Why Savings Plan Logic Doesn't Work for Loans

Max Girbig

• 11 de abril de 2026 16:21

The new auto-invest system feels like a step backward, and I think it's worth explaining why.

The core issue is a product-market fit mismatch: savings plans make sense for equities, where you deploy capital once and let it compound. Loans are fundamentally different — they amortize. Principal and interest return continuously, so reinvestment isn't a one-time event but an ongoing operational requirement. Applying a brokerage-style savings plan to a loan portfolio creates structural cash drag by design.

The weekly reinvestment interval is the most obvious symptom, and the logic is simple: the plan deploys a fixed amount on a fixed schedule, nothing more. So any cash returned between cycles sits uninvested. The more productive your portfolio — the more interest and principal coming back — the larger that idle surplus grows. You're essentially penalized for having a well-performing portfolio.

With the old priority-based system, idle funds were reallocated automatically and continuously. That matched how loans actually behave.

For the record, the old system had real shortcomings too: the hard portfolio size cap was arbitrary (why not allow an uncapped allocation?), and the inability to route interest payments directly to a linked bank account was a meaningful quality-of-life gap. Both are worth fixing.

But the solution shouldn't be to replace a system built around the mechanics of lending with one borrowed from equity investing. I'd strongly encourage Mintos to reconsider — either restore the priority-based logic or build something that actually accounts for the continuous cash flow nature of loan portfolios.

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  Ugo

  • 13 de abril de 2026 08:25

  I completely agree. Incidentally, all the changes over the past year have been solely in Mintos’s interest, not that of their clients. For example, the monitoring of late payments has been removed, and the investment per portfolio is also nonsensical for the investor (see my latest monthly update). 
  The problem of cash drag is almost impossible to solve. Mintos also has no means of ensuring lenders make repayments.
  To be most efficient when reinvesting the daily cash flow that comes back, the best approach is to invest everything yourself (and also sell at the right time). That takes a lot of time, but anyone who lets the algorithms do it misses out on a lot of potential.

   

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