Monday, May 3, 2021

Update #001 - April 2021

Hello! As will be regular from now on here it goes my first official monthly update. April was a very interesting month, crashed the walking targets, decided to leave Bondora to improve my P2P portfolio yield and got some nice dividend bumps here and there. Besides all that, It's good to see world slowly coming back to normal, at least here in Ireland we have left behind some of the restrictions and getting some of our freedom back. Hopefully as vaccines become more and more available we will all be back to the world we knew!

    P2P Update

    It's been good to see some of the P2P Platforms releasing some sort of financial/performance reports for 2020, this definitely brings some piece of mind to the investors.

     At first glance looks as if the P2P industry has not been deadly wounded by the impact of Covid-19, or maybe is too soon to see it??? Time will tell, but in the meantime I'll refrain from adding more money to my P2P portfolio.

    In terms of the interests earned this month, it has been slightly disappointing. As you may know I decided to move away from Bondora (read here) with the idea of raising my return rate a bit while keeping a similar risk profile. This move had a bit of an impact on the overall monthly income (down 11.2%), mainly because the interest Bondora would have generated (roughly € 4.13) was disrupted, but on top of that PeerBerry had a bit of a crappy performance compared with March. Here are the full numbers:

    PlatformApr21(+/-)
    Mintos€5.722.10%
    Grupeer€0.000.00%
    Finbee€5.569.89%
    Bondora€0.80-416.25%
    Robocash€8.1311.69%
    PeerBerry€6.01-20.47%
    Monthly Total€26.22-11.21%

    In perspective with the previous months April was lower than March, but still higher than the months before (with the exception of November) so nothing to panic about.    


    I do expect May to be much better than March and April since I moved all Bondora's money to higher yielding platforms. However... as I'd foreseen some platforms experienced higher than usual cash dragging due to the move (not that I moved millions of € xD). This translates in less interest payments coming in for May, but I'd expect to compensate due to the higher rates (we'll see I guess).

    The only things that caught my attention were some delays in both Mintos and Robocash:

    • 5%  delayed in "up to 15 days"
    • 11% delayed in "up to 15 days"

    Overall P2P remains on track with an average annual yield of 8.77% still far behind my 10% to 12% target. 

    Dividends Update

    April was without a doubt a very odd month for the stock market in general, we experienced some of the highest earnings revealings in a long time followed by very puzzling reactions, like MSFT selloff after earnings. That said, dividends wise things went pretty fine, collected a total of €15.77 way, way below my beloved March results (€36.09), but still better than the previous months.


    Since several companies announced earnings during April, some of them decided to increase their lovely dividends and that makes dividend investors very, very happy! Luckily enough I owned shares in the following 3 companies:

    • JNJ increased their dividends by 4.95% (2 shares)
    • AAPL increased their dividends by 7% (3 shares)
    • RDSA increased their dividends by 4% (23 shares)

     This bumps might seem minor, and let's be honest they won't really change my life (because of the low number of shares I own), however proportionally they are much, much higher than my annual salary increase was :) and that is what matters.

    Overall my passive income turned out to be €41.99 (€26.22 + €15.77) covering just 1.57% of my monthly expenses, way below March and less than 3 times my annual target :O. Looks like there's some work to be done here...

    Personal life and health

    Enough finances, now lets have a look at my personal targets! I initially thought targeting to walk about 40 km a month was going to be somewhat challenging. However, making good use of the sunniest days in the history of Ireland, this turned out to be easy peasy. According to Strava I managed to get 57KM done with just 10 days of walking! Now... Am I super fit or did I set a ridiculously low bar? Well... yes, the latter xD. 

    Considering doing 60KM was like a walk in the park (see what I did there :P) I'll set 60KM as the monthly target from now on. This means I should increase my average walk to 6KM or increase the number of days I go for walks. Now that spring is among us, I should struggle to find reasonable excuses not to go for walks after work, so why not?

    Regarding the handstand, I haven't been practicing them explicitly but I have increased the insensitivity of my morning workout sessions and introduced a few exercises that should strengthen my shoulders and lower back paving my way to the almighty hand stand :).

    Monthly objectives review

    • Stock Analysis
      • :( I started doing a deeper analysis in CMCSA mainly because I have some concerns about them and I can't really remember why I bought them in the first place. Although I'm starting to build a decision on what to do with the stocks, I haven't finished reviewing their financials yet. For example, I don't like the fact that their are basically loosing users slowly and their only really growing business (the Universal Parks) were super impacted by Covid and may take a while to be back in good shape.
    • Walk 40 KM
      • Totally smashed it, I will increase this target to 60 KM.
    • Fix something
      • Sadly I did not fix anything this month, so I'll take two fixes on May. 

     Anyways, this the update for April, I'm still trying to figure out the right format of this xD, it'll get there! 

    Cheers!

    No comments:

    Post a Comment

    Update #012 - March 2022