A year ago I started my investment journey and I wish I had a blog that talked about leveraging cashback and signup bonuses.

To make you understand what I mean under cashback deals let us talk about a specific case. I started using a broker for stock trading and after some time I realised that I could have gotten a signup bonus from the broker and that I could have paid less in fees. Almost every broker offers some kind of a signup bonus, it might be 10, 20 or even 100 € and you can earn that by simply doing a bit of google research. Regarding the fees, I was always sending my money to PayPal and then via PayPal to my Broker, then my broker would charge a conversion fee because I was sending Euros instead of Dollars. If I would have used a better payment provider and invested in the right currency I would have not lost money on nothing.

What did I do wrong when I started, well I did not understand my sources of income and the broker fee, additionaly I did not do any research on signup bonuses. With a 20-30 minute research I could have saved 141.94 €, making my hourly rate 283.88 € which is amazing.

Crypto Investing Case

The first mistake I made with crypto investing was to use my existing broker instead of a crypto brokerage. At this point, I had a bit more experience and I did not invest much money, instead, I wanted to try it out with 100 €. With the initial investment of 100 €, the broker took a 2.9% spread fee, making my investment 97.1 €. But hey at least I did not lose the transaction and conversion fee money.

After some time I found Crypto.com . They offered a $50 signup bonus for an initial investment of $150. This meant that I was up 33.33 % on my initial investment. They also had 0% fees for crypto trading and constant bonuses for using their app. Besides that, they have an investment portfolio which has an up to 18% p.a. return.

P2P Investing Case

I was a pro-investor in the case of P2P investing, using the initial signup bonus for 2 different P2P platforms and using bank transfers instead of PayPal. After reading some interesting blogs, I decided to invest in Mintos and Bondora, investing 500€ in Mintos and 300€ in Bondora. Since Bondora offers a 5€ signup bonus for new users and Mintos a 1% bonus on the invested amount, I decided to invest 500€ with Mintos to gain the same bonus as for Bondora. For both platforms the cashback has a limit of 30 days, this means that you cannot claim a cashback 30 days after registration.