It is truly hard to know what I want from the market. I mean for more than a half a year every time I logged on my LHV account I just saw red. Everything was below the purchase price and looked so depressing. At times my account was more than 12% below the purchase price, and for months 10% below... Of course, as a long term investor, it was a great time to buy, and I did try to save more and buy more ETFs... At the same time, it is now finally great to see some green. So for the second day in a row, my account is in profit. The overall look (including my single stock) has been in profit for about a month or so, as my MDARA stock has been profitable, but now also the Growth Account is finally in green. Just by 0,07%, but still, it's GREEN! So still a great time to buy, but also good time mentally when you do not need to look at the red numbers constantly...

I have been Madara investor since last summer, so again this spring was time to receive another Madara box. It is something I have talked about previously here and here. I had seen this springs box advertised on Instagram and was getting worried that I had not head from Madara... Did they stop giving away the mystery box to the stock owners? No, I had just completely missed the email. Silly me.

So I had received the email on 11th of March and the deadline of making the order was 15th of March. I missed it. I found the email, between many unread ones on 17th and decided to try if the code still works for an order. If it didn't, well it was my own fault, but if it did, I would be happy of course. And it still worked :)
So I made the order late on 17th, got a notification that my order had been received on 18th, received an SMS notification that I had a package on 19th and picked it up the next day. So, all in all, I got my order in basically 3 days.

The beauty box is sold for 27,95 and is advertised to contain at least 40 € of products, which seems to be the case this time as well.
What did it contain?

• 155 ml Grow Volume Conditioner (full size 175 ml costs 19,90€). I personally do not use conditioners for my hair, but it is a nice gift for someone with long hair. And comes in plant-based plastic packaging, which is a nice touch. 
• 10 ml tester of their Grow Volume shampoo. The size is such that I would get 3-4 washes out of it due to my short hair, but as it is a rip-me-open type package, it would be hard to do. Probably will give it to someone with long hair who could use it in a single wash. 
• Full-size Beach BB Shimmering Sunscreen SPF15 (valued at 21,95€ in the website). I love mineral sunscreen and with summer coming this will be used up. I prefer the non-shimmering ones personally but as mineral sunscreen can have a white cast, a bit of golden shimmer might help with that.
• 3 ml tester of their Weightless Sun Milk SPF20. These tiny testers a quite good for short travels where I might see the sun just for a few hours on a one day. I have a half day field trip planned near the Black Sea in June. So great for hand luggage on a plane for that trip, for example. 
• 15 ml sample of Fake It, the Natural Look Self Tan Milk. Probably big enough to get full application for feet and legs. Maybe even arms as well. Not sure, I do not usually eye-ball the amount of moisturiser I use. I do use fake tan from time to time (Dove usually), so not bad to have an extra to try of a bit higher price range.
• 2 ml sample of the Daily Defence Cream. I own it in original size and it is great for elbows, feet, even lips. So great tiny sample for travelling. 
• 12,5 ml Scrub Exfoliating Oil-To-Milk Scrub. This is a product I own in full size. It is not in my daily rotation as I prefer acid exfoliators to the mechanical ones... But it is a good product and I am sure to use it in my travels when I usually tend to not bring most of my skincare due to the large sizes. So no excuse for not taking this along.

So, all in all, looking at the two larger products and 2 larger samples I would say there is at least 45€ worth of value here. So I have 100 stocks with the purchase price of 7,35 a piece (you could get the packages even with less stocks), and get more than 80€ worth of products yearly. So better than 10% dividend. And they do pay out some real monetary dividends as well. So not bad, not bad at all.
Do you own Madara stock? Plan to buy? Have any other stock giving such perks?

It feels like every month starts with an apology on the fact that I have been absent a bit. In November December I was travelling for work, half of January was dealing with severe illness in my family and then death and funeral arrangements. So I was really hoping for a much better February. I had a planned post on the income tax I wanted to do, but alas, the companies have not sent in all the data for the tax administration. So I have been unable to declare my taxes, and it would be a rather limited post due to that- so I figured I'd wait. And then I had my regular doctors appointment about my chronic illness and they were unhappy with my results and I was unexpectedly hospitalised. So I am currently sitting up in my hospital bed and getting an IV drip.
So, I guess I can plan only so much. Life really loves to laugh at your plans and change them.

But let's get to the February overview.

So what about deposits?

As I did set myself rather ambitious goals on the income received this year (1800€ or 150 a month) I have been trying to deposit as much as possible within the first months so that I will gains some of the interest from these deposits throughout the year. So I have taken some money from my snowy day fund and put it into deposits this month.  I plan to top it up in few months time. 

Deposits and withdrawals made in February:

Bondora -10

CrowdEstate 50

Grupeer 60
Envestio 100

LHV Growth Account 200

Mintos 350

So, all in all, I withdrew 10€ from Bondora and deposited 760 to other portals which means 750€ deposited to investments within February. I have been putting in small sums to the Grupeer and Envestio where I hope to get higher interest rates and I also added a significant sum to Mintos where the interest rates are lower but the portal itself has proven itself for a longer time. 

For the Growth Account, I have the auto deposit running weekly on every Tuesday I deposit 50€ there. So If I do not add any extra money there the month always ends up being 200 or 250 a month depending on how many Tuesdays there are. On CrowdEstate I have a 50€ a month auto deposit running and depending on how cash flow is on the portal and how many interesting projects there are I sometimes add extra money there (that happened for example in January), but in February I had several projects ending and I had cash flow to invest in new projects so I did not add any extra there. 

Income for Feruary

CrowdEstate 77,18

Mintos 32,66

EstateGuru 21,82

Envestio 5,33

Grupeer 3,14

Bondora 0,17

Income for February was 140,3€ which is 5,01 a day. It is not the highest monthly income I have received, but due to the short month, it is the first time the daily income is above 5€ a day! Small victories are important :) To get to the 1800 a year I need an average of 4,93 a day so I need to keep this up. It will be hard I am sure but that is what goals are for.
As you can see, again the CrowdEstate was the best one for the income, as several longer projects ended there the payout was nice (for comparison the monthly average of last year was ca 26€). As I mentioned last month I had some projects in trouble both in CrowdEstate and in EstateGuru. I am happy to say, that at the moment in CrowdEstate almost all of them have paid up, and the only one still owing me money is the MMMSprattus OÜ, but it seems they are also working on the cash flow, they have paid some of the owed money and hopefully this will solve itself soon. All other portals did perform up to usual standard so no real surprises there.

The portfolio value on 28.02.2019 across all the platforms was 21127,46€, which is 955 higher than a month ago. As the deposits were about 750 the rest 200€ is portfolio growth, mostly coming from the LHV Growth Account being less in red, with just about -2% (compared to -4,15% last month). Also, my only single stock Mdara is up more than 8+ compared to the purchase price, being currently the highest it has been since I purchased it.

So fingers crossed that my portfolio keeps on growing and that I will be able to achieve all my goals for 2019!

I posted the part one of this post last week, but what about the other non-real estate portals?

Well, there is the good, maybe no bad ones, but surely still the ugly. So let's get into it. All the numbers are from 9.02.2019 when I downloaded the info from the portals, to write this post.

Bondora is the first investing platform I ever used. I started investing there in August 2016, and by the end of that year, I had deposited 1350€. 
I chose the platform mostly due to the fact that many people were speaking of it. Not in the sense that there was a lot of advertising (I guess there was on TV, but not owning one I did not see that), but mostly just because there was a lot of information available and a lot of it was also in Estonian (helps to read in your native language when just getting to know a completely new topic). So the main things I was looking back then, were real how-to-guides on how actually the investing works and as I tend to be the person who follows the rules, there were also guides on how to report the income for the income tax. Also, a friend of a friend worked there, so this seemed to give the company credibility. 
As I started getting to know the investing world and realised that the loans were not paying back and the rating system seemed really strange and really bad predictor of who would actually pay back, I decided to exit the portal. So after starting in this portal (mistake number one), the second mistake I made was deciding to go for a slow exit. So I stopped investing in new loans in January 2017 and started to withdraw the money that was coming back to my account. I guess that if I had sold the loans back then I could have made a way better exit. 
So, up to last summer, I just let the loans be and money trickle in, and then tried to sell most of them at first with the market price and then with bigger and bigger discounts. At the highest point I had almost 130 loans in my portfolio, and by the time I decided to sell them just 2(!) of them had had no issues and were nice and "green". I did not sell those two (one has paid me back by now, the other is still going strong). So where am I now? 
I put in 1350, I have withdrawn 1155 €, so I am still missing 195€ even to get the initial deposit back. Well actually more as from the money withdrawn officially 378,89€ has been accrued interest and has been taxed at 20% so 75,78€ has been given to the state and to break even I sill need to get 270,78 out (well even more as any interest I get is taxed). Officially the Bondora account is worth 345€ by their calculations but this diminishes daily when payments are missed again and again...

Here is the view of the interest income from the last year, I hope this would be informative (scary?) for everyone. 
And here is the general statistics to prove what I have said:

So let's move on to a much better portal.
I have been using Mintos since September 2016, and by the end of 2016, I had deposited to here also 1350€. But for some reason, the story is much different. 
Mintos is a much different portal in the sense that it is a platform where many companies (loan originators) list their loans. There are loans offered for rather different interest, loan length, different currencies as well as either with or without buyback guarantee. It is important to note that even loans from the same originator and same interest rate are not equal as we can not predict everything but it is more than sure that loans from different loan originators differ as well. To help out the users Mintos also rates the loan originators on their portal. In general, I invest in loans in euros, which have buyback guarantee and where the originator has a rating from A+ to B. I have also read the  comprehensive explorep2p post on their assessment of the loan originators and made few adjustments based on their suggestions (if you use or plan to use Mintos, it is a must read post!). I have 2 auto investments running there with the aforementioned settings, one asks for 12% interest and investment is 10€ and the second one is of 11% and 15€. So basically if the money is not going out when it comes to the sum of 15€ it should go out for sure. Because money sitting on the account does not produce anything, so I accept lower interest for the fact that the money is circulating. The only real issues I have with the portal is that sometimes even though the portal shows that there are plenty of loans matching my criteria the money is not going out (even with the lower interest). There are times when I log on and there is 50€ sitting there. Usually, it is gone the next day (and has been put into 12% loans), but it bothers me a bit. 
Also, let's be honest, if the depression should hit and some originators might go under, the fact that I have buyback guarantee won't help me a bit. So I try to diversify across originators to lessen this threat.
I have few defaulted loans and some 60+ days loans and bad debt on the portal from before I used 100% buyback guarantee loans. 
To this day I have deposited 2975 € and received 634,58 € in interest, I still use and recommend this portal. 
Full details are shown on the account view, here:

Now we come to the 2 relatively new portals, the Grupeer and the Envestio.

Grupeer offers a somewhat similar service to Mintos. It mediates loans between originators (called "deal partners" on the site) and p2p lenders. It offers both building projects as well as business loans. The advantage compared to Mintos is a higher interest rate (even 15%), at the same time the portal is small, and we can not be sure it will be able to row enough to be competition to Mintos, otherwise, it will just slowly die off, as for the loan originators it is more useful to go to portals offering lower interest for them.
On the positive note, all loans have buyback guarantee in case of borrower`s payments delay for more than 15 days. So this is enforced faster than the 60-day-rule in Mintos.
I do not use the portal that much, I have used it since April last year and I have invested just 310€. The money is nicely in circulation since the auto invest was implemented, so with my small sums no cash drag. Not planning to up my game here too much, just use it as a small part of the portfolio to get a pump up for the general portfolio interest rate :) But I will see how it works. If the interest rates drop to the Mintos level, I might exit. But at the moment, I plan to keep using it. 

Envestio is an interesting platform and newest in my portfolio. I started there just last November and have deposited 500, and invested 400, you'll see why. 
It offers funding to companies running a business in rather different fields like timber and wood pellet industry, green energy (biomass, wind) and traditional oil energy, fruit wholesale, urban mining etc. So it can give your portfolio access to interesting different fields and allows easy diversification across fields. The interest rate has dropped in this portal, the older projects are around 21%, now it is more common to see 15-17%. I find the projects offered really interesting and plan to grow my portfolio here. The only issue is that the projects fill really fast, and there is no real regularity when to expect them. There is no auto invest and no real time to study the projects. You get an email notification and if you do not notice it, in 1-2 hours it can be already filled. So I have a hard time keeping track of this portal and if the money is not invested it will earn me nothing... But I do find it rather unique and fascinating. I have a few first loans ending at the end of February and March so I hope to have positive news from those. A small thing perhaps, but I love that it shows the list of payments you are expected to receive (just like CrowdEstate), I wish more portals had this function. It makes planning my deposits easier, as if I know a larger payment is expected I might this month deposit to other portals as I know that I have free capital to invest here and opposite if I can just expect small interest payments, I will add more money to portal get to take part in new interesting projects. I have done so in CrowdEstate for some time and I just love this functionality.

So all in all, loving Mintos and Envestio, also Grupeer and CrowdEstate. Unsure about the fate of EstateGuru in my portfolio, and still trying to exit the Bondora. What portals are you using and loving?

I have planned to give a short overview of the portals I used in 2018. On some portals, my experience is rather limited in time, on some others, such as Bondora I have used the portal for about 2,5 years.

It can be difficult to decide where to start, but perhaps the two mostly real estate portals could be the ones to go for first.

EstateGuru
So the stats first. I started in this portal in January 2017, so I have used it for 2 full years. 
Based on the portal, the account value at the moment is 3986,83 € (as I just withdraw 200 it was a bit bigger at the beginning of the year), and I have earned 331,60 in interest and 4,51 in bonuses and whopping 6 cents in cashback. Portal states that my net annual return is 12,85%, but looking at the amount of money in the portal and also received interest it looks more around 6%?  I mean my calculations of the loans I have invested in, the weighted average the average interest is 11% and the average length is 13,8 months. So as many of the loans are bullet type I guess I still can expect to receive more. Also, let's be honest, many of the loans are in trouble. Out of 57 loans in my portfolio only 45 are marked current by the portal, so more than 20% of the loans seem to have some sort of difficulties, well 3 of them are just late between 3-15 days so maybe there is some kind of communication error, but the others... At the moment I have deactivated the auto invest and I am not sure I will be actively investing there. Probably also depends on how they will manage to resolve the defaulted loans if things do not improve I will be withdrawing more of the money.

CrowdEstate
I started investing in the CrowdEstate in December 2016, so a month earlier compared to the EstateGuru.
The account value is 5269,89 €, and I have received 382,19 in income. It is important to note that the average project length here is also longer, averaging in my portfolio at 20 months, with the longest loans running even 4 years.
Average expected return is shown in the portal as 17,47% for my loans, my own calculations with the weighted average show 17,3%, not sure how the portal calculates this. As you can see the interest rate is much higher than in EstateGuru. I am no expert in this but it actually feels that the risk (compared to the possible gain) is lower here. There seem to be fewer projects uploaded and also fewer issues with the projects so far, I do feel (although I have no evidence for this) that the due diligence done by the portal is better here. So, although I have some difficult projects here as well, I trust this portal much more. 

I have previously mentioned a project which is doing badly for me here, the MMMSprattus OÜ project is not paying as it should be. Also, 3 more projects were supposed to pay interest or final payment on 31.01.2019 and have not done so. On 2 of the projects, I did receive some of the interest and the portal states that the payment will be made on Tuesday, on the MMMSprattus the portal states that they have asked the firm to solve issues by February the 6th. Also expecting money or news on this front. On the last one, the ROLEGUR OÜ, there has been no communication from the portal which I do find to be in poor taste. Altogether there seem to be issues with 4 out of 40 loans, and 3 of these are very recent issues hopefully to be solved within this week. 

But these issues with loans unable to pay back or even claims of fraud have been in the press. If you read Estonian there was a recent article in Äripäev about some bad loans in CrowdEstate and EstateGuru. It is an interesting read. I remember the CT Kapital OÜ offer in the portal and being happy that I was either out of money or had deactivated the auto invest. I have a background in biology and although I know that medical research and manufacturing is a lucrative business I know it is also incredibly volatile being dependant on both market and research grants which are harder and harder to get. So if you have an agreement with a science team to produce for them, and they end up not getting the grant, you will get no work. And if there was really some bad business practice and moving the money out of the company, then, even happier I missed this one. 
All in all, I am still investing in CrowdEstate and my portfolio here is about 25% of my whole investment protfolio. I guess this means I really believe in this platform!

I will upload a part two of this post with the rest of the portals: Bondora, Mintos, Grupeer and Envestio.

As mentioned in my latest post I have been a bit absent lately, dealing with a loss of a family member as well as funeral organisations can be tough. And so my investments did mostly just run on the autopilot.

So what about deposits?

Mintos 50

Envestio 100

CrowdEstate 150

EstateGuru -200

LHV Growth Account 250

Well, a major change might be that, as I have not seen any really interesting projects on EstateGuru, I did withdraw 200 from there. I have made some new investments there, but as projects seem to have trouble paying and new projects have low interests compared to a year ago (or even half a year ago), I have reduced my presence there for the first time. I will see how I feel in the next months. Probably also depends on how they will manage to resolve the defaulted loans. I have 4 out of 57 loans in default at the moment based on their web-page. And perhaps some more will be there as 8 loans are late at the moment. So not so happy with that portal.
I added the most funds to my Growth account, also some to the CrowdEstate as well as Envestio and Mintos. All together 350€ new money invested in January.

Income for January

CrowdEstate 40,21
Mintos 35,11
EstateGuru 15,89
Grupeer 3,24
Envestio 3,17

Bondora 0,17

Income for January was all together 97,79 € which is 3,15 a day. The best earner was CrowdEstate where actually not all loans paid on time (so some payments meant for January are late), so the sum should be bigger. Hopefully, they will correct it and payments will come in February. The second best was Mintos, which has been a rather stable portal for me although lately there have been issues with money sitting on the account even if there are loans matching my auto invest... Still, the cash drag is not constant, so still quite happy with the portal. EstateGruru was third, and I already mentioned the issues above with them. The 2 others are really small but my capital there is also small. Bondora is an old enemy which is swallowing my money. We will see if I will be able to retrieve the money I initially deposited. Still more than 200€ to get out of there, and as you see the income comes in just a few cents every month...
I forgot to write out the portfolio value numbers late on the 31st of January. So this time the portfolio value is from the first of the month (so 1st of February 2019), being 20121,54 €, which is 670€ more than at the end of a year. As you can see from the deposits as well as income the portfolio has increased more than those numbers explain. This comes from my Growth Account where the strong minus of about 7% has changed to -4,15%, still in negative but much-improved number there :) Actually, one of my funds (IEMM) is in green being on +0,10% compared to purchase price. So there is hope. I mean it has been good to buy from the red, but at the same time every time I log on to the bank, constantly seeing that the account has a loss, is disheartening.

So, crossing my fingers for better months to come, both financially as well as personally. 

Just letting everyone know that I have not gone anywhere but... last year was hard due to my unexpected illness, which still needs regular tests and hospitalisations. And the beginning of this year we had a sudden illness in the family which ended with a funeral last week. So life has set new priorities.

I will be blogging again but I have been unable to really write new posts for the past 2 weeks or so. I have not had the time nor the focus to think about financial issues.

Soon to be back... Please, if you are a regular reader, be patient.

I was already in the middle of December thinking about my 2019 goals, but to be honest I did not think of anything more original than last year. I have set 3 financial goals, one of them should be really easy but is important for me mentally, one I expect to be hard and one more of medium difficulty, so something for every occasion. So here we go.

My Financial Goals of 2019

• To have an income of 1800 € from my investments by the end of a year. This year income was a bit below 1200 € so this one might be the hardest to implement also as it does depend on if most of my investments also pay in time, and I am asking for a 50% increase compared to 2018. But if I take that my interest rate was 9,66% last year and base my calculations on my portfolio value of 31st of December of 2018 this should just be attainable, difficult but attainable. It is also specific, measurable (on average 150 a month), relevant and time-based. So it is a SMART goal. 

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• To have a portfolio value of 25 000 € by the end of the year. So this would mean about 5500 € increase compared to last year. If I did not receive any dividends and interest payments, this would mean that I need to invest about 460 monthly. As I hope to get almost 2000 in interest (see the previous point) that would mean I need to deposit about 310 a month. As I plan to be a bit more relaxed with my savings rate this year (as it was a bit too much for me last year), something like 350 on average to deposit to portals would be good. So this would be a monthly goal to keep monthly deposits on average around this mark.

• And finally, after 10 years of paying, to get rid of student debt. To be honest, the payments schedule will end early in the summer so I do not need to do anything special for it, but it will feel so awesome to be finally debt free. I have been thinking of paying it up early but as there are quite some fees to change the contract to higher payments or to just pay it up and the interest was relatively low by now, I did not bother. Also, this means I might be shopping around for a new home bank as I am no longer tied to any bank beside LHV where my investments are, but for my day to day banking, I need to look around and see who offers the best deal (lowest fees, credit card perks etc).

On a more personal level and due to health issues I have promised to exercise at least 3 times a week. It doesn't have to be anything massive, even just 10 minutes of yoga is better than nothing. So the main goal is to keep up up a practice in long-term, to improve my general health is important for me. So let's keep the fingers crossed, and work for it as well of course :) 

Also if you would like to read a bit on SMART Goal setting I do have quite a good post on it. Go have a look!

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:

-10 Bondora

50 CrowdEstate

100 Envestio

450 LHV Growth Account

50 Mintos

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 39,54

Mintos 30,36

EstateGuru 25,33

LHV Growth Account10,90 € and 2,46$

Envestio 4,19

Grupeer 2,67

Bondora 0,09

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?

Maybe a bit more of a lifestyle post, but it does link slightly to the budget part of personal finance.

I am a bit of a hoarder. I tend to collect things and I have a hard time letting them go. This also tends to include things which have lost their usefulness.

So I decided to go through my closet and look at what I have, what I am missing and what (for the love of God) I should get rid of. This is important for several reasons...

First of all, if you are a hoarder like me I think it is important to take the time at least once a year to go through all your clothes and look at them closely.

Is it still in good condition? Yes? Great! Does it need mending, does it have stains etc? If so, will you take the time to correct these problems? Great! Or is it likely it will still need mending in a month or two? If so, it should be thrown out. You can also test it by collecting all these items to a selected place and give yourself for example 30 days to mend them. The ones not mended by the deadline, need to go.

I do feel it can be OK do keep one rather worn out favorite jumper to be worn just around the house or maybe one old pair of stained jeans which are great for gardening, painting a room etc (where ruining the next pair is likely to happen). But really, why did I have 5 pairs of old worn out jeans in my closet? 4 of those MUST go! So I had a hard look at my closet and throw out quite some things where I had no real idea, why I had been keeping these.

Also on the clothes which are in good condition- do they still fit you and do you wear them? It is appropriate to this season, and you have not worn it yet? Make a plan for the next few weeks to wear all the things you have not worn in a long time, to see if you still love them. Maybe it itches, or the hem tends to ride up when you walk or is actually a bit too tight/loose etc. Then get rid of it- if it is in good condition you can sell it and make some money in the process. Testing the weather appropriate clothes is a good thing to be done once every season. I plan to test my winter clothes in next weeks, I will see how it goes.

It was also a good time to reorganize my closet again, as wearing things means they are not always put back in the right place and this, in the end, means I forget about it and will not wear it. For example, if I want to wear a cardigan and look at where my cardigans are folded, I will not see the one I have absent-mindedly hung on a hanger next to my blouses and shirts...

So to sum up:

1) Clear out broken things;

2) Test the things not worn a long time;

3) Reorganize

And why do I feel that the end of a year is a great time to do all of this? Well, it might end up that you realize you actually are missing something you wardrobe really needs. And after the holiday madness, the shops tend to do sales, as they need to draw in the customers somehow. And maybe you received some gift cards for holidays you should use up, and the best thing is to use them up for a thing you actually need, not on an impulse purchase. So, I think it is a great time to plan these purchases to January.

What do I need?

I work in a quite casual office but from time to time, I need to dress more formally, so I, for example, need to look for a new pair of dress pants, and also a warmer weather suit jacket/blazer. The jacket will be really hard as my body shape means I almost never find things suited for me... But at least I can look for it.

As I mentioned in my last monthly update, the end of November and beginning of December was largely spent abroad and this is also why the last month update comes so late. But better late than never, right?!

November went by really fast, but was it also profitable?

So from the deposit side of things, being away and unable to spend due to horrible workload is a good thing, I guess. For example, while in France I had lunch twice and dinner once during the whole week. The days were so packed full of meetings that I just had no time for more. Not healthy, but great savings as otherwise I would have had to eat out all these meals.

Deposits were 800 € and this divided between portals as follows:
Mintos 50
CrowdEstate 250
LHV Growth Account 300
Envestio (a new portal) 200

Income was about average, no big surprises (well one bad one, CrowdEstate).

EstateGuru 36,91
Mintos 31,58
CrowdEstate 11,27
Envestio 5
Grupeer 3,08

Bandora 0,18

All together 88,02€ or mathematically 2,93 € a day, which is a bit below the average.

So in general EstateGuru which pays unevenly due to being linked to when the project's end, had the best month of a year for me. Mintos has been quite stable, but as the interest rate has gone down, the interest received has gone down a bit as well. CrowdEstate has otherwise been spot on, but the MMMSprattus OÜ has been late more than a month with payments (from the end of October). It seems they expected to pay up using a state subsidy which they did not end up getting (or have not got yet). So hoping for a resolution on this project. All others have paid on time, so happy with those.
All others were small payments, the Envestio which I just started within November paid the new client signup bonus, which you get if you use an user-link to sign up and transfer also some money to the account.

The portfolio value was 18857,55 € on 30.11.2018. This the second month in a row where the general value is lower than expected based on the deposits. The stock market has gone down a bit again, and my LHV Growth Account showed that I was down almost 10 % in the value (based on the purchase value), as I am writing it almost 3 weeks later, the drop is almost 11% at the moment. So a great time to buy more :)

So this was November. In a week it is time to look at the December stats and then also draw conclusions for the whole year, and of course, set some new goals. Can't wait to see the final stats of the year.