The month of March was a bit better than February. 

Let's start from the deposits. I withdrew 30 € from Bondora and deposited altogether 280 € to all other places (Mintos, EstateGuru, CrowdEstate and LHV Growth Account). So, in the end, the deposit balance was +250 € to investments, which is about 22% of my after-tax income. Perhaps I could have invested more but as I am planning a short holiday abroad I did spend some money on that as well (plane tickets, lodging etc).

So what did I earn?

The biggest part of the income came from CrowdEstate where the exit from Mustakivi tee project was made. The exit was a few months early as the planned deadline was in July so the interest is smaller than planned due to a shorter time, but I did get a bit more than 68 € from there with interest rate >15%.

The second great "player" was Mintos with the Lendo and Mogo cashback campaigns. All in all, I got 30,04 € from Mintos, including  6,90 € cashback.  Not bad, not bad at all. So this year I have got 15,45 € in cashback from buyback guarantee loans I would be investing in any way. I mean if I could deposit more money there the numbers would be greater, but any little bit helps. 

The only thing with cashback I find annoying is that it is not shown separately in account statement, but put to the deposits row (see image, I deposited 120 and Mintos added 6,90). Yes, it is a deposit, but for clarity, it would be great to see it as a distinct row. In the overview page they do show it as "Campaign Rewards", but that is the all-time value, not the current month info. At least now I know where to look for it. Before I realized where it is shown, I was looking through the emails to get the exact number (they send emails about once a week during campaigns to let you know you got X amount of cashback).

In EstateGuru 2 projects with 11,5% interest rate ended, also some other interests trickled in - all together 19,32 €.  Also, one loan did not go through and the money was given back. One of the finished loans had had some payment issues- so I am happy to see it had a positive finalization. At the same time, the Tolli 7 loan with the deadline of 7th of February is still in trouble, we will see how the bailiff process goes. If all else fails I understand the property will be auctioned off.

Bondora income was less than 10€.

LHV growth account has not received any dividends (SPYW coming in April, maybe something else as well, as most of my funds pay quarterly dividends). Also out of my 5 funds there, 4 are red, this influences the portfolio value a bit. I have been reinvesting money I received from selling off the American funds, so I have not deposited a lot of money there. As this money is in my head dedicated to the growth account I have included it in the "value in time" calculations previous month and this month- this seems logical to me. So this is why there has not been a significant dip there... although I did sell most of my funds in January or February and moved the income to another account. I am spreading out the investments in time, to benefit from the "dollar cost averaging"- I guess in Europe we really should say euro cost averaging but this seems strange- perhaps I have been listening too many US podcasts and the term is stuck in my brain :)

So all together the income in March was 131,45 € or mathematically 4,24 € a day- which is great. I mean I can't live off of such a sum, but at the same time, if I bought a cup of coffee to go daily, I would fink of it as a great indulgence. And now I could do it from my investments if I wanted to. Small victories!

The portfolio value was 14211,12 € on 31.03.2018.

As always exact numbers can be seen in the spreadsheet here.

Although goal setting is usually associated with the new year I do feel it is important all year round, especially keeping track of your goals already made. I do believe in SMART goal setting. 

So all goals either big or small should be made based on the SMART acronym:

SPECIFIC - write a clear concise goal.For example, financial freedom is not a clear goal as financial freedom might mean passive income of 1000€ a month for me, but totally different amount to someone else.

MEASURABLE - it should be clear when you have reached a goal, and if possible the goal should be something you can track throughout the time you are working on it. So losing weight is not a good goal, as it is measurable but not specific (does not give you a target). Losing 10 kg is a clear and measurable goal. Writing a book is specific but not really measurable as a book is something you could work on and improve your whole life. But writing a 100-page first draft by a specific date is a measurable goal.

ATTAINABLE - making goals attainable is also extremely important. Making them too hard means you lose the drive to go for it when it becomes clear you will not be able to achieve it by the deadline. Also postponing deadline will set a very bad example and should not be done. Better is to rephrase the goal all together. Also making them too easy makes them uninteresting and also if you reach them you do not feel the empowerment from reaching an easy goal. So the trick is to set goals that are just hard enough.

RELEVANT - a good goal is something that is relevant to you. Goals set perhaps because someone else wants you to do something will have much less chance working, compared to the same goal if you truly want to achieve this yourself. For example, pressuring someone to quit smoking is quite unlikely to work, but the same person might quit smoking if they feel the need to do so themselves.

TIME-BASED - to keep track of goals it is important to give yourself clear deadlines. Deadlines keep you on track and for goals which need more effort, I feel it is good to give also sub-deadlines. Even if they are just mathematical goalposts they help to keep you motivated on longer goals. This is especially helpful for me, as I tend to be the person who procrastinates and then does all the work on last night day before the deadline. I know I should change that and clear goals are a way to do that.

What kind of goals I have? This year I have 2 main financial goals:

1) to have earned 1000€ from my investments by the end of a year. This goal is clearly based on SMART goal setting. Mathematically this means earning a bit more than 83€ a month- this is good as it gives me monthly subgoals. I exceeded this in January and fell short in February, but the two months together were over 166€, so all is good for now. We will see how the current month goes. As I have quite some investment which does not pay out monthly the months are quite uneven. Last year the yearly earning was about 628, so I am going for almost double the amount. Wish me luck!

2) to have my portfolio value 15 000€ by the end of the year. This is also mostly a smart goal. The main downside might be attainability. My portfolio value was about 12400 on December 31st. I am sure I can deposit 2600 in a year or about 215 a month (~20% of my wages), but as portfolio value also is dependant on the markets I might need to invest more than that. My TVEAT is almost -500€ and also most of the ETFs are in the red, so a great time to buy, but hard to keep portfolio value increasing. We will see, I am hopeful.

Also, I tend to set small goals on tasks I tend to put off. For example, Estonian income tax declaration deadline is 2.04 this year. So I told myself I need to do it at least 1 month before that. I succeeded but it was a close call as one of the CrowdEstate companies did not send in the tax info as promised and it took some emails to get it on my tax return so I could actually submit it. Now all I have to do is pay the 20% by 1st of October- another goal to pay it at least 10 days early. But not earlier, this zero interest loan from the state is a good thing :)

Possible other financial goals to go for, just to give you some ideas:

• Save up a 3 (or 6) month emergency fund on a separate bank account by date;
• Have a zero spend month;
• Read x amount financial books in a year;
• Pay up a loan you have by a date or if the loan is too large set a short time goal to pay back a certain amount;
• Save at least 5% of your monthly income and if possible invest it (it is easiest to make an automated transfer on your payday to investing site or to separate bank account so you do not even see the money  and won't miss it) or;
• Save and invest 1% of your income next month and increase this every month by 1% until you find a level that is sustainable for you;
• Pay up all your credit cards by date (or start from one card but plan to pay up all);
• Listen to at least 2 (another number) episodes of financial podcasts in a week;
• Figure out a way to earn x amount of extra money outside of your normal wages and invest it;
• Do a budget and follow it for a month or alternatively just track all your expenses for a month and make conclusions to improve your spending habits;
• Learn a new skill to improve your career;
• Find a zero spend activity you like and add this to your schedule regularly (possibly to replace an activity you spend on), like walking, going to free cultural event x times a month etc. For example, some museums have a free entrance day once a month, town districts have regular free musical events etc.

You have more ideas? Leave them in the comments.

I start out by stating that I am exiting from the Bondora portal. I have several reasons for this and will talk about reasons and my history in this portal first. If you would just like to see my current stats on this portal - please scroll down a bit.

Also, thing stated here are my recollections about the portal, some facts might be a bit off, I have not made any notes along the way.

I started investing in Bondora in August 2016. Before depositing any money into the portal I had read about bet hedging and the fact that there is need to invest in about 200 loans in any given portal to give you better protection from bad loans. As I had savings to invest and at the time the minimum loan amount was 5€ - I deposited 1000€. This is no way a requirement to start with such a sum. You could always start with just a few loans to understand a portal and if you feel happy with the portal you could build up the portfolio over time. I was impatient and just put 1000€ in. And in the beginning, I was quite happy and added money over several months. 

Bondora gives out loans, evaluates the lender and gives the lender rating based on the risk seen. ratings go from AA (safest), through letters A, B, C, D, E, F and end with HR (standing for high risk). In all these categories there are different interest loans on the market for investors to invest in. The risk category is based on Bondora algorithms and is not true always of course. HR loan is more likely to not be paid back, but AA loan might stop paying as well... All the time I have been on the portal there has been option to also sell loans you have invested in, so portal allows quite a quick exit it needs might arise. But of course, selling loans which have problems means selling these with discount.

When I started in August 2016, there was an automatic investing option (can't remember what it was called), which allowed you to choose which loans to invest in. You could look at the country, loan purpose, interest amount etc and activate the program to invest in just such loans. There was always an option to manually select loans as well, but loans you would like might be willed by automated programs from other accounts so hand picking is time-consuming and was not the best solution. 

A bit later, I think in the autumn of 2016 they announced that this is too complicated for investors and decided to stop this option to auto-invest into loans you thought had potential to be paid back... I personally thought they were unhappy that some people were earning too much? Who knows. 

Instead, they had created some kind of portfolio manager where your only choice was to choose between 5(?) options: very conservative-conservative-balanced-progressive-very progressive. I am not sure about the names of these but this was the gist of the things. Each option showed the what kind of interest you might expect. The problem was that even the most conservative options invested in risky HR and F loans, which made many more conservative people (like me) unhappy. The official response to that was, that it might be sometimes needed to increase the interest yield of the portfolio to give you the promised interest of your chosen option. In reality, you might choose an option promising let's say 10% and Bondora showing that your current portfolio was already giving you 13%, so there was no need to take in more risky investments until more conservative AA and A loans bring your yield down, but it still happened. This was when I decided to stop the auto-investing on the portal. 

At the same time, there was talk that people were writing their own programs to still be able to choose which loans to invest in. Also, one was publicly offered- BeePlus. Beeplus allowed choosing from all the different characteristics Bandora was asking from the lenders. For example, you could just invest in loans given to Estonia, to people who had full employment, had income verified by the portal and who wanted to spend the money on health, or perhaps to all reasons besides traveling etc. You had huge options. I kept investing in Bondora as long as BeePlus was free to use. As I am investing as a private person and therefore all losses and any expenses can't be deducted from profits... when the BeePlus decided to make the use of the site paid I stopped using it. It was a bit more expensive in the beginning, now it is quite good: 1.9€ + 0.9% transaction* fee per month. But still, as I had realized that the Bondora changes its' policies when they want to, and their rating system is quite bad. I decided to end my relationship with Bondora by not investing anymore and any money that comes back to site as paid premium or interest has been withdrawn since January 2017. I could cut my losses and just sell all my loans- not sure if this would be better or not. We will see how this slow exit goes.

Of course as the new 5 option investing in the portal was unpopular it was changed several times and at the moment there is 9 option Portfolio Manager coming from ultra-conservative to opportunistic. It shows you the expected distribution of loans between ratings and countries. For example, the most conservative option would invest in AA, A and B loans (respectively 20%, 45% and 35%) and gives 55% of loans to Estonia and 45% to Finland. On the end of the scale is the most progressive option with AA 10%, A 2,5%, B 5%, C 17,5%, D 22,5%, E 12,5%, F 17,5% and HR 12,5% and loan origin countries would be divided as follows: Estonia 40%, Spain 30% and Finland 30%. And I guess there were still unhappy people - so the more detailed investing came back as Portfolio Pro. Portfolio Pro allows choosing Country, Rating (AA, A etc), loan duration and how much to invest in each borrower loans. So much fewer options compared to BeePlus. But still better (more nuanced) than the automated Portfolio Manager. I do feel these changes were too little too late. Bondora gives better investment interests than several other portals but I also have way more "red loans" - so loans which are not paying back as they should. And this happens in all categories which shows the automatic categorization is flawed and can not be trusted. But if you would like to invest in Bondora I would recommend at least checking out BeePlus. It is very helpful :)

Finally some statistics from my portfolio. I have deposited 1350 and as I am exiting I have withdrawn 520€ from the portal. So I need to get out 830 more to just get my money back (not taking into account inflation). They show my account value as 966,65€:

And profitability shown based on loan ratings is as follows:

Also as seen in the principal overdue column above, many of the loans are not paying back the loans. Based on my account - more than a third of the loans are overdue. In the graph gray shows repaid loans, green are current and reds and oranges are overdue. The large red 28,46%, for example, are loans overdue more than 180 days. Fun isn't it?

Well, they do try to get them to pay. If you look at the recovery process chart, they are doing something. Based on my loans some borrowers have made a new payment contract (the small blue sliver of about 2%). Others are in court 56%, or in the hands of bailiffs (30%) or in court with the civil claim (about 3%). So there is hope, but the process is so slow.

In the end some more just fun statistics about my portfolio:

• 69% of my loans are to Estonia, 15% to Spain and 16% to Finland
• Quater of my loans are from rating C. AA, A and B loans are also almost a quarter altogether.
• The biggest part of the loans based on my portfolio is for home redecorating 29,6%, second largest is other reason 22,5% and third is loan consolidation with 13,8%. Loan consolidation? Really. I mean Bondora does not offer low interests for people needing money. What did they pay off to be happy to replace their other loans with Bondora? The famous SMS loans? Sad to see this... Also why to borrow for home decoration? If your roof is leeking and you need to save your home from loss of value I do understand, but if you just want new wallpaper you really should save up :)

As I have not given out any new loans in Bondora for more than a year, my critique of the rating system might be out of date. Please take this into account. Maybe someone who starts today and has a similar rating balance would not have about a third of their loans late... But as this is my experience I just love another portal who offers a lot of loans with about 8-13% interest with buyback quarantee... Totally different feelings compared to Bondora where every time I log on I see that third of my loans are red...

More info on Bondora in easy to follow videos in English, Estonian and German from their YouTube channel.

February was a bit slower month for me. And no, it is not because it is the shortest month of the year. Just I haven't had dividend payouts in 2 months from my stock and fund investments and this month also no bigger bullet investments ended in P2P platforms. So the stats are a quite bit lower than January.
In January the main part of my wholesome ;) profit 143,01€ that I got from my investments came from CrowdEstate where the Peterburi 98 early exit was finalized and final internal rate of return was 26,09%.
In February the biggest part came from EstateGuru where 3 of my loans ended and that is why the sum is bigger. Also, one more loan was supposed to end, the Tolli 7 which seems to be in financial difficulty. We will see how this plays out- my skin in the game is the minimum 50€ they allow in this portal. All together my profit in February is 72,55€, and my deposits in February were 450€.

Also what is important to note is EstateGuru and CrowdEstate are longer-term investments and pay out interest not as often as private loans in Mintos and Bondora- so here the income varies quite a lot as I do not have a large portfolio diversification in these portals. I started to invest in CrowdEstete in December 2016 and based on my loans the average loan term is 26 months and most of them do not pay interest monthly or even quarterly. In the EstateGuru portal, I started in February 2017 and there perhaps about half the loans pay monthly interest and the average loan duration (based on my loans is 14,4 months). So based on these portals the Estateguru gives better money circulation and as the minimal amount is smaller it allows a bit better diversification. At the same time CrowdEstate gives higher profits (NB also higher risk) and as the loan terms are longer this might be useful when the average interest offered in the portal(s) goes down- your money is locked in higher interest loan for a longer time- giving better yields. But of course, if the market crashes your money is stuck there. So it is risky...

As I was a bit forgetful I did not write down all the stats at the end of the month, so I do not have the exact investment portfolio value of 28th February, but it was about 13 800€, based on the fact that today, on the 4th of March it is 13819,5€.
As always, exact numbers are available here.