Time flies when you are having fun! We’re in February already; Time to look back again. The days are still depressingly short and my town flirts with freezing low temperatures, but we’re in much calmer waters as far as the financial markets are concerned. The volatile and rather stress-inducing see-sawing that we witnessed in the last quarter of 2018 is behind us. For good? Of course! It’s history! We don’t know what’s in store for the rest of 2019, but I am not going to worry about that in this post. Today I only look back.
Let’s dive right into the numbers for January.
January 2019
Income
The income/gain looks like this:
Company shares
As you can see, last month’s gain (company shares) is significant. A great comeback after the declines of the last months in 2018!
Below is a chart with the month on month income. Looking good right?
Note that the capital gain as a percentage of my total investment dropped slightly. See the chart below. The sole reason for this is the new investment of $13,686.40 (RSU company shares).
So nothing to be concerned about. I have added even more company shares to my portfolio and they will hopefully contribute to higher returns in the months to come.
Crowdlending
Again, I didn’t increase my investments in loans on Mintos (crowdlending platform) but the return is accumulating (and automatically re-invested using Mintos’ auto-invest feature.
I have been a bit too optimistic regarding how much additional funds I am able to pour into alternative assets. I will continue to expand, but at a reduced rate.
Portfolio
I decided to include the equity I hold in my mortgage-free home in the charts (because I see this as part of my investment portfolio).
If we forget about my home (second pie-chart), then I have 2,4% invested in non-correlated (alternative) assets (Mintos). This is down from 3,0% last month.
Net worth
My net worth saw a sharp increase in January.
| Mortgage-free home | $300K |
| Company shares | $87,232.64 |
| Crowdlending | $2,101.99 |
| Liabilities | $30K |
| Net worth | $359,334.63 |
That’s an increase of $20,294.63 (almost 6%) compared to December 2018!
Blog
I published a decent amount of posts. Not as much as I had planned, but things got a bit hectic in January.
Plans for February
My plans for February:
- Keep the ESPP program running
- Continue to invest on Mintos (I skipped December…and January… )
- Open accounts on other crowdlending/funding platforms (I already wanted to do that in November….and December…and January…but lacked the funds)
- Write, write, write
- Plan the next road trip with my brother. Followers of my blog know I go on a trip like that every year. Last time was Scandinavia and the arctic region. Chances are we will find warmer regions this time!
That’s all for this time!
Thanks for sharing. January was a nice stress reliever indeed! What other crowdlending platforms are you considering at this time? There are so many to choose from nowadays!
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Thanks for stopping by! January was indeed a great relief. I don’t think we’ve necessarily left the roller coaster ride, but let’s see what February will bring.
Yes there are many platforms. I am probably going to start with Envestio (crowd investing) and perhaps Grupeer, which is another Latvian crow lending plaform (like Mintos).
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HI Marc,
Congrats on the 6% net worth increase in January. It seems we all had a good month. It reminds me the great last January we had too in 2018 and the following February drop. Hopefuly this year won’t repeat and our next monthly report will be as postivie as January’s.
Have a nice time planning your next trip.
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Thanks a lot Tony! Yeah I know what happened last year. I won’t worry too much about it. It is not something we can control. One tweet from Trump and we could have another downturn 😉 To be honest I’d be happy if 2019 turns out only half as good as 2018… That would still constitute a pretty good result. But let’s see what happens!
One thing I can control is the next road trip and I am really looking forward to that!
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