P2P Lending and Investing

Recently I started to look for other options for investing then eToro. With eToro I have to check the app regulary and invest time. I wanted to find something that is a real passive income source.

While I was listening to a podcast, I discovered the terms P2P investing and P2P lending. The terms were new and very interesting to me.

P2P (investing or lending) is a term for a group of people combining their money and investing in something. Imagine you have a friend who has one million dollars. He finds an opportunity to invest $500 000 and earn $25 000 in a matter of 2 months. Now imagine you have $100 000 and have four more friends that also have $100 000 and you all pitch in and invest it. Then each one of you gets $5000 for those two months. I mean, you have to pay fees and other stupid things, but you get the point. Sometimes one person does not have enough money to invest in something. He either borrows money or invests with others. This is where these P2P platforms come into place. They enable companies or individuals to get a loan for a lower interest rate or much quicker. They also give the opportunity that regular people invest in different projects.

My search for a P2P platform started. Since I live in the European Union, I had to find something that works in the European Union. My search resulted in two platforms. The first is October (formerly known as Lendix) and the second one is Mintos. Both of these links are affiliate links. If you sign up via October you will get $20 if you invest $500, for Mintos you get 10 Euros for 500 Euros, 20 for 1000 Euros and 30 for 2500 Euros.

Let us start with October. I wanted to start with October and then I had a look at their fees. I had troubles finding what the fees are for people who want to invest. I could only find service fees for people trying to get a loan. So I was not sure about how much they charge. Then the second problem was verification and identification. For October I had to provide a bank account statement, with my IBAN and other personal information. This was not that appealing to me and made me search for another alternative.

Then I found Mintos, a much simpler interface where I could find information about the fees directly. The registration and verification process was amazingly smooth. I had to just take a picture of myself and my passport via my webcam. Then I wanted to invest only 200 Euros and the deposit process was quite straight forward. But then I noticed that the minimum investment is 500 Euro. So after depositing 200, I had to deposit an additional 300. Which for me was not that hard, but they could have written in in the deposit area "Idiot we cannot do anything with less than 500 Euro". But if I had looked at what they offer I would have seen that with less than 500, I cannot use the "Invest & Access" functionality. Let me just say that this functionality is something amazing. It does your diversification and risk management out of the box. The only thing you have to do is to set a goal, that tells the platform to invest 500 Euro for you. Honestly, I was amazed, after one click the platform invested 500 Euro into diverse loan opportunities, that had the buyback option (as much as I understand this is a safety that you will get your money back). It also invested in loans that give you a 20% return and loans that give you a 6.8% return. It was like me investing a day in searching for good loans and investing in them, but done in a matter of 3-5 minutes.

I don't want to be an all Mintos guy, because I did not try out October. But for me personally, I would want to go with Mintos, simply because of the ease of access and verification. But October has great support, as soon as I wrote to them they replied. Maybe in the future, I will also invest in October and write about it. One huge benefit that October has is the native application. Mintos only has a web interface, which is a bit disappointing.

For now, I do all of my trading via eToro and you can read about that in here.

If you are interested in finding out more about investing, I can suggest this --> The Intelligent Investor.

Disclaimer:
I am not a financial advisor.
I am not a direct affiliated with eToro.
I am not a direct affiliated with Mintos or October.
All the links here are affiliate links.

The intention of the post is just to share my experiences.

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