Investor Talk with Marco Schwartz
Our guest today is someone who has been very successful with blogging and investing, Marco Schwartz. Marco owns a blog and he is an online entrepreneur. His simple goal is to help you to build your online empire, so you can live the lifestyle you ever wanted. Enjoy!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself & your story with investing?
My name is Marco Schwartz and I am an online entrepreneur, running a software company called SiteEngine, which helps other entrepreneurs build their own websites & online businesses. About a year after I started my business, I started to make some profits from it, however, I had no idea what to do with this money and it just ended up on my savings account. Even if it was not large amounts of money, I knew I had to do something with it and I started to learn about investing.
What made you get interested in Peer-to-Peer Lending?
Most of my friends, especially online entrepreneurs, were recommending me to invest in real estate, so that’s what I did. I bought a small apartment, with the plan to rent it and enjoy the monthly rent. I worked well for a couple of years, but the yield was low (around 4%), it required a lot of my time, and after three years I had problems with one tenant that completely ruined the flat. I then decided to sell it, and I was a bit disgusted about investing.
However, I was still definitely interested in investing. However, I put some rules for my next investment. It would need to be completely passive, and with high yield. Also, I wanted to be able to easily diversify, and not depend on one single asset as I did with this flat. That’s the time when I heard about Peer-to-Peer lending. It filled all the criteria I set earlier, and I definitely wanted to know more.
Why did you decide to start investing with FAST INVEST?
While I was looking for Peer-to-Peer lending platforms to invest in, I quickly heard about FAST INVEST from other investor friends. I decided to check it and try it out for myself. So I opened an account, and first tried the platform with a quite low sum of money, just to test the waters.
I was quickly convinced by the platform, especially by the fact that they had a lot of loans available, a buyback guarantee on all loans, as well quite high yields compared to other platforms. Plus, their website is really easy to use, and I found out they had excellent customer support when I had some questions.
What were your goals in terms of investments, and how is your portfolio doing at the moment?
My end goal with investing is to become financially independent, meaning being able to pay for all our living expenses for me & my wife just with money coming from investments. We are still far from that, but we can already pay our basic living expenses like our rent with investing, and that’s mainly due to excellent platforms like FAST INVEST.
My portfolio on FAST INVEST is doing great and is currently yielding at 13.76%. I also wrote a detailed review of FAST INVEST on my website, which I regularly update with my latest returns from the platform.
What features of the platform do you use the most?
Definitely the Auto Invest feature. I use it to completely automate my investments on the platform, so I just had to set it once and then just forget about it. It’s been active since the very first day I invested on FastInvest, and it’s definitely helping me achieve those great returns since that day.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting out with FAST INVEST, what would it be?
I would definitely recommend diversifying your investments on the platform. Even if there is a buyback guarantee on all loans, it is a good practice to diversify your investments in as many loans as possible. Therefore, I recommend setting your Auto Invest to the minimum amount possible and diversify in all the loans available on the platform.