Peter Renton, the Founder of Lend Academy opened his first LendingClub account in mid-2009. I opened my first LendingClub account in early 2013. While we are intimately familiar with the platform and the changes over the years things are on autopilot from the investment perspective. It has been a long time since we have gone through the process of opening a new LendingClub account.
Recently LendingClub reached out to us offering to fund a new LendingClub account so we could go through the new investor experience step by step. We wanted to take this opportunity to take a fresh look at opening and investing through LendingClub as a complete beginner. As outlined after the video below we’ll be sharing video content and blog posts along the way as this account matures.
Opening up a new LendingClub Account
The new LendingClub account setup is a simple, straight forward process, taking less than five minutes. As you’ll see in the video below LendingClub asks for some basic information during the signup process and then asks for information for the initial funding of the account.
Although I had to link my bank account manually in the video below, LendingClub now has the ability to connect your bank account quickly, simply by using your bank’s login credentials. Up to 15,000+ banks are available for linking, including USAA, Citi, Bank of America, and Chase.
New LendingClub Experiment
As mentioned earlier, LendingClub is funding our new account with an initial deposit of $5,000. This is part of a new program they are launching this year with a small subset of bloggers in the investing space. While they paid to fund this account we have complete freedom to write whenever and whatever we want. We considered this a good opportunity to start a new account from scratch and share the experience as both my and Peter’s accounts at LendingClub have been open for many years.
Once we invest this initial capital all principal and interest payments will be reinvested in new loans. Every quarter we will detail what is going on with this account, much like Peter shares his own returns.
In this series of posts we hope to answer several questions new investors may have such as:
- What does signing up for a LendingClub account entail?
- How do I setup automated investing?
- How long does it take to deploy funds?
- What returns could a potential investor expect starting in 2018?
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for our next video as we outline how to setup automated investing.
The real question is whether you, as someone with experience with Lending Club would invest $5,000 of your own new money in the account. As someone who has invested via Lending Club for several years, my answer is “Absolutely not” The upside is limited, the rules can change at any time, and the possible rewards are not nearly high enough to compensate for the risk involved.
Absolutely agree!