Mintos - a P2P Lending Platform

There have been a few different options i have been looking at in terms of investment diversification and one area that has caught my eye has been crowdfunding. Out of all the blogs i have read and podcasts i have listened to the one that caught my eye was Mintos. I have been dabbling with it for a few days so far and if everything goes as expected i should earn the first cent of interest today thanks to financing a short-term loan in Denmark.

My view on how it works so far:

1) Create an account.
This was pretty straight forward and i doubt anyone would have issues with this part.

2) Make a deposit.
There seems to be an option to make a deposit in several different currencies: EUR, CZK, PLN, DKK, GBP, SEK, RUB, KZT, USD. Clicking through them i noticed that the thing that changed for those was the bank(s) you could use to make the deposits from. I will be focusing on EUR currency since this appears to be the main currency of the site with the most features available to it. For EUR i had the option to make a deposit using the LHV bank. For all the currencies the deposit options include TransferWise, PaySera, Currencycloud, CurrencyFair and EasyChange.

After making the deposit it takes some time before the money is delivered to your account. I believe they stated it could take 1-2 business days. My first experience was that i made the payment before going to sleep and in the morning my money was already divided to serve different loans all around the world.

3a) Manually pick which countries and what kind of products you want to invest in.
I have not tried this option yet but i will give an insight to manual loan selection if i happen to have the time to dwelwe into it. Seems to be the best option if you want to have the biggest possible control on where and for how long your money gets invested.

OR

3b) Set up the feature called autoinvest.
This is a very comfortable (and therefore likely slightly riskier) option that prevents you from having to put too much time into operating your Mintos account. There are two options here - either you choose to put together a custom investment strategy (likely the preferred choice as you get more familiar with the platform) or you choose one of the Mintos premade strategies:

I decided to initially go for the Short-term strategy. Then i reviewed what settings it had applied and i tweaked it myself to the countries that are geographically closer to me so i can more easily keep an eye on how they are doing financially and assess the risks of handingout loans there. 

One of the things i would like to note is the minimum and maximum investment in one loan. For diversification maximization i went for 10 EUR - 10 EUR range which is also the smallest investment you can have per loan. Other options that you can tune is if you want to automatically reinvest the money that has come back, if you want to diversify across different loan origintors, if you want this investment strategy to invest in the same loans that your other strategies might have already invested in.

DISCLAIMER: The annual returns you can see on the picture above are only an indication of your potential earnings. This is not a risk free investment option and nothing is guaranteed so make sure to accept the risk of possibly losing some of your assets or them not being liquid for longer than the calculated repayment dates suggest.

4) Wait for the money to come back
I Started off with 100 EUR which was divided into 10 different loans with a 1-3 month repayment date. I am thinking of putting in 100 a month for starters to go slow and steady and increase my involvement in this platform if everything goes as I expect. When you log in you can see a nice overview of how you are doing, mine looks like this at the moment:

5) Go back to step 2 or 3.
If everything goes well and your money is working for you, you can choose to reinvest the money you get back from the successfully repaid loans automatically or manually.

There is also a campaign going on right now called "refer-a-friend" in what we both can participate in to earn some extra bling to spend on the platform. It works in a way where if you register using someone's link, the platform will check if you have deposited money into the platform after 30 days and it will calculate the average amount of the money INVESTED in that time and we both get 1% of the average invested amount to add to our investment portfolio on that platform. If the average should go up it will be reviewed after 60 and 90 days and we will be treated with more money. I joined with someone's referral link so i will be making them and myself 1 EUR after 30 days and more if i decide to invest more on this platform.

You can read more about this campaign here: Mintos refer-a-friend campaign

And if you feel like i have given you something useful with this post, you can give us both a treat by using my referral link:

A link to treat Yourself and the Viking

I feel like i am obliged to remind again anyone reading this post that these kinds of investments are not risk free and since the platform mostly operates with short-term high-interest loans, there is no way of telling how bad the situation can get if there should be an economic crash again.

I am still waiting for my first ever investment profit cent for the loan ending today to celebrate with some mead and chicken!

PS: The limit they allow for the refer-a-friend campaign per account is 25 000 EUR (it would make us both 250 EUR!) so if you decide to become my friend, don't go overboard, okay! :))