The Lending Works Experiment (2 Months On)

It’s been 2 months since I started the Lending Works experiment.  As a recap Lending Works are a peer-to-peer lending platform and at the time I published my original post I had opened an account, deposited £300 and was in the queue to get into the lending market.  I also promised to update you in 2 months so time for an update on what’s happened since then?

Firstly, I'm now successfully in the Lending Works lending market.  At the time of my last post I had £78,430 queued ahead of my £300 and indications were that it would take 8 days to get my money into the market.  With P2P lending it’s of crucial that you minimise time out of the market as until your money is actually lent you’re earning no interest.  As it turns out I didn't have to wait 8 days with money starting to be lent after 5 days and fully lent after 6.

When I signed up £12 million had been lent into the market and the reserve fund was £211,470 meaning 1.7% of loans by value would have had to be missed or fall into arrears before I started taking a loss.  Today lending is now £14.7 million with a reserve fund of £252,031 meaning that protection is stable at 1.7%.

Living off the Dividends in Early Retirement

The number one fear of any early retiree (or any retiree living of investments for that matter) must nearly be a bad sequence of returns early in retirement.  I can only imagine the emotional rollercoaster of watching a stock market fall in value by more than 80% in real terms (like the US market did during the Great Depression), rebalancing into it continuously, while knowing that you’re no longer working so ‘can’t’ replenish and then on top of that then being forced to sell down capital to live off.

Click to enlarge, US Market Percentage Falls from Real New Highs

With this in mind and for some time now I’ve been trying to build my portfolio in such a way that I can live off less than the dividends received at FIRE (financial independence retired early), which will allow a little for reinvestment during the good times, while providing some protection during periods of falling dividends.  The methods I've used to do this have included the addition of a High Yield Portfolio (HYP) and moving from accumulation funds within an expensive work insurance company defined contribution pension to income funds within my own SIPP.

With this in mind I’m today going to conduct a little thought experiment.  Will I have enough dividends spinning off in FIRE to avoid selling down wealth during a severe bear market?

Now before I go on I’m of course aware that past performance is not a guide to future performance.  To keep it simple I’m also going to use the US market as a proxy for my ‘global’ equities portfolio which of course is not 100% accurate but I have a good dataset for the US (unlike other countries).  Hopefully it will give a bit of steer as we do know global equities have a high correlation with each other plus this is just an order of magnitude thought experiment and I’m not chasing perfection here.

At time of writing this is how I’ve managed to increase my dividends over the years:

Click to enlarge, RIT’s Dividends Received by Year

Has Technology Reached Peak Usefulness

A couple of events this month have really had me asking myself if we are at peak technology usefulness.  Now before you start accusing me of being one step away from off grid living (which I do respect people for pursuing but for which I'm probably a little lazy), hair shirt weaving and/or tin foil hat wearing let me first clarify that I do think technology is incredibly useful and has certainly helped me get ahead.  I'm just questioning if all the newer stuff provides any real benefit to the user.

Firstly, let me give a couple of examples of the good stuff.  I've certainly benefited from the ability to achieve rapid price discovery.  For one I don’t believe I’d be sitting on an investment portfolio, all tied up in wrappers, with total expenses of 0.27%, with all the benefits that brings, without the ability to trawl the offerings from many providers in a matter of minutes.  Would I even know them all let alone know the cost to start with?  The ability to talk to and see someone across the globe in real time for ‘free’ has also helped me hugely.  The thing is that these possibilities are nothing new; the technology to provide them has been around for many years now and importantly is relatively unchanged.  My rapid learning on how to be a successful investor has certainly been helped by fantastic sites like Monevator but here I would have also been more than ok with excellent books like Smarter Investing which requires no technology.  I would have also been well educated on finance and investing with excellent books like When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation and The Millionaire Next Door instead of the great internet.

Let me now jump forward to more recent times and see if new technology is helping me.  This week our friends at Apple released some new products.  Now I’m not an Apple fan boy/girl so if I have it wrong then please do correct me in the Comments below but all that I see is things that are bigger/smaller, slightly faster with more mega pixels.  An iPad Air 2 with decent storage and Wi-Fi ‘only’ costs £559.  Who knows what an iPad Pro is going to set one back but I’d bet it will be more expensive.  Is this new bit of tech about to obsolete my Nexus 7 Tablet which today can be had for £141.11?  In my case it certainly isn't as what I have today does everything (and more) than I currently need.  What about a new ‘tasty’ iWatch which from what I can see tells the time unless you have it tethered to an expensive iPhone?  Then as if by magic it does things that your phone can do...  I think I’ll stick with my mechanical watch which I guarantee will still be running long after the latest iWatches are consigned to the scrap heap.  I’d actually nearly bet that my watch will actually still be running and telling the time as well as any future iWatch technology long after I've popped my clogs.

Will I want seclusion in FIRE

I don’t learn quickly.  My successes so far have very much come from a mindset that life is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.  This meant that during university and my early career (I'm still deciding if a career is a job where you don’t get paid for overtime) I spent a lot of time staring into a multitude of texts and tomes learning stuff.  During this period I also used to enjoy spending a lot of time socialising with friends and family in my spare time.  At work I was psychometrically profiled and discovered as part of this that apparently I'm an extrovert.  What I'm now starting to wonder is am I really an extrovert or was that just a response to life at that time?  That is the compulsory element of my life was a need to learn fast at an individual level and in response I craved company when spare time allowed.

Today my work day starts early and finishes late.  During those long days at work my day is broken down into not much more than 15 minute intervals.  Everyone wants/needs a piece of me and I’m constantly making decisions.  I no longer need to learn at such a great rate (I do need to stay current so some learning still occurs) with my ‘unique selling point’ now being my domain knowledge and leadership.  In return for that I'm paid well as those decisions are (currently at least) rarely wrong and my leadership skills are seen as a positive.  This probably sounds like the behaviour of an extrovert however now for the problem.

On weekends and the couple of spare hours I get during the week I now no longer crave company.  I certainly don’t enjoy spending time with wider family and friends who continue to consume like the best of them.  Their talk of how much their house has gone up in value or what new car they are going to buy now just bores me.  Instead I now chase quiet time with close friends/family while also coveting some seclusion and time to self reflect.  This blog is a great outlet for me now as it gives me quiet time to learn; self reflect and write about what’s important for me.  The question then becomes is my personal life a response to try and balance my compulsory extroverted work element, combined with consumerism no longer being important to me, or is it because I'm not actually not a natural extrovert?

Investing Like a Sloth

Stock market prices go up and down continuously.  Stock market prices also trend up and down over longer periods of time.  In recent weeks we've been seeing prices go down at a faster rate than up resulting in a trend downwards.  This has resulted in plenty of press/blog inches from experts trying to explain what’s going on.

In response to this my investing strategy is unchanged despite having lost, on paper at least, over £53,000 from my peak 2015 wealth valuation even after new contributions.  That is multiple years of post FIRE spending and so not an insignificant amount of money.  I continue to passively rebalance but importantly everything is done in slow motion and contains no ‘backing the truck up’ or ‘going all in’.  I think of it as investing at the pace of a sloth.

I do this because even though there is lots of investing noise around I am very conscious that price down trends can occur for long periods of time.  Let me demonstrate with a chart looking at US stock market price downtrends.

Click to enlarge, US Market Percentage Falls from Real New Highs    

Is it unrelenting or just obsessive?

A few things combined have had me trying to answer a question or two over the past day or so.  Why do I think I can FIRE (become financially independent and retire early) in less than 10 years, with £1 million, when the vast majority of people won’t ever even think about it, will dream about it and think it’s impossible or will simply fail trying?  What right do I have to even consider this when I'm not from money and will certainly have no inheritance to help me on my way?

The question becomes even more relevant when I take a step back and think about the strategies I’m employing to get me there – earn more, spend less, minimise investment expenses, minimise taxes and invest in a balanced portfolio of different asset classes that are rebalanced both actively and passively.  The strategies are simple and there is certainly no secret sauce in there.

A couple of comments in recent weeks have started to give me an idea:

• A reader last week made the comment that they were resigned to the fact that they couldn't FIRE.  This reader is already earning “£2200 a month” after NI/taxes, saving/investing “£750 per month” of it at age 28 but then saying that “I accept that early retirement is not possible”.  In comparison I didn't wake up and smell the roses until I was 34, even in real inflation adjusted terms wasn't earning anything like that at 28 and certainly wasn't saving/investing to that level at that age.  Yet here I sit today at age 42 with £820,000 worth of investments and a possible retirement age of 44 or so.  Just what right did/do I have to think I could/can FIRE at an early age when somebody who is already saving more than me at a younger age doesn't?
• The comment on the Exchange Rate Conundrum post - “all this endless planning, it's exhausting“ -  has been on my mind also.  Particularly when what I was doing, trying to minimise risk by thorough planning, didn't seem strange to me at all.

So just what is so special about my approach?  Why are the principles so simple but the desired result considered so difficult by many?  Why did I think I could FIRE when someone saving more than me at the same age of life and who is younger than me when I started my FIRE journey think they can’t?  Why is my planning so exhausting for others?  Some thinking has identified one natural trait I have in general life which could explain this – I have a natural ability to set a few long term very difficult goals which I don’t know how to achieve when I set them, can plan directionally towards them and can then go at them, even if it takes years, like a Rottweiler until they are achieved.

Let me try and demonstrate with an example from one of my strategies – Earn More.  My real (adjusted for inflation) taxable earnings as a multiple of my first graduate salary are shown in the chart below.  My records are a little poor pre the 2001/2002 tax year and so here I've just used my basic salary as I know I was saving very little into a pension and certainly wasn't achieving bonuses.  Right of the orange line is the period where I have been actively on my FIRE journey.  The boxed numbers identify my age in that year.

Click to enlarge, RIT’s Increase in Taxable Earnings after Inflation

My Spending

Saving Hard has thus far been one of the biggest contributors to my reasonably rapid FIRE (financially independent retired early) Number progress.  For me this has never been about simply spending the least amount possible but instead always about maximising the answer to the formula Earnings – Taxes – Spending.  This results in a twofold approach:

• Living Well Below Your Means (LWBYM) where that spending has no impact on Earnings; and
• Being prepared to spend where it means Earnings – Taxes – Spending are greater than £0.

With this in mind I suspect my spending profile will look quite strange when compared to many, but hey we’re all different and that’s what makes the world an interesting place.

In July 2015 I spent £1,926 (an annualised £23,112) and 2015 Year to Date I've averaged £2,068 per month (£24,816 annualised).  This covers all family spending, whether for fun or just too live, plus any personal spending that I desire.  The only thing excluded is my better half’s small personal spending.  Given this is hopefully my final full year before FIRE I want to track my full 2015 average spending as well as monthly for a couple reasons:

• It gives me a floor of spending at which the family are happy with the lifestyle that we are living.  This will help tell me when I’m FI (financial independent), which will be before FIRE’d.  It will also help me understand how much overhead my 2.5% wealth withdrawal rate, at the start of FIRE, combined with my £1,000,000, actually provides me with.
• We are still torn between early retirement in The Mediterranean vs Old Blighty and this will also help us understand our average spending profile when in different countries.

Click to enlarge, Retirement Investing Today July 2015 and Average 2015 Spending

Now the detail:

The Lending Works Experiment

A little over a year ago I cried enough of the derisory instant savings account interest rates that were being offered by the banking sector, which after inflation and taxes, meant the value of my wealth was going backwards.  A quick trip over to Money Saving Expert reveals that the problem still exists.   The market-leading rate if you want instant access to your money is 1.6% meaning a higher rate tax punter, after inflation of 1.0%, is going backwards by 0.04% annually.  Additionally, this rate then reverts to 1.1% after a year meaning you have to do the savings account dance all again.  Even the best 3-year fixed rate account is only offering 2.65% meaning after inflation of 1.0% and higher rate tax our punter would only be getting ahead by 0.59%.  The chart below shows it’s been like this for a long time now and with no sign of an up-turn.

Click to enlarge, Average UK Savings Account Interest Rates

Meanwhile, while this has all been occurring I’ve been quietly shifting/building wealth with peer to peer (P2P) lending (while of course acknowledging that P2P has a different risk profile to bank savings accounts) as an alternative to a bank savings account.  Today I have as much money invested in P2P, £43,000, as I do in savings accounts.  Since starting out in May 2014 I’ve earned interest/bonuses of £1,342 which after taking into account deposits/transfers occurring over time is an annualised 4.3%.

Given my successes so far with P2P my interest was piqued this week when I was contacted by Lending Works enquiring whether there was any opportunity for us to work together.  At the time I wasn't using Lending Works as a P2P platform but I was aware of them as I know weenie over at Quietly Saving has money in their platform.  A few emails later we had agreed that rather than something like a boring advertisement that would add little value to readers I would instead run a published experiment with real money lent into the market.

My FIRE Number

Since starting this blog at 35 years of age in 2009 I have never revealed my portfolio values or targets in £ terms.  Rightly or wrongly I've always believed that it was irrelevant to readers given we all have different earnings, investments, risk profiles, savings rates and target retirement amounts.  This has resulted in posts that always focus on the theory and how I'm applying it but that in hindsight come across as dry and impersonal.

Today I'm going to try and change that by starting to talk in real numbers rather than percentages.  My hope is that it will up the debate a little and help us all continue to learn from each other.  I just hope it doesn't kill the community that has developed over the past 5 or so years.  Given the name of this blog and my closeness to FIRE (financially independent retired early) the amount of wealth I am trying to accrue is probably the number that is currently most important to me and probably one of the most popular topics debated/discussed within personal finance blogs and forums.  So let’s start there.

As a person who does not plan on receiving a State Pension and is not going to be receiving any sort of inheritance it is a crucial number for me as to fully FIRE it needs to be enough to last my family and I for the rest of my life.  That could be 45 or more years.  The methodology to calculate it was first devised back in 2007 when I first started on my DIY FIRE journey and went like this:

• I was renting in London, as I still am today and though of London as home
• I asked myself what a good salary would be that would enable me to live well including covering rent or mortgage payments.  That number was £30,000
• As I worked towards FIRE I would increase that salary annually by inflation.  Today that salary within my Excel spreadsheet is £37,691
• I calculated what I expected my portfolio to return annually in real terms.  This number still dynamically calculates in my Excel spreadsheet every week when I update my financial position.  That number after expenses was 3.8%.  A number I later learnt wasn't so far from the (in)famous 4% Rule

Dividing that FIRE salary by the expected return enabled me to calculate my number.  Today Excel tells me my early retirement number is £1,011,034.  To avoid discussions about me being obsessive compulsive let’s do a little rounding - I will be financially independent and have the option of early retirement with wealth of one million pounds.  My journey to the million is shown in the chart below.

The Exchange Rate Conundrum

It’s no secret that exchange rates can be and are volatile.  If you’re a person who’s earning in Pounds, has a reasonable portion of their wealth in Pounds and intends to retire in the UK spending Pounds then exchange rates are probably not going to lose you too much sleep.  Short term volatility might add a couple of hundred pounds to your continental holiday or repress the return on your international equities for a couple of years, where if you've made reasonable plans with a little contingency, is going to be noise in the scheme of things.  Long term volatility could end up resulting in some inflation but your Safe Withdrawal Rate has hopefully accounted for that as well.

Now let’s jump to somebody like myself and I'm sure I'm not along out there.  I'm earning in Pounds, have a reasonable portion of my wealth in Pounds, intend to retire early somewhere in the Mediterranean (still favouring Malta) but want to always give myself a chance of coming back to the UK if it for any reason turns ugly.  From today this is how the plans are unfolding:
1. 12 to 18 months still working for The Man in the UK and earning Pounds
2. Move to Malta (more likely Malta’s smaller island Gozo) and rent for 6 months to be sure I still love the place and know exactly which region I want to live
3. Buy a home for my family
4. Live happily ever after spending Euro’s but with my wealth still set up assuming the UK is home.  Longer term I may start to tilt more towards a European home assumption but that would be very gradual and take many years.

So I'm more heavily exposed to the GBP (Pounds or £’s) to EUR (Euro or €) exchange rate.  The Euro first started on the 01 January 1999 as an accounting currency and the chart below shows its monthly performance up to present day.

Click to enlarge, GBP to EUR Exchange Rate January 1999 to June 2015 

Even over that relatively short period big swings are evident.  It was at its weakest in October 2000 at 1.6977 and strongest in January 2009 at 1.0863.  The long run average is 1.3756 (the red line on the chart) which isn't far from today’s rate of 1.41287.

A Retirement Investing Today Half 1 2015 Review

On this blog I talk a lot about my own strategy and portfolio including how I'm managing and changing them as I learn.  Importantly, this is not a demonstration strategy or portfolio but instead reflects every penny I have to my name.  The journey also now represents a significant portion of my life with me now having been on this DIY Early Financial Independence (FI) path for seven and three quarter years which is nearly 20% of my life so far.  When I started in 2007 and even when I started this blog in 2009 I had no idea if I would succeed.  Today I'm far more confident that I’ll eventually get there and I also now believe that I have a level of personal finance knowledge that will enable me to self manage my portfolio to and into Early Retirement.  Even so I’m not yet going to relax.  At some point I'm also sure I’ll need to start thinking about how to set-up an autopilot portfolio (Vanguard LifeStrategy anyone?) but that’s for another day.

This strategy and portfolio is an essential enabler to how I want to live my later life – one not burdened by the need to work for The Man but instead able to focus 100% on what’s important to me which enables both location and time freedom.  Given its importance I like to stop every quarter and in line with my Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) strategy do some Checking against the three key focus areas that I believe are essential to get over the Financial Independence line - Save Hard, Invest Wisely and Retire Early.

SAVE HARD

Saving Hard is defined as Gross Earnings (ie before taxes) plus Employee Pension Contributions minus Spending minus Taxes.  Earn more and one is winning.  Spend less or pay less taxes and you’re also winning.  Savings Rate is then Savings divided by Gross Earnings plus Employee Pension Contributions.  To make it a little more conservative Taxes include any taxes on investments but Earnings include no investment returns.  This encourages me to continually look for the most tax efficient investment methods.  It’s a different and tougher measure to most of my fellow personal finance bloggers who don’t include tax in the calculation.

Savings Rate for the quarter ends at 53.8% against a plan of 55%.  This is identical to last quarter.  While not achieving plan in pounds, shillings and pence it’s actually 56% more than I managed in Half 1 2014 thanks in part to a healthy bonus.

Click to enlarge, RIT Savings Rate

Saving Hard score: Conceded Pass.  While not achieving a plan of 55% in pound terms I’m a long way above 2014.  Savings have also added 7.6% to my net wealth in the first half of the year – a surreal amount given I’m towards the back end of my Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) journey.

HYP Mid-Year Update including Purchase 14

The vast majority of my investment portfolio is made up of passive index tracking funds.  Why?  Well as a person who’s now been investing heavily for a bit over 7.5 years I personally believe this is the best way for me to achieve my wealth ambitions.  One exception to this is my High Yield Portfolio (HYP) which is held within the Equities portion of my portfolio and can only be described as active investing.  So if I'm a tracker believer what am I doing actively investing I hear you ask.

Click to enlarge, RIT UK Equities Portion of Total Portfolio 

Simply, while 99% of my investing is all about non-emotional investing my HYP is an outlier as it’s there for psychological reasons.  I’m now fast approaching optional very early retirement and when in that retirement I’m going to be likely 100% living off my wealth.  I’m going to do this by drawing down from my wealth at the rate of 2.5%.  I have two ways to do this – spend dividends/interest and/or sell down capital.  For me, particularly in a severe bear market, I think that spending dividends/interest will psychologically be far easier and less disruptive to life than being forced to sell down capital.  With that in mind before retirement I’m trying to ensure that the dividends/interest I receive annually is as close to 3% of wealth as possible.  If I can achieve 3% in the good times I can draw down 2.5% and reinvest 0.5% and in the bad times I have some buffer to allow for dividend attrition.

This psychological advantage is however a fool’s errand if it causes my total portfolio to underperform the market.  Unemotionally what matters is Total Return which is Capital Appreciation plus Dividends.  So with this in mind I watch my HYP performance, particularly capital gains, like a hawk.  So as we pass the mid-year point of 2015 let’s take a look at my HYP's performance to date.

Firstly to what the HYP is all about – Dividends.  Performance here is still very good with the portfolio currently sitting on a trailing yield of 5.2% which is 1.4 times the FTSE100’s 3.6%.  So far so good.

Now let’s look at the risk associated with buying big, boring, non-cyclical industries – Capital Gains.  Since inception in November 2011 this is also ok.  The HYP has returned a gain of 31.0% vs the FTSE100’s 25.6%.  Where it gets interesting though is year to date gains to today.  Here the HYP has fallen by 1.7% vs the FTSE100’s gain of 1.6%.