One of my investment areas is peer to peer lending. My interest here is split into Real estate and Loans and covered on two different platforms. The following Mintos review will cover my online loans income approach as an EU citizen. To use my referral you can either click here or use the code AR3W8A
Contents
One year of Mintos
Before you read the original review, I though that it would help to give you my 1 year Mintos review as this is the first of the three milestones when I have decided to share my insights/experience with my passive income platforms.
Looking back at what happened this year to my ~8000 EUR investment is quite interesting. Overall I have a 11% rate of return, but I have split my money into three areas on Mintos: primary market, secondary market, and Invest & Access. The last one is something new that they brought up in 2019 and it mainly invests your money over a diversified portfolio of loans. You can extract and add to it at any time, but the extract limit is set to all current loans. Everything that is not current, will have to remain invested.
Although I started with 500 and then moved to 2000 for the new feature Invest & Access, I have later decided to bring this down as the rate of return has dropped from above 11% to around 9.5%. This 9.5% is too low for my aim, as for Mintos I have my auto invest set for above 10.9%.
Besides this I only have good thoughts towards Mintos, even if one of their supplier – Iute Credit is now facing issues in Kosova. To me it seems that they are managing it well, and as I use to only invest with EURO as currency and hand pick my countries for auto-invest, this is not that harmful for my autoinvest, but it is affecting me for Invest & Access.
Overall I am very happy that I have invested with Mintos and will leverage on the autoinvest as I move forward and stick to primary and secondary market once I will extract my remaining 600 from invest & access.
Please feel free to go through the original review or if you are just interested in the financial aspects, then you can take a look at my financial portfolio.
Short description
This platform allows investment into loans (personal, car, agriculture, etc.) with a minimum investment of 10 and an average % p.a. of around 10.75%(based on the offers I was able to find) and no fees towards the investor.
The majority of investments are short term loans with some guaranteed by the loan providers. The Mintos platform is like a marketplace of loan originators from which you can choose to buy loan shares.
As this is not a bank, and as per my understanding (I would appreciate to be corrected) my account is not guaranteed, but this is expected.
For more questions, I would sincerely recommend you browse their website and take a look at the frequently asked questions or even their blog.
Registration
The registration was simple and easy. Even the identity verification was an ease and went really quick. There is no login via social media or google, but this is not an issue as the process is a breeze as are also other parts listed in this Mintos review for using their platform.
I have also added the google authentication as an additional security process. It was quick and the guide is listed on their blog.
Fund transfer
Transferring funds is simple and for a SEPA international payment, it is usually done in 2 working days, but it depends on the bank from where you issue the transfer. For me it was 2 working day (I transferred on Fri afternoon and the money was in by Monday).
The transfer can be done in multiple currencies, but I only use EUR and I would recommend that you either use your local currency and exchange it via Mintos or that you use the currency that you want to loan in and exchange outside of Mintos (your bank or Revolut). I would strongly recommend that you use the platform which is better suited and has the best rate for you after you consider the associated cost for the transfers and exchange.
The transfer details are provided by the platform and the transfer has to be done from an account owned by the investor. The account holder name is checked versus the Mintos investor account.
How the system behaves
The platform is intuitive and easy to use as I hope to highlight in this review. The general menu consists of an overview, loan listings, account details and auto invest options as shown below.
Within the overview, you just have a high level summary of your account statistics with a shortcut to adding funds and investing. The my investments view is also a good representation that highlights the status of your loans (current, past due, default, etc.).
The 2nd item on the menu is the Loan Listings view and here is where the magic happens as through it you can invest in loans. The filter system implemented by Mintos is very well designed and it caters for all of your needs and desires.
For example, I currently tend to use the following filters:
- term under 24 months (makes for an easier exit compared to 60 months)
- currency as EUR (although there are a lot of currencies available, I am aiming for a stable one and one that has a lower inflation)
- Interest rate higher than 9.9%
- as a loan type I prefer car loan, personal loan and short-term loan
- countries are picked by me based on their stability, mainly I tend to choose EU countries although the % interest is lower
- Loan originators – I have some preferences after browsing them from the Loan Originators overview (tend to pick the ones with rating higher than B and skin in the game at max 10% and only the ones with buyback guarantee)
- Buyback guarantee is always Yes for me
- Loan status as current (no late dues at this point in time)
- Initial LTV under 50% (I tend to filter the loans which have a very high borrower cost, thus aiming to target a better informed or educated person that took the loan)
- And I exclude my investments from the view
A very nice feature is the option to create an auto invest rule based on your filter criteria. This is how I created both of my auto invest rules. I also tend to only invest 10 to max 50 per loan and use this as a diversification, as shown in my overview by number of loans – 771 versus 8,336 EUR current account value (16-04-2019).
Moving now to the auto invest function, the main things that pop out for Mintos relate to the fact that you can have multiple rules, set the portfolio size for each, set their priority and establish a minimum limit for your manual investing for a better personalized control.
The account statements and my investments views show my investments, at both high level and detailed views. The account statement is just my high level accounting view while my investments show the details.
The current investments as listed in my Mintos review are listed clearly in the view and once clicking on any of them, you can go into the detailed view which is also offered for each individual loan also in the loan listings view. The finished investments show the same level of details.
Last, but now least, Mintos has a referral program and if you want to use me as your referral please register either via this link or by using AR3W8A referral code. The bonus system is simple and currently I have none.
My setup of the system
My setup here only looks at the auto investment rules as I want to leave this platform to continue working in the background and help me generate income as tracked in my monthly statistics.
Primary rule has a selection of creditors: Capitalia, Credissimo, Creditstar, Credius, GetBucks, ID Finance, IuteCredit, Mogo, Placet Group with a limit of 10,000 portfolio value, focused only on guaranteed loans with an investment of 10 EUR for each and a diversification between loan originators
Secondary rule has only one creditor: Mogo and focused on car loans only, a selection of countries, guaranteed loans and has a portfolio value of 5,000 and investments of 10 per loan.
Reports
You can extract tax reports and have them sent via email to you and have a very wide selection of countries for the report. I really love this as it makes my life easier when doing my yearly taxes as an EU citizen.
Other reports can be extracted from your account statements and even loan listings.
Fund withdrawal
Did not had to do it yet, but there is a link to fund withdrawal to the IBANs you used to add funds. They are not configurable, but they automatically appear (magic) after you added funds to your account from them.
Will let you know once I reel in the first profits or once I exit from Mintos.
Profit & Loss
So far I am 4 months+ with Mintos and based on my overview, the % p.a. is 10.90 as shown on a month by month basis in my monthly extract.
At this point in time, when I am writing this Mintos Review (16-04-2019) I am at a profit of 336 EUR which is good and consists of 66 EUR as a cashback due to my referral to Mintos and 269 EUR from interest generated so far.
Due to the dynamic of the loan listings on this platform, it is very difficult for me to calculate the investment return and break even points as the money is constantly reinvested in new loans. For example, so far my profile had 354 finished investments besides the 771 active ones. The amount used for the investments was of 3,881 and the return was of 3,950 EUR, but all that principal and interest was reinvested in other loans via the auto invest rules.
Conclusion
Overall I like Mintos and it is fairly easy & simple as a platform. The Loan Originators are vast and you have the option to choose based on your preferences, the loan listings are multiple on both primary (290k) and secondary (240k) markets, of different risk levels and some even have buy back guarantees. I also like that fact that I can diversify via 10 EUR investments per loan (minimum) and the auto invest function can also diversify between the Loan Originators.
There are sufficient Mintos reviews online and opinions. As I am somewhat new to the platform I can only share my experience, but I will constantly update this review and make it relevant based on my experience as an EU citizen. So far you can see on my portfolio page or you can follow in my monthly statistics my positions and historic record for this site.
I love the way i can do my taxes via a simple extract that comes via email, but i do not like the lack of reporting functions provided by Mintos. When I will do my taxes for a full year, then I should be able to further state if this is a real downside or not.
The referral option is a big plus, but this will bring me revenue only if I convince friends or some of my readers to join the platform by using my referral code AR3W8A so that we can all benefit from it.