As you read in my last post, I invested in peer-to-peer (short: P2P) loans via the platform Mintos*.
Surely you still think "Exactly.. not even my best buddy pays off his debt to me".. That could very well happen, but with the right settings at Mintos*, you can minimize the risk of defaults.
But from the beginning:
What are P2P loans? These are loans that are made between two private individuals without a bank in between. There are different platforms for this, I decided to use Mintos*. Mostly you can find so-called lenders on these platforms, who get the money for the loans from private investors.
How to be sure?
Nothing is certain with any investment. Not even under your pillow. With Mintos*, however, you can minimize the risk by a clever strategy, which you can configure there relatively easily.
Borrowers, i.e. the poor bastards who need your money, are divided into risk groups. Similar to Schufa. At Mintos* the score groups are 10 (low risk) to 1 (high risk). Still not completely safe, but for this there are still so-called repurchase obligations from many lenders. This means: if the borrower can no longer pay his loan and is more than 60 days in arrears, you will get your investment back. You will not receive any interest, but at least the money is not gone.
I am now active there since the end of August 2021 and have earned so far almost 5€ interest, with 400€ investment. For the short time really good! Of course there are also with me some borrowers with their payments are in default. But by the repurchase obligation I don't need to care about anything and have the money after 60 days again available and can invest it again.
Mintos* will invest for you automatically according to your strategy parameters. That is, if you have received from the borrower an installment of 3.05 € (example), Mintos* tries to put this 3.05 € immediately back into a loan.
If you want to implement the same strategy as me, you can do as follows:
(1. Register, logical or?)
2. You will now be taken to a page where you can choose whether you want to make an automatic strategy created by Mintos* or a custom one. I prefer to decide myself where my money goes in, so I choose Custom (hopefully you do too)!
After that you will be asked if you want to select all loans manually, or if you want Mintos* to do it automatically based on your criteria. Sure, here we are being lazy again and choosing Automated (otherwise you'll have to keep logging in and choosing credits):
The next question will be harder:
Primary market or secondary market?
What`n this? The primary market is where the loan companies offer the loans to us investors. On the secondary market you buy the loans from other investors. So you are buying my investment from me. (if I would ever do that) So we decide for the primary market.
2, 1 Risk!
Now we are already at the last step. We choose our risk tolerance. As mentioned above, there is the Mintos* Risk Score. The Mintos* Risk Score is composed of 4 ratings of the lending company: Loan portfolio performance, loan management efficiency, repurchase strength, and legal framework. Valuations are updated quarterly. You can sort of say that the more risk you take, the more interest you get. I have decided here for the 6, 7 and 8.
Cars?
At Mintos* you can invest in 9 different types of loans. Agricultural, car, mortgages, etc. . I have chosen everything except factoring. Fun Fact: With car loans, you can sometimes even see later what the borrower has bought for a car and what he has paid for it.
Safer Investment
Let's move on to the repurchase obligation. You should definitely activate this! So you don't have to worry about sending a collection agency to Moscow yourself to get back your 10€ investment! If the loan is 60 days in arrears, you just get the cash back. So hook it!
Term and interest rate
A little further down we come to the numbers. Here you can set the interest rate of the loans you want to invest in and the remaining term of these loans.
Do not be too greedy! High interest rates often have a higher risk of default and then you might not get any interest at all, but only your investment back.
So my strategy there is as follows:
Strategy Goal?
Make money! Under Strategy Goal you define when Mintos* should stop investing. Let's say you deposit 400€ and want to make only 10€ profit and then stop using Mintos* again, then enter 410€ there. I have entered 450€ to get a feeling for it.
You can also say here how many euros you want to invest per loan. I thought that I would invest only small sums, 10-15€ per loan, then I would have only a small loss of interest if a loan ever defaults. If I invest 100€ per loan and one defaults, then I lack directly for 100€ and 60 days the interests. Ouch!
Now save everything and Mintos* will find loans for you in the next hours and invest automatically. It sometimes takes longer and sometimes it goes faster, be patient!
What do you think about Mintos*?? Did everything work out for you? Leave a comment
By the way, I already have an update on my investment for you: Here
*you will receive 0.5% cashback on your first investment!