Niall’s virtual diary archives – Saturday 23 January 2021

Saturday 23 January 2021: 01:56. Since my last post, Christmas came and Christmas went. We had supposed to have been in the United States to visit Megan’s family, but Covid made that not possible. In order to be able to safely visit my father on Christmas Day, we imposed upon ourselves self quarantine for the preceding five days – we didn’t go near anybody else. Thus we were able to stay the day with my father safely, and indeed none of us caught Covid, so it worked out well. Meanwhile, most of Ireland seemed to party like it was 1999, and the death rate promptly rose twenty fold starting from about a week after Christmas and kept getting worse. Last week, I believe, around ten percent of total excess deaths in Ireland due to Covid since all this began a year ago occurred, which is quite the hangover from all that partying. We dodged a bullet.

Since then, obviously enough it’s been another total lockdown, can’t travel more than 5km, which is a total arse for entertaining my children at the weekend when I have to find something for us to do not at home. Last weekend I took them up a forested mountain and for a long bike ride (for them). Almost certainly I’ll be doing exactly the same again tomorrow and Sunday, because there is precious little alternative within a 5km radius.

I got my battery load tester from China, so I’ll be able to post empirical testing of those lithium ion AA and AAA batteries I was talking about last post soon. The battery load tester is pretty impressive for €30, sure it’s cobbled together from raw parts, but in terms of capability and UX I came away impressed. I’ll talk about all that when I make my post about those batteries.

As a quick update to #mintos, here are the last two months of earnings:

Month	Annualised return for each month, total	Non-earning capital	Annualised return for earning capital
August 2020	10.36%	9.7%	11.47%
September 2020	11.09%	9.6%	12.26%
October 2020	10.86%	9.5%	12%
November 2020	5.51%	9.7%	6.1%
December 2020	11.29%	11.4%	12.74%

The hit in November was due to me getting out of Mogo, in which I had become 92% invested as I mentioned in my last post, which was causing me concern as according to https://explorep2p.com/mintos-lender-ratings/, Mogo are in trouble. The hit is due to the 0.9% fee Mintos charge for you to sell your holdings, plus for the loans with particularly low interest rate with a ⁶⁄₁₀ safety rating I had to add a 0.6% discount to get them to shift. Shift them I did though, and I am now merely 31% invested in Mogo, and mostly the higher paying loans at that. I’m comfortable with it being around a quarter of my total.

I mainly swapped out for DelphinGroup, ⁸⁄₁₀ rating and also highly rated by explorep2p. They had been paying 14% per annum, but just recently they axed that back to 11% or even lower, obviously they feel they no longer need to pay as much for capital. Rather than go back into more Mogo, I decided to diversify into a ⁷⁄₁₀ rating loan originator, IuteCredit which explorep2p think so highly of. I’m currently at 54% DelphinGroup, 31% Mogo, 15% IuteCredit with loan early paybacks and interest being directed into more IuteCredit, so its relative proportion will keep growing.

Finally, as you’ll note non-earning capital has been rising. This isn’t what it seems, I’ve actually been pulling money out of Mintos altogether, so the proportion locked up due to Capital Service defaulting appears to rise. Mintos supposedly did a repayment deal with Capital Service, in theory they’ll be repaying the whole sum plus interest within three years. All I’ve noticed to date is that what they owe me has actually been slightly increasing from the interest Mintos are adding onto the debt i.e. they don’t appear to be repaying a thing yet, or if they are, it’s less than the interest Mintos are adding. I’d imagine there won’t be progress on this until at least the summer, when in theory we’ll all be vaccinated and Capital Service can start bringing in money again. Assuming they haven’t gone bust before then, of course.

Otherwise all is well here. Work, sleep, childcare, the treadmill keeps turning.

#mintos #p2p-lending