Did you ever Invest in Peer-to-Peer Lending ?

[johnpau]

Has anyone invested in peer-to-peer lending investments ?

There are several of them online, which one do you like.

Any pros and cons on these kind of investments ?

Thanks

[TexasHusker]

Can you expand on your definition of peer-to-peer lending?

[disneysteve]

Can you expand on your definition of peer-to-peer lending?

I'm guessing he means sites like Prosper or Lending Tree.

[bjl584]

Nope.
It's currently illegal in Pennsylvania.

[Singuy]

Yes.

My lending club as of right now after a year in returned me 7% on average. I have only really aggressive crap notes that are 13+% in interest rate. Lots of people not paying their notes and this money is not liquid at all so I decided to stop putting anymore than 5k in the account.

I also do peerstreet which returns me a cool 7.5%. Now I have two foreclosures. They are still not solved. One has been a year since my last interest payment. We'll see how this turns out.

So far stocks are giving me the best returns and I am actually disappointed with peer to peer.

[~bs]

yeah, lending club.

i divested out of it simply because maintaining it was more than I wished, and i wanted to pick my own loans, not invest in garbagey loans that will default that they'll pick for you.

Return was decent. I probably averaged over 10% return per year by going after lower rated loans.

[MooseBucks]

I did prosper before they got shut down in PA ~10 yrs ago. I don't think I'd ever do P2P in the US again.

[sblatner]

I've invested in Lending Club loans since probably 2011. I get a steady 6% rate of return which I am happy with. Yes, people do default but I more than make up for it with the payments that people make.

I did find that you need to put enough into your account so that when someone defaults, you are earning enough interest to make up for it...say if you had $1000 in an account, your defaults would be larger than your interest payments each month.

[~bs]

^

I found it worthwhile to go after the lowest rated loans, but without history of defaults, and with history of steady employment.

The A and B rated loans still have risk, and aren't worth dealing with the lower % return given that risk. I'd rather go after the riskier loans, for 3x the payoff (or whatever). In that case, even if they default 1/3 of the way through the loan, you still might break even on the loan. One of the things that bugged me about the lower rated loans is that some people use them to boost their credit rating, and refinance into a lower interest loan once they've shown they're capable of making payments timely. So the lender takes all the risk by lending them the money, but only get a fraction of the interest because they refinanced out of the loan. Good for the lendee, but bad for the lendor if all the most responsible people bail on you.

[PierceFerdy]

I've only done this a few times with local sites like Harmoney here in Middle Earth (lol), and both of those times I've erred on the lower side of the risk spectrum.

To be fair it was less a proper attempt at investing and more a way to satisfy my curiosity.

From memory the return was 5-6% which wasn't too bad, but the constant need to manage / sort through new options etc was too time consuming - an auto-re-invest option may have kept my attention, but ho hum. Not much to write home about, personally.

As always, ymmv (your mileage may vary).