June has arrived, so it is time for another portfolio update. May passed extremely quickly as far as I am concerned, mainly because I had a break from work, visited family in my native Holland, went on a road trip with my brother and lost track of time. More about that later.
During May I was largely unaware of what happened in the stock markets. Not because I didn’t have an Internet connection, but because I didn’t really feel the need to check. If I had followed the markets while being abroad I think I would have missed my bottle of whiskey that I keep hidden for nervous times. But instead of whisky I tasted an array of local beers in Romania. Oblivious to the markets that apparently went pretty sour again…
May 2019
Income/gain
The income/gain looks like this:
Company shares
May pretty much erased the gains from the previous month. So the 4-month sequence of gains ended. 
With this the total value of my company stock also fell under the $100K mark again. Bugger!
A reason to be nervous or even panic? Absolutely not. In a recent post I explained why my concentrated portfolio strategy suits me so well. Temporary losses are inevitable, but they’re not a threat as far as FIRE is concerned.
On the upside, I have saved nearly $8K that will be invested in new (ESPP) company shares at the end of June. I expect an increase in total asset value of at least $15K (due to the a discount). So chances are I will soon break the $100K mark again.
Crowdlending
My Mintos investments live their own life. I haven’t invested more funds in this asset for a number of months now, but the return keeps accumulating (and is automatically re-invested using Mintos’ auto-invest feature).
The total return now stands at nearly $120.
I will most likely realize some of the gains of my company shares in the near future and re-invest in crowdlending. This should make things a bit less boring alternative assets wise 😉
Portfolio
Net worth
My net worth decreased, but it is not as bad as it seems. I convert all my numbers to US dollars and as the dollar has increased in strength relative to the Euro (and hence Danish Kroner), it paints too negative a picture.
In other words, my numbers fluctuate with the exchange rate. In future posts I am probably going to use a fixed rate to eliminate the fluctuations. That may be artificial, but converting all numbers to US dollars is artificial to begin with.
| Mortgage-free home | $300K |
| Company shares | $95,356.80 |
| Crowdlending | $2,117.79 |
| Pension | $144,795.43 |
| Liabilities | $30K |
| Net worth | $512,270.02 |
Blog
May was a fairly quiet month blogging-wise. I really enjoyed the microfiction writing challenge, which saw some really great contributions from fellow (personal finance) bloggers. I consider it a success and will definitely create a follow-up challenge in June 🙂
Travel
As mentioned I had a break from work and spent some time in Holland and Romania. The latter with my brother. My followers know I go on annual road trips with him. We’ve often been in the far north (Lapland), but this year we decided to go back to Romania (we’ve been there before). Why? Because it is a lovely country!
We practiced FIRE. Practiced ‘La Dolce Far Niente’, the sweetness of doing nothing. He’s on his way to FIRE as well and it was a great trip to re-align, discuss plans, progress and drink local beers at the same time.
I plan to write a separate post about this trip by the way.
Plans for June
My plans for June:
- New micro fiction writing challenge.
- Participate in the new thought experiment from SavingNinja. It’s a challenging one!
- Keep the ESPP program running
- Swim. I signed up for some mini triathlon event here in town. With colleagues. I’ll do the swimming part and better get in shape for that.
That’s all for this time!
earlyretirementplanning.wordpress.com 
Swinds and roundabouts – big gains in April and big falls in May.
At least your trends are all going in the right direction!
LikeLiked by 1 person