This is my second Quarterly report. Now is the first time when I compare my figures from one quarter to another. You can check out my previous quarter report and I hope you enjoy my current Portfolio Quarterly earnings report quarter 1 2020.
The idea of this post is to show my active and passive income streams and highlight the profit and loss statement, the investments done and the returns. In parallel to this, I will mention the challenges faced and the decisions I took to overcome them.
If you are reading an older post, but want to check my progress towards my goals, then you can check my passive income goals or just check out my monthly updated portfolio.
Active Income
Consulting Firm – My consulting services
As you may know from my previous report, the revenue and scope of my business is not something that I am currently comfortable to disclose. This is still my bread and butter (>90%) of revenue and I must respect my customers and my company’s confidentiality.
On this area, I have continues promoting my eBook via a total cost of 561 EUR for Hosting, SEO services and some ads. April will be the last moth of such costs as the eBook sales are a dead end. Currently my eBook venture could be considered a loss, but it helped me gain some notoriety for my business, although no new clients so far.
Personal Blog
I still have no revenue from the blog. This is currently only generating a cost which I expected as the initial investment. For this quarter I have split the costs for the blog from the ones related to my business and have added some banners on the website, hoping to promote some affiliate sales. As I do not have a proper read base for now, I do not expect to gain revenue from the blog, but I hope to start increasing my reader’s base.
The total cost for the blog was of 165 EUR for this first quarter of 2020.
The profits made from the blog are listed below:
| What | EUR | Comments |
| Ads | 0 | No ads on blog for now |
| Affiliate | 0 | Nothing so far |
| Donations | 0 | No donations button on blog for now |
| Total Revenue | 0 |
This means that I am currently at a loss of 750 EUR with my company’s website and personal blog for this quarter. As this generates no revenue, it is time to buy 1 year of hosting next month and put a stop to these expenses.
Passive Income
Paying off Debt
As you remember from my active and passive income streams article, I consider paying off debt a good part of my passive income. Why? Simple – reducing the amount paid in loans increases the amount invested.
We paid 10,000 in advance on our mortgage and were able to bring down the monthly rate for the house and apartment to 1240 EUR (55 less than before). The reason for these early payments is best described on my other article about prepayment on the mortgage.
I would also like to take a moment and state that for now, there will be no more prepayments on the mortgage due to the coronavirus outbreak. Any excess liquidity that we have, will go towards our emergency fund or stock/ETF investments until this crisis ends. This is why I have also increased the emergency fund to 50,000 EUR instead of the previous 35,000.
Stock and ETF investments
The core of my passive income is my investing. This is the area towards which I want to allocate most of my savings and go long. As my strategy is buy and hold, I can easily flag this under my passive income stream. During this quarter I have added some ETFs ad some stocks as you can see in my portfolio.
On top of this, I have started exploring the insights of Capitalist Exploits and am curious to see if this is something suitable or not for me. I am not only curious about their articles, but also about their community and I am thinking on investing 4000 EUR into some of their themes for the long run.
As this quarter overlapped with the bear market that occurred due to the coronavirus outbreak, I am currently at a loss for this quarter, but overall still at profit if I count all my ETF and stock investments. For more, please check out my financial portfolio page.
Overall loss for Q1 2020 in unrealized profit: 3225 EUR which leads me to a total unrealized profit of only 742 EUR for my investments.
Venture Capital investments
| Symbol | Position | Currency | Market Value |
| Carwow | 447 | GBP | 1,500 |
| Etergo | 13,350 | EUR | 5,340 |
| Total | EUR | 7,125 | |
| vs previous Q | EUR | 0 |
Single Stocks and ETFs
Due to the outbreak I have added some stocks and ETFs to my portfolio. I have marked them below as new additions to my portfolio. Some are new and some are just increases in my current positions.
| Symbol | New | Position | Currency | Market Value |
| 2343 | X | 4,000 | HKD | 3,980 |
| AAPL | 10 | USD | 2,471 | |
| AEO | 20 | USD | 163 | |
| ATVI | 20 | USD | 1,145 | |
| BABA | 10 | USD | 1,890 | |
| BIDU | 10 | USD | 977 | |
| BMW | 20 | EUR | 905 | |
| BRYN | X | 10 | EUR | 1,606 |
| CLF | 50 | USD | 186 | |
| COKE | X | 10 | USD | 2,016 |
| CSEMUS | 4 | EUR | 604 | |
| CSSPX | X | 20 | USD | 5,066 |
| DPW | 30 | EUR | 672 | |
| EQQQ | 12 | EUR | 2,008 | |
| EXS3 | 4 | EUR | 693 | |
| GILD | X | 10 | USD | 732 |
| IWDA | X | 50 | EUR | 2,209 |
| MCD | X | 6 | USD | 978 |
| MEUD | 12 | EUR | 1,554 | |
| MVOL | 40 | EUR | 1,591 | |
| NESN | X | 10 | CHF | 977 |
| TLRD | 100 | USD | 152 | |
| TNOW | 7 | EUR | 1,913 | |
| WSML | 162 | USD | 1,143 | |
| XOM | X | 20 | USD | 736 |
| Cash | 1 | CHF | 37 | |
| Cash | 1 | EUR | 4,855 | |
| Cash | 1 | USD | 714 | |
| Total Invested | 40,000 | EUR | ||
| Total Market Value | 39,778 | EUR | -222 |
P2P Lending
During the coronavirus outbreak, I have noticed that governments tend to lower interest rates and try to boost the economy. Besides this, there are a lot of people who become unemployed and several sectors are badly hit financially. As most of my loans are either on real-estate or on small loans, I start to lose confidence in the lenders ability to guarantee them as more and more borrowers will have to postpone their payments. This is why I have started to exit from both of my P2P lending platforms. On Mintos it is rather slow and I am selling at a 7% discount right now. Yes, I am taking in some losses, but the overall yearly gains only fell from 11.7 to 10% on this platform and on Crowdestate I am selling at a loss on the secondary market and currently my % annual profit has decreased from approximately 12% to 8% due to these sales.
Even with these losses, I am comfortable as long as I am able to invest the money I withdraw into stocks and ETFs. As I was not impacted by Envestio and Kuetzal scams, my current P2P portfolio is still at a profit.
| P2P Lending | Invested | % p.a. | Current | Details |
| Mintos | 7,432 | 11.70% | 8,684 | extract |
| Crowdestate | 4,450 | 8.66% | 5,054 | extract |
| Total Invested | 11,882 | Total Value | 13,738 | 1,856 |
Sell eBook online
Not a lot to say here, in total I sold 3 eBooks, but now I am giving it for free until the 1st of June in order to support the stay at home movement meant to fight the coronavirus outbreak. Even as a FREE eBook, there have been only 50 total downloads. It seems that my niche or my content or my marketing approach was not meant to be.
The main changes that I did here was to transition from Teachable as the selling platform to PayHip. This was mainly because PayHip is more oriented to eBook or digital sales and Teachable is mainly meant for online courses. As both platforms manage VAT within the European Union, I am happy with this change.
This means that for this quarter, the eBook was generated 9 EUR In profits.
Sell Course online
A complete revamp of this was put in place. The current approach is to create free YouTube videos in order to promote the eBook and improve the existing articles on my company’s site in order to boost eBook sales.
This will mean that 70% of the context of the course I was thinking about will be free and on YouTube. I plan to monetize it once I either have the 1,000 subscribers (35 so far) or 4,000 hours (52 so far) of public watching via YouTube. Until then, I have to wait.
So far, I was able to create 5 videos and I am still pending 19 more in order to cover all my articles. Once this is done, I will shift my focus and start creating videos for this personal goals blog.
Starting with the next quarterly report, this section will be removed.
Affiliate marketing
At this point in time I do not have the actual time, nor the willingness to invest a lot in affiliate marketing. The only improvements I have done here was to add some banners on the side bar for P2P lending, Hosting and Fiverr. You can check them out or you can just go to my Resources page to see all the items for which I am an affiliate.
YouTube videos
Last, but not least is YouTube. I have already hinted to this in a previous chapter, but I am happy to say that I have +10 subscribers and +50 public hours of videos watched compared to the previous report.
Starting from next quarterly report, my online courses section will merge with this areas as I will focus via YouTube to improve eBook sales and cover 70% of the course for free via this platform and with embedded videos on my company website blog articles.
Conclusion
In order to conclude my Passive Income Portfolio Quarterly earnings report for Q1 2020, I have listed below the overall profit and loss across all mentioned segments.
| + | – | |
| Company | N/A | 1,146 |
| Blog | 0 | 165 |
| VC | 934 | 0 |
| Stocks/ETFs | 0 | 222 |
| P2P Lending | 1856 | 0 |
| eBook | 21 | 0 |
| Course | 0 | 0 |
| Affiliate | 0 | 0 |
| YouTube | 0 | 0 |
| 2,811 | 1,533 | |
| Bottom Line | 1,278 |
I am happy to say that I am at an overall profit of 1,278 EUR between Dec 19 and Mar 20, but I lost 766 between Jan and Mar 20.