Jean Galea

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The Ultimate Guide to Investing in European Real Estate Online

Last updated: May 08, 202412 Comments

Real estate investing needs little introduction. We all know that this asset class has been one of the top choices for investors since time immemorial. Nothing beats owning land and buildings. It’s an asset that you can see, use or rent out. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge so the barrier to entry is very low. And that is why real estate remains the number one place for people to park their money.

I have been dabbling in real estate through various platforms over the years, and this has given me a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a quick list of some of my favorite property-based P2P lending and real estate crowdfunding platforms reviewed on this site.

  • EstateGuru
  • Raizers
  • Bulkestate
  • Property Partner

For more information about real estate investing you can head over to my dedicated page on property investments.

REITs vs Real Estate Crowdfunding vs Private Investing

When talking about the real estate market, currently there are three ways of investing:

  • Property Crowdfunding
  • Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)
  • Private Investing

There are various pros and cons of each way of investing, so I will describe all three of them in more detail so that you can decide which one is most suitable for your situation and goals.

Property Crowdfunding

Real estate crowdfunding platforms are part of the fintech surge of recent years and have become very popular in countries such as the US, UK, and Spain. A property crowdfunding platform will typically have an attractive and modern website and give the user an experience that is very similar to owning the property directly. As an investor, you will have the opportunity to view properties in exposition phase, where you can read about the location of the property, the developer’s plans and financials, as well as the type of financing to be used (leveraged vs non-leveraged).

Typically, your money will be tied up for a 3-5 year term, although many platforms have now introduced a secondary market where you can put up your shares for sale to other investors.

I have personally invested in several property crowdfunding platforms (such as Raizers) and so far I’m happy with the results. I’m convinced that we’ll be seeing many more people making their first entry into property investing via property crowdfunding platforms versus REITs or private ownership.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)

Let’s now talk about one of the best ways you can diversify your property portfolio; real estate investment trusts (REITs). They started in the USA but are now available in many other countries around the world. A pure REIT represents the shares of an individual real estate company, while a REIT electronically traded fund (ETF) passively track indexes for the larger real estate market. These REIT indexes include a number of different types of REITs as components. The individual performance of REITs can vary widely. Many REITs are traded on major stock exchanges, but there are also a number of private and non-publicly traded REITs.

REITs own many types of commercial real estate, ranging from office and apartment buildings to warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and timberlands. Some REITs engage in financing real estate.

The iShares Europe Developed Real Estate ETF is an example of a European real estate ETF that you might want to check out. The ETF seeks to track the investment results of an index composed of real estate equities in developed European markets. You can expect to pay around 0.5% in fees when choosing such an ETF.

The Vanguard REIT ETF (VNQ)is the largest US REIT in the sector and began trading in 2004. It invests in stocks issued by REITs and seeks to track the MSCI U.S. REIT index, the most prominent REIT index.

One thing to consider is that a publicly-traded REIT is usually highly liquid. That means that you can easily sell your investment at any point in time if you need the money or if you’re not satisfied with your investment.

With a REIT you can obtain much wider portfolio diversification with the same amount of money when compared to private investment. You will also be totally detached from the management of these properties, which you might consider to be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on your interest and skills in real estate.

Private Investing

Private investment is the oldest and most well-known form of investing in the property market. An investor would purchase one or more properties and rent them out to obtain a monthly rent payment. To possibly obtain higher returns, the investor could also flip properties. Flipping properties involves buying an older property, fixing it up and selling it again. The whole operation is usually done within 8-12 months and in areas where the price of housing is rising in a fast and consistent manner.

Private investing offers you maximum control over your investment. You can deal with clients personally as well as refurbish the property as you deem fit. If you’re an expert in the local market and have the right contacts, this might be a good opportunity for you. Needless to say, you will need a lot of time to supervise the refurbishment of properties, as well as to make sure that your rented properties are well managed and your clients are properly taken care of whenever they have a problem.

The biggest con with private investing, apart from the time requirement, is the lack of diversification. Unless you have millions of euros/dollars to invest and have a deep knowledge of the property market in several countries/cities, you will struggle to diversify your property portfolio. You will thus be at the mercy of the local economy of typically one city/country, as well as the building you invested in.

Another issue is that if you invest in just one or even a few properties, vacant periods will seriously affect your cash flow. It might easily take one or two months to find a new tenant (even assuming strong demand in the rental market) and during that period you will have zero income from your property. Whether this will affect your lifestyle, of course, depends on your particular situation. Imagine a retired person with limited savings who relies on the rent payment from one property to get him through each month. Then imagine the property remains vacant for a few months due to whatever reason. You can understand why that would have a very significant impact on his life.

Personally, I am not a fan of private investing. Dealing with the day-to-day issues that crop up is something that would seriously affect my sense of freedom, and hiring a property management firm would involve more overheads and take away control over the level of service that the clients receive.

Secondly, I am not a property market expert and have little interest in keeping up-to-date with several local markets.

Thirdly, I don’t have the money to purchase several properties in order to diversify, and neither do I fancy taking out loans from the bank to fuel such purchases. Again, I’m only giving some insight on my personal situation to illustrate that every person needs to make his own analysis of his situation and conclude whether one style of investing is ideal for him or not.

To sum this section up, I would say that private investing is ideal for people who are passionate about property, have considerable capital to play around with (or are comfortable with taking out several loans), and want to do this as a part-time or full-time job.

Why I Prefer Real Estate Crowdfunding

As I already mentioned, private investing is definitely not something I’m interested in at this stage. I have zero interest in the day-to-day management of properties, and furthermore, I don’t have the capital nor the wish to take on loans to finance the purchases of property.

My biggest issue with REITs is precisely the fact that you are very detached from the underlying properties.

With property crowdfunding, I find that I can stay free from the annoying parts of managing properties, while at the same time having full access to the properties’ financials, business plans and individual performance. So far I’ve had a go at investing in Spanish property, UK real estate, as well as participating in a German real estate crowdfunding platform. The Baltic real estate platforms were the best performing by far.

Apart from the potential to earn a good return, property crowdfunding is a great educational experience that will probably come in handy in the future if I decide to go for private investing or buy my own property to live in.

Why do Borrowers Obtain Finance from Real Estate Crowdfunding Platforms?

A common question that comes up with investors new to real estate crowdfunding, is why exactly do borrowers go to these platforms when borrowing rates are so low these days? Why don’t they go to the banks directly?

Every entrepreneur and property developer is looking for the best measures to save money and earn a solid profit, so why would they take on debt obligations with an interest rate of 11% per annum?

The answer is not unequivocal as there are several advantages to be taken into account when evaluating financing possibilities on P2P lending platforms and real estate crowdfunding sites:

Speed

When using traditional financing methods, real estate developers often fail to get the desired results within the required timeframe – banks make decisions slowly, the period from application submission to receiving funding may be up to 4-6 months, while P2P lending platforms can provide an indicative offer within 24 hours of submission and money on the borrower’s account within 2 weeks. Developers are happy to use this opportunity as a “bridge” – you can start working on your project while the bank is still evaluating it.

Loan Period

When considering the possibility of using a P2P lending platform for financing your project, it should be taken into account that this is a short-term solution for the sales period of the property, during the development phase of the project or a bridge loan. The major benefit can however be seen in the fact that many of the above platforms allow early repayments with no penalties, so should the borrower sell one of the apartments or establish long-term financing, they can repay the loan earlier if convenient. This means that if the funds were used for 6 months and 6 days, then the interest payment will be calculated for exactly 6 months and 6 days.

No monthly payments

P2P lending platforms normally enable flexible repayment schedules, for example, the possibility to pay both interest and principal at the end of the period – you won’t find this kind of opportunity in traditional financial institutions. This significantly boosts work on a new project by enabling the borrower to fully focus on the project, with no additional liabilities each month. The developer can use the money to actually finance the project, not to pay interest.

Additional marketing

What is the cost of a new development project’s sales campaign in the media and how effectively can you reach people who are interested in real estate? Many of these platforms have thousands of registered investors from different countries interested in property and development, which gives the developers free publicity for their projects.

Doesn’t the publication of a project’s financial data in a public manner negatively affect the eventual sale of the property?

Not really, although it might initially appear to have that effect. In reality, what happens is that the eventual buyer is looking at the property and comparing the price to other properties in the same area in the same conditions. The buyer is also comparing the price and property to other properties he has shortlisted, even in other areas. Therefore, ultimately these two facts are much more important than the limited downside of the project details being published on the platform.

Many platforms also limit access to the project’s most important financial details to investors themselves, meaning the eventual buyer (unless he is an investor himself) would not have seen those details.

Communication and knowledge

A less important factor might be the opportunity to get another partner on board. A partner who understands the business has evaluated dozens of similar projects. If your project gets rejected, it probably means that there is something seriously off and you can go back to the drawing board to make adjustments. With banks, sometimes getting rejected is just the result of excessive bureaucracy and doesn’t mean there is necessarily anything wrong with your project.

When investing in real estate, there are many ways we can put our money to work. Each type of real estate investment carries its own risk factor as well as yield percentage.

How Property Crowdfunding is Taxed

So how does taxation of property crowdfunding finance work? We can use Property Partner as an example.

Property crowdfunding is a form of indirect property investment. This consists of the investment in shares of a company that owns, develops and manages property on behalf of its shareholders. Investors will hold legal shares in the company that owns a specific property. For each investment, an SPV company is created. Information on the special purchase vehicle (“SPV”) that holds the property can be found on the companies house website. Please type the SPV name into the search box on their site to find out more details.

Each property is held for a fixed term which is specified on each investment page. The investor hopes to receive a financial return in the form of dividends on rent received as well an increase in the value of the property subsequently shown as an increase in share price. The value of investment may go down as well as up and, as with all investments, you may get back less than you have invested. Indirect property investment allows investors to enter property markets without having to provide the full, up-front capital of buying a house or flat.

Your shares are held in a nominee account, registered in the name of Property Partner Nominee Limited. This account is ring-fenced from the assets and liabilities of Property Partner. You, as the beneficial owner, will receive all of the economic benefits including dividends and capital returns. More information on the nominee structure can be found on the Property Partner site.

Investment Costs are calculated using a First In First Out (FIFO) costing method per share, rounded to the nearest penny.

What income is taxed?

In most countries, you are taxed on capital gains as well as dividends, which are the two ways you can make money with property crowdfunding on platforms such as Property Partner.

With that in mind, you will then have to consult the laws of your country of residence to determine the tax rates for capital gains and dividends.

Please note that I am not an accountant or financial advisor, the above is the fruit of my personal research, and might contain inaccuracies. Before you submit any tax returns, I highly recommend you contact a tax consultant or accountant to check your numbers. 

How to Evaluate Real Estate Crowdfunding Investments

With the proliferation of real estate crowdfunding websites over the past years, investors can now invest all over Europe and the UK from the comfort of their homes.

Not all platforms and investments are equally good, however, and while it is good practice to diversify and thus spread the risk, it still makes a lot of sense to have a basic skill set in evaluating real estate investments, before you hit the Invest button.

In general, from my experience, investing in loans tends to be riskier, however, it is the format favored by many projects on these crowdfunding websites, as it is much more straightforward to structure. The alternative is to set up a company that owns the property, but that incurs more costs and is harder to manage. The advantage for an investor, however, is that he would own shares in a property and thus not be at the sole mercy of the developer.

Loan-To-Value

If the deal involves giving a loan to a property developer to build or refurbish a property, a very important metric to look at is loan-to-value, or LTV in short.

The lower the loan amount compared to the value of the property, the safer you are as an investor, as it means that in case of any problems, the chances of recouping the investment are higher.

You have to be extra cautious with this one, and take a close look at what value figure is being taken into consideration.

This can easily be explained by an example. Let’s say the developer puts up a project that involves buying an old and dilapidated building at 500,000 Euro, refurbishing it completely to luxury standard, and selling it off within a year for 1,000,000 Euro. He asks for a loan of 250,000 Euro for the project.

Now, here’s the trick some platforms use. Instead of listing the project as having a loan-to-value figure of 50% (250,000 divided by 500,000), they will use the anticipated value of the finished project, giving a loan-to-value figure of 25% (250,000 divided by 1,000,000).

I would advise staying away from these kinds of projects, as they tend to be much riskier. The price that the project is eventually sold at depends on many factors, including how good of a job the developer does, prevailing market conditions, the buyers’ profile, etc. As investors, we should concentrate on the facts, and therefore look at the value of the property right now, and that is 500,000 Euro in our example.

The fantastical figures that developers provide can lead to investors getting burned, as happened with the Lendy platform, which eventually went bust.

First or Second Rank Mortgage

A mortgage is the collateral of real estate which is pledged against borrowed capital. It is divided into primary and secondary ranks, which indicate which investor or institution is the first to recover the money. Typically, a first-rank mortgage holder in large projects is a bank or other large financial institution, while the second-rank mortgage is held by crowdfunding platforms or other institutions.

In general, you should prefer first rank mortgages. Platforms like LANDE only do first rank mortgages, for example. Other platforms might offer the riskier (but potentially more profitable) second-rank mortgages.

Secondary rank mortgages are quite popular on the German and British real estate crowdfunding platforms, such as Property Partner.

There are nuances, of course.

For example, if the property is already built and has tenants that generate rental income the risk is naturally lower. When assessing the risk in such a scenario, one should look at the property’s profitability.

Consider the case of a €5M property that is generating a net rental income of €350,000 or a 7% annual return, You can check what would be the return for primary and secondary mortgage holders. You can do this with a simple formula:  €350,000 (rental profit) / €3,600,000 (sum of primary and secondary mortgages loan values) * 100 = 9.72% net yield.

This step is important to assess the liquidity of the real estate, which helps to understand whether after a takeover of the asset it would be difficult to find a buyer and repay both mortgages to the investors. In this scenario, selling a property that is generating a yield above 9% shouldn’t be complicated.

Apply Financial Ratios & Rules

When you are buying a property, or investing through online real estate crowdfunding platforms. it’s a good idea to keep in mind the following ratios that can help you in judging whether this is a good investment or not.

Price/Rent Ratio

Look at the median price and median rent for the area in which you are considering buying a property. You will want to favor lower ratios versus higher ones.

The 50% Rule

The 50% Rule is just a shortcut to estimate the Net Operating Income or NOI of a rental property.

The 50% Rule says that you will only keep 50% of the rent you collect on an average rental after paying for vacancy, management, taxes, insurance, and maintenance.

The 50% Rule and NOI exclude mortgage costs.

Capitalization Rate

The 50% Rule allows us to quickly determine a cap rate so that we can decide to pursue the deal or not.

A capitalization rate is a tool experienced investors use to compare the performance of one property to another.

In some neighborhoods, a 6% cap rate will be a great deal. In other neighborhoods (usually lower-priced ones) a 12% cap rate or more might be needed to make it worthwhile.

The 1% Rule

The 1% Rule states that your gross monthly income from the rent of a property must equal or surpass 1% of the total investment in that property. By total investment, I mean the purchase price plus fees and expenses to refurbish the property before putting it onto the rental market.

As an easy example, if your total investment into a property was €100,000, then you would want to get at least €1,000 a month in gross rental income.

The 2% Rule

This is exactly the same as the 1% Rule, except this time we are looking for a 2% gross return in monthly rent versus the total investment.

When To Apply Each Rule

The obvious question is, therefore: when should we apply each of these rules. The answer is that it is totally dependent on the area you’re considering. There are some areas where a 2% deal is possible from time to time, and other areas where even a 1% deal would be a real stroke of luck.

The key here is to know the yields being produced in the area and the investments needed to produce those yields. Armed with that information you can then decide whether to apply the 1% or 2% rule to your investment options.

Rule Limitations

Like every shortcut, these rules have limitations. The major limitation you should be aware of is that what matters most in buy-to-let is the net rental income.

Here are a few costs that will eat into your gross monthly rental:

  • Taxes
  • Insurance
  • Maintenance
  • Management
  • Vacancy/Turnover
  • Condominium Fees

Some of these costs will inevitably be equal for all properties in a particular area (taxes is one such example), but others may not (for example maintenance). An older building might meet the 1% Rule criteria while a new building wouldn’t, however, the older building will probably have significantly higher maintenance costs. It might therefore very well be the case that the newer property might end up outperforming the older property even though at first glance and based on the 1% Rule the old building looked like a better investment.

Using the Rules

Given the additional intricacies we discussed, the best use of these rules is for quick filtering and comparison. If you’re using crowdfunding property platforms, for example, you’re likely to have several options to consider every month, and having a few quick rules to sort out the wheat from the chaff will be useful in saving precious time. Once you narrow down your options to a handful of properties, you can then dig deeper until you find your perfect investment.

Consider the Platform’s History

Take a look at the history of the platform you plan to invest in. Ideally, it should have been operating for a number of years already with no significant issues. If it’s been through a sideways or downward market and emerge unscathed that’s even better. Everybody can perform well when the market is up, but when the market is not helping many platforms cease to make updates and run into problems.

Property Partner are a good example of how to keep things professional and take care of your investors in a bad market, such as that of the UK during and after Brexit and the COVID crisis.

Read Reviews

While you should always assume that the reviews you read online are biased in some way or another, I still recommend checking out blogs, forums and specialist review websites to get a general feel of whether a platform is trustworthy or not.

Do you use any other criteria when evaluating real estate crowdfunding platforms? Let me know in the comments section.

Yield VS Risk Relationship in Real Estate Investing

Like any financial product, the higher the estimated yields the higher the risks. Investment opportunities with renovation are placed in a balanced position in the real estate investment type chart, almost in the middle, which is also why they are one of the most popular projects on many crowdfunding platforms.

Which are your favorite types of real investment? I’m a big fan of renovations that last around 8 months from purchase to an eventual sale. I tend to balance my portfolio with this type of investment together with savings opportunities where I get dividends/rent every month and have a constant flow of income.

Do you invest in real estate? Have you tried out property crowdfunding or other types of investing in property? Let me know in the comments section.

Filed under: Money, Real estate

🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless

Last updated: February 15, 202326 Comments


Wise introduced borderless banking in 2017. The big advantage it gives you is that you can have bank accounts in multiple currencies. As soon as they launched I started to think of how it could help me get rid of PayPal and its high fees.

First, let me introduce you briefly to Wise Borderless. If you want to read my full review of this product, do browse over to my review of Wise Borderless.

The vast majority of entrepreneurs I know require a combination of accounts in these three major currencies:

  • US Dollars (USD)
  • Euro (EUR)
  • British Pounds (GBP)

The problem so far has been the simple fact that it’s unnecessarily and frustratingly hard or downright impossible to open a bank account in another country than the one your business is based in.

So for example if your business is based in the UK, but you make all your online sales in USD, you would probably want a USD account so that you would be able to transfer money to it without losing on exchange rates.

This problem is now solved with Transferwise’s borderless banking system. Once you open an account with Transferwise, you will be able to apply for borderless banking and select the accounts you need (USD, EUR and GBP available at the moment). Within two days you will have them in place and you can then start receiving client payments to these accounts.

So what are borderless accounts?

Your borderless account is a bit like having local accounts all over the world, without having to open a real bank account abroad.

It’s a multi-currency account that lets you keep money in 28 currencies, and convert between them at the real exchange rate whenever you need.

You get bank details (like account numbers, bank codes and IBANs) issued by TransferWise so you can receive money in different currencies around the world with zero fees. These aren’t actual bank accounts (they only work similarly to bank accounts), so you don’t have to fill in any forms or have a foreign proof of address. They’re your unique bank details issued by TransferWise to you, that you can give to your friends, company or customers in the US, UK, Eurozone and Australia to get paid in those countries as if you had a bank account there, with zero fees.

How do they work?

  • Add money to your account in any of the supported currencies. Then activate the currencies you want to convert to or hold money in.
  • Convert money between your currencies in seconds whenever you need, always at the real exchange rate, with our low conversion fees.
  • Send money directly from any currency in your account to pay bills, pay friends or move it to another account of your own.
  • Activate AUD, EUR, GBP or USD in your account to get account numbers and IBANs. Give them to your friends, company or customers to receive those currencies from any bank account in Australia, Eurozone, UK or US with zero fees.

Wise vs PayPal

I’ve written about the loss of money due to currency conversion when using PayPal before, so I was hoping that Borderless Banking would solve this issue once and for all.

First Use Case – Invoicing Clients

The first thing I thought of was to replace PayPal completely with TransferWise. Instead of issuing my clients invoices through PayPal, I would ask them to send money directly to my Borderless accounts thus incurring no fees. Apart from incurring no fees to receive the money, I would also avoid the currency conversions, since I now have accounts in the four major currencies I use the most.

TransferWise works perfectly in this case, and for this purpose I was able to eliminate PayPal completely from my workflow.

Second Use Case – Paying Employees or Freelancers Globally

I’ve always used PayPal to pay my employees or collaborators who work in other countries, but this is expensive for both me and them. Again, TransferWise Borderless proved to be a great solution.

I can recommend the borderless accounts for this purpose as you will definitely save a ton of money.

Third Use Case – Withdrawing money from PayPal

Unfortunately, I still had to keep on using PayPal as it is one of the most comfortable ways to set up automated payments for digital products, especially in countries where Stripe is not yet established.

The problem, as I described in another post, is that PayPal charges hefty fees for currency conversions when withdrawing money to your bank account. Even if you use my method to eliminate the conversion on PayPal’s end, you will still have the money converted automatically by your bank when it arrives there. The ideal solution is to have USD be transferred from PayPal to a USD bank account, and so on and so forth with the other currencies. This makes borderless perfect for the job.

My idea was to add each of my borderless accounts to PayPal as withdrawal methods.

However, after checking with PayPal, they have informed me that at this stage they don’t support virtual bank accounts, which is what TransferWise’s Borderless banking solution is classified as.

2Checkout do not allow withdrawals to a Borderless Banking account unfortunately, so I can’t use them there either.

It would also be interesting to know what Stripe are doing, so if any of my readers wants to try that, do leave a comment with the results.

You should be able to use Borderless Banking with other services that support bank wire transfers, such as affiliate systems like Avangate and Shareasale.

While I did not have any luck adding the borderless accounts to PayPal, several readers have reported that they managed to do so by calling PayPal directly. I hate waiting on calls to be honest, and the prospect of dealing with some PayPal rep and trying to convince them to do something like this wasn’t very enticing, so I didn’t bother.

If you want to try it, here’s how:

Go to the contact page within your PayPal account, click call us and you’ll get a freephone number to call (which works on Skype too) and a code to give them. Once you call you have to answer some security questions, then give them the ACH routing number and account number of the Transferwise US bank account. If you’re lucky it will show up instantly on your PayPal account as the Community Federal Savings Bank.

Wrapping Up

This is a great step in the right direction. Revolut released something similar earlier this year, but TransferWise’s solution is better. The last step now is for everyone to be able to use this type of account with PayPal for withdrawals.

In any case, you can still ask clients to pay you to one of your multi-current Wise Borderless accounts, and that’s already a huge bonus for those entrepreneurs and companies who receive invoice payments directly rather than through payment gateways such as 2Checkout, Stripe or PayPal.

Don’t forget that you can now also get a TransferWise debit card, which gives you direct access to your multi-currency Borderless accounts so that you can spend your money anywhere around the world where cards are accepted.

Sign up to Wwise Borderless Banking

  1. Are You Losing out from PayPal’s Exchange Rates?
  2. 🤔 Which PayPal Account is Best for You?
  3. 💸 Changing Your PayPal Withdrawal Currency
  4. 💸 Understanding PayPal Cross Border Fees
  5. How to Withdraw From PayPal into a Maltese Bank Account
  6. 💳 Withdrawing Money From PayPal for Non-US Accounts
  7. Which PayPal E-Commerce Checkout Service Should You Use?
  8. 🤔 Should You Open Separate PayPal Accounts for Each of Your E-Commerce Stores?
  9. 🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless
  10. 💳 Linking Virtual Bank Accounts and Cards to PayPal (Revolut, Wise etc)
  11. How to Change Ownership of a PayPal Account

Filed under: Banking, Money

💶 The Best European P2P Lending Platforms in 2025

Last updated: July 17, 202594 Comments

European peer-to-peer lending sites

Amongst all the online investment platforms available today, European peer-to-peer lending sites are the ones that offer the highest returns.

Let’s have a look at how P2P lending works and which are the best European P2P lending sites.

Why do I focus on Europe? Simply because I am European and currently based in Europe. Most US lending sites, as well as some UK lending platforms, prohibit European citizens from investing, so this post focuses exclusively on those platforms that are available to all European citizens. The nice thing is that the majority of European P2P platforms accept international investors.

Another reason for focusing on Europe is that currently, the European platforms offer higher returns than those in the United States or Asia.

Without further ado, let’s jump straight into a list of what I consider the best platforms available nowadays. I will then proceed to talk about the P2P lending space in general for those who are new and want to learn more about this asset class.

The Best European P2P Lending Platforms

  • Mintos – read my review
  • Lonvest – read my review
  • Swaper – read my review
  • Peerberry – read my review
  • LANDE – read my review
  • RoboCash – read my review
  • Bondora – read my review

Now let’s explore each of them further.

If you’re unsure which platform to invest in, one of the best things you could do is to check the platforms’ ratings on multiple channels. I’ve analyzed most of the platforms out there, used several, and taken a look at their Facebook, Trustpilot, and Google scores, so here’s the list of top P2P platforms in Europe at the moment.

I also keep an eye on the market data on European P2P lending every month, as this is an important indicator of whether any of the platforms are in trouble or whether they are in a healthy growth and profitability stage.

Mintos

Mintos European peer-to-peer lending site

Mintos is undoubtedly the powerhouse of European P2P lending platforms. Founded in 2015 in Riga, Latvia, Mintos has quickly grown to become the largest and most trusted platform in the region. It offers a plethora of investment opportunities across a wide variety of loan types, including personal loans, business loans, and mortgages. With more than 340,000 investors and a stunning €7 billion in funded loans, Mintos has established itself as the go-to platform for P2P lending enthusiasts.

The interface is great; everything is understandable and you don’t need to fish around for data. You get a daily report in your inbox and you can also use the auto-invest functionality, which I always do.

See also: My full review of Mintos – I invested €150,000

Mintos has a solid secondary market which provides investors with liquidity. If you want to sell off your loans at any point, you can put them on the secondary market, choosing whether to apply a discount (making them more attractive) or add a premium (less attractive). If you want to sell quickly, applying a discount is the best way to do this.

The minimum investment in any single loan on the primary market is EUR 10, DKK 80, GEL 25, PLN 50  or CZK 300. There is no minimum for investments in the secondary market.

You have to be careful when setting the auto-invest parameters on Mintos. Check out the Mintos lender ratings post on Explorep2p as well as the Mintos loan scanner to see which are the most trustworthy lenders on the platform.

The income earned at Mintos is taxed for each investor based on the legislation of the respective country where the investor is a tax resident. Each investor can receive extensive information necessary for tax returns when logged into their Mintos investor account.

You can add funds safely via your online banking directly in the app, by bank transfer, or with a debit/credit card. I recommend using N26, Wise or Revolut when doing deposits and withdrawals as you avoid fees altogether.

Companies can also invest through Mintos without any problem. There are specific documents that need to be provided in order to comply with AML legislation, but it’s pretty straightforward.

During the past three years, Mintos experienced significant growth, making it the peer-to-peer lending market leader for continental Europe with a 38% market share according to AltFi Data. Since their establishment, they have exceeded EUR 660 million in cumulative investments by investors and they expect the number of loans funded to reach EUR 1 billion by the end of the year.

Over the past years, Mintos have made considerable investments in technology, people and the marketplace, making the service even more convenient for investors. The number of investors has been growing in exponential numbers year on year. As an investor, this is reassuring, as I know I’m not alone using this platform, but I’m joined by tens of thousands of others like me.

On Mintos, you can expect returns between 6% and 18%, and the minimum investment per loan is €10.

Sign up to Mintos

Lonvest

Lonvest is a promising newcomer in the European P2P lending space, offering investors an opportunity to earn passive income through carefully selected loans. Despite being a relatively new platform, Lonvest has positioned itself as a serious player by focusing on transparency, investor security, and attractive returns.

The platform provides investors with access to loans that are backed by a reputable loan originator, ensuring a layer of protection against potential defaults. With a straightforward and user-friendly interface, investors can easily navigate their portfolios, set up automated strategies, and track their earnings in real time. Lonvest also offers competitive interest rates, making it an appealing choice for those looking to diversify their investment portfolios beyond traditional assets.

See also: In-depth review of Lonvest

One of the standout aspects of Lonvest is its commitment to building a sustainable and secure lending environment. The platform implements rigorous due diligence processes to assess loan quality and borrower credibility, ensuring that investors are exposed to well-vetted opportunities. Additionally, with buyback guarantees in place on many loans, investors have an extra layer of confidence when deploying their capital.

For those seeking a fresh yet reliable P2P lending option in Europe, Lonvest is certainly worth considering. Its combination of solid returns, transparency, and security features make it an attractive addition to any investor’s passive income strategy.

Sign up to Lonvest

Swaper

Swaper P2P lending platform

Swaper is one of the latest entries into the P2P lending space in Europe, having started operations in May 2019. They have found success pretty quickly though, amassing more than 4000 active investors, 160m euro in investments and 2.1m euro in interest paid back to investors.

See also: In-depth review of Swaper

I really like this platform and the team has been extremely pleasant to deal with whenever I contacted them.

Join Swaper

PeerBerry

PeerBerry Landing Page

Launched in 2017, PeerBerry has been gaining quite a lot of popularity among peer-to-peer platforms recently. As with many crowdlending platforms, PeerBerry originated in the Baltics – specifically Riga, Latvia.

This platform has an average annual investment return of 11.51%, a solid return for most platforms. With more than 18,000 investors and over €212 million in funded loans, PeerBerry is certainly making some waves in the peer-to-peer business.

See also: My in-depth review of PeerBerry

As with many peer-to-peer platforms, PeerBerry offers an Auto Invest function and a BuyBack guarantee. Unfortunately, however, no secondary market is available yet.

I really like this platform and its website. PeerBerry has the potential to be one of the big players in European P2P over the coming years.

Open an account with Peerberry

LANDE Finance

LendSecured investment opportunities

LANDE was started in 2019, when two experienced professionals from the secured lending sector Ņikita Gončars and Edgars Tālums became aware that there is a niche in the crowdlending market, as none of the existing market players offered low-LTV investment deals.

LANDE is going after the agricultural loans niche. There is currently a big gap between the financing needs of farmers in Eastern Europe and what’s available to them from banks and other lending providers.

Read more: My full review of LANDE

All projects are first rank mortgage, which is the most secure type of mortgage you can get. Other platforms offer second-rank mortgages which are riskier, but can have higher interest rates.

I would recommend having a look at LANDE as it might be one of the most innovative players in the space going forward. It’s worth mentioning that LANDE also has skin-in-the-game for every project launched.

Invest on LANDE

Bondora

Bondora review

Bondora is one of the oldest peer-to-peer lending platforms, and I joined early on in my P2P lending journey, around 2016.

While this platform has been criticized by investors in the past, my portfolio has been chugging along quite well over the years, and my only complaint would be about the graphics and UI of the platform, which I find really ugly.

Read more: My in-depth review of Bondora

I’ve obtained a return of 17% while investing on Bondora.

If you’re looking for a reliable platform I would recommend taking a look at Bondora, as they have one of the best track records in the industry.

Invest on Bondora

What about Other Platforms?

There are several other sites that I consider either a scam or badly managed and on the course toward bankruptcy and loss of investor funds. Be very careful who you trust when investing in these platforms.

Many people just want to paint a nice picture for any platform just to take in commissions, and the platforms themselves all try to emphasize how safe they are and what great opportunities they are offering to investors. Don’t believe everything, and check out my list of worst P2P lending platforms before you proceed.

If you’re concerned about the safety of P2P platforms, make sure you also read my post on whether it is safe to invest in P2P lending.

🌍 Who Can Invest in P2P Lending Sites?

These European lending sites are open to all European investors, possibly even those outside of Europe in some cases. The only exceptions are the UK-based platforms, which are typically restricted to investors resident in the UK. CapitalRise is one such example. It’s been around since 2005 but is restricted to UK-based people.

The majority of platforms that are open to other countries are based in the Baltic countries.

Many of these platforms are available in more than one language, precisely to cater for the fact that in Europe people speak so many different languages and might not be comfortable investing their money if the site is only available in English.

From my experience, at the moment in Europe, the country with the most investors in P2P lending is Germany, leading by a long margin. German investors love P2P platforms. Germany is a country where people have a high purchasing power and they are looking for good returns on their savings, and hence P2P lending platforms are a great match for them.

What Returns Can Lenders Expect?

The returns that lenders/investors can expect vary depending on the economic climate. If interest rates are low in general, then we can expect that platforms will offer lower rates as well. This is the current economic outlook worldwide. But 15-20 years ago bank interest rates were very high, so it would not have made sense to invest in P2P platforms when your savings account already rewarded you with 10% returns guaranteed.

Nowadays, you barely find any bank accounts giving you 1% returns, so the returns of 10-15% offered by P2P lending sites are way better in comparison.

It is important to understand that such investments are to be considered alternative investments with a rather high-risk profile. You will most probably have loans that default, but the idea is that the overall returns will eclipse these minor defaults.

Risks of P2P Lending

For each investment class, and indeed every investment you make, you need to carefully consider the risks involved. There’s a lot to say about the safety of P2P lending and what risks you need to consider, so I wrote a separate guide on whether P2P lending can be considered safe that you should find interesting.

Alternatives to P2P Lending

If, like myself, you want to diversify beyond P2P lending, I would suggest you read up on real estate crowdfunding platforms as well as crypto interest accounts. You can obtain similar rates of return (usually 3-4% less than P2P lending) but these other types of investors tend to be safer as they involve collateral.

✅ Conclusion

If you’re interested in trying out peer-to-peer loan platforms, I suggest you start with Peerberry or Swaper.

If you have any questions about any of the platforms I mentioned, or how the model of peer-to-peer loans works, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

Before you make any investment decisions, I also encourage you to have a look at how your country taxes proceeds from peer-to-peer lending. You can check out my article on how peer-to-peer lending is taxed to get started on this topic.

You should also read about the risks of P2P lending before making any investments, and make sure you are comfortable with that level of risk for the money you are putting into P2P lending platforms.

Have you invested in p2p lending platforms? What has been your experience with these platforms?

Filed under: Money, P2P Lending, Top Post

📈 What is the Best Cryptocurrency Portfolio Tracker?

Last updated: April 02, 202455 Comments

Buy cryptos

With thousands of crypto tradeable assets available, it is hard to keep track of your crypto portfolio these days. Even if you’re just buying and selling one or two different coins, you can quickly lose track of things, especially if you’re using several crypto exchanges or trading apps like Coinbase, Binance etc. Not to mention if you’ve been dabbling around in DeFi and DEXes like Uniswap and Sushiswap.

It is also important to track other crypto-related activities, for example when earning interest on your crypto through platforms like Nexo and YouHodler.

You could also be using one of the various crypto debit and credit cards, like Crypto.com, where for tax purposes you will need to keep track of every single purchase done with your card.

As you can see, it is important to know your positions in an easy way, and there is no better way than to use an app or software solution.

You need to know where you stand at all times:

  • to keep track of your overall investment
  • to be prepared when tax time comes along

Here are my favorite portfolio tracking and tax preparation tools.

CoinTracking

Cointracking

CoinTracking is the most complete portfolio tracker on the market. They have automatic import from exchanges built-in, and the interface is very clean. Their support is fantastic, and best of all, everything is free for those with few transactions. This is the system I would have built if I had to build a tracker myself.

CoinTracking analyzes your trades and generates real-time reports on profit and loss, the value of your coins, realized and unrealized gains, reports for taxes and much more. With the prices for 7666 coins and assets, you’ll always have a complete overview.

  • 620K+ Active Users
  • 750+ CPAs & Corporate Clients
  • 11 Years of Historical Data
  • Coin Trends for 7666 Coins
  • $4.3B Total Value of all Portfolios

This is one of the earliest and most complete services available out there. They have two offerings, one for crypto traders and the other for crypto companies.

See also: My detailed review of Cointracking

CoinTracking.info has one of the most extensive customer service areas I have seen on tax reporting platforms. It has an elaborate documentation section that covers almost every question you might have. It also has a separate FAQ that caters to the most commonly asked questions.

There is even a CoinTracking.info robot ready at your disposal. This is all aside from the typical customer service tools such as communities, live chat, video tutorials, and email contact. There is also a demo version of the website available that can give you a good idea of what to expect once you start using the platform.

Of course, CoinTracking also calculates crypto taxes every year for you. Given that it’s still so hard to find competent accountants who understand crypto (plus it would be very expensive), it’s well worth it to pay for a tool like this that prepares everything for you. At any point, you can review your tax summary, and download the reports you need to file your taxes. CoinTracking is seamlessly integrated with TurboTax and your accountant’s software. Full support is offered in US, UK, Canada, Australia, and partial support for every other country. They are adding full support for other countries too, so check out the site for the latest list.

I’ve spoken to the founder of CoinTracker on my podcast Mastermind.fm, so check that episode out if you’re interested in learning more about the platform and crypto taxation in general.

You can not only connect it to your exchanges to pull in all the data about trades you’ve made, but you can also mark transfers to your Ledger Nano or other cold wallets so that they are not deducted from your overall balance.

In terms of exchanges, they practically support every exchange out there, including my favorites Binance and Binance. You can import your data automatically via API or upload a CSV of all your trades. Cointracker uses read-only access to your exchange accounts to protect your funds. That is very very important as it means that Cointracker will never have any permission to operate with your crypto.

Read more: The Best Books about Bitcoin and Crypto

This service offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of your crypto portfolio – which allows you to manage all your digital currency accounts at once.

Moreover, its longstanding reputation has allowed the CoinTracking.info team to update the platform regularly to cater to the changing needs of the crypto community.

To ensure the provider is right for you, CoinTracking.info also offers a free account to help you understand whether the platform can fit your tax reporting needs. Overall, CoinTracking.info comes across as one of the most efficient management tools you can use for your crypto portfolios.

Get your 10% discount on Cointracking plans

Koinly

Koinly crypto tax preparation

Koinly was established in 2018 and has already generated more than 11,000 tax reports for its clients.

I like it since it’s not 100% US-focused, and as such you can use it to prepare your German, Italian, Spanish, French taxes along with many other countries. The team behind Koinly is composed of tax lawyers, accountants and engineers who study the tax implementations of many countries and make sure the software can support these systems as well as a plethora of worldwide exchanges.

See also: My detailed review of Koinly

Koinly automatically imports your transactions, finds all the market prices at the time of your trades, matches transfers between your own wallets, calculates your crypto gains/losses and generates your tax reports.

Check out Koinly

Cointelli

Cointelli is one of the most recent additions to the crypto tax reporting tools and to date, it is only available to US-based crypto investors who are after obtaining automated US-tax reports.

Established in 2021, Cointelli’s service is intended to ease the pressure of accurate tax reporting by automatically compiling your transactions from across your wallets and exchanges. Once it generates your transaction list, Cointelli’s software will consequently help you to easily fix any errors therein, prepare a comprehensive report for tax purposes based on the latest tax provisions and have it sent out to your accountant or other relevant tax platforms.

Apart from freeing up a great deal of precious time, Cointelli places a lot of effort into helping you generate the required stats and reports as accurately as possible, thus saving you from paying any unnecessary tax.

Cointelli’s pricing structure is lean with a one-size-fits-all price for consumers and customized packages for large transaction-volume enterprises. For a flat annual fee of $49, clients can benefit from all the Cointelli suites and services for up to 100,000 crypto transactions, be it DeFi, margin trades, or NFTs. This is very competitive pricing, particularly when a number of other platforms offering similar services, already start charging a higher fee as soon as transaction volume exceeds 100.

Cointelli also scores high in terms of support. It not only offers customer support via email and chat widget, but also provides 24/7 live customer service with dedicated tax experts.

Get your crypto tax report with Cointelli

CryptoTaxCalculator

Cryptotaxcalculator

  • Direct support for hundreds of exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase.
  • Handles staking rewards, airdrops, margin/futures trading, perpetuals, lost/stolen funds, ICOs, and much more.
  • Direct support for DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Binance Smart Chain.
  • Pricing is an annual subscription, and you can cancel anytime, with a 30 day money back guarantee.
  • The plan covers all historical tax years so if you need to amend your tax return for previous tax years the plan has you covered.
  • Prices range from $49 (100 transactions); $99 (2,500 transactions); $249 (10,000 transactions), $399 (100,000 transactions).

Open an account with CryptoTaxCalculator

TokenTax

Tokentax

TokenTax is a crypto tax software platform and a full-service cryptocurrency tax accounting firm. This tool also takes care of tax-loss harvesting. If you hold assets at a loss, then you can save money on your taxes. TokenTax’s Tax Loss Harvesting dashboard tells you exactly how much losses you can claim by strategically selling off assets.

Read more: My in-depth review of TokenTax

Tax loss harvesting is selling off assets you hold at a loss to reduce your capital gains. When you reduce your capital gains, you owe less taxes. And, if you take a loss in crypto, you can offset other capital gains in assets like stocks.

Support for margin trading is also included.

Check out Tokentax

Cryptotrader

Cryptotrader

CryptoTrader.Tax takes away the pain of preparing your bitcoin and crypto taxes. Simply connect your exchanges, import trades, and download your tax report in minutes.

Check out Cryptotrader

Kubera

Kubera helps you to organize all your wealth in one place and keep regular track of your net worth in a very simple intuitive way. In fact, Kubera is a more holistic tracker than the above platforms in that apart from automatically tracking your crypto position and NFT holdings, it also captures your bank and brokerage accounts, real estate, vehicles, domains and metals. Kubera also allows you to manually input any other assets you own so that you can obtain a comprehensive view of your net worth in real-time.

Kubera will also provide you charts with analytics showing you how your net worth and investments changed over time. Every update to your asset value is kept in history to go back in time to see how you fared. It also allows you to keep an eye on the asset allocation and statistics indicating which asset experienced the highest appreciation or depreciation.

Kubera also calculates accurate rate of returns (IRR) for all your investments based on the multiple contributions & withdrawals and the time invested. It also benchmarks the IRR with the returns from popular indices and tickers (S&P 500, Dow Jones, AAPL, BTC etc.).

See also: My detailed review of Kubera

Another handy feature of Kubera is the possibility to store important financial or asset documents on the platform.

Through Kubera you will also be able to share a read-only link of your portfolio with others. In addition, with Kubera’s “Life Beat” feature you can allow portfolio and document access to your beneficiary of choice, however only after extended periods of inactivity.

Check out Kubera

How to Easily Prepare Your Crypto Taxes

So you’ve fallen down the crypto rabbit hole, started buying and selling some Bitcoin, then bought some Ether, and perhaps even ventured further to buy some other altcoins.

After some time, seeing that you’re profiting massively, you decide to sell some of your tokens. Sometime later, you decide to buy a new token that you believe will revolutionize the world.

The problem is, of course, keeping track of all these purchases and sales. You want to keep track of whether you’re actually turning a profit or not, plus you need to calculate what you owe your country’s taxman at the end of the year.

Crypto taxes are a complex topic, but I’ve done my best to summarise the situation in several major countries, so check out my post on how Bitcoin and other cryptos are taxed around the world.

So what are your options for crypto tax preparation?

You could keep track of things manually using a tool like Excel, but this quickly gets out of hand, especially if you’re trading on multiple platforms or have multiple wallets.

The better solution is to use an online crypto tax preparation tool.

All the tools mentioned in this post can help you in preparing your taxes apart from acting as a handy crypto portfolio.

If you’re preparing your crypto taxes for the first time, I would suggest you check out my favorite portfolio/tax preparation tools:

  • CoinTracking
  • Koinly

Depending on what your needs are, what jurisdiction you’re in, and what your budget is, you can choose one of those platforms. All three of them are excellent and run by serious people, so you cannot go wrong.

What’s your favorite crypto tax preparation tool?

Filed under: Cryptoassets, Money

MyTripleA Review – Better Alternatives Exist

Last updated: January 19, 20222 Comments

MyTripleA is a Spanish investment platform launched in 2015. It is the first and only Spanish crowdlending platform that has been granted two licenses to operate:

  • Payment Entity license granted by the Ministry for Economics and supervised by the Bank of Spain
  • License to act as a Crowdfunding Platform (since July 2016) registered at the CNMV.

MyTripleA offers two ways to invest:

  1. Fixed and guaranteed returns that are based on the Euribor rate + 2%.
  2. Non-guaranteed loans with a higher interest rate.

Guaranteed and Fixed Returns Loans

They offer guaranteed deposits and returns through collaborating with SGR (Sociedades de Garantia Reciproca). These entities are supervised by the Bank of Spain and guarantee payments in case that other companies are unable to pay.

In this way, there is no need to diversify since all the loans are guaranteed. MyTripleA says that they use the same SGRs as the banks themselves. Hence you are getting the same security as you would when putting your money in a savings account at the bank. However, you get a much better rate of return.

See also: The Best European P2P Lending platforms

MyTripleA says that the difference between what they offer and what the banks offer is due to the fact that banks keep a much larger commission for themselves, and hence MyTripleA are passing on to their clients a bigger share of the profits.

In case that there are any delays or defaults affecting your loans, the SGR will return any capital invested plus interest. This will take place after the 3rd failed payment. The maximum period between the failed payment and the compensation date is 60 days.

When investing in these fixed returns loans, you commit your money for a total of 36 quotas, in other words, you won’t be able to withdraw your money for three years. During this period you will be receiving monthly interest and capital repayments.

Non-Guaranteed Loans

While the guaranteed loans are certainly a nice way to park a sum of money and get safe returns, they are not that interesting to me at this stage. I am still young and am more interested in generating good returns while undertaking a medium risk rather than focusing fully on low risk. This is why I was more interested in the non-guaranteed loans that MyTripleA offers.

When I decided to invest, there were a few non-guaranteed loans available. I decided to go with a factory that needed the money to buy supplies of rubber and plastic. The company is based in Cantabria and was looking for a total of €7,350 in funding. In return, they offered a 6% annual interest rate. This was a relatively short-term loan of just three months, which made it very attractive to me.

MyTripleA does a good job at providing a risk analysis for each loan as well as details about the company and the loan itself.

Below is the introduction of the loan and its details.

They gave it a D rating with a 3.99% of loss of funds. In that eventuality, I would have not

The MyTripleA website is only available in Spanish at this stage.

As with other Spanish platforms, MyTripleA deducts 19% of all your interest payments.

I feel that the website itself is a bit old-fashioned and there isn’t much activity really. This has made me somewhat lose confidence in MyTripleA and I have decided to pull out all my funds from this platform. The 19% tax deduction doesn’t help either. The idea is good but they need to modernize themselves and make sure that investors always have plenty of diverse loans to choose from.

I would recommend having a look at some better platforms like Mintos, Swaper and Peerberry instead.

Have you invested your money with MyTripleA? What’s your experience so far?

Filed under: Money

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