And it is time to look at all that has happened in December as well as throughout the year. This has been a quite crazy year. I have been busy at work with several large projects, one luckily ended before Christmas so this is behind me and work life should calm down a bit... well if I was not writing a 20 million Euro project proposal at the moment, it would calm down...
I had also health troubles and many hospital visits in 2018, managed to acquire a rare disease and now can honestly claim I am one in a million. Still, more hospital stays and tests to come but the main threat to my life seems to be in the past, at least until the next flare up.
So it is time to look back on the financial year and gather some thoughts for 2019 as well. 2019 goals will be a post on its own, but here I will look back at the December as well as on the whole year, and I decided to add a net worth update as well, so a lot to go through here. So let's get on with it.
First a short look at December.
Deposits and withdrawals:
Managed to withdraw 10€ from Bondora, added 50 to Mintos and CrowdEstate, 100 to Envestio and 450 to Growth Account. So all together 640 € of deposited money.
Interest and other income were as follows:
CrowdEstate was the best earner being more than 10€ above the monthly average of this year. Mintos was the second best but did underperform a bit compared the monthly average of 33,27. EstateGuru and LHV were solid performers. Two new portals have obviously small sums coming in and the Bondora is a disaster in its own right as always.
The last monthly income of 2018 was 113,08 or 3,65 a day.
With all these portals plus the MDARA single stock the investment portfolio was all together 19451,24 € on the 31.12.2018.
And the yearly wrap-up
First of all, I did some math and realised that based on deposits to the investments (and not technically to savings), my savings rate of 2018 was 40,7%.
I do not calculate XIRR or monthly interest or something similar but if I base calculations on the portfolio value of 31.12.2017 and look at the interest gathered in 2018, the interest rate was 9,66%. I guess calculating it so is not ideal as I do deposit money throughout the year as well, but at the same time, many of my investments are longer-term bullet investments which pay at the end of the term. Therefore many investment payments are delayed as in portals such as EstateGuru and CrowdEstate my average investment terms are respectively 13,7 and 17,4 months. So this seemed like a logical compromise of looking at it- and I clearly state how it was calculated.
Now to the yearly deposits. My depositing to different accounts was rather uneven throughout the year, being based both on the opportunities (Mintos cashback in May) and also on how much money I could save up. The May deposit was done partly from the savings (or the so-called snowy-day-fund) and therefore for the next 2 months, I had to fill that up again...
But basically I do the pay yourself first by having both monthly and weekly transfers to investment accounts, and if there is money "left over" by the end of the month that goes to where I feel like at the moment.
The income is very uneven which is caused mainly by the fact that I have a limited amount of investments in portals with larger payment limits such as CrowdEstate (min investment 100, with 100 increases) and EstateGuru (min investment 50, with increases of 1 allowed). So these projects end or have larger payments only during some months, and so those months peaks and others are really low. The income could have been a few cents more to have lovely round and even number, but what can I do. The final income of the year 2018 was 1199,37.
Longer time view of my deposits is even more uneven as in the beginning, I invested my savings just sitting on the savings account. I do not have such buffer any more to put in the game. The trend seems to decrease but I hope that in future it will flatten out. Although that might be tricky as the few outliers tend to effect such graphs a lot. The final amount of yearly deposits was 6445 €.
Income seems also to drop every year, being larger in the first part of the year and smaller in the second half. This comes from having larger projects ending usually in the beginning of the year. I guess larger building projects tend to do most of the building works during summer, interior things and the finishing details in autumn- winter and most sales happen and the loans are paid back in early spring... Also in 2017 and 2018, I received the TVEAT dividends June influencing again the first half of the year. The bigger spike in July 2018 came from both CrowdEstate as well as VAL (one of my LHV Growth Accound funds) paying dividends.
What else?
In August I made a goal for myself that by the end of the year I should have 1/3 of my investments in LHV Growth Account and that I probably will not add any more portals. Well, I messed up both.
Even if I would recalculate my LHV to the purchase price (and not account the strong minus there) I would not have 1/3 in there it is around 30% mark, but not more. It is also partly due to testing 2 new portals. Well, at least that was not a goal or a promise really. That was me stating that I do not expect to add any new portals.
I think I should actually do a small portal by the portal review as well, but that post will come later- otherwise, this post will twice as long.
So time to wrap up with my yearly statistics, just one more thing to do...
I think the end of a year is also a great time to calculate my NET WORTH again. I made a longer post about it HERE. So I will not go into it really here, all the calculations are the same and I have included the same categories. But the NEW WORTH of Snowy at the end of 2018 was 33 859,05, which is 2571 more than in September.
How was your year? What are the best investments? Is your monthly investing income as variable as mine?
