Sunday, July 4, 2021

Update #003 - June 2021

Hello hello! Here we are deeping our toes in the second half of 2021, closing second quarter of the year and most importantly the month of my birthday! Yay! Summer in Ireland seems to be slowly but surely fading away, which makes me pretty sad to be honest. Thinking about winter again is not particularly exciting xD. But I am not here to rant about crappy Irish weather (although I just did and may keep doing), I'm here to bring you updates regarding my path towards financial freedom.

The way towards Financial Freedom is a bumpy one, but June's part was pretty smooth :). A record month for passive income, record month for dividends and some good changes in the P2P portfolio, so despite how much I love it, I can't complain. Also to add to the mix I finally finished reading "The little book that beats the market", although as more of the financial classics is a bit dated it has very clear content and easy to digest, totally recommend it.

Without further ado, here we go!


    P2P Update

    This month my P2P portfolio collected a total of €34.36, passing May's returns by 14%!!! Not bad :).

    PlatformJun21(+/-)
    Mintos€9.2331.96%
    Grupeer€0.00#DIV/0!
    Finbee€7.8718.17%
    Bondora€0.00#DIV/0!
    Robocash€9.54-11.11%
    PeerBerry€7.723.76%
    Monthly Total€34.3614.73%

    The star of the month, without a doubt and against all possible predictions, was Mintos. Yeahp... I am still surprised myself, but Mintos returned almost 32% more than in May. I believe there's two reasons for this, first the allocation changes I introduced back in May, and also Mintos recovered €45.31 (out of €87.56) from Akulaku Indonesia (some of that was capital and some was interest). The rest of the platforms did ok, Finbee had a good bump, mostly driven by the cash I moved there from Mintos back in May. Robocash had a bit of a rough month as in returned lower than May, but I'm no really concerned as of now, looks like a few delayed loans. Last but not least, Peerberry had a normal organic growth, nothing fancy there.

    What really shocked me this month was the overall avg annual yield :). Yesss the one I was half happy about last month because of being higher than 10% but on the low end, well it reached a very nice 11.34% :O. In fairness I seriously doubt it will stay that high however if it stabilizes around 10.5% I'd be a happy investor, so time will tell. The reason I don't think it will stay that high is essentially Mintos, the platform is hardly returning more than 9% to 10% so for the combined average to stay that high the other 3 would have to start returning way above their current rates.

    Another reason to be happy is that Mintos current funds are now back to ~77%, a bit better than last month and helping Mintos to stay in my portfolio a bit longer :). That said, the up to 60 days loans increased considerably so I'll keep an eye on this anyways. The rest of the platforms didn't show any big swings in delays or dragging.


     If you feel like joining any of these platforms, you can use the following affiliate links and push me a step closer to financial freedom in the process :)

    Dividend Update

    June came with the highest dividend payout ever hitting a sweet €45.57!!! The biggest three contributors were NN that payed its annual dividend of €11.25, followed by XOM with €6.10 and PEP with €5.40, etc. Here's the full composition, although is not a live graph yet :(

    In the year-over-year picture things are looking good :), June 2021 payed out 4.5x more than June 2020. This is not just organic growth of course, it's mostly driven by new positions opened during 2020 and 2021, but growth nonetheless:


    This month I received €0.07 in dividends from VTRS (Viatris), first time this PFE (Pfizer) spinoff pays dividend. I'm unsure whether I'll keep the share (yeah, I only have 1 share of stock) in my portfolio or not, since I don't really know much about the company. However since PFE announced they'll be cutting their dividend after VTRS started paying theirs (in theory same amount) I decided I'll keep the stock and essentially milk it in the meantime.

    Stocks Update

    June was very unusual on the personal level, I moved in with my partner so there were a lot of logistics challenges to face xD. That left little room for Buy/Sell moves, on top of that I didn't notice any tasty deeps to jump in. That said, I did increase my position in VZ which seemed to be the best opportunity to increase my dividend yield a little bit.

    • Buy: VZ: on June 16th bought 10 shares at $56.65. Verizon is one of the biggest wireless operators in the US. They currently have a very nice dividend yield of about 4.45%, this is much higher than my current portfolio yield which is sitting at about ~2.90%, so it gives a good boost. VZ currently has a very low PE, about 11 which is waaay lower than the avg 46 SP500 has at the moment, suggesting the company is in general terms a cheap buy right now. Also VZ, has a very stable inflow of cash due to their type of business, and lets face it... mobile phones are not going anywhere. Their dividend growth rate isn't stellar at all (same as their growth in general), however their payout ratio is about 50% making the dividend very very safe.

    Besides VZ I almost pulled the trigger on some YPF (Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales). For the ones that don't know it, this is an Argentine oil and gas company. It was sold to Repsol in 1999 and "bought" back (51%) by Argentine government back in 2012 to regain control of the company (sort of a political move). Unfortunately YPF is now going through a bit of financial distress (as any other Argentine company xD) that was only made worse by a pretty bad 2020 for the energy industry. All this resulted in the stock price going full nose dive to the lowest levels in history, currently sitting at $4.53. Don't get me wrong, I don't think YPF is a great company for the long term, they haven't been particularly profitable but... the current price seems ridiculously low! The book value of the company sits at $24.67 per share and its cash flow per share at $4.27. So if you look at it in terms of how much you are paying for their assets, you are basically paying them almost a fifth of their value (P/B ratio of 0.18)! Seems like a classic value play to me. I'll give it some more thoughts and may throw some money at it sometime this week, at least a bit to get hooked into following the price closely.

    Overall passive income

    Despite having some higher than usual (but hopefully non recurrent) expenses this month, my passive income managed to cover 2.23% of my expenses!!! Although it was lower than the peak of 2.69% back in March, it's pretty sweet because June was the highest passive income month ever, reaching a lovely €79.93. I wonder how close to the 5% expense coverage with passive income I'll get the end of 2020 :). Compared with June 2020 when I merely got €13.52 in passive income, is quite a step forward :), almost 6x more!

    Health and fitness

    Oh my, June had some walking! Moving houses turned out to be a very physically demanding task, who would have thought xD, maybe that's why I'd been postponing it for so long haha. I may have set a personal record, with a total of 105.2 KM!!! Out of these 105.2 KM, 10KM were Hiking. I finally found a nice day to head back to the Dublin mountains trail and had a great time with my partner.

    I must confess I've been procrastinating a lot in the mornings and mostly skipping my workout and yoga routine, I think I did it two times this week, which is not good. But on the other side I've been doing one to two times a week Bouldering and that is amazing. I find it super demanding physically, it really puts every muscle to work and when I finish I have that great feeling of having done something challenging, besides the regular muscle fatigue xD.

    Health and fitness aside, I finally finished reading "The little book that beats the market". Maybe one day I could write a post on it, I found the book very interesting. The author is very fun, lots of jokes around, and good and easy to digest examples. That said, as usual, the financial context the examples develop in is rather different than the current financial context, but even then is a great exercise trying to see these differences and understand the impact. In a nutshell and without going too in depth, the author presents an investment strategy based on a "Magic Formula" that consists in buying fairly priced and healthy companies, keeping them for certain time and selling them to buy new ones again and repeat. The whole thesis is based on the fact that the market sooner or later balances things out and good companies experience very good returns. So in a few years after a few cycles you should see your capital growing. The key factor of the strategy is as usual picking the right companies, and for that the author presents different metrics that can be used. Anyways I really recommend the book, is an easy and short read, ideal for new investors like myself.

    You can find the book in Amazon here, and if you buy it from this affiliate link you'll be supporting my way towards Financial Freedom :).

    Monthly objectives review

    Overall June was a great month, and a great closure to the first half of 2021. However I'm struggling a lot to keep myself on track with studying and working on my Stock investment strategy.

    • Stock analysis: I didn't do any deep dives in particular stocks this month. I did write an article about my dividend income shrinking that you can find here. It's a nice read about how currency fluctuations can have quite an impact on your passive income if your portfolio is heavily weighted towards a particular currency. 
    •  Walk 60 Km: this one I totally obliterated :) almost doubled it! 
    • Fix something: wow, honestly I had to fix/throw away so many things this month while moving houses that was hard to track.

    Well, here I go second half of 2021! Hope you all are doing great out there wherever you happen to be right now. Keeping your investments on track but don't forget, both mental and physical health are corner stone for any future enjoyment of such investments. So do some workout get some nice food, and stay sane :).

    BTW I thought it'd be nice to leave you here a picture I took on my recent hiking to Dublin Mountains. This is the old lead mines chimney:


     

     

    1 comment:

    1. Hey Juan, it was nice to read your update!

      That passive income chart seems to be getting rolling on the right rails! Good job!

      I still got to read The Little Book That Beats The Market, it's been on my list for ages, I may need to prioritise it, thanks for sharing your opinion.

      That picture looks lovely, I've been to Dublin once but did not see Dublin Mountains. I can't believe summer is already fading away, it is probably like in the UK, it will come back a couple more times before hitting the winter again.

      Have a great July, cheers

      ReplyDelete

    Update #012 - March 2022