P2P lending experiences #5 – Mintos

As I recently reported my Fixura experience, I thought I would share my Mintos experience. I signed up to Mintos in February 2018, started with only 1,000 euros, and in the late summer, I added 19,390 + 4,000 + 628 euros. I realized that with a small amount of money, I have the same difficulty with p2p loans as the stock market. Dividends are payed on regular basis on the stock market, but as long as there is no sufficient capital, it is not worth investing the received dividends as the transaction fee is high. Well, with loans, it’s difficult too, because while a few loans bustle with non-payment, there won’t be enough capital to be reinvested. However, with the current portfolio size (25,813 €), that does not bother you when you get stuck in loans. Currently, I am invested 1006 EUR based, and 29 rubles based loans. Since I only invest in short-term loans (up to 3 months maturity), my daily turnover on my account is € 500-2000. Since last February, the whole capital has been reinvested several times, with a total credit of € 132,082. What I prefer in Mintos is the buy-back guarantee. Simply, if a loan is overdue for more than 60 days, the credit provider (not Mintos) will repay all the capital, including interest. For this reason, no loans can overdue for more than 60 days.

What is “mis-informing”, however, is Net Annual Return. Unfortunately it is not that much as 9.86%, though this number seems pretty nice. Reality is around 9%. So this investment produces about 200 € per month for me (2400€/year).

As an attempt, when the ruble was very weak compared to the euro, I converted an amount of € 300 to ruble. (1 RUB = approx. 4.2 HUF)

The ruble yield is closer to reality.

Several bloggers / portals are also testing p2p lending providers, but it seems that Mintos is still the best for the following reasons:

• You can set the Auto-investment system very accurately
  
• The picture above shows that there are 139 884 loans available at the moment, so the liquidity is very good, the money is not parked on the account
• A secondary market where you can get out of the investment if you want
• Secondary market has auto-investment also available
  
• Short-term loans are also available, not only on a multi-year basis (in fact, most of the loans are short-term)
• Transferwise can also be used to deposit/withdraw money
• Buy-back guarantee for certain service providers, it is worth choosing them among others
  
• In terms of risk, service providers are classified into categories A-B-C-D, making it even easier to set up a risk-tolerance strategy
• Since its launch, 1.6 billion euros of loans were made, it’s worth checking out their statistics.

Mintos plans for 2019 include Mintos bankcard and an individual IBAN bank account to make it easier for you to use/withdraw your money and use your Mintos account as a quasi-payment account.

So far, I have not found any other service provider to invest in, or write about as good as Mintos. So, if you are not afraid of risk and don’t mind dealing with your tax statements, I can recommend Mintos 🙂 Of course, all the money you put into Mintos is extremely risky. Mintos is a Latvian provider without financial supervision. Most of the community lending providers are based in Latvia, because there is the legal possibility and the regulations are loose. In Hungary, it is not legally possible to start such a service provider (there was an attempt before).