Mintos Income Review After 12 Months

Hello Everyone,

Back in January 2018, I started investing in the Mintos platform. I started with a very small amount as an experiment. After the first month, I started making periodic contributions varying from €100 to €1.000 per month.

My experience with Mintos has been excellent. I have solid returns and have lost nothing due to bad debt. If you want to check my in-depth Mintos review you can visit this page, which is updated regularly.

During the last 12 months, I have generated €527,32 which translates as a net annual return of over 13%. Not bad for a passive income stream.

As you can see, I have also earned some money from Campaign Rewards and secondary market transactions. That is because periodically during the year Mogo, Lendo and GetBucks all had cashback campaigns rewarding from 1.5% all the way up to 5% when you purchased a loan. This allowed me to accrue 158,69 from cashback and 23,41 from secondary market transactions since investors had an incentive to sell loans on the secondary market with heavy discounts.

For 2018 I invested €4.160,58 and the closing balance on December 31st 2018 has grown to €4.687.90. That is much better than my banks 0.80% on the running balance on my savings account.

Also, for the month of November I made a withdraw of €0,59 just to check how fast they would process the request and within a couple of days the money were in my account.

Of course, these kinds of returns come with risks. I try to mitigate that risk by only buying loans with buyback guarantee. This means that I will get both the principal and the interest even if the borrower of the loan defaults. As you can imagine, the only problem would be in the event that an originator folds. This has only happened back in June 2017 when Eurocent stopped servings its loans on the platform after a corporate bond default. Mintos is currently working on rectifying the situation but no one knows what will happen in the end.

That is why you need to spread your peer to peer lending investments across many different loan originators, in order to minimize the risk of them defaulting.

This is my account statement for the past 12 Months and for 2018.

And this is the breakdown of my Current Investments.

On the “Status” pie chart, as you can see, the “current loans” are only 50% of the portfolio. I assume this is because it was the holidays and most of my GetBucks loans were paid a couple of days late. Things went back to normal after about a week with about 75-80% of the loans  being current.

On the Following Chart, you can see my monthly contributions as well as my monthly return.

Rates

During the last 12 months, rates on Mintos have fluctuated quite a bit. When I started you could get a 13% Mogo loan and receive a 5% immediate cashback on the purchase as well. After the Mogo bond issuance during summer rates plummeted. You couldn’t get any loan yielding more than 11%. Thankfully it was only for a small period of time and that gave me the opportunity to invest in loans with lower yields but from better originators.

A great way to boost your returns is to sign up for Mintos’ campaigns when available and direct your investments accordingly.

Mintos Ratings

Also, since August 2018, they introduced a rating system for their loan originators ranging from A to D. It is also possible to change your auto-invest settings and select rating you are comfortable with, which is great for your safety.

Loan liquidity

Mintos’ large number of originators guarantees that you will most certainly find a loan to invest in.

Auto Invest

To be honest, I don’t feel very comfortable investing through the auto-invest feature just yet. Don’t get me wrong, it works perfectly. I have used it when I was on vacation and I knew I wouldn’t have access to a computer for a week straight and had absolutely no problems with it. I just like to be more hands-on and keep track of the fluctuations on the yields that are been offered on the platform.

Drawbacks

Many different loan originators, some of them very small with limited track record means that Mintos lets in lower quality lenders and it’s more difficult for Mintos to keep tabs in all of them.  Also,  the website is a bit glitchy at times.

My 12 Month Mintos Overview

After about 12 Months of investing on the Mintos platform, I can say that it has been a great experience. It’s my only position in my growing peer to peer lending portfolio and I love that pretty much all of their loans come with buyback guarantee. I will definitely continue to invest in Mintos on a monthly basis and I will also expand on other platforms as well. I generally put about half of my excess income every month into Mintos. The other half I put into high growth stocks and they have underperformed Mintos at the time of this writing, especially Q42018 has been extremely bad for the stock market.

Bonus

Mintos pays a 1% bonus for any investment you make in their platform during the initial three months of your investment account opening date.

For more information about Mintos and the bonus you can read my full Mintos Review.

 

Please leave your comment below.

Until Next Time,

Peter