My first €uro

I'm sorry for the absence, but the work has kept me pretty busy lately (and that's a good thing!).

 

In the meantime, I "cashed" my first euro! I told everyone at work, and now I want to tell you too! It's silly, it's only € 1, but it's my first on this platform and I'm happy about it.

During the last few weeks I have selected short-term loans for two reasons:

1) Annual interest rates are much higher than in long-term loans

2) Liquidity is higher both because the sale of the loan is easier to sell and because the maturity of the principal is very short

My diversification among LO's is not homogeneous. I want to keep the annual interest rate high and this limits me to a bit of diversification, however, I am satisfied with the percentages of each LO.

The great advantage of entering the platform gradually is that I have time to learn from my mistakes, to see what works best and what I should not do. I continue to follow the groups on Facebook and some blogs over this and other platforms and I believe that soon I will enter into two others.

Seeing interest coming into our account almost every day is a motivating factor. However, seeing loans that are repaid before the term that had been established is unpleasant because the loans that are paid before their maturity are exactly the ones that have the best interest rates. Law of supply and demand, there is not much that can be done about it.

Regarding the cashback and agricultural loans announced by Mintos this week, I will not subscribe to either of these two hypotheses. Low interest, no buyback and long terms are not for me.

I wish you good investments!

Avoid to panic!

In this image you can see the current status of my account in Mintos.

"Avoid the panic!", it is always simpler to say than to do. I was able to motivate some friends of mine to register on the platform and start investing in it. I must confess that I was very happy and excited to have friends and co-workers sharing this same experience. Sharing ideas and experiences is good, and we'd always have something more to talk about than work.

This is the Overview of Cátia's account. You can rest assured that she gave me the necessary permission for me to show you this data, and I'll explain why

She made the registration and immediately deposit €500. As it was her first deposit, our fellows at Mintos had to manually associate her IBAN with her user account, a process that took about 48 hours, just as Mintos informs all users. 

But Catia is no ordinary user. She emailed Mintos, dozens of messages to my Whatsapp, and spent the whole weekend putting a thousand and one questions about Mintos to me.

I thought I would find peace of mind on Monday when she received the amount in her user account, but I was wrong. I received a message like: "The money came into my account but soon after it left without me doing anything!". I explained to her that this is what we want: the money to be invested without us having to waste time with it. That's what we have auto invest for.

I'm just doing this post because Catia is my wife.

With this I just want to say that regardless of whoever recommends to you some type of investment on this or another platform, start slowly, get well informed and read the FAQ before you start investing, it will save you lots of own and others' headaches.

Investing is learning, ALWAYS!

10.54% interest rate. If the interest rate could be better? Now I know it could, it could be so much better! But all this is part of my process of learning. There are lots of things that are not explained in tutorials (at least those I saw and / or read) and that we have to learn from our mistakes. In my case, the initial error was to set auto-invest parameters that run contrary to my preferences. It was my mistake, it has NOTHING to do with the design of the platform.

You can verify that the auto invest profile that I have now has defined the minimum rate of 12.9%. This means that the automatic investment will begin to be made from 12.9%, as long as it complies with all other parameters I have defined. In practice, auto invest will first subscribe for loans with lower rates and only after the loans with lower interest rates are exhausted it will subscribe to loans with higher interest rates.

In my previous auto invest profile, I had selected the interest rate from 9.5% and what happened was that auto invest invested the entire money that I transferred to MINTOS in loans with 9.5% of interest rate.

Initially, I thought that auto invest would buy loans exactly the opposite way of what it actually does, ie that auto invest would first buy loans that meet user criteria and have the highest interest rate, but I was mistaken.

This little problem can be overcome very easily. For this it will be enough to create several profiles of auto invest and define their order of execution with the decreasing interest rate.

But that's not what I'm doing. I set my auto invest profile to 12.9% and did not create any other auto invest profile. In case there is no loan available with the parameters that I set, I do the investment manually. It is a personal choice.

It is interesting to note that with only 37 loans subscribed, I already receive payments almost every day. I had two loans that were repurchased from me by the loan originator the day after my subscription.

In the details of account movements, the payment of 0.00 € of interest appears, but when you download the excel of these same movements, you will be able to verify that the interest that was due for the 24 hours of the contract was paid.

These € 0.00361111111111111 € may not seem significant, however, for the hundreds of thousands of loans traded on MINTOS, it's money. This shows a lot of transparency on the part of MINTOS and a real will to be a fair, fair company to the point of considering the fifteenth decimal place in the calculation of interest rate. I do not know what it's like in your country, but in Portugal, banks only consider the third decimal place to calculate interest rates.

And you? Do you invest in MINTOS? Want to share any tips?

Summary of the first week

We have arrived at the weekend, it's time to review the progress of this week.

I have now reached the 30 loans. Each loan with amounts between €10.00 and €11.00, with the exception of a loan that I've subscribed twice in a distraction moment.

As you can see from the photo above, we have the option to exclude the loans we have already subscribed to. It is advisable to select this option, especially in small portfolios, as is my personnal case. The mentioned loan has a total weight of 6.67% of the total of my portfolio, far from my target of 0.5%.

There are many characteristics by which we can filter the type of loans that we intend to subscribe to. There is also the possibility to select time intervals of loan duration and / or interest rate intervals in which we are interested.

While writing this post, I received payments. That is, I just discovered something else that I did not knew: the MINTOS platform also makes payments over the weekend. As you can see, the annualized interest rate has been updated with this payment and is now at 10.00%.

There is much more to learn about the platform as it continues to evolve. I agree that the risks associated with using this platform are far greater than traditional savings bank accounts, however, I am available to continue to strengthen my position on the platform as a means of diversifying my global portfolio of investments and potentially increasing my gains.

Breaking the ice

I'm not one of those guys who walks into a room and greets everyone, that gets himself to know immediately to all the strangers in the room. I am that quiet, shy person who rarely talks to any stranger. So this blog will be as weird to me as it is to you.

That said, let's get down to business!

The MINTOS platform is known to be one of the largest and most successful crowdfunding online platforms. Like any other investor, I opened the account on the platform and began to analyze how it works. I've read A LOT about MINTOS for over eight months. But I did not invest a cent in the plan.

On January 8, 2019, I decided that it was time to check if the platform does or does not do what it says it does, so I ordered an interbank transfer of €200.00 to start playing.

As expected, my "Auto Invest" profile invested the amount in the same second as the money entered my account, fulfilling all the requirements I had set.

Very soon after, on January 14, I began to receive interest and principal payments.

 It was then that I thought, "- But then this money will stand still without interest?" I decided to transfer another €8.00 to my account, because I consulted the payment plan and verified that this would be the amount that I would be missing to have the €10.00 (minimum amount to make a new investment or to reinforce an existing investment ), and in this way I would not have money just standing there.

I adjusted the "Auto Invest" profile to make investments between €10.00 and €20.00, so the money will always be invested in full, not a single cent available to be invested. I have already set up automatic transfers through my homebanking so that each working day is credited €10.00 in my MINTOS account. So I will invest the € 10.00 plus the money I receive every single day.

 So this is my current situation on the platform. I will post my evolution here every day. I intend to reach the level of €5,000.00 on the platform by June 2019 if payments remain stable. I already invested in other platforms (Raize and Housers), but the experience did not go well at all. I hope that in MINTOS the buy back guarantee will really work.

Follow the blog and see if it was a right decision or another nonsense of me.