Portfolio & Savings Update #39 Q1 2022 – €198,016

Hola amigos/as! Another month quarter went by, which means it is time for a monthly quarterly portfolio & savings update to count Q1 2022 in the books.

Q1 2022 In A Nutshell

It’s been a little quiet here on the blog over the last few weeks. I’ve been busy, that’s true, but that’s not the primary reason why I (intentionally) missed the February update.

February was an atypical month for me. First, I stopped being employed and transited to freelance work. As with everything in life, It’s got some advantages and disadvantages. The biggest pro for me is flexibility. It allowed me to finish clearing up my flat in Spain and sorting out all the bits and pieces I had left to do, go for a run during sunnier/warmer hours, be able to meet old friends and family, and also take more care of some health issues.

In February, I learned that you MUST take probiotics if taking antibiotics, even if your doctor doesn’t prescribe it — your immune system will thank you for it. I didn’t and just after 7 days of taking them to relieve a gum infection, a virus called shingles appear on my skin! Oh, dear me! How painful and annoying it was! I needed to take more pills (antivirals) and it all together kept me feeling worn out for three weeks.

All of this unleashed me having a less structured life, sadly, leaving the habits and goals I had planned for this year on the “sidelines”, including my monthly posting habit on the blog :(.

Obviously, there’s still a lot of 2022 left, so I can still work on my goals, but my life has changed quickly in a short time and I don’t think some of my 2022 habits apply to me anymore, so I’ll have to set new ones.

So, what are those changes I am referring to, you may ask. Well, we moved back to the UK! YAYYY?? Yes YAYYY!

It was interesting to see the shocking reaction of my friends and closer digital fellas as I told them about our intentions. Some didn’t think coming back to the UK was on our cards. But, it was, and that card was called Liverpool!

We moved at the end of March, so we’ve been here for only two weeks, but our first impressions are positive. I can’t wait to know more about this multicultural city and its surroundings, and who knows, maybe even buy a house if things turn out well? Salaries for the type of work I can offer are similar to the south of England, but here housing is half the price of the South. I remember pre covid we were close to buying a new 2-bedroom flat for £250K. For that money here we can live in a terraced house or semi-detached house with a little garden in a good area.

Time will tell what we’ll end up doing, but for now, I am pulling most of my cash saved in Euros in Spanish bank accounts (adiós!) to the UK converted into £. Thanks to Revolut Premium* I am saving so much on these conversions! This cash is kept in an easy-access savings account and gives 1.5% interest paid monthly. This is ideal to keep the cash I plan to use for a house down payment in a safe, convenient manner. One of the things I missed is how easy it is to find the best places to put your money in the UK, you just need to check what the moneysavingexpert needs to say about it and you are done and ready to move on with your life.

What else, what else!?

Oh, yeah! I am changing my monthly updates for quarterly ones, at least for a while, until things get a bit more settled. I felt I didn’t have that much to write about on my monthly reports anyway, so it will be good to see how a quarterly basis reporting pans out as well. Hopefully, by doing that, I won’t be sentencing this blog to death!

Let’s jump into the numbers for this quarter.

Quick Recap of Q1-2022 Numbers

• Portfolio value: €198,016 (+4%) – details HERE
• Contributions to the portfolio: €11,484
• Monthly growth from investments: €-2,895
• Passive income: €3,630 – details HERE
• Savings Rate: 35.5%

Comments

My savings rate took a big hit as we had to pay 6 months of rent in advance plus a deposit :(. That was a whopping £4,200 leaving my savings account. Rents are a bit more affordable here, we pay £600 for a brand-new studio flat in the city centre. We didn’t have time to choose what to rent, so we had to take what was available after landing, and we were lucky to get this one! We’ve never lived in a luxury posher apartment before, some blocks of flats are still unfinished, but apparently, once they are completed, we’ll have a gym included for free and a spa for a small extra fee. Six-pack, here I come? (Keep saying this since blog day number one, but it never materializes, haha… maybe this time will be different? ;-p)

Important to mention! This quarter, my portfolio finally reached an all-time high! Woohoo! That’s the first step to making this big, steep decline look like a tiny correction over the long term. Let’s make it happen!

Monthly Income and Expenses

This quarter, savings amounted to £5,887.91 (7,007 EUR).

This is the outlook of my income and expenses in 2022 so far:

Moving back to the UK was expensive. Despite the 6 months’ rent in advance, we had to buy small kitchen appliances, cutlery, pans, flight tickets, luggage, and so on. I managed to make another £439 from selling, which has helped to alleviate some of these costs, but still, I didn’t get to the positive SR zone. The good thing is that I won’t have to worry about paying rent for the next 5 months! 🙂

Portfolio Performance

As I like to do on a monthly quarterly basis, this is a breakdown of all my current and past investments:

Please note, links containing a star (*) are either affiliate or referral links. P2P lending is a risky business, so you could end up losing all your invested money if you choose to join any of these platforms.

** 20 % discounted to estimate future withdrawal tax payments

Despite the market seeming to get into a bouncing back traction, returns for the quarter were negative. Passive income from divided stocks and alternative investment were close to €300, so that tells I am currently earning about €100 a month thanks to these investments.

No major changes on my investing philosophy, I just keep following it. The only thing perhaps to highlight is that I joined Nexo* and became a Platinum member. I am holding my Bitcoins (transferred from Binance as it earns 6% instead of 5%), Nexo tokens and EURX. The EURX pays 10-12% interest on Euros held, that’s the bit that caught my attention, although it’s obviously high risk, so I just put a small amount of €1K.

On the P2P side of things, I wrote off FastInvest (it was about time, wasn’t it?). On Property Partner, I am just waiting from PP management to sell the last property I’ve got in my portfolio. Crowdestor stays at the same average trend, nice. Housers, same disaster as usual. Happy with Qardus although I think it’s an unnecessary P2P to have in my portfolio (small amounts), so on a good path towards exiting. Crowdestate, can’t complain, but missing monthly interest paying investments, so exiting as well. On Abundance all investments are on track except one that has been restructured. On Estateguru I have two defaults and one partiality recovered loan, although it’s quite likely these will be all fully recovered soon. And finally it’s all running smooth on Reinvest24 with non issues whatsoever.

In case you’d be interested in joining Estateguru or Reinvest24, you are welcome to use my links below. Also check out this comparison between the two.

Dividend Portfolio

Finally, I get to look into my dividend portfolio which has generated €139.7 of passive income this quarter.

This was the outlook of my holdings at the end of the March:

I had two major purchases this quarter. One was Legal & General (LGEN), as I mentioned on my January’s update, and the second one was Leggett & Platt (LEG). The latter is a Furnishings, Fixtures & Appliances business within the Consumer Cyclical sector. On a year-over-year basis, earnings declined despite revenue growth as the company batted higher costs associated with supply chain issues, semiconductor and foam chemical shortages, labour constraints, and transportation challenges. This has made a significant price drop on its share price since June 2021 and what I believe is a buying opportunity to get a dividend king in my portfolio with an over 4% attractive yield.

Following a steep rise in the price of gold, I sold some Royal Gold shares and reinvested the capital in 3M and AT&T (yes, AT&T that’s not a mistake!). I still plan to keep AT&T shares after the spin-off, whether you think I am “loco” or not ;).

Dividend Payments

I received dividend payments from these beautiful lovely companies:

Here’s an update on my year-over-year dividend comparison:

That was it for now financial friends, hope you had a good quarter?