December 2019

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It’s still early days. Stocks and shares needs to make up a significant proportion of my investments so I have been investigating investment brokers. The platform I have decided to use is FreeTrade, a new platform with no trading fees. Investments won’t start until next month

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Investments

This months investments are on the same theme as last month. The Sun Exchange investment amounted to £742. My second investment of £500 to Crowd Property doubles my investment in property development. My regular investment of £200 to Invictus Capital and £77 of TUSD to NEXO completes the investments.

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Monthly Income

Income from The Sun Exchange from the first project has started to come in. Some of the development loans pay back monthly, so a small amount of income has started to come in from Crowd Property. In the crypto sphere, the Invictus fund has started to grow and interest is starting to come in from NEXO.

November 2019

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Legacy investments

Over the years I have made some investments when I had some spare cash.

• I pay £200 per month into an endowment policy. I took this out in 1998 for 25 years and it is due to mature in 2023
• I have a stocks and shares ISA held with BMO
• I have a stocks and shares ISA held with L&G
• I have a 50% share in a buy-2-let apartment that needs all its cladding removed and replaced. The property is mortgaged and has minimal equity.

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New Investments

Earlier in the year while researching investing I decided that property was going to be part of my portfolio. I made an initial investment of £1000 in Property Partner in Feb 2019, the largest crowd funding platform in the UK for property purchase and rental. The next month (March 2019) I also put £1000 into a peer-2-peer property development loan platform called UOWN. In April 2019 I invested a further £1000 into CurveBlock, a new property development company that looked exciting. All a bit random so far!

In September 2019 I discovered The Sun Exchange. This is a crowd-funding platform for the purchase of solar cells that are then leased for 20 years providing a monthly income. I made my first purchase in September of £1031 and followed up with further purchase in October of £466 and November with £416. I plan to continue this moving forward, investing in at least 1 project every month. Income from the 20 year lease starts at around 7-8% pa increasing every year until it has reached around 20% pa.

Further investigation of the P-2-P crowdfunding of property development loans, led me to Crowd Property. This is the largest platform in the UK, being FSA regulated and offering investments wrapped in an IFISA. I have chosen this as my preferred platform for this type of investment. My first investment of £500 was in November. The plan is to invest £500 every month. The interest rate on the loans are 8% (tax free in an ISA). With lead times of 12-18 months on most of the projects I won’t really feel the income for over a year.

My final investments at this early stage are in Cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin (BTC) and the stablecoin TUSD. The BTC I have placed on the NEXO platform where it will be loaned out earning me interest of 5-6% pa in BTC. The TUSD is invested across 2 platforms, the first is NEXO where it earns an interest of 10% pa, the second is in a margin lending fund with Invictus Capital. Again the currency is leant out and returns to the fund are in the range of 10-15% pa. I plan to make regular investments of $200 to the Margin Lending Fund per month. With regards to the BTC I plan to invest every month but I am unsure how much yet. In November I invested £38.

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Monthly Income

A gentle start with just £8.70 in the first month!

November 2019

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Opting out of my Pension Scheme 🤯

This is the month I opted out of my defined benefits pension scheme. I have been a member since 1997 and have built up a retirement income worth around £25,000. £20,000 will be available at the age of 60 and the other £5,000 will be available at the age of 67. It’s considered a good scheme, but of course the money is not available until I reach the retirement age, not allowing me to retire early.

What made me really look at the pension scheme was being stung for pension tax. I crossed a pay threshold leading to a pay rise of £8,000. This re-valued my pensions and left me with a tax bill of £18,000

Taking a closer look at my pension, I calculated that a years membership would grow my pension by around £1,800 per annum or £150 per month. Could I do better?

By opting out of the pension scheme I would increase my gross salary by both my pension contributions of 13.5% and a large proportion of my employers 17.5% contribution. This would result in an increase in my net salary of around £1,200 per month. Invested wisely I should be able to generate £150 per month income by the end of a year.

Target

The target by November 2020 is to be generating £150 per month in passive income from my investments

This will more than match my pension which would have earned me £150 per month in 20 years time.

Strategy

• Invest at least my pension contributions every month and preferably any other excess cash left over from my salary after expenses.
• Most investments should be in income generating vehicles rather than growth vehicles.
• All income generated will be reinvested to benefit from the compound interest effect.