Just a few days ago LHV publicised some great news about their Growth Account. It seems LHV has decided to grow its user base by getting more young clients to join their bank and this has brought some rewards to others as well. 

The main change in the Growth Account I have seen is the fact that the account management fee has gone down for some people, especially for investors just starting out. The Growth Account is free of charge for the first year and then the monthly management fee is 0,05% with the minimum being set to 50 cents (this used to be 1€). So after one year now it is advisable to have at least 1000€ on the Growth Account not to pay more than the 0.05% minimum. Previous to the change the amount you needed to gather in the first year was 2000€. The other change is that the Growth Account management fee is 0€ for people until they turn 26 years old. So if you have a newborn child and you would like to invest some money for their future in long term then this account could be free of charge for 25 years (if no changes are made to fees of course).
The other main fees such as purchase and sale transaction fees remained the same- 1% purchase fee, 11€ + 0,3% per instrument sale fee.

Another bigger change is that although you still can choose "just" 6 funds the options are largely increased. There used to be 22 fund options in Growth Account and now there are 38 to choose from. They also added filter functions by themes (technology, consumption, sustainable development, healthcare and even cryptocurrencies etc), types (dividend payers) and regions (global, developed countries, developing countries). There is also a risk scale ranging from 1 to 7, where the lowest risk fund has level 3 (corporate bonds) and level 7 are cryptocurrencies and Russian companies. Sometimes too many options can be paralysing and some of the options are more speculation than long-term investing. Not sure about how I feel about it yet. Some of the new options are interesting- I have been thinking about medicine or biotechnology field since starting the Growth Account (as it is a field I try to keep myself up to date on anyway) but up to now I didn't really have an option to dabble in it. Need to read more about the field in general as well as the options now open to me. So maybe, just maybe I'll change something. We'll see.

There was another news related to Growth Account...
If you have Growth Account and also use LHV for your daily banking there is also now new micro investing option you can activate. Basically every time you pay with the card small amount of money is transferred to the Growth Account and once a week purchase is made based on your predetermined preferences just like happens with your normal deposits to there. I have somewhat similar thing in my SEB account although there the money is put on regular savings account. But even for a person like me who prefers to pay cash (more on it here)- this account still gathers some money. How much is added to the Growth Account depends on what you choose. 
  • In the so-called unlimited option always your purchase is rounded up to the next full euro and the difference is deposited to the Growth Account. So, for example, the price is 7,40€ and an additional 60 cents would make full 8€ so 60 cents are deposited to Growth Account. In all the everyday prices ending in 90 or 99 cents - the amount deposited is really small.
  • In case of the limited amount if the payment is less than 10€ you would deposit 10% of the payment made. This makes some deposits larger and some smaller than in the first option. In the 7,40€ example, you would deposit 74 cents. If the price was 1.20 you would deposit just 12 cents compared to 80 cents of the unlimited option. If the payment is 10€ or more it is always rounded up to nearest €, same as in the unlimited option.
Using this LHV micro investing can be done on any LHV debit card and activating this service is free of charge (but the Growth Account fees still apply of course). 

One more news they stated was for students, and it was that starting this year LHV is giving out student loans. This does get them, clients, perhaps? When I started university it was quite common that people my age didn't have bank accounts and they made it in the bank where they took out a student loan. And as you needed 2 persons to guarantee the loan, it was the least amount of paperwork to get the loan from the bank they banked at. Nowadays as the student loan terms are the same in all banks I guess it is still true people take it from their home bank? But at least they won't lose clients who would need to make an account in another bank to get the loan. So not sure how much this changes for them but maybe the image of a youthful and successful bank will draw in more young people if they can get the loan there as well?
I have been really trying to figure out how being ill effects my financial state- my income and spending. It is not just curiosity... I guess nobody thinks of being unwell when they are healthy... Within the last month, I have been in the hospital for about 15 days, some of it in the intensive care unit. 
And of course all of it depends on what is the matter with you, but it really feels like financially it has been rather positive for me. 

In Estonia, you get sickness benefit from the fourth day of your falling ill, and some employers also pay for the first 3 days. The sickness benefit is paid at the rate of 70% of daily income, and this is calculated based on the last 6 months wages. So, yes, of course, you get less money when being ill but you get also paid for the weekends and holidays (which can be is important for those who work shift work for example). Also compared to being healthy or just ill at home - in the hospital you have almost no ability to spend your money. You are given food 3 times a day, you get all the medications you need... You are expected to pay "bed fee" of 2,5 € per day from the second day of being in the hospital and this is not paid for the intensive care unit days. So basically you get 30 % less money but spend just 2,5€ a day. Sounds like a deal doesn't it?

Being ill at home and buying expensive medicines, being unable to cook at home for some reason and needing to order in a lot of food etc can be really expensive. But this hospital stay seems like best saving month ever. To be honest being home from the hospital for a few days I did spend more than usual as I just missed so many foods. Hospital food is filling but there is a limit of how many times I can eat cabbage soup... I guess anyone who has been in Estonian hospital in summer and eaten cabbage soup 1-2 times a day (for 15 days) like me, knows it. 
From time to time when I feel I need to unwind from work, I watch some youtube videos (yes, I am guilty of that)... and somehow I stumbled on an account The Financial Diet which provides short financial videos about twice a week. And I have kept on watching. 
There are two female hosts and a regular guest host as well and they have about 200 videos uploaded there.
To be frank, most of it is quite USA specific but most videos tend to have something noteworthy for the rest of the world as well. They do screw up sometimes and say things like "a good coat which serves you for many years is an investment", perhaps financial text should not state that, but hey, these slipups happen. Also, the hosts do not invest, which is important to know. But they talk about saving, earning extra money, bad money habits, spending mistakes etc. Nothing too deep, but nice relatable episodes- maybe worth checking out?

Do you have a favourite financial / investing youtube account or a podcast? 
I started investing in August 2016, so by the second half of this month, I have been in the investing "scene" for 2 years. 

So what have I achieved, are there any changes and what are the future plans?

I started in August 2016  by adding 1000€ to Bondora, then in September I added 1000€ to Mintos and in December added also some funds to CrowdEstate. In January 2017 I started an LHV Growth Account, which allows to by regularly ETFs with relatively low costs and also started using EstateGuru. So half a year in I was already in 4 portals. Quite recently I added Grupeer as 5th.

I realized quite quickly that Bondora is not something I could use as the interest % they show and what you get are really not in balance. I stopped adding money there already in January 2017. This is the only portal I am exiting. Also as lately the interests have dropped significantly in other portals and inflation also eats into the profits I feel too much of my money is in crowdfunding sites... so I have limited my deposits to these sites and try to add most of my investments to LHV Growth Accounts that seems a safer option also due to tax benefits there.
So while 6 months ago in general terms my portfolio looked like this, the current status is on the lower image. The categories are not perfect but I thought it would be better than just adding every portal seperately. 
Bondora and Mintos (and Grupeer in the lower image) are in P2P loans. As EstateGuru and CrowdEstate mostly deal with realestate they are marked in the orange category. LHV Growth Account with the 5 funds I buy weekly is the grey and individual stock is the yellow (in February graph it is the Tallinna Vesi and now Madara Cosmetics). On the upper image the full sum was 13800€ and on July it was 16300€. There aren't that big differences but as you can see I have been adding more money to the Growth Account and have a smaller investment in individual stocks.  The change towards more money in ETFs is something  I plan to keep up. I will also add some money to CrowdEstate, but try to limit deposits to other portals to get a bit better balance of the different risks. The P2P loans part has not been going down as Mintos had several lovely campaigns so I added uncommonly much money there in June. But as they publicised that Mogo will be buying back a lot of the loans my average interest I am able to get there has significantly gone down. I had to change my auto-invest portfolios as my money was just sitting on my account. So this is why am hesitant to add more money there. I generally enjoy the portal but, hey, of course I loved the higher interests with buyback guarantee more.

What else I should say about this 2-year journey?
I generated 2 graphs to show in time my deposits month by month as well as the cumulative sum I have deposited over this time. So the best months was January 2017 when I started LHV Growth account and added a lot of money there. All in all, I have deposited 14085€ to my investing accounts.

From the pretax profits, it is clear that months vary quite a bit but all in all, I have gathered 1507€ in profits during these 2 years. I am quite happy with this sum. I mean I am in no way professional, but as someone who started 2 years ago knowing absolutely nothing, this isn't half bad I think. 

So what next?
Well, first of all, I try to keep up my current savings level.
I am not currently looking for new portals to try, but I would not say this is ruled out if something interesting crops up. The main target is to keep adding money to investments and I would like to see that by the end of the year 1/3 of my portfolio value is in the LHV Growth account. The end of the year will be a good time to reevaluate things anyway, to see where to go from there.
Also, September will be a bit slower month as I need to pay up the last years income tax (deadline is 1st of October) so probably a bit less money will be deposited to investments next month.
Where will I be the same time next year? I'd love to have portfolio value over 20 000€. Let's see :)

July was the second best month I have had this year. So this was really exciting. I actually was quite busy and didn't have time to look at my investments that much so this was really a surprise for me, when I was looking at the numbers yesterday.

From deposits and also withdrawals I am finally giving up and trying to sell my Bondora loans, this is not going very fast but I managed to withdraw 265€ from the site. I also feel the pressure to be more conservative so most of it went to LHV growth account, with some additional money I added 350 there. I also added money to CrowdEstateEstateGuru, and Mintos. So in summary I withdraw 265€ and deposited 590€ to other sites - so this balances to 325€ of "new" money added to investments.

Income was quite good 137,25€ or 4,43€ a day.
The biggest part of it with a bit ower 45€ came from CrowdEstateMintos portfolio earned me almost 35€ and on my LHV growth account, the VAL ETF (MSCI EMU Value ETF, the European value companies) gave me almost 30€ dividends. So I am happy with this months income :)

The portfolio value was 16352,48€ on 31.06.2018, which is 425€ increase compared to June, not bad, not bad at all.

Exact numbers for July and previous months can be seen in the spreadsheet here.