Monthly Update: March 2019

A quarter in the year in. And as every quarter, I decided to delight myself with something that makes me happy but I’m withholding to do otherwise. So I decided to let go, spend some money, and bought a new pair of shoes. But that’s not the only purchase I made. My girlfriend and myself put a down-payment on a beautiful house with a large garden and we’re really happy for the decision. The price was slightly higher than we could afford to borrow, but we had to outbid the others, so our combined emergency funds came to the rescue to cover all the expenses. And as a proud owner of the said assets, I decided to buy myself a Rolex watch with the tax refund I got afterwards.

Everything until this sentence was a lie.

It’s not first of April for another day, so I won’t keep this up for the whole post. The only major purchase I made was the DCA contribution to my portfolio, increasing my ownership in the S&P 500 companies. Talk about intrinsic value.

You already know that there are really no items that could make me happier. What actually did make me happier is that I just finished a hardcore training program I was following for 3 months and am currently in an optimal physical shape. By the way, since I talk about my healthy habits throughout this series, I think I’ll prepare a post about my approach to strength training. Expect it in near future, so follow me on Facebook and Twitter or subscribe below so you don’t miss any of my next posts.

MonkWealth is Mind, Body, and Personal Finance, and we’re really lacking in the Body section, so it’s on its way. That being said, this training routine was complemented by a healthy diet, as I was also focused on detoxifying my body from the last year’s vacations where I ate and drank slightly more than I should have. This didn’t only have health benefits, but also financial ones – I really avoided eating outside, so I cooked my own food to bring to work. My saving potential was maximized. Actually, I was showing my bank transactions to my girlfriend and we had a laugh about how few of them are actually there.

Apart from this, there were no significant changes in my life. There is not much to complain or brag about, just reliving the constant monotony of the working adult life. Yes, I’ll take a vacation next month.

Asset Allocation, March 2019 

• 47% Stocks
• 5% P2P Lending
• 4% Cryptocurrency
• 44% Cash

Cool.

The major financial update of this month was the yield curve inversion (meaning that long-term debt instruments have lower yield than short-term debt instruments – US treasury bonds in this case). There are no immediate consequences, but it was a predecessor to the previous US recessions – historically, they occur 6-18 months after the yield curve inverts.

You can track it at FRED Economic Data, but here is a picture of the last few inversions. The parts where it’s below zero represents an inverted yield curve and the shaded areas represent the recessions.

It’s not the best thought and I have no idea how severe it would be once it hits, but I have neither fear nor regrets about my investments to this point. Although waiting for the best valuation to get in the market is the best timing, we may wait for it for 5 years and miss out on 50% hypothetical growth, just to get in on a hypothetical 30% dip. The reality might also be that we get 10% growth and experience a 50% crash, but no one knows nor can predict what and when exactly will happen. For now, I’m doing my DCA contributions and not trying to create an opinion around the current state of the market. Here it goes: Time in the market beats timing the market.

I may do both eventually, though. Those cash savings don’t sit on the bank account just for emergencies. They’re ready to be put to work once the right opportunity arises. But it’s still early to think about it – the stock market gains this month were actually fine.

My P2P lending interest was paid out as expected by each platform. I’m really pleased with the ease of use and the timely payments. I also increased my allocation in P2P because of this. Mintos and Grupeer is where most of my P2P allocation is and I can recommend these platforms to anyone interested in starting with P2P lending and getting up to 14% return. I also have accounts on FastInvest, PeerBerry, and Envestio for diversification purposes. It’s a great way to minimize investment risk.

NiceHash (no affiliation) recommended their NHML miner for Nvidia GPUs (I mine with a few Nvidia GTX 1080TIs), incorporating third party miners, still with automatic algorithm switching to maximize profitability. It is a different and less intuitive interface than the previous miner, but I’m not a person prone to complaining about the looks of something that does its work. And the work was better – the profitability indeed increased just by switching to NHML.

For the crypto enthusiasts, I plan to write how-to guides for NiceHash, Coinbase, and Coinbase PRO, so don’t forget to subscribe if you’re interested. I’ll also write an instructional on how to buy shares through DeGiro, but checking out the Become an Investor series might be a good prerequisite before creating a brokerage account.

By the way, I consider both P2P lending and Cryptocurrency riskier investments and it’s been a while since I contributed to my crypto portfolio (apart from mining). In the past few months I was putting a couple of thousands in the P2P platforms though, but since my overall exposure to P2P and Crypto risk is almost 10%, I’ll slow it down a little bit.

FIRE Progress, March 2019

My FIRE Progress went from 33,44% to 35,2%. Still winning at a slow pace. 💪