My Second Investment – Fundrise (Website)

Fundrise

Fundrise is an investment platform that specializes in real estate projects, with multiple levels of investment that help determine the project types and what you’re aiming for. Using the link above to sign up will give you and I 90 days of no advisory fees. Every friend you invite will give you and them the same amount.

Snapshot

Fundrise

Fundrise was an interesting find off of a Facebook ad. Real estate always looked interesting to me, just not in the way Fundrise did things, but I looked into it more and found that their approach was one I could work with. They invest in multiple projects to build a portfolio for you that ranges from stable housing to new developments.

There is a $500.00 minimum investment to begin, which gives you a Basic account. There are a number of projects for a Starter Portfolio that I believe are the same for everyone until they upgrade to a higher level. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I invested my first $500.00 on April 5 of 2019. I was intrigued by the idea of real estate investing the way they did it, and it allowed me a shoe in the door to make some extra money off of existing real estate projects that I didn’t have to do anything but fund.

My second $500.00 came soon after on April 12 of 2019. I had the money available and wanted to select the type of account I wanted. At the Core Portfolio level, at a $1,000.00 investment, you get to select one of three types:

• Supplemental Income
• Balanced Investing
• Long-Term Growth

Supplemental Income has the highest rate of dividends, with low appreciation and moderate to high returns.

Balanced Investing has a moderate rate of dividends, moderate appreciation, and moderate to high returns.

Long-Term Growth, which is what I selected, has the lowest rate of dividends, the highest appreciation, and the highest rate of returns.

I chose Long-Term Growth because I have time to spare. I don’t need immediate income from dividends (not that it would provide much of that with only $1,000.00 invested anyways). I want to see the most growth possible over the longer term.

Fundrise gives updates on the projects in your portfolio, which is emailed to you and shows up on a timeline feed on your portfolio. These are nice little snippets with pictures and some information on the investment projects in your portfolio by most recent first.

You can also look deeper into each project in your portfolio. That will give you images, a map, project details such as projected return, rating, and capital invested total, as well as some market and location analysis, and individual project timeline.

As of writing this, I have 65 active projects in my portfolio and 25 days remaining of no advisory fees, after which Fundrise’s annual 1% will kick in. I am not sure if they charge this to the account monthly or annually, though I suspect I might see some advisory fees start kicking in at 0.083% monthly. That’s only $0.83 per month on my current portfolio value.

Considering I have received dividends of $6.30 in 2 months, I’d say I’m not worried about advisory fees.

I opted to reinvest my dividends in the portfolio instead of getting them cashed out. It makes more sense for the long-term to have more money in the portfolio.

That’s not even taking into account the very high appreciation value of projects in the Long-Term Growth portfolio type I selected. As most projects have a 2-5 year timeline, I do not expect to see these any time soon. The value of my shares owned would go up, be sold, and returned to my portfolio.

As far as I am concerned, Fundrise is doing right by me. I look forward to seeing some of the projects in my portfolio complete to see the real value behind the shares build, and I would certainly be interested to learn what kind of dividends the Supplemental Income portfolio type generates with a similar portfolio value, then compare the two after 6 months to a year.

Additional Investments

After obtaining my loan, I invested $250.00 in the Income eREIT II and $493.00 in the Income eREIT III which is expected to resolve on July 3 of 2019.

The Income eREITs are primarily focused on dividends, gathered monthly and distributed quarterly. Being able to put more dividends back into the investments here may provide an extra layer of additional gains that the broader stock market might fail to do if they stay relatively even. Of course, the bulk of my loan will be going towards Robinhood’s stock selection, but this $743.00 will be monitored for effectiveness.

At $8.08 dividends currently, this means my account value is up to $1,751.06.

Dividends!

I have received my first set of dividends from the platform, a whopping $10.52. While this might not seem like a lot, this was specifically Q2 dividends and does not include the loan money additions I made. These dividends will be reinvested in my chosen portfolio style.