Jean Galea

Mintos Invest & Access Review

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mintos invest & Access

Mintos is my favorite P2P platform in Europe, and I know many other investors in the space feel the same way.

I love Mintos because it aggregates many loan originators and thousands of loans, so you can easily diversify and spread the risk. I am making more than 11% returns on an annual basis over my investments, so I’m very happy so far after 2 years of investing.

The only real issue that was preventing me and other investors from investing more money into the platform is the question of liquidity. As investors, we always tend to favor investments that are highly liquid. This is especially true when you have limited capital to play around with, which happens to be the case with younger generations who are still getting their foothold in the financial ladder.

So the question that Mintos Invest & Access sets out to answer is this:

How easily can I convert an investment to cash?

In the past, investors often had to make a tradeoff between earning high returns, or having high liquidity.

Mintos Invest & Access combines the best of both worlds. It’s a fully automated way of investing whereby you select the amount you want to invest and that amount is then automatically diversified across loans in the marketplace. So far so good, but what’s special about that?

The answer is that you can pull out the money in your investment at any point in time, solving the liquidity problem. There are no questions asked, and no extra cost.

The minimum investment is 500 EUR and the maximum is 100,000 EUR. I recommend at least 2,000 EUR to ensure proper diversification and a good rate of return.

mintos invest and access setup

The obvious question then, is what happens when you want to sell your investments? Who will buy them? The answer is that other investors will pick up your loans via the secondary market, although this is all transparent to you when you are using Invest & Access.

Essentially, Mintos is just making things easier that were already possible with Auto Invest and manual intervention.

Keep in mind that if there low demand on the secondary market, it might take longer to sell your investments. So far so good, however, as there is a very high level of liquidity in the secondary market. Whenever I tried selling loans to test it out I found buyers the very same day, so I’m not too worried about that aspect of the system thus far.

Invest & Access only invests in loans with a rating of A+ to C- and buyback guarantee. In addition, it only buys loans from lending companies that have been on the marketplace for at least 6 months, further enhancing the safety of your investment. To give you the best diversification for additional protection and stable returns, Invest & Access rebalances your portfolio daily.

Have you tried out Invest & Access? What do you think of it?

Invest and obtain 11%+ returns on Mintos today

My Morning Routine

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I have a fairly structured morning routine that I’ve developed over the years. It goes something like this:

  1. Wake up and take a shower immediately.
  2. Brew a cup of coffee and do a ten-minute meditation.
  3. Foam roll for 30 minutes while listening to a podcast.
  4. Study a language for 15-20 minutes on Duolingo.

It takes around an hour and a half, and I try to be up by 7am on a good day, so by 8.30am I’m ready to start my day with some good wins in my bag.

As a morning person with the Lion chronotype, I have no trouble waking up and getting out of bed in the morning. I tend to wake up without any alarm clocks after 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep, and I’m immediately ready to jump out of bed with lots of energy and start the day.

I like to take a shower as it makes me feel fresh and ready to approach the day. The act of showering is more than just an act of basic hygiene; it gives me an extra boost psychologically, so I rarely go without it, even though I usually shower again during the day after training or in the evening before I head to bed.

The brewing of coffee is a meditative process in itself and gets me primed for the structured meditation that comes after it. By using a moka pot and manually grinding the beans I would have previously selected from a local roastery, I’m injecting a bit of art and manual work into the process, and it definitely means more and feels more satisfying to finally drink the brewed shot of coffee while I start my meditation, compared to if I had just used a Nespresso machine.

For meditation, I use the Calm app and adopt a zen meditation pose. The ten minutes of meditation give me the chance to heighten my awareness and build resilience for the day ahead.

When that’s done I move on to foam rolling, which is an essential way for me to iron out the knots in my muscles and stretch them out. Since I train so much, I tend to wake up with sore muscles and overall a stiff body, and foam rolling works wonders for that. I follow a number of podcasts so I’ll just pick up where I had left off the previous day or select a new episode that I fancy from the list of available ones. If my wife and son are awake by this time, I’ll skip the podcast and chat with them while I foam roll.

After foam rolling, I do the last part of my morning routine, which consists of studying a language using the excellent Duolingo app. There’s not much to say about this, except for the fact that it’s a compounding exercise. Although I do just 15-20 minutes a day, when you add it up over a year or two you can really get familiar with a language and be able to make practical use of your new skill.

Practical Mindfulness – Dealing with Irritation

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I’ve been meditating for a few years now, almost on a daily basis using the Calm app, and when I have some downtime I’ll do some longer periods of meditation and reflection on what’s going on in my life.

Mindfulness practice is not something we should do at the start or end of the day only though. Practical mindfulness is knowing how to apply mindfulness practice in daily life as we go along our day. By nature, I’m quite easily irritated and frustrated, and I am constantly working on improving this part of myself. I know exactly how it feels and how it manifests in my body. I clench my teeth, I can feel my heart beating rapidly, my legs get restless, and everything else in the world seems to fade away as my whole being zooms in on the discomfort and injustice of the situation. It’s a dark place to be in and not conducive to any good result especially when interacting with people.

This sense of irritation and frustration is easily triggered, but a very typical trigger is when I have to call customer service for any big company. Here’s a recent one from when I had to call my bank. As usual, I had to navigate my way through a series of automated questions and subsequent questions, which is enough to trigger some frustration and “don’t waste my time” feeling. Add to that the fact that I was calling due to a mistake the bank had made with my account, so I was already charged going into the call. As I was put on hold and left alone with the elevator music, I noticed stress in my stomach and tension in my body. I stopped, realizing this irritation felt familiar. I know I have this tendency to get frustrated and I didn’t want to strengthen it.

It was an opportunity to tap into my practice. So I took a few deep breaths and helped my mind and body relax. I made a commitment to myself that when the customer rep would come on the phone I would express no irritation and treat them warmly. When she asked if I was having a nice day, instead of projecting my irritation, I said “I am, thanks. How are you?”. The conversation then proceeded calmly, it was indeed their mistake and I had to explain what happened, wait until I was put on hold for a few more minutes, and then have them acknowledge the mistake and rectify it. In this situation there was nothing I could do to influence things, they made a mistake and it needed to be fixed, following all their standard procedures. The only factor I had under my control was my response before and throughout the conversation.

Since this is a challenging scenario for me, when I hung up the phone I had a sense of triumph. If we remain grounded and mindful in situations where we can easily become irritated, even if we don’t get what we want we release the stress and irritation that we are carrying. To me, that in itself is a victory. The way Thich Nhat Hanh describes it is that every feeling is a field of energy; a pleasant feeling is a feeling that can nourish, irritation is a feeling that can destroy. Under the light of awareness, the energy of irritation can be transformed into an energy which nourishes. So basically, our choices directly strengthen the qualities within us. If we practice patience, we strengthen patience. If we get swept away by irritation, we strengthen irritation.

It’s up to us which quality we wish to strengthen.

Attending Collision Conference 2019 in Toronto

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In May this year I was in Toronto to attend Collision, North America’s fastest-growing tech conference. I was really looking forward to this conference, after having attended Web Summit in Europe for several years and having thoroughly enjoyed that sister conference.

I wasn’t disappointed by the conference. Toronto turned out to be a great location for such a conference.

I met a lot of interesting startup founders. In comparison with Web Summit I would say that I enjoyed the talks at Web Summit more; they were more interesting to me than those at Collision, however that might just have been due to my particular interests.

The majority of startups focused on North America, so if you’re a European startup that wants to promote your product or services I would recommend attending Web Summit over Collision.

If you want to have a taste of the kind of presentations given at Collision, you can head over to the Facebook page where you can watch various videos of these presentations.

Here are some of the highlights from this year’s edition:

If you’d like to attend this year, you can make use of the 2 for 1 offer and get 50% off your tickets.

Lending Platform Lendy Goes Bust – Lessons Learnt

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In May 2019, UK lending platform Lendy (previously known as SavingStream) went into administration following an announcement by the FCA.

This didn’t come as much of a surprise to many investors on this platform since things had been going downhill for some time. However, it’s always a sad moment when a platform you’ve invested money in goes out of business, possibly taking with it your money.

It’s also a moment to learn some lessons that will serve us well for future investments.

How did Lendy Work?

Lendy was a platform where property developers could apply for and obtain bridging and development loans. Most of these loans returned 1% per month and Lendy sometimes paid bonuses on loans that were overdue or simply defaulted. The loans were for the ranges of 3-12 months however many of them ended up defaulting or running for much longer than agreed.

These loans were secured against property or land with LTV ratios of 11-70%. There was also a discretionary provision fund that allegedly held 2% of the entire loan book in reserve.

All loans were secured against property or land. Lendy used to loan against boats and other items but they veered away from these types of loans in favor of property developments. The loan-to-value ratios on the properties and land ranged from 11-70%.

According to estimates, around 20,000 investors were operating on Lendy, with a total of £165m invested in the firm at the time of its closure. The platform had offered returns of upwards of 12% before things went south. It had been operating since 2013.

The money investors had invested in loans on the platform is now in jeopardy. Many investors also had uninvested money on the platform, and there are also doubts whether that part of their funds can be obtained eventually or not.

Concerned investors have launched the Lendy Action Group (LAG) that has the following aims as stated on its website:

  1. To act as a point of support and provide coordination, news and information to Lendy investors affected by their collapse.
  2. To work collectively to recover our investment. We are many but dispersed – together we become strong.
  3. To be a voice for investors to the administrators, regulators and press.
  4. To explore potential opportunities for further actions (if they become necessary and legal basis can be defined for such).

ORCA Money’s chief executive Iain Niblock has slammed failed peer-to-peer platform Lendy as a “typical example of poor P2P lending”, as he urged investors to seek out less risky loans.

Niblock who also co-founded the P2P investment aggregator and analysis firm said that it was “no surprise that Lendy had gone into administration, citing the platform’s “extremely poor” loan book performance and regulatory issues, which had been a cause for concern among investors for some time.

“Disappointingly, the lender was at one time one of the more popular UK P2P platforms with cumulative lending volumes reaching £428m,” Niblock added. “Over 22,661 lenders were attracted to its simple one percent interest per month offering.

“The platform grew rapidly in 2016 with cumulative lending growing from £79m by the end of 2015 to £271m by year end 2016. The company has suffered from extremely poor loan performance with worryingly high numbers of loans in defaults. Currently, on the platform there is £97m worth of loans in default and, only £65m of loans repaying.”

So let’s talk about those lessons I mentioned earlier. One of the biggest reasons behind my investing in P2P platforms and real estate crowdfunding is to learn how to invest as well as analyze my feelings when an investment is a success or when it tanks. The knowledge I get and the awareness of my feelings will guide my investing decisions further on in life, when being careful with my money will be of even more paramount importance due to aging, lower earning potential, and the necessity to support my children.

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Jean Galea

Online Entrepreneur. Global Citizen. Padel Player.
Founder of WP Mayor & WP RSS Aggregator.

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