First setback: €5500 lost in crowdlending

Last month brought the very first serious setback on our investment journey. The crowdlending platform Mintos which used to earn us really nice returns until now suspended one of the loan originators from their platform.

It’s a Ukrainian company called Finko and because of the economic situation in that country, it failed to pay back what it owes to investors. Mintos then decided to remove this company from their platform.

We had a considerable chunk of our Mintos portfolio invested in Finko. Which means that we now have €5563 of our Mintos investments marked as “In recovery”.

It means we cannot access this money and it’s unclear to which extent and by when it will be paid back. Finko has said that they will aim to do it in one year, by July 2021. However there’s no guarantee that it will really happen or that we’ll get 100% of our money.

Our total Mintos portfolio is €30,912 which means that 18% of it is now basically frozen and for the moment, lost.

This doesn’t feel good of course and I keep checking the amount marked as “In recovery” every day (it has grown slowly in the last weeks which gives me even more anxiety). What if this happens to other loan companies on Mintos? Should we pull everything out from crowdlending? So many questions and no one knows the answers.

For now, we stopped counting this €5,5k as part of our investment portfolio. I have a feeling that recovering this money will be slow and difficult. The situation sucks but at the same time I’m so grateful that we are in a privileged position where losing this money, while being a huge setback, is not something that would keep us awake at night.

We have diversified our investments and keep a large amount of our savings in cash since the crisis began so we will be fine. I just hope that the next surprises will be a lot smaller than this one.