Portfolio Update (May 2019)

May 2019 was a rough month. May 31 marked my first burn-out at work. I took 2 days of sick leave followed by another week of the flu. Morale of the story, if you visit the doctor’s office healthy to get a sick note, you’ll leave being sick.

Next month is going to be even harder, with our 5-year old daughter moving to Belgium. Because of that, we had to make some additional expenses for a mattress, wardrobe, plane tickets and some other things. Either way, every month that is passing by, we’re making progress. We’re now making roughly 200 EUR per month on passive income which feels amazing. It took us 2 years to get here.

When you start building your passive income, you may feel desperate or about to give up. Because it feels like it’s not growing fast enough. But if you write everything down, and transform the data into a chart, you can reflect on your past. We managed to save nearly 30k EUR in Belgium in just 2 years. Given the nation’s median net income of 2000 EUR per month and my salary not being too far off, I’d say that’s pretty damn amazing.

Portfolio

Peer to peer lending

Lendy, one of the biggest peer to peer lending platforms in the United Kingdom has collapsed in May 2019. They started to slip up on doing background checks of the borrowers, making eventually mistakes in the credit risk assessment. Anyways, it does show how important it is to diversify your peer to peer lending portfolio.

But I’m not saying that you should diversify your portfolio blindly. Lately, I’ve been stressing how important it is to only invest in platforms that are transparent about their financials and their loan portfolio.

Next month, we will start building a stock portfolio for the next 3-4 months or so to make use of the 800 EUR dividend exemption as well as to diversify our investments in multiple asset classes.

Envestio was causing quite a discussion, having missed the April 2019 VAT declaration according to several websites, bringing now the total 2 missed VAT declarations. Although all of them have been paid up. It’s unclear what happened or why it happened. For now we’ll still continue to recommend Envestio.

PeerBerry has a bug where the invested amount doesn’t match the account portfolio. If the numbers in the chart don’t match, make sure to contact PeerBerry Support to have it rectified. Another investor pointed out she had the exact same problem last year. So it’s clear that they either don’t know what is causing this bug or they don’t plan on fixing it. But this is considered key process, and should be working properly.