Godanubis
Member of DD Central
Anubis is known as the god of death and is the oldest and most popular of ancient Egyptian deities.
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Post by Godanubis on May 29, 2019 21:08:48 GMT
Still nothing beats actual property owning and renting with BTL mortgage investing in cheap property areas where property is cheap and rents are about 10%-20% net . Get rent and legal guaranteed and you can buy 10 for price of cheaper London flat and returns are guaranteed if you spend your money on your family split the ownership and split the tax bill and CGT when property eventually sold. Even better start a company. Both of these are risk and time. For property you need the right spot, the right price, the right tenant. It's also a lot of time. Same for business. If it was easy everybody would be doing it Right tenant covered by rent and legal vetting. Give rest to management company. They are doing it check out property in most of Scottish areas, Welsh areas and some select English areas. There are full service companies offering full services from buying To refurbishing and final rental and management giving > 10% ROI with value increasing every few years re-mortgage and reinvest. For some property at under £15K not much to lose usually -30% for distressed sale so quick refurbishment may be your preferred option. Doesn’t take much to get great APR returns. Not for everyone but might be good for those that can get the right team to do the hard work at a costed outlay. I personally don’t do it but my brother when he retired turned his lump sum into several houses with rend and flip strategy.
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cwah
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Post by cwah on May 29, 2019 22:34:37 GMT
Both of these are risk and time. For property you need the right spot, the right price, the right tenant. It's also a lot of time. Same for business. If it was easy everybody would be doing it Right tenant covered by rent and legal vetting. Give rest to management company. They are doing it check out property in most of Scottish areas, Welsh areas and some select English areas. There are full service companies offering full services from buying To refurbishing and final rental and management giving > 10% ROI with value increasing every few years re-mortgage and reinvest. For some property at under £15K not much to lose usually -30% for distressed sale so quick refurbishment may be your preferred option. Doesn’t take much to get great APR returns. Not for everyone but might be good for those that can get the right team to do the hard work at a costed outlay. I personally don’t do it but my brother when he retired turned his lump sum into several houses with rend and flip strategy. There are load of risk and time necessary for it for about 10-20% return on capital invested. It's also an illiquid investment. I'd prefer doing some loans at 12% and do due dilligence accordingly! It would only take few hours as opposed to many weeks or months of work. Time is money! Should be accounted for that. The ones really making money are the development projects, but these come at risk as we see many defaults!
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Godanubis
Member of DD Central
Anubis is known as the god of death and is the oldest and most popular of ancient Egyptian deities.
Posts: 2,011
Likes: 1,013
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Post by Godanubis on May 30, 2019 1:37:16 GMT
Right tenant covered by rent and legal vetting. Give rest to management company. They are doing it check out property in most of Scottish areas, Welsh areas and some select English areas. There are full service companies offering full services from buying To refurbishing and final rental and management giving > 10% ROI with value increasing every few years re-mortgage and reinvest. For some property at under £15K not much to lose usually -30% for distressed sale so quick refurbishment may be your preferred option. Doesn’t take much to get great APR returns. Not for everyone but might be good for those that can get the right team to do the hard work at a costed outlay. I personally don’t do it but my brother when he retired turned his lump sum into several houses with rend and flip strategy. There are load of risk and time necessary for it for about 10-20% return on capital invested. It's also an illiquid investment. I'd prefer doing some loans at 12% and do due dilligence accordingly! It would only take few hours as opposed to many weeks or months of work. Time is money! Should be accounted for that. The ones really making money are the development projects, but these come at risk as we see many defaults! The return on capital investment is covered 100% by a mortgage on improved value after renovation. Then buy another and repeat as required . The money you make is on mortgage money £200 net monthly on each house or £300 on £20000 no mortgage Can sell at -25% to we buy any house you boughtat -30% within 7 days . Some wish they could do that with P2P No great work just pay someone to do all the work. Only works well on sub £50000 property. I’ve seen 100k turned to £500K of property with £3000 net a month in 5 years I like you do My P2P but at 15%+ because I spend the time and make profit throughout the active period mainly. Getting bit slower due to general slowdown. FS offered loan to bro’s company at 1.2% APR (crazy cheap) making renovating cheaper
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invester
P2P Blogger
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Post by invester on May 30, 2019 8:10:02 GMT
I'm sure other platforms will go broke as we move forward. A small downshift in the economy could cause some real problems. Another 2008/9 or worse could make things really interesting. That's why I put no more than 5% of my total investable assets in to P2P. Read your site and am very impressed with it. I admire your restraint, obviously there are many platforms. I must admit to having quite a lot more but the admin is quite tedious as I have smaller amounts in many. What plugin do you use to make the P2P monthly returns table? I think that is a very good way of presenting the information. I tried importing my Excel spreadsheet but I lost the formatting. I personally think I am overexposed to P2P as a whole and having data like this is a reminder not to invest too much across all platforms.
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Post by lotus_eater on May 30, 2019 8:19:43 GMT
I'm sure other platforms will go broke as we move forward. A small downshift in the economy could cause some real problems. Another 2008/9 or worse could make things really interesting. That's why I put no more than 5% of my total investable assets in to P2P. Read your site and am very impressed with it. I admire your restraint, obviously there are many platforms. I must admit to having quite a lot more but the admin is quite tedious as I have smaller amounts in many. What plugin do you use to make the P2P monthly returns table? I think that is a very good way of presenting the information. I tried importing my Excel spreadsheet but I lost the formatting. I personally think I am overexposed to P2P as a whole and having data like this is a reminder not to invest too much across all platforms. Thanks for the thumbs up, that's good to hear! The plugin I use for the tracking tables is Supsytic not perfect but the best I've found so far. For static tables like the tables used in the first section of each review ("easy-Info" Tables near the top of each review) I just use Tablepress which is a very well known free plugin. It's easy to get overexposed in P2P, especially when you see some of the returns available in the riskier platforms. Personally I keep the account size to the level I feel comfortable with for each individual lender. Research and gut feeling.
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bg
Member of DD Central
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Post by bg on May 30, 2019 9:59:03 GMT
An interesting post that I almost completely agree with. Like you I consider my p2p activities virtually a full-time job. Also like you, I'm ditching FC, Z and RS, and was in the process of ditching Lendy. Unfortunately I'm a bit behind the curve when compared to yourself, which is why I'm a little concerned that I may have missed something regarding ABL. Having tried 26 platforms, to various degrees, I consider ABL to me my favourite and most trusted. So much so that I'm constantly tempted to break my self-imposed limits there. I'd be interested in any info that you would care to share on why you decided to ditch them. Hi, I don't think you have missed anything re ABL. It's a personal preference rather than fear of something sinister. In fact I have been impressed with the way they have dealt with some of their recent problem loans and with their willingness to communicate openly on this forum, they're not shutting up shop. Its one I'm keeping an eye on and I would consider potentially lending again if circumstances change in the future (ie more distinct loans that I can actually understand). The reasons I decided to withdraw are:- 1. I've never liked the layout on the platform, I find the way the information is presented poor, wordy and difficult to find what I'm looking for. I struggle to see what loans have difficulties and I just think the info is all over the place - I can't even see the LTV without having to drill down into the loan. Others however love the layout and way the info is displayed - like I said this is a personal choice. 2. Very few loans and even fewer distinct borrowers. I didn't even know some of these loans were connected until about 5 of them were suspended on the same day, not great. I don't like to do detailed DD, I like to spend 5 mins a loan on a platform I trust and allocate my investments this way. That's fine if there are lots of loans as I can just put £5-10k in each loan I like and build up a decent holding. With ABL that gives me too small a total holding to make it worthwhile logging in - and . I've tried doing more detailed DD on some of the loans but as I outlined in 1) above, I just can't understand most of them. 3. I find many of the investments too niche. They're not really for me, I like simpler property loans or secured business loans which I can easily understand. 4. The rates are very high. People are drawn to this but to me it smacks of 'very high risk'. Last year I made the decision to move my investments higher up the credit spectrum when I heard spreads on UK CLO product were widening sharply. Political risks are high, I'm happy to accept 8% instead of 13% during this period for reduced risk. 5. I had a string of my loans suspended/miss payments in quick succession. This reinforced my view in 4) so I switched from 'hold' to 'sell'. This coincided with many loans being offered at a discount on the SM. 6. The final straw, which lead to me selling more aggressively was the set up of ASMX to create an aggregator and issue ABL investors with 'free' ASMX crypto. People seemed very excited by this but I thought this crazy. They were looking to do (or have done?) an ICO to issue tokens (in return for $25m of real cash!) which they said could be used as a "borrower bounty for lenders" , "status fees" , "gas for settlement". These words are meaningless drivel in my view and merely a way of jumping on the crypto bandwagon to extract cash from people that think they're investing in some amazing new tech (which they are not). It really concerned me they were focusing their attention on something like this as opposed to focusing on improving origination and sorting out some of the platform issues (like figuring out how to allow trading on amortising loans that have missed a payment/had a restructure). To compound this, a platform rep on this forum said I should not dismiss the technology without an understanding of it. Nothing could be further from the truth, I have a very strong understanding of blockchain (which is a fantastic technology which will have important uses) and of crypto (which I will not replace 'real' money). Selling tokens that give you 'status' or 'bounty' or 'gas' on a platform for $25m does not sit well with me. I see it as trying to cash in on a fad. I would rather they engaged with the points I made and explain why a status fee is worth real cash instead of just saying I didn't understand the technology. So all in, its a personal choice and I understand why so many people see them as their favourite platform. I have an open mind about the future but 6) really was the killer blow for me that set the alarm bells ringing but others are clearly in favour of it and good luck to them.
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bg
Member of DD Central
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Post by bg on May 30, 2019 10:15:11 GMT
- However further down this thread you say "I had a large holding in Lendy until I got concerned 18 months or so ago" so obviously something got you concerned? Fair to say? I saw it and didn't invest just a little bit earlier than you pulled out. Either way, neither of us lost money which is the main point I think?
I was always pretty concerned, particularly with their DFL's. I didn't want to be in any of their stuff until maturity if I could help it. This was all fine for a couple of years but as soon as things weren't snapped up immediately if you put them up for sale I made the decision to dramatically reduce my holdings. What was always in the back of my mind was the comments of a couple of directors at another platform who said that most of the Lendy loans had been presented to them and they had rejected them on the grounds of too high risk. They said things would end in tears, just wait a couple of years and that's exactly what did happen. I've still got £17k stuck in there (I got a bit tardy when my balance got below £50k) but all in I've made multiple of that amount in interest so I can't have too many complaints. Yes agree that larger platforms can still fail (I've exited FC just about) but I think the chances are significantly higher for smaller players. I used to have the same outlook as you but now I feel being spread around to such an extent means you could well miss the warning signs that start brewing. I'm happier being in a couple of platforms that I monitor closely and as soon as I smell a rat I can exit quickly. Very hard to monitor 20 platforms! I'm 25 years off retirement age! I just decided to manage my own money as opposed to working for someone else. Better work/life balance  My worry is that there are too many chancers out there setting up a platform as its the latest fad and money is rushing into it. They are looking at making a fast buck and letting the platform fail if necessary. It's pretty easy to raise money right now, especially with SEIS where your downside is limited. If I was going to put a significant sum in a new (for me) platform now I would probably want to meet the directors face to face and look into them in detail before taking the plunge.
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Post by lotus_eater on May 30, 2019 10:27:20 GMT
My worry is that there are too many chancers out there setting up a platform as its the latest fad and money is rushing into it. They are looking at making a fast buck and letting the platform fail if necessary. It's pretty easy to raise money right now, especially with SEIS where your downside is limited. If I was going to put a significant sum in a new (for me) platform now I would probably want to meet the directors face to face and look into them in detail before taking the plunge. I hear you, and I agree totally. There are a LOT of platforms setting up, and the Euro platforms are not even monitored or regulated as they are in the UK. So it comes down to DD and a bit of luck probably. Anything I put in to P2P I consider risk capital, and anything I put into Euro P2P I consider "punt" capital for now at least. Although I've been watching some of them for a year or so and they "seem" surprisingly stable. I just started publishing some of the Euro investments now so we'll see how they go.
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scc
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Post by scc on May 30, 2019 14:31:08 GMT
Am only in Ratesetter and Abundance. Both platforms have been good so far, but I flip/flop between running them down and up. Ratesetter's rules keep changing and not to the benefit of individual investors (but perhaps to the longer term stability of the company). Rates also go to  for several months around ISA season. Never lost anything. Poor customer service. My view now is that I will only invest if I can get great rates, and run down at all over times. Abundance is a well run ship with fantastic customer service. Arguably they've peaked or are in the process of pivoting from a focus on renewable energy projects which was the original attraction. They seem pretty good on DD, and no money lost - but a few projects have had serious problems and still in the slow motion process of dodging their respective bullets. Worryingly, it seems to be the more recent projects which have struggled. Pipeline tends to be slow and lumpy and you have to be in many of them for nigh on 20 years. For the right project, I'll still invest. |
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Post by lotus_eater on May 31, 2019 9:15:37 GMT
Am only in Ratesetter and Abundance. Both platforms have been good so far, but I flip/flop between running them down and up. Ratesetter's rules keep changing and not to the benefit of individual investors (but perhaps to the longer term stability of the company). Rates also go to for several months around ISA season. Never lost anything. Poor customer service. My view now is that I will only invest if I can get great rates, and run down at all over times. Abundance is a well run ship with fantastic customer service. Arguably they've peaked or are in the process of pivoting from a focus on renewable energy projects which was the original attraction. They seem pretty good on DD, and no money lost - but a few projects have had serious problems and still in the slow motion process of dodging their respective bullets. Worryingly, it seems to be the more recent projects which have struggled. Pipeline tends to be slow and lumpy and you have to be in many of them for nigh on 20 years. For the right project, I'll still invest. How long have you been in Abundance if you don't mind me asking? I have never really looked at them. I have a similar strategy to you with RS. I have my reinvestment auto-invest set at 6.1%, if cash doesn't reach it by the end of the month, the money is coming out and going elsewhere.
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scc
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Post by scc on May 31, 2019 9:52:54 GMT
How long have you been in Abundance if you don't mind me asking? I have never really looked at them. Just over five years.
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for several months around ISA season. Never lost anything. Poor customer service. My view now is that I will only invest if I can get great rates, and run down at all over times.