It is me again (a bit late xD), this time saying good by to Mr October 2021. A month that didn't bring much to be honest, neither financially nor personally. Don't get me wrong, wasn't a bad month, just nothing particularly good about it. Good thing is, I am now entering the last 4 weeks before my so, so, so, needed holidays!!! It's actually 4 weeks to leave Ireland, I'll do remote work for a week and a half and then proper holidays mode on. But just being able to get on a plane and get the heck out of here for a while will be a big relief. Honestly... I have never wished holidays so bad.
P2P Update
After the extra money I added in August, I thought by now my P2P portfolio would be returning about €40 per month. Unfortunately it is not there yet, the returns for October ended up being €37.25, a 7% improvement compared to September, so not bad, but still below what it should be. All the platforms except PeerBerry experienced better results compared to September:
Fortunately, the overall annualized yield barely managed to stay above my target 10%, reaching 10.28%.
During October I noticed two issues in my P2P portfolio that I wanted to bring up here. First, Mintos (as usual) had €220 parked in my account without investing them at all for most of the month. Because of that, I decided to withdraw that cash and instead distribute it among the other platforms (added €75 euros in each). I'm really concerned about Mintos ability to supply loans, actually I have the feeling the P2P market as a whole has been cooling down a bit for the past few months. I don't really have any metrics to back this claim up though, so take it as it is, a hunch.
The other small issue I noticed, is a sudden increase in delayed loans on PeerBerry. I'm not really concerned about this one right now, these are loans with up to 15 days delays. I'll keep an eye on these the next few weeks to see what happens, most likely they will get payed or the buyback will catch them.
Dividend Update
I must confess, comparing October dividends (€20.11) with September ones (€94.67) did make me cry a bit xD. It's hard to get used to this sort of roller coaster that the dividend investing is. The companies that payed in October are mostly companies I don't have big positions in, so it was sort of expected.
The YoY picture shows a 1.52x improvement, which is good. But... is also the smallest YoY increase this year and that's a bit sad. I blame myself for this, 100%, because I have not increased the positions on these companies. Looking at the estimates for November I think is going to be very similar.
Dividend increases
These are perhaps the most beautiful words a dividend investor can hear "we are increasing our dividend". It is so rewarding when companies (healthily) decide to share more money with the shareholders :). During the last few weeks a few of my holdings have decided to increase their dividends a bit to make shareholders happier and happier:- ABBV announced a 8% hike on their dividend, which is not bad, but it is way below their almost 18% 5y CAGR.
- Exxon mobile (XOM) with a mere 1%
- Verizon (VZ) which increased by 1.25%
Stocks Update
I have been trying to be more detached from the market in October, and I actually plan on doing the same from now on. I realized I was waaay too expectant/pending on whether things went up or down, whether it was good time to buy or not and I didn't like it. The whole point of working on creating passive income is for it to be passive xD. That said, I did buy some things this month, it could be summarize in two recovery bets and a dividend play:
- Bought 100 shares of YPF@$4.48, I finally pulled the trigger in this one. This is an Argentine oil company, that has been struggling a bit so its price has reached very low levels. My idea is that with the oil prices going up, at some point it will be benefited... but then I realized Argentine government froze the price of the oil barrel to keep the fuel prices down so YPF is not really benefiting from the high Oil prices. That said, at some point the price will catch up with reality... hopefully before green energies take over... They have paid dividends in the past, but not reliably.
- Bought 6 shares of INTC@$49.45, honestly I can't think of Intel disappearing I believe this company will be back on the top. If it's not with their CPUs will be as a foundry, but will be back.
- Bought 6 shares of MMM@$179.5, just because their dividend yield was getting juicy at these prices, I believe it was around 3.3%.
Overall passive income
Looking at the passive income, October had a regular performance. Total income reached €57.36, dominated by the P2P returns. This resulted in a 2.96% expenses coverage for the month and a 2.09% for the rolling 12 months avg expenses, not too bad. The reason why these are so different, is based on the fact that October was a rather low expenses month, way below the rolling average.
Interestingly my monthly expenses coverage has been above 2% for 5 consecutive months now :), while the 12 months rolling average has been above 2% only for 2 consecutive months (it went down to 1.84% in August sadly).
All that said, by now it's very clear I won't be getting any closer to the 5% coverage I set as target for the end of the year. But that's ok, there's some learning to be learned here. There's enough reasons to stay positive, for example during 2020 the highest expenses coverage was during November with 1.81% and this is what I get now on a regular month :).
Personal life and health
With the coming cold weather, I've cut considerably my walking xD, but even then I managed to get 68.7Km during October, most of them on gun point by my girlfriend so kudos to her. Most of the walking was done on the way to the bouldering Gym, which I'm loving more and more by the day. Complementing the climbing sessions with some light home indoor workout I've been making great progress on the walls, not spiderman yet but working on it xD.
Anyways hope everyone is doing great out there, enjoying life as we all should do!!! Cheers!!!
Great update as usual, Juan.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to your desperate feeling of going for a holiday. I did struggle in the UK with those never ending cloudy weeks. I was normally Ok with it, as I would travel abroad often, but with the lockdown the game changed, obviously. Your holiday is almost there now!
My dividend income for this month was even lower than yours, I win!
Have a nice November :)