Update #012 - March 2022

Update 12!!! that means this thing just turned 1 year old, Happy blogthday to me I guess xD. Honestly, I had some second thoughts about writing this entry... almost felt it was pointless. But then I thought it's freaking cold outside and I'm oncall so can't go anywhere xD, what the heck, lets get this done!

March was a bit bitter in a way for my finances, dividends were pretty good but the P2P returns are clearly effected by the conflict in Ukraine. The one impacted the most, as predicted in last month's update, was PeerBerry, however they have been keeping users very much up to date with their plans and actions and seems as if they will be able to turn this around... will see. I really don't want another Grupeer in my back.

P2P Update

So.... my P2P returns for March were €31.26, that's essentially 15% down from February, and the lowest returns in 10 months!!! Yeah, this one took a hit... good thing is that at the moment the only platform that has been considerably affected by the Russia/Ukraine conflict has been PeerBerry. I mean, Mintos is also affected but... I've kind of given up on Mintos by now.

As you can imagine, my 10% avg annual yield was literally obliterated by March's returns :(, it barely reached 8.26%, the lowest in 17 months I believe. I hope things get back on track soon.

Something I need to keep a close eye on is PeerBerry's delays, >62% of my loans are between 15 and 30 days late :(.

P2P New

I have introduced no changes in my P2P portfolio since February's update. I found it very interesting how during March I received a plethora of emails from the different P2P platforms trying to keep users at ease maybe to prevent a total bleed out of their portfolios. 

PeerBerry

From Peerberry only I received 9 emails in March. It's too early to say, but honestly, seems that they are doing pretty well considering they even had some operations running from Ukraine. Emails aside, keeping users well informed of the situation and actions is the way to go if you ask me. They have made some hard calls, like reducing staff in order to keep the business running (more here). 

As many companies, they still have a lot of money stuck in both Russia and Ukraine that they need to figure out how to get. During March they payed €8.7M from their reserves and they will pay another €1.2M in April apparently. Will see how long they can do this considering an increasing number of default loans are expected from these two countries in the coming months.

On the bright side, they announced rates increased in many lending companies (to retain/get new users? maybe).

Mintos

I received 11 emails from Mintos! Most of them were about recovery from bankrupted platforms, and a few related to the conflict in Ukraine. Apparently, 15% of the Mintos outstanding loans are rooted in Russia (€60.4M ouches!) while only a 0.5% is in Ukraine. Personally, I didn't see a big impact in my returns since they were already crap to begin with. However my last assessment suggests 49% of my money in Mintos is in Russian loans.

Similarly to PeerBerry, Mintos have announced some rate hikes on some of the lending companies.

Robocash

These guys got it quite good, apparently they have most of the operations and money in Singapore so no direct connections to Russia or Russian banks that could impact them directly. Some more details here. They also announced interest rates bumps during March.

Dividend Update

Dividends in March were pretty good I must say, they reached €74.32. This was mostly fueled by Shell (pun intended xD), BHP and Unilever, these 3 collected more than 50% of March's dividend.

This is the second highest amount, and 2.3x the dividends collected on March 2021 :), taking a peak at April looks like it will be quite interesting as well :P.

Stocks Update

I didn't do much buying in March, in fact I only bought a few stocks of BABA (4) when they reached $89 on the 11th. This means now BABA @$103 represents 4.3% of my stock portfolio. I'm not going to buy BABA in the near future, unless it drops again to values <$90.

Overall passive income

If we add up P2P returns with Dividends for March we get to €105.58, second highest passive income ever!!! This is a yoy growth of 1.6x, not bad :). In terms of a expenses coverage, the passive income covered 4.07% of my 12 months rolling average, a very very nice month indeed.

Wrap up

March was a good financial month, despite the impact the war in Ukraine is having on some P2P platforms. Looks like P2P platforms are going out of their ways trying to keep growing despite the very uncertain times we live in. From my side, I plan to keep dripping money on dividend paying stocks, but I won't be adding any money to P2P for now.