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SpelledBackwards posted:I went to sign up today too, but unfortunately Texas only allows for FolioFN as well, and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. Normally this state lets me do all kinds of crazy things with my money! I guess I'll put a smaller amount of cash in and feel it out.
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Jul 25, 2013 20:01
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I've been toying with the idea of applying for a loan to consolidate my credit card debt. My CC debt is bad, but not horrendous, around 11k. Even if the rate ends up being comparable, isn't an installment loan better for your credit rating than revolving debt? I didn't see anything about this in the OP, sorry if it's been asked, but is there any early repayment penalty?
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Jul 25, 2013 21:21
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Dantu posted:I've been toying with the idea of applying for a loan to consolidate my credit card debt. My CC debt is bad, but not horrendous, around 11k. Even if the rate ends up being comparable, isn't an installment loan better for your credit rating than revolving debt? I didn't see anything about this in the OP, sorry if it's been asked, but is there any early repayment penalty?
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Jul 25, 2013 22:22
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Can anyone elaborate a bit more about LC's required $70,000 income? I don't make nearly that much but I was only planning on investing $500 or so. I've seen here that there's some sort of income verification, but does that apply to small-scale investors?
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Jul 27, 2013 06:55
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I thought it was 70k in total net worth not yearly income. Wither way I've never heard of anything coming of it. I assume it's so people can't blame LC if they go broke investing in notes, sort of a CYA thing.
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Jul 27, 2013 10:47
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Monocular posted:Can anyone elaborate a bit more about LC's required $70,000 income? I don't make nearly that much but I was only planning on investing $500 or so. I've seen here that there's some sort of income verification, but does that apply to small-scale investors? I've read somewhere that that only applies to people who are investing over a certain amount. Something like $5000. Although I haven't heard of them ever doing any sort of verification.
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Jul 27, 2013 14:15
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Lending Club posted:Investors who are residents of states other than California or Kentucky must have (a) an annual gross income of at least $70,000 and a net worth (exclusive of home, home furnishings and automobile) of at least $70,000; or (b) have a net worth of at least $250,000 (determined with the same exclusions).
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Jul 27, 2013 22:06
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Looks like lending club may be selling out of loans tonight - anyone seen that before?
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Aug 24, 2013 03:42
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baquerd posted:Looks like lending club may be selling out of loans tonight - anyone seen that before? Okay that makes more sense than my fear that the loving walls were falling down. I've been seeing fewer and fewer available loans, yet their statistics indicate record growth, so okay, just not as many borrowers as investors right now I guess. There is currently ONE loan available. Sheesh.
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Aug 24, 2013 05:34
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This sounds dangerous. Drastically less borrowers than investors means there won't be any loans, which will increase demand through the roof, and probably mean that investors will (once again) just lower their standards, meaning that credit will be easy to get through this site and that will probably result in a lot of people getting burned when substandard loans are filled and later default.
Keisari fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Aug 24, 2013 |
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Aug 24, 2013 07:01
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I'm just going to stick with my lending standards. If there aren't any loans available that meet them then I won't buy any notes, it's that simple. It seems like the interest rate being offered for the notes turning up in my filters has been slowly getting lower over the last year or so. I guess this shouldn't be that unexpected since more and more lenders have been hopping on the bandwagon. Gravy train is slowing down apparently.
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Aug 24, 2013 08:23
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I guess this is a good time to come in as a borrower then.
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Aug 27, 2013 04:07
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Turns out the lack of notes on Friday was just a technical error at LC. But yeah still tilting toward borrowers right now either way.
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Aug 27, 2013 04:28
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baquerd posted:For the non-income verified loans on Lending Club, my understanding is that they have to verify their income at some point before the loan is issued, right? I was misinformed earlier in the thread - I have a ton of loans issued without income verification, which is extremely disturbing.
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Sep 4, 2013 01:28
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baquerd posted:I was misinformed earlier in the thread - I have a ton of loans issued without income verification, which is extremely disturbing. My husband and I actually applied for a loan a few months ago due to an unexpected bill. We ended up getting an extension on the bill & not taking the loan, but for us, the process went like: -Submit application -Undergo pre-review (at this point we had to rewrite our description a few times before they accepted it) -Loan goes out for funding -Loan gets 100% funded -Undergo pre-issue review - at this point, they wanted proof of income, employment, etc. So I think that a lot of loans get funded without income verification, but I don't think they actually issue loans without verifying income. Otherwise, there wouldn't be that 2-week gap between loans getting funded and issued.
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Sep 4, 2013 01:49
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April posted:I don't think they actually issue loans without verifying income. Otherwise, there wouldn't be that 2-week gap between loans getting funded and issued. They most certainly do, e.g. https://www.lendingclub.com/account/loanDetail.action?loan_id=6624744 or https://www.lendingclub.com/account/loanDetail.action?loan_id=6716709
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Sep 4, 2013 02:24
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I started lending with Prosper late last year. So I'm officially 10 months in on some of my notes which means they are "seasoned". According to Prosper's own data mining, once a note has made it 10 months the chances of defaulting is much lower. When I first started out I started with $2500 spread over 100 notes with literally no filters. So everything was between A-HR for the first 100 notes. So needless to say I've gotten a few defaults from these and will probably get more in the future. But over all it's been a decent experience. My seasoned notes have an annualized return rate of 9.21% - All notes combined are at 11.10% Granted, compared to the S&P 500 this return rate isn't as good, but very few things are. Overall I just consider Prosper as one more area of diversification. Here's a screenshot of my current portfolio. The HR looks way out of whack because I only had a few loans and one or two defaulted, so it looks crazy (-20%) 
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Oct 10, 2013 19:55
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The only complaint I have with Lending Club is that making extra payments requires manually emailing their support and that their payments take a while to process. Other than that, highly recommend them.
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Oct 11, 2013 13:11
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I just realized I haven't updated in a while, so here are my latest numbers:quote:My Notes at-a-Glance (826) Still hanging around the 1% charge-off rate. It's been just about 1 year since I did my 3-month bulk-buying binge (October, November, and December of last year), so I expect a few more to fall out in the next couple of months. Overall though, pretty good performance: quote:Payments to Date $5,334.11 My biggest complaint lately is the scarcity of notes. I've been buying more B-rated ones than normal, because there just aren't any good C and above ones when I log in. I'm hoping to find a fairly user-friendly auto-buying program, that will let me set up all the filters that I want, and log in every time there's a note dump, and invest for me. Lending Club has a feature like that, but the only filter you can use, I think, is grade. No way am I using that.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:26
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One more update! Today I hit a milestone - I am officially in the 800-note club! I am basing this off of open notes, as I have a total of 853 notes, of which, 42 have been paid in full, and 11 have defaulted.
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Oct 28, 2013 15:18
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Has anyone here used Prosper and have thoughts and/or a review on it? Lending Club isn't allowed in my state, which is why I ask...
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Oct 30, 2013 03:52
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Here are my stats after about a year. I've been trickling in money to see how performance is, but so far I've been very impressed. In Funding 8 Issued & Current 136 Fully Paid 7 Late 16 - 30 Days 0 Late 31 - 120 Days 2 Default 0 Charged Off 1
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Oct 30, 2013 05:06
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Whats are the thoughts on using LC Prime to hold a lot of money for medium term (3-5 year) timeframe? We are in a really good financial situation and have completely taken care of emergency funds, retirement accounts and college savings and are now focused on building up a large amount of savings for a down payment eventually. Storing all of this money in a savings account is killing me from the lack of returns and I dont want to go into bond funds due to what I perceive as a likely increase in interest rates. Full blown equities seem risky though I am also consider high dividend/low growth stocks. A coworker alerted me to the Prime program where you just put in a large amount of money and let it sit, no dealing with individual notes which sounded like it could be a good blend of risk and return.
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Oct 30, 2013 05:09
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kansas posted:Whats are the thoughts on using LC Prime to hold a lot of money for medium term (3-5 year) timeframe? It sounds like it could be really cool, and I'd be interested to hear people's experience as well. They did increase the minimum to $25k, up from $10k.
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Oct 30, 2013 05:13
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Thinking about giving this a whirl with a few grand, I've been browsing notes while waiting for my bank account to verify. I've noticed that most of them (or at least the ones I was browsing at about 11pm PST last night) didn't have any questions answered at all, but were still at 80%+ funded. I saw one or two questions answered, so I'm pretty sure the questions aren't private per request or anything, but correct me if I'm wrong. I read the whole thread last night, and one of the things that was repeated a few times is that you can get some sort of read on the borrower by seeing how well they write their responses, but it seems like a lot of the notes I was browsing were almost ready to go without answering a single question. Did I just check at a weird time, or am I missing something?
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Oct 30, 2013 21:27
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It used to be that notes would take a few days to a week to get funded but now with so many new investors the "good" notes get funded within minutes of being posted. I used to wait for responses but now if you see a note that looks good to you and meets your filter criteria (you do filter perspective notes right?) you have to jump on it immediately. Over the last year especially there has been a huge increase in lenders and seemingly a not as huge increase in borrowers. To me it seems like this has resulted in generally lower yields on all notes. I'm now mostly buying B rated notes when I used to only get C or D notes. I keep investing though because I think there are still decent returns to be had, just not as good as it was when I started out.
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Oct 30, 2013 21:58
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Some notes will have a description of what it's for, but yea most of the ones I've seen lately have no questions asked or answered. Setting up filters is probably good if you're buying en masse but what I did earlier this year was buy 50 notes over the course of a few weeks and vetted each one myself. It was kind of fun. And now that it's been 8-9 months I haven't had any late payments on any of my notes either. (jinx) Quick question I guess, the estimated return percentage factors in defaults, does this automatically adjust if the bulk of your notes are nearing the end of their life? I'm at 12.7% now for instance, but if everyone comes through and I don't buy more notes will that rise to the ~16% I initially calculated myself?
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Oct 30, 2013 22:30
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I transferred some money over to FolioFN back when I made my last post since I can't invest in new notes in Texas. However, upon searching, lots and lots of them have ridiculously negative expected ROIs because they're near to term and someone has them posted up for more than what's owed... would anybody in their right minds go for them? It's annoying that they even show up and that you can't trust any information on there from the time the note was generated since it all could have changed, to where I'm pretty discouraged from investing in any of them at all.
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Oct 30, 2013 23:27
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Inverse Icarus posted:Thinking about giving this a whirl with a few grand, I've been browsing notes while waiting for my bank account to verify. You aren't missing anything, there is no time on either side to ask or answer questions and I don't think it really matters because if someone is talking their way into borrowing 35k, then they will just say what they need to. What I do is, I have my filter setup, and at the loan load times (6, 10, 2, 6 pacific), I just blanket give out loans to the highest interest rate people that fall into it. Rarely the title of the loan will cause me to pass giving out 25$ but it's pretty rare that I even look at the title. This morning I did see a title that said "A hope to live a better life", and I thought, that person is going to default for sure. I still invested though, because it met one of my filters, in this case it was a high interest, low dollar amount loan (F for 1000$).
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Oct 31, 2013 14:24
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Dazzleberries posted:I just blanket give out loans to the highest interest rate people that fall into it. Rarely the title of the loan will cause me to pass giving out 25$ but it's pretty rare that I even look at the title. How many of those loans end up not being actually funded even though they get enough funders? My impression from borrowers is that isn't uncommon to get to that stage before getting denied.
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Oct 31, 2013 18:00
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My unscientific guess based on experience is that about one third to one half of the notes I order don't end up going through. I would guess that the rejection rate gets higher with higher rate loans since these borrowers are even less likely to meet LC's underwriting criteria.
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Oct 31, 2013 21:36
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Saint Fu posted:My unscientific guess based on experience is that about one third to one half of the notes I order don't end up going through. I would guess that the rejection rate gets higher with higher rate loans since these borrowers are even less likely to meet LC's underwriting criteria. Yeah, a tremendous amount of funded loans don't get issued, easily 50%+ and that's for things in the B/C range which is where I tend to invest. It's not a huge deal if you are trying to invest a ton of money because your real bottleneck will be getting that money even into the in funding status. You're lucky if you find a half dozen good notes even if you hawk over the time they get issued. The last few hundred dollars you invest will take you forever to get issued.
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Oct 31, 2013 22:07
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How long is the money tied up in those rejected notes, on average?
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Oct 31, 2013 23:41
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Inverse Icarus posted:How long is the money tied up in those rejected notes, on average? I would say maybe 5-7 days, perhaps more in some cases. I don't know that there is a way to see loans that you invested in, that didn't get issued. It's annoying but I'd rather loans get checked out again before being issued than to end up with a default. Peer to peer is a lot of work, even if you just experiment with 150$ you'll see that and it may not seem worth it, and for some people it isn't, but I enjoy the control I have, even if it is a lot of work.
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Nov 1, 2013 02:21
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I sort of like the idea of investing in actual humans that need money, but I'm a pessimist when it comes to thinking people are going to be assholes when it comes to money. We'll see how it goes.
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Nov 1, 2013 03:38
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Saint Fu posted:My unscientific guess based on experience is that about one third to one half of the notes I order don't end up going through. I would guess that the rejection rate gets higher with higher rate loans since these borrowers are even less likely to meet LC's underwriting criteria. Why would LC not issue loans if they have the funding for them? From what I understand they are just a middleman and lose nothing if the loan defaults, so what do they gain by refusing to process loans for people who don't meet some criteria?
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Nov 1, 2013 08:09
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Prosper went through a big wave of defaults in I think 2009 and scared a lot of the early inverters off. My understanding is that this a major reason why Prosper is so much smaller than LC now. LC and Prosper both took note and really buckled down on their underwriting to appease and attract the investors. You're right though, they could likely loosen their requirements and still have enough investors for to buy all of the notes. I think they actually may be slowly doing this due to the huge appetite for more loans. As a lender, I do appreciate that they do some background checking but to be completely honest, I haven't followed all of their changes in underwriting in great detail over the last 2.5 years. I'm guessing that management feels that it is still in their best interest to keep investors happy in the long run over filling more loans (and collecting their 1%) for the 1-2 years they'd get before the loose lending practices came back to bite them.
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Nov 1, 2013 08:48
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Konstantin posted:Why would LC not issue loans if they have the funding for them? From what I understand they are just a middleman and lose nothing if the loan defaults, so what do they gain by refusing to process loans for people who don't meet some criteria? Personally I'm thankful if LC denies a loan if they find someone's income isn't correct, or they don't actually own their home or they're not employed or whatever. I buy notes based on that info and if a note doesn't get issued I'm not too hurt about it.
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Nov 1, 2013 15:16
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Konstantin posted:Why would LC not issue loans if they have the funding for them? From what I understand they are just a middleman and lose nothing if the loan defaults, so what do they gain by refusing to process loans for people who don't meet some criteria? I've heard that they deny 90% of loans, and of that, probably half are ones that are already funded. I'm personally OK with LC vetting the loans more thoroughly and then possibly denying them after I've already put in my $25. Yes, it's frustrating that I have to wait longer to start receiving payments, but it's more frustrating when people default. As far as what LC has to gain by slowing the process down, pretty much their entire pool of investors, I'd imagine. I keep putting money in because I keep earning back more than what I put in, and I've been quite enthusiastically vocal about that. If my default rate starts going above the generally-accepted 3% mark, I will stop putting new money in and slow down or stop reinvesting what I already have in there, and I'll probably be just as vocal (if not more so) in that case. I can't imagine I'm alone in that mindset, either.
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Nov 1, 2013 16:10
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Even as far back as 2006 or so before the crash when I was looking at Prosper's community, there was a lot of unhappiness about the number of defaults and especially the collection efforts on defaults. Almost 0 defaults ever had any amount collected; it even seemed that there was little to no effort to collect by the 3rd party agencies chosen to do so. It's probably very much in their best interest be careful about approving notes.
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Nov 4, 2013 21:30
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