While Europe is in crisis and in full lockdown the rest of the world marches on and steers the stock markets to new all time highs. Especially the news of one successful vaccine after another are giving that extra boost to the markets. Markets don’t always care what the current situation is, their value is often based on what the market will look like in the future. Markets don’t like insecurity, but it seems that the news of vaccines going around has taken away that insecurity and the market has already compensated today for what will happen in 6 months.

Meanwhile in Belgium the lockdown is being slowly lifted. Shops and swimming pools can reopen, although that is the only thing that is allowed. On Christmas it would be allowed to celebrate with 3 people indoors (not of the same household), if you are single. Families can only invite one extra person.

I changed the website URL to https://roadtriptofire.com. There was multiple reasons, firstly I always wanted to move to a .com domain but I did not want to lose my domain rating. I realized my domain rating is not so high to begin with, and I would be able to recover that rating and even rise above it in a few months. Another thing is that I was contacted by euromoney.com who don’t like that their site is being confused with mine, and to be honest I don’t like being confused with them as well! Lastly I feel the new name of the site reflects much better what direction this site is going to, the name already contains what this page is about, which is much better!

Mountainbiking is what is keeping me on my toes during these times. I have been going every weekend, but I do notice I have trouble to keep up with people with better bikes then me. I am riding a 300 euro mountainbike that’s super heavy, so I have become aware that I really need to upgrade. So I started to look for a pretty new second hand bike. The ideal bycicle would be one that someone purchased new, barely used and now wants to get rid of. I managed to get really lucky with my racebike, buying a full carbon second hand for just 250 EUR, but I might need a bigger budget for my mountainbike.

Alright enough stuff about my life lets go and check how much my portfolio dropped or increased.

My Portfolio

My Portfolio has increased to 69889 EUR (+2880) with nothing additionally invested this month. Really a big win here!

I am considering to switch to a quarterly graph since it is getting a bit crowded. I went into some of my numbers all the way back to 2016, and came up with this:

Lets look into more detail for each of these investment types shall we.

Someone told me once you reach 100k it gets easier because compound interest starts to kick in. So close…

ETFs

For the first time the stock market reaches green! I bought about 25k of ETFs the beginning of the year and kept investing all year. Now it seems its paid off and I finally have a (small profit).

At this point I am really happy I limited my portfolio to just two ETFs, it makes it so much easier to track! And I keep finding it very easy to invest with DEGIRO, I am really happy I chose DEGIRO as broker!

I did notice I should invest more in Emerging Markets, the goal was to keep this ETF at 15% but its now bellow that so my next investment will be in this ETF.

SPDR MSCI World UCITS ETF (SWRD)

My World ETF has made a big jump this month, putting me at a 3.59% profit since inception.

ISHARES CORE MSCI Emerging Markets IMI UCITS ETF

Also my emerging markets ETF rose slightly

Peer to Peer

I am left with only 5 peer to peer investments: 1 active peer to peer investment (Crowdestor), and with 100% of the funds in recovery (Mintos and TFGCrowd) and 2 where I am trying to recover some funds trough legal action.

I only show withdrawals here. So far I withdrew about 58% (+3%) of the funds I had invested in peer to peer.

CrowdEstor

• I was able to cut my investment in CrowdEstor in half thanks to the secondary market and is now at 907 EUR (-902 EUR). Unfortunately I fear the projects I have left will be harder to sell. Most of them have delayed payments and for some I don’t have any confidence at all I will be able to recover some of the money. I will keep trying to list them on the secondary market though!

Grupeer & Kuetzal

Nothing new to report this month, just letting legal action take its course.

Mintos

Good news and bad news. The good news is that Mintos finally agreed with Capital Service on a payment plan. The bad news is that it is spread out over 3 years, and the large majority of the money would come only at the end as a bulk payment, from what I could tell on the payment plan it would be like 80% at the end. I have about 600 EUR in Capital service, so the good news is I won’t need to default this at this point.

TFGCrowd

I still have 88 EUR in TFGCrowd because of a failed project. The buy back did not kick in this month like planned, instead they did “partial payments”, about 6 EUR. At this rate it would be another 2 years to fully repay the investment. I expressed my unhappiness at TFGCrowd but with not much luck. I assume my project will not be the only project that suffers from this. Are the curtains starting to fall?

The only good point? I am already profitable at TFGCrowd!

Startups

I still have now 3200 EUR in startups invested, I have every intention to withdraw this whenever possible. Someone mailed me asking me why I was withdrawing here, the main reason is the lack of liquidity. The money you invest is often stuck for 8 years with no secondary market and I need more liquidity on my money.

Retirement funds

I decided not to update my retirement funds all the time since for most of the funds I get an update just once a year, so I will update it also just once a year. This is from end of 2019. I will update it again in December 2020.

Wins / losses this month

• My ETF Portfolio made a 3700 EUR profit!
• I managed to pull out another 900 EUR out of peer to peer!

What is next?

• I will need to focus on getting my domain rating back up the next few months. I did start to get quite a bit of traffic from google so I am not happy if that drops out. I hope it will just take me a few months to get it back to the same DR it was before, and hopefully even higher!

I will also post a savings rate update soon! Subscribe and make sure you don’t miss any of my monthly portfolio updates!