Jean Galea

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My Thoughts on the FIRE Concept and Movement

Last updated: January 08, 202110 Comments

fire jorgen wolf

FIRE stands for Financial Independence/Retire Early. It’s a term that was coined in the United States by personal finance bloggers who started to blog about their journeys of achieving financial independence with the aim of escaping the rat race and retiring earlier than the standard 60-65 age bracket.

Obviously this is a hugely attractive proposition for pretty much any person around the world, so the concept and the FIRE bloggers themselves have become immensely popular.

I’d like to share my thoughts on the concept itself and the FIRE community, as there are some things I like and others I don’t like so much.

[Read more…]

Filed under: Money & Investing, Tips & Tricks

Banqia Review – Not Trustworthy

Last updated: July 11, 20202 Comments

Here’s my experience of using Banqia. It’s been an infuriating experience that drove me to write this article in the hope that others will read it before they try using Banqia.

Note that this is a review of Banqia and not Bankia, with a ‘k’. The latter is a Spanish bank, and the similarity in names actually poses the first problem for Banqia. I expect them to be forced to change their name shortly as it causes market confusion being so similar to the other established bank’s name.

Anyway, let’s talk about Banqia.

This is what they promise:

EASY EUROPEAN IBAN ACCOUNT OPENING.
It takes just 10 minutes to open a free Banqia current account. Get access to Banqia App and manage your financials from anywhere.
Banqia is a modern advanced alternative to traditional banking. We have broke down banking complex structures to the simplest levels.
BANQIA is the first fintech company offering designated IBAN accounts to individuals and businesses. The current account, complete with IBAN, the ability to transfer money instantly via SEPA & SWIFT, but also to receive Settlements for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum & more directly to your Banqia Bank Account, We are Crypto Business & Non EU residents friendly !

Site Riddled with Spelling Mistakes

For a company that is supposed to be managing your money, it doesn’t inspire confidence to see silly spelling mistakes dotting the whole site.

As you can see above, in just one paragraph there are two amateurish spelling mistakes.

Non-existent Customer Support

They claim customer support hours from 9am to 7pm. However, when I tried to access their chat 9 times out of 10 it would be offline.

Chat always offline, and some more spelling mistakes…

I also sent them several emails through their support system which were never answered.

In the footer of the site, they even state different opening hours than the header. Go figure!

[Read more…]

Filed under: Banking, Money & Investing

Inveslar Spanish Property Crowdfunding Platform Review 2021

Last updated: January 08, 20212 Comments

Inveslar property crowdfunding spain

In this review, I’ll talk about my experience with investing in the Spanish real estate crowdfunding platform Inveslar – The Urban Investors. What they mean by the name “urban” is unclear to me, perhaps it refers to the fact that they stick to major cities and towns in Spain.

I’ve already introduced Inveslar in my earlier post about the best Spanish property crowdfunding platforms, but in this post, I would like to focus on my real-life experience with the projects I’ve invested in on this platform.

Registration with Spanish Authorities

Inveslar provides regulatory coverage to investors and developers thanks to the integration with Socilen PFP, S.L., an authorized company registered with the CNMV as a Participatory Financing Platform with registration number 9.

Internationalization

The platform is open to all European and non-European investors, although you will have to obtain a NIE from the nearest Spanish embassy to be able to invest. It’s a minor inconvenience, but once you’ve got your NIE you will also be able to invest in other Spanish platforms too.

The properties available on Inveslar are all in Spain, with a specific focus on Barcelona and surrounding areas.

The website itself is available in several languages:

  • Spanish
  • Catalan
  • French
  • English
  • German

That covers all the big markets in Europe for investors. The original languages of the site are Spanish and Catalan, and the translations are not perfect but decent enough.

Terms of Investment

For all projects, the investor agreement states that the investor is lending money to the platform.

If you understand Spanish, this is the explanation directly from Inveslar, about how we are investing money on their platform, specificying that we are giving fixed interest loans to developers who in turn invest that money into their projects.

Los últimos proyectos corresponden todos a financiación de circulante. Son préstamos a tipo fijo que solicita un promotor para poder hacer frente a una reforma, permisos de obra, o lo que él considere. La rentabilidad del préstamo no va asociada a la rentabilidad del proyecto, sino que se trata de un préstamo a tipo fijo dónde los inversores cobran mensualmente los intereses, y la devolución del capital se lleva a cabo en la última cuota. Por este motivo no existe un proyecto participativo en sí, sino que se trata de una inversión en un préstamo a tipo fijo a promotor.”

In the early days, Inveslar used to create a separate company for each investment, and the investors would purchase shares in that company. However, they have stopped using that model, since the ley de sociedades de capital in Spain obliges all purchases and sales of shares to take place with a notary present, which makes it impossible to operate an online secondary market.

Secondary markets are very important to investors as they provided liquidity and the ability to sell investments at the click of a button, provided there are interested buyers.

Unfortunately, the Spanish law has not been updated to keep up with modern trends, which forces platforms like Inveslar to use the lending model.

Email Support

Whenever I emailed Inveslar I always got a reply within 2 days, and sometimes comprehensive replies from the CEO himself, so I am very satisfied with that aspect of the experience.

Types of Investment Available

As an investor, when you visit the site and click on the Investments menu item, you will see the following options:

  • Crowd projects
  • Crowd marketplace
  • Properties for sale

Inveslar has also recently announced that they will start putting up projects related to auctioned properties, which I am very interested in. The first auction projects should be available in the coming months.

Let’s take a look at them one-by-one.

[Read more…]

Filed under: Money & Investing, Real estate

🔥 Mintos Review 2021 – 11.42% Returns on Over €150,000 Invested

Last updated: January 20, 202167 Comments

mintos review 2020

Mintos is a peer-to-peer lending platform in Europe. Like many other FinTech companies of this type, it is based in the Baltic region; in Latvia specifically.

Currently, Mintos has four offices employing more than 160 people in Riga, Vilnius, Berlin and Warsaw.

Mintos started operating in 2015, but has experienced rapid growth due to getting a lot of things right and becoming popular with financial bloggers due to its ease of use and transparency.

Mintos has raised a total of € 7 million – € 2 million seed funding in 2016 and € 5 million Series A funding in 2018. Investors in both rounds were Maris Keiss (co-founder of 4finance and Mogo), Aigars Kesenfelds (co-founder of 4finance and Mogo, investor in Artsy and Madara Cosmetics), Kristaps Ozols (co-founder of 4finance and Mogo), and Alberts Pole (co-founder of 4finance and Mogo) – all investing through Grumpy Investments (previously known as Skillion Ventures).

Although it’s still early days for P2P lending in general and Mintos as a platform, they have some incredible numbers to be proud of.

The average interest rate 12.49% as of October 2020, with more than 340,000 investors registered from all over the world, €6bn invested, and an average investment of €4,128 and more €100,000,000 in interest paid to investors. Mintos is also the only double award winner at the annual AltFi awards of 2019.

mintos investor statistics november 2019

Another important statistic to look at is the loan book growth, and here again, Mintos is doing very well as can be seen in the following screenshot.

The total money invested so far is higher than 2.2 billion Euros, which is a staggering number for such a young platform. There is no doubt that Mintos is the biggest player in P2P lending in Europe at the moment, with over 50% market share of the total p2p lending market. There are some good competitors, but none of them provide the security and track record that Mintos does.

The management team of Mintos is clearly displayed on the website with links to the Linkedin profiles of each person in the team. Mintos has over 160 employees which makes it the biggest employer in the P2P lending space.

Being able to view the team and also check out various YouTube videos with their CEO Martins Sulte enhances the feeling of transparency and peace of mind. I am one of those who take a look at these pages on a website and use them when judging whether I should invest on a platform or not. Everything counts.

I have personally interviewed Martins on my podcast Mastermind.fm, so be sure to check out that episode if you like podcasts.

Mintos is a platform that is in line with EU law, so when you invest you won’t have any trouble with your accountant or tax authorities back home in terms of explaining what you are doing.

Finally and very importantly, Mintos as a company is profitable, so they are not only running on investor money but are actually turning a profit, which means that they have a much higher chance of standing the test of time compared to some other competitors that are still in startup mode.

how mintos stacks up against other asset classes

The biggest number of investors come from Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic respectively, but this is mostly a reflection of those countries’ familiarity with this type of investing. There are more than 340,000 investors that have used Mintos and they come from 90+ countries.

More than 60 lending companies offer their loans on the Mintos platform, with over 25,000 people working at these companies and spread over 33 countries, so you can have a global reach when investing on Mintos.

The company supports 10 languages via its multilingual support team, while the website is available in 6 languages and there are loans available in 10 currencies.

[Read more…]

Filed under: Money & Investing, P2P Lending

My P2P Lending Platform Investment Returns in 2021

Last updated: January 20, 20216 Comments

These are my annualized latest rates of returns on the various peer-to-peer landing platforms that I’m invested in:

  • Mintos – 11.42%
  • Viventor – 15.51%
  • Bulkestate – 14.75%
  • Crowdestate – 11.73%
  • October – 7.12%
  • Reinvest24 – 8.01%
  • iFunded – 5%
  • Bondora – 6.75%

Hopefully, this will serve to give you an idea of the kinds of returns you can make with this alternative investment class.

I also invest in other platforms where the rate of return is harder to calculate as the investments are not all loans. For example with Housers and Property Partner, many of the projects are buy-to-sell projects or development projects whose rate of return will only be known once they are completed and sold on the market.

When calculating returns, keep in mind that you will most probably have to pay tax on those P2P lending returns in your country of residence.

As this is a risky asset class, I would recommend investing an amount of money that would not cripple your life if it were to eventually get lost due to the various risks of P2P lending. If your risk tolerance is higher and have several income streams as I do, then you can invest a bit more.

If you’re thinking of investing in P2P as an overall investment strategy, you can check how P2P compares to other investments on my other post about that topic. You can also read about what I think are the best peer-to-peer loan platforms in Europe as of this year.

Filed under: Money & Investing, P2P Lending

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Jean Galea

Investor. Dad. Global Citizen. Padel Player.

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