invest due to my recent change in income (more on this here).

fundingsecure.com (ISA and non-ISA)

I was moving out from this platform because I no longer had additional pounds to invest due to my recent change in income (more on this here), but fundingsecure.com went into adiministration. The FAQs about the administration process are being regularly updated on their website, but it is still unclear as to what’s going to happen with my investments. For the time being I will consider the entire portfolio with fundingsecure.com at risk. However, the accrued interest amounts displayed in the platform continue increasing, so I will carry on recording it.

Primary income

• +£4,585.05Stock options
• +£2,824.66Salary
• +£345.75Pension
• +£8,475.00Dividends from REDAL
• +£2,687.50Tax refund on SIPP contributions
• +£616.79Misc
• =£19,534.75

Stock options at Nested.com

The amount of pounds I receive in stock options went up because of my recent decision to sacrifice part of my salary for additional stock options. Will see how this pans out in the future.

Pension

I’ve learned that Nested won’t be able to transfer my pension from Royal London to AJ Bell, so it seems that I will end up having 2 pension providers. I’ve transferred £8,250 extra to AJ Bell this month. I have also received my first government contribution of £2,687.50 for the money I transfered in September.

I will aim to make full use of the £40,000 annual allowance, but won’t worry too much about maxing out my carry-forward as there’s still plenty of time to reach the £1,055,000 lifetime allowance.

AJ Bell

• +£11,750.00Start
• +£245.86Growth
• +£8,250.00Deposit
• +£2,687.50Government contribution
• =£22,933.36

Royal London

I didn’t care much about my investments here as I was expecting them to be transferred to AJ Bell. Given that this is not going to happen, I will try to sort out my investments with Royal London so I get better returns by investing in an index tracker fund as well.

Misc

• +£471.79Child support
• +£145.00Stroller sale
• =£616.79

This should be the last child support payment as my youngest son has turned 2 in the last month (November). We also no longer need the double stroller, since my eldest son walks everywhere on his own!

Cashflow for the month

• +£19,534.75Primary income
• +£1,309.48P2P income
• -£3,836.42Expenses
• =£17,007.81

We made a lot of investments during Black Friday, e.g. buying bigger clothes for kids, and booked next year’s holidays, which significantly bumped up the expenses for this month. However, I suspect that December will be very low on expenses as we’ll get back some of the money due to refunds. I will also aim to read more about diversification.

Questions I’ll look to answer this month:

• Is my portfolio big enough to worry about diversification? When should I start worrying about it?
• What are the trade-offs of diversification?
• What is the right level of diversification?
• Should I have a rule of “less than 10% of my money in any one platform”?