When I started this blog I had the goal to document my journey to financial independence and generally have a place where I can talk about money and finances. We’re 9 months later and face total profits of 2114 EUR vs. losses of 8720 EUR (including Grupeer which still has a chance to recover).
The cost of the returns
Fast forward 9 months I realized that most of the P2P investing platforms are scam or an inherit Ponzi scheme by pushing people to promoting platforms using referral links. Sure it would have been great to earn some extra money on the side with this blog but I can’t justify misleading my readers and tempting them to invest in shady platforms.
Platforms like TargetCircle and others which give away my personal information to random people are also part of the problem. They play the nice man in the middle of providing a referral/affiliate platform but promote all these shady platforms very aggressively.
Also after reading a few more articles from Kristaps Mors, I decided to not want to be part of these shady bloggers which optimize for P2P referrals at all cost. If somebody follows my moves or investments then I want to be able to make sure everyone profits and not only the person at the top of the pyramid.
It also seems silly to invest in P2P when the Stock market provides incredible returns like the 5k USD I made in 2 weeks with Tesla. Or the 4.7k USD with VT. I rather take the higher returns and the lower risks of fraud here.
The actions taken
As a immediate action I removed the Signup-Bonus page and the Technical Review areas.
I also stopped all AutoInvest setups and already liquidated 712 EUR worth of my P2P portfolio with much more to follow. The money of the P2P Portfolio will flow into my single ETF strategy for which I will buy VT stocks (ok maybe some more TSLA too xD and I might experiment with value investing allocating a small portion of my money to undervalued companies). But I will keep blogging about my portfolio and moves towards FIRE.
There are so many more ways to earn money as a blogger and I will try to produce more useful content for my readers instead.
Sorry if for some of you this conclusion or change of course came a bit late.
The future
I will obviously not come up with any other Technical Review for any P2P Platform in the future. But I will try to start a new category called “Business Ideas” where I share some ideas and concepts around business ideas I had to improve the world (or someones finances).
Let me know in the comments what you think about my change of course.
Have you thought about keeping a just a few platforms for portfolio diversification? I am talking about quality instead of quantity and just a small percentage of my total investments.Or maybe this is just another form of Stockholm syndrome, I don’t know!
Seeing that even Mintos as the biggest platform has soo much money at risk right now I probably prefer to abandon P2P completely for now. I’ll think about it…
Hy Mr. Cheese
Im so happy someone writes about it and is honest.
I wrote 2 years ago, that P2P platforms are suspicous.
I wrote in march, that because of the pandemic a lot of P2Ps will suffer.
I had also offers to push P2P Affiliates.
Everybody said, P2P is good, now everybody leaves P2P but only in your post I see that you admit some of P2Ps were scams. Respect
Greets
Thank you for the feedback, looks like I should have read your blog. Are you in the mustachian post forum too? I plan to attend some MP Meetup in Zürich soon.
Hi Mr Cheese, this is a good move. I have invested around 3k in Bondora. Currently, the rate of return is around 1% and I’m not sure I will able to recover all my money as the market is not liquid
Thanks for stopping by 😉 I’m glad I didn’t go for Bondora, only heard disappointing results so far.
I don’t know what plattforms you invested in. Stay away from Mintos. But apart from Mintos, I had no issues so far. There are some interesting ones in Switzerland, although the intrest rates are a bit low, but there’s one with minimal risk, since it pools risks of all invested capital (creditgate24.ch, KMU and private loans). Another one, but doesn’t look very trustworthy is crowd4cash.ch (KMU and private loans), apart from one loan I had no problem with repayment. There are a few more, like lend.ch and another one I can’t remember the name, that offers only KMU loans.
In addition, robo.cash pays steadily and and minimal outstanding loans. usually gets covered very quickly (1.6% outstanding, 10%+ interest). Bondora go&grow I was able to pull my money easily, but for over a year now it’s a hassle to invest. So I let it ride for now, but I don’t make any changes.
Yeah P2P is ultimately a minefield which I stay away from for now.