Yearly summary - 2021

Hello how long!!! Here I am, ready to do a review of my 2021, see which of my goals I achieved and which I didn't and also to rant a bit about other stuff. Also was thinking about including some highlights of 2021 and set the new goals for 2022.

Goals 2021 review

Ok, here comes the hard truth xD. Back in April 2021 when I decided to start this blog to track my financial progress and force myself to learn and acquire some other healthy habits, I set a few goals you can find here. It is the story of my life that consistency and commitment have never been a thing for me, I've always struggled to keep routines long enough for them to become habits, except for showering and tooth brushing luckily xD.

So lets dive into the goals and have some introspection (TLDR: Met 1 out of 9)

Read at least 4 investment books NOT MET

I did some reading during 2021, but unfortunately not enough to reach the goal. I read "The little book that beats the market", and started reading "The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy" (like 80% read now). Not exactly reading, but I also listened to two audio books "Psychology of Money" and "The richest man in Babylon". We could say I read 3 books in total, hence the result. That said I totally recommend these 4 books, if I had to read them again I would do it in the following order:

1. Psychology of Money:  great book that explains how money and peoples mind bond together, why people make the choices the make. Super super interesting, and full of examples.
2. The little book that beats the market: it's a short book on investing, keeping things simple and also guided by examples. It also introduces the author's famous magic formula for the ones interested in a pretty much hands off investing approach.
3. The richest man in Babylon: this one is perhaps a bit harder to read due to the old English style, but is also full of investing and financing lessons, most of them that can be applied to daily (if properly translated from old Babylon to our twenty first century world).
4. The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy: this one is the hardest to read, but at the same time is the most recently written and is FULL of recent examples and references. The author goes out of her way to demonstrate from the Modern Monetary point of view how countries' deficits are not bad and if done correctly could increase economic growth and help to distribute wealth more evenly.
   

Finish 2021 having at least 2 months where my passive income covered 5% or more of my average expenses. NOT MET

This one didn't flight either xD, I did get very close though. During September, my passive income managed to cover 4.7% of my 12 months rolling average expenses. That same month was the highest passive income ever, fueled mostly by dividends reaching a whooping €129.25 :) :) :). Pretty sure I'll break this 5% sometime during 2022, but yeah...

Reduce the number of companies in my portfolio to 27 or less. NOT MET

The idea here was to get a more focused portfolio, however I only sold 2 companies CCL and CMCSA (here) and acquired a few more. So right now my portfolio holds 42 different companies... and at the time of setting the goal it had 34.

Balance out the portfolio a bit more, targeting a 30% of European based companies. MET

Strictly speaking I did make some progress in terms of diversifying the portfolio. At the time of setting the goal 22.7% of my portfolio was EU stock and the rest was US stocks. Now US stocks represent 67.6% of the portfolio with EU stocks representing 25.5% followed by China and South America:

Hike at least 100 km. NOT MET

This is one of the goals that I do want to set also for 2022, unfortunately during 2021 I procrastinated way more than usual and barely hiked 20 Km. For this new year, I have in mind to take this goal much more seriously, and in fact with my girlfriend we are planning a hike in Iceland for the summer, so we'll see :).

Be able to hold a handstand for at least 10 seconds. NOT MET

Man, this turned out to be much harder than I though! I managed to get the handstand for 3 to 4 seconds a few times, but I have to work much more on my core strength and maybe loose some weight as well in order to get to the 10 seconds.

Read at least 3 books. NOT MET

 I was very close here as well :|, I read two great books by Isaac Asimov the king of science fiction. Began with "The end of eternity" and "Foundation", two amazing books. With the first one I realized how much I missed and loved reading science fiction books, the author does an amazing job presenting you great stories in distant times and places. On 2022 I'll definitely go for the rest of the books he's written, particularly the ones in Foundation trilogy.

Be able to play and sing "Black hole sun" by Chris Cornell with the acoustic guitar. NOT MET

I did great progress on this song over a few weekends with my girlfriend singing it, but I consider I'm not there yet. I'll give this one more work. I have learned other songs during 2021 but I wanted this one in particular for many reasons, hence the not met.

Finish the year below 80kg of weight. NOT MET

I haven't been below 80Kg for a while now, at least 2 to 3 years. Even though during 2021 I did much more workout and got a bit stronger, I didn't loose weight (maybe gained some muscle?). I closed 2021 with 83Kg, which is not too bad, but higher than the target unfortunately. In fairness I didn't push at all into the weight loss goal, and instead focused on getting workouts done along with the bouldering sessions.

Clearly I didn't do a great job here working towards my yearly goals. I must agree with my own assessment here to be honest. A few changes that I have in the back of my mind should make 2022 much more efficient and productive :), time will tell.

Overall results of 2021

I would say 2021 despite having missed most of my goals was in fact a very very good year. To begin with I was lucky enough not to get Covid, had a stable job and a roof over my head :) so all good there!

Yeah... I wasn't able to travel as much as I would have liked, but finally got to travel back home and see my family. Seeing my family again after so long was without a doubt the peak of 2021. Also having the chance to see some old friends and go to the beach and enjoy some sunny sunny days, oh my I missed that.

Although many of the financial goals weren't met, financially speaking 2021 was without a doubt a great year as well. My passive income reached €769.7 almost 3x what I got during 2020!!!

I'm super happy about this particular number to be honest, I mostly track my finances monthly and I do some YoY tracking but had never stopped to think about how much the passive income has grown in a single year :), pretty neat! Hopefully this time next year I will be showing another 3x (or more :)) jump.

The dividend jump from €90 to €377.39 has several reasons, firstly I started investing in dividends stocks I believe around March 2020 (when the big deep happened) so there's a quarter that I missed essentially. Also, during 2021 I added a bit more money to the portfolio than in 2020 hence more dividends coming in.

I was also surprised to see how even passive income distribution turned out to be, this wasn't planned at all. Ideally I'd prefer to have a bigger portion of the passive income coming from Dividends rather than P2P (I still think these are very high risk), but we will see how things move forward this year. I don't plan to add big sums of money to P2P, maybe a few hundred euros here and there, but that's it.

Doing some very raw math, just dividing the passive return per asset looks like  my P2P portfolio yielded roughly 8.04% this year, while the stocks portfolio yielded 1.74%. Pretty big difference isn't it? The main reason for this is that here I'm only considering the dividends returned by the portfolio, however not all my holdings pay dividends (€377.39), and I'm not taking into account capital appreciation (€2625.07) in that case the portfolio yielded 13.85%!!!  That was an unexpected number to be honest, I have no idea how the SP500 did, but heck I'm happy with these returns.

Highlights 2021

Now a few of what I consider the Financial highlights of 2021 :):

• Left Bondora P2P platform. Time might prove me wrong, but so far I think this was one of the biggest hits of 2021. Literally Bondora was pulling by P2P yield down considerably. Since I exited, my P2P avg yield has been consistently above 10% (with the exception of December that was 9.95% xD). Yeah... now my P2P portfolio is more concentrated (only 4 platforms) but Bondora's low yield wasn't worth it at all.
• P2P income finally covered Grupeer's loss. This was a great one as well :), back in August finally the P2P platforms returned enough interests to cover Grupeer's €404.37 loss. Maybe one day this money will be back, but... I don't wait for it anymore.
• Exited two holdings during 2021 being my first two SELL operations ever.
• In February (pre blog times) exited CCL, with a really good returns since I bought them dirty cheap when the pandemic hit.
• In May exited CMCSA and wrote about it here. Essentially it was one of the holdings that also bought dirty cheap during the pandemic and I didn't see any potential catalyst for it anymore.
• Passed the the €100 mark on passive income. This happened on September, when I reached €129.25, and never again since then xD. I did get very close again on December with €98.11 so it's on the right track :).
• Biggest dividend payer. Unlike 2020 where T was the biggest dividend payer with 9.7% (€8.82) of my dividend income, on 2021 things were much more evenly distributed and the throne was taken by Unilever that delivered 7.6% of my dividend income (€29.02). Unilever was followed by RDSA, XOM and RIO. This is very good news considering the upcoming dividend cut T will experience in mid 2022.
  

Goals for 2022

Having done a review of my 2021 and being conscious of the catastrophe it was in terms of goals being met xD, now is time to set the goals for 2022. I'm still trying to get my head around this, is not trivial to set realistic and meaningful goals.

Financial goals

• Read 2 Finance/Investing related books. 
• I find these books very hard to read, and don't want to set any unrealistic goals here again. This number DOES NOT include me finishing "The deficit Myth" that I'm currently reading.
• Finish 2022 with at least 3 months where my passive income covers 6% or more of my expenses. 
• I honestly think I won't be able to get this one nailed, 50% increase in the number of months and 20% increase in the coverage expected.
• Write at least 5 blog entries analyzing different companies.
• This is I believe a low bar goal, but I'll be using it as incentive :P.

Health and Fitness goals

• Hike at least 100 km.
• I'll keep this one as it is since I think it is a meaningful one.
• Get under 80KG by the end of the year.
• Read at least 4 books (non finance related).

I think these goals will do for 2022, I dropped a few to not have a too long of a list and also relaxed a bit some of them. I don't want to get to the end of the year and having missed again like 90% of my goals xD. Regarding the monthly objectives, I'm still thinking about them, and once they are settle I'll be adding them to my goals page :) along with these updates here.

Well, that's about it for now. I hope everyone is doing great out there and wish you all an amazing 2022 ahead!!!