Say good bye to July!!! Yess, July 2021 is official behind us all, and I'm a year older than I was in "Update #003 - June 2021". Besides the regular aging that comes along with time, July has been a pretty fun month, very sportive I must say. Back to play some volley ball here and there and some very intense Bouldering sessions. For the ones unfamiliar with Bouldering is a sort of indoor climbing, pretty fun and great full body workout.
Financially wise, July wasn't a record month in terms of passive income, but was pretty close. It did reach the highest expenses coverage percent ever with a nice 2.7%, beating March 2021 by 0.01%!!! How come you have lower income and higher expense coverage? You must be thinking! Panic not, I have the answer for you :), essentially my expenses have dropped a bit since I moved in with my girlfriend and this is a side effect of that. Anyways, enough talking, show me the numberssss
P2P Update
P2P had an Ok month overall reaching a healthy €34.11 which is slightly lower than the return of June, but for just €0.25. There's a reason why I'm not panicking and that is that all the platforms have shown positive growth with the exception of... guess who? YESSS, freagging Mintos. To be fair, I believe Mintos had such a good month in June not due to good performance but due to some old loans being finally repaid. July's returns are pretty much in line with the previous months. Unfortunately Mintos issue was enough to make the monthly difference look red :(
There's some good news about Mintos though, the platforms is working hard to get its Investment license in Latvia and according to them it should be done by the end of August. This is amazing for Mintos and their investors since it should legitimate the platform making it safer and more attractive for new investors (includes a €20000 protection on irrevocably loss) and lenders. However, there was something sad in this story. According to their "Suitabilty and Appropiateness assessment" survey Mintos's Strategies and custom automated strategies won't be available to me due to my risk profile xD. Honestly, I couldn't care less :P I don't use them anyways.
Despite Minto's hiccup, the P2P returns were ok and in line with the previous months. In fact the Avg annual yield remained above 11% so can't really complain about anything this month xD. It's super nice to see how much of a positive impact leaving Bondora had in my P2P portfolio yield:
There is something that caught my attention though. Finbee (my dearest platform) shows a reasonable increase in delayed loans "up to 30 days". This could be just delayed borrowers, however It's been slowly but steadily growing since May and is now becoming a bit of a concern. I haven't done any big changes in how I allocate my money in the platform, so it's unclear to me why this is happening. All I can do now is keep an eye on the numbers and see how this evolves next month.
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
In the realm of dividends July wasn't a gold medal, it reached €29.98 and is unfortunately a bit lower than last month's number. That said the month did bring some fun moments, like the one I had with Iberdrola's first dividend. Iberdrola is a Spanish energy company which pays their dividends through a sort of DRIP mechanism. To be honest I initially found it super confusing, and to make things worse Degiro sent an email trying to explain how the options were implemented in their platform and they just left me with more doubts xD. So with a little of reading, reading and asking Degiro I ended up deciding against the DRIP strategy and in favor of the gimme the money now! approach. It may not be the most tax efficient approach but the whole point of dividends investing is getting the cash to allocate in different holdings so made sense to me.
Overall we could say July ended up with a Bronze medal being the third highest dividend payout ever so not too bad :). Besides that things look even better in the YoY picture where July 2021 was 2.6x July 2020!!!
Stocks Update
No big announcements regarding my stock portfolio. No sells at all but I did buy some shares during July 19th and 22nd when the market took a bit of a nose dive. I essentially increased my position in Shell, Unilever and Palantir since they seemed to have dropped to interesting prices:
- BUY: 25 shares of RDSA.AS at €15.87 on July 19th. Shell cut their dividends at the beginning of the pandemic and came up with a strategy to both reduce their debt and focus on the energy transition that is happening. On Q2 not only they showed a better balance sheet but also higher stronger cashflows and surprised shareholders with a 38% dividend bump :O, gotta love Shell. By the way, this purchase made Shell my biggest holding taking about 7.33% of my portfolio
- BUY: 10 shares of UNA.AS at €47.11 on July 22nd. Unilever had a solid quarter growing sales by 5.4% however there are some concerns about inflation and general cost prices going up, putting some pressure on their margins. This also place Unilever in the second position of my holdings representing about 6.7% of my portfolio, same as Shell I'll be staying away from Unilever for a while now.
- BUY: 20 shares of PLTR at $20.55 on July 19th. With this purchase PLTR is my 4th biggest holding, and considering PLTR is a pure growth play that pays no dividends, I won't be adding more to it in the near future.
I've been trying to get my hands on some BABA stocks but no luck so far, I would love to get them under $190 but I lost my opportunity a few weeks ago :( cause I didn't have the orders in place. Besides that now just looking forward to the next earnings reports to see what happens.
Overall passive income
Of course if you have read up to this point and payed attention xD, you can infer that the passive income for July hasn't been better than June. The total passive income turned out to be €64.09, resulting in a -19% drop :O compared with June, not fun! Even then July's income is the third highest ever and 2.36x bigger than July 2020:
Personal life and health
Personally July was great, lots of sunny days, good meals and very sporty overall so can't really complain. Managed to get my KMs done, in fact I ended up doing 77.8 Km so way above my 60 Km target :). That said I'm not loosing any weight whatsoever xD, but to be honest I'm not doing any efforts either. Last time I weight myself it was 83.4Kg so bad bad bad xD. Luckily my girlfriend enjoys similar things so we did quite a few Bouldering sessions that I enjoy a lot, super recommended.
By the way! I started reading a new book, called "The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary theory and How to Build a better economy" by Stephanie Kelton. It's a very interesting read, the author goes all the way trying to destroy the different myths behind money printing, taxes and inflation. For someone like me that doesn't have a very solid financial background there's some very controversial lines about taxes and how countries with currency sovereignty shouldn't worry too much about having to print money. I haven't finished it yet, but if you have a few spare euros and want read an interesting opinion on Modern Monetary theory and all the excuses politicians made around taxes and inflation, this book is perfect for you. One of the things I liked the most so far, is the fact that the book has very recent examples, so it's easier to contextualize its content. Super recommended.
Here's an associate link in case you would like to purchase the book while helping me reach financial freedom:
I believe there's a newer version of the book published a few months ago, It's called "The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary theory and the birth of People's economy", maybe you would prefer that one instead?
Wrapping up!
Think about this... on July 2021 we are watching live 2020's Olympic games (yes, that's why the bad Olympic references), I don't think many people in history got to experience something like that xD. Jokes aside feels nice to see how this pandemic keeps fading away, I myself got my first Pfizer shot a few weeks ago and have the second scheduled in a few days. Can't wait to be able to travel again, and particularly see my family after almost 2 years now.
Anyways, enough about me!!! How's your July? did it get you closer to financial freedom? Did you enjoy some nice meals and sunny days? Hope you did!!!
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