Hello Everyone,
First things first, my name is Peter, and I am 26 years old. I have studied accounting, and I used to be a financial advisor in a small financial services company. I make a good living at this point (For Greek standards), and I want to start investing a part of my excess income in order to secure some passive income as I grow older. I have no debts and have no housing payment. I was the kind of person that was not really big on savings, but I wanted to start investing so I can have enough to retire early and comfortably by the age of 50. The purpose of this blog is to publish my financial journey towards financial independence and early retirement (or as people call it in short, FIRE), as I make it, with you and also have some “supervision” in order to save as much money as possible. I will publish all my money-making activities as well as my plans and hopes for the future.
My initial first goal is to generate about €1.200 of passive income on a monthly basis through peer to peer lending. At this point, I will be close to being financially independent since that is the amount of my current monthly expenses.
I wanted to start investing for a while now and researched some potential investments. To be completely honest, I have a lot of investment ideas. An essential thing for me is to create some passive income that can be reinvested. The ones that I was most interested in were the following:
- Dividend-paying stocks with growth potential
- Low-Cost Index Funds or ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds)
- Peer to Peer Lending
- Cryptocurrency Mining (After all its pretty trendy lately)
For several reasons, that I will get into in a future post, peer to peer lending was a better match for me, so I started researching between the different ways and platforms. The platforms that stood out were the following Grupeer, Mintos, FastInvest, Robo.Cash, Lenndy, PeerBerry, Viventor, ViaInvest, EstateGuru, Crowdestor, and Bondora. There were probably hundreds of peer-to-peer lending platforms to choose from. The one that I thought was the best for me was Mintos. You can read my “Mintos Review” that I am explaining why I chose Mintos as my first platform.
But the main reasons were:
- Decent returns with Buyback Guarantee
- Large platform with over €480 Million Loans Funded (01/2018)
- It had very attractive cashback campaigns at the time. -Up to 5%-
- A large variety of loan originators from a variety of countries and different currencies to invest in. Which also meant high liquidity and I would have no problem finding “attractive” loans
- Excellent user reviews online
There was an issue with one of the loan originators in 2017, but that didn’t put me off.
I made a small deposit of €100 to test the waters before a make a larger deposit and then made a couple of €1.000 deposits which I invested in the Primary as well as the Secondary market.
My current plan is to invest about €150-250 per month in Mintos. I will also be investing in some growth stocks in the NYSE, but that is going to be more like gambling than investing since I am going to trading and I will not opt for dividend paying stock since there is a 30% withholding tax from dividends in my country. I also want to diversify between different platforms and types of loans. The platforms that I want to diversify on are the following Grupeer, PeerBerry, ViaInvest, , Fastinvest, and some others.
The reason is that they all have decent returns, buyback guarantee, and they are all offering Euro-denominated loans, which I prefer because I don’t want to assume the currency risk and currency conversion fees. You can read all available platform reviews here.
As I said, I am also going to be investing in stocks, but this blog is going to be focused on peer to peer lending investments in Europe/EU.
I will be posting monthly or bi-weekly reviews of my portfolio and any issues that come up as I go. I hope that this blog will be an excellent opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas in order to maximize our returns.
Contact
If you like to contact me for any investment questions, collaborations or guest and sponsored posts, my email address is peter.p2pincome@gmail.com
P2P Income 
Hi Peter,
All very admirable goals. I have been under impression that if you own a house, you could easily leave in Greece for 1,250 a month. Not a luxurious lifestyle but neither a survival.
No doubt that the goals will change, the same as personal circumstances. I wish that I was thinking about financial independence when I was 24! The first thought about the future came to me in the early 30s 🙂
All the best and lets stay in touch.
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That’s correct. Cost of living in Greece is low and 1.250 per month without a housing payment is more than enough to cover a normal lifestyle.
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Well Peter, I will happily follow your blog, as it happens that I am also 24 years old and have similar goals with investing. Should be interesting to compare each other results over time.
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Sounds like a plan. 😉
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Hello Peter, I am new to P2P lending.
In any of these platforms, can you dispose (In other words, withdraw) of funds monthly?
Let say, I invest 100€ (lets say, in your favorite platform you mentioned) in a 7 day term one that requires 100€ (so I take full 100% investor share) would I be able to withdraw in the next 9 days? (considering the term is 7 days and the borrower paid in full his debt at the 8th day)
I don’t really understand this thing if it is anually or monthly… (meaning if it is anually, then I invest 100€ in a 7d term one and wait 365 days to recieve 12%? in that case I’d be better off with saving accounts from banks, lol)
Keep up your amazing blog, thanks for your input to the internets!
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Hello Andrea,
Thank you for your kind words. The 12% rate is annual but you still receive interest when they pay you back. For example, if you invest 100€ in a loan that is for one week you will receive your 100€ investment plus around 0.25€ for interest. Keep in mind that the borrower might not make the payment on time and you will have to wait 60 days for the Buyback Guarantee to kick in. But to answer you question, you can withdraw funds to your account as soon as the loan is paid back (including principal and interest).
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Hi Peter,
Been starting to invest on p2p lending platforms and found your blog, it helped me a lot choosing which platform to invest on or not. I have a question, have you been able to refer investors to those platforms and if so, around how many? Really curious to understand if it’s been worth for you to make this amazing blog
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I am really glad that you enjoy my blog and that it was a good resource for you when choosing where to put your money. To be honest with you I don’t know if it’s worth it from a financial standpoint but I like doing it so far. I always wanted to design a website but I didn’t know the first thing about it and although it is not something special in regards to the design I am pretty proud of the fact that I was able to do it all on my own. And thank you for calling my blog “amazing” by the way that was pretty encouraging to me.
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Hi Peter,
I’m new to this kind of investment and now I’m doing the first steps, like your blog, and Marco’s blog are very useful to me. I want to thank you for the information you share, because it is very useful for recruits like me. I would like you in one of your next articles if you can give specific advice from your experience on what credits it is good to invest (such as type of credit, country, term, etc.) for which I will be grateful.
Greetings
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Thank you for the kind words Fillip and that’s great to hear that you are starting with p2p lending. That is a great idea for my blog as I am always looking for new content ideas. Thank you
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Hi Peter,
Thanks a lot for this blog and the information that you share. Its very useful for do it yourself investors like me. I wanted to know if you have any experience with Bondora and its go & grow plan which was introduced recently. Would be great to hear your reviews on this topic.
Thanks,
Adithya
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Funny that you should ask me today since I just made a trial deposit yesterday. I can’t comment on it though just yet but it is supposed to be exactly as they advertise it to be. I read a couple of reviews on it and I decided to give it a go. Ask me again in a couple of months. 😉
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Hello Peter
First of all thanks for useful information that you share.
As far as I saw you have investments in 11 p2p platforms I know the diversification is good, but can you share do you feel comfortable with tracking of so much platforms, do you have some kind of limit for platforms which invest ?
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