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Three Bloggers Share Their P2P Lending Results

January 6, 2011 By Peter Renton 7 Comments

Views: 9

The last week has been a banner week for those wanting to find out details of how successful p2p investors put together their portfolios. We have had three leading personal finance bloggers share intimate details of their returns on Lending Club. Here is a quick analysis.

Steadfast Finances – first cab off the rank was Matt with Steadfast Finances. He also has the best return on his investment of the three bloggers with a 15.64% NAR. Matt has a strict investment policy of only investing $25 per loan and looking for borrowers who have job security. His portfolio consists of 279 loans with grades primarily C, D and E, but he has a renewed focus on loans with a NAR of 15% pre more so new loans are mainly grades D, E, F and G. He is adding to his portfolio to the tune of $100 to $150 per week and he spends 1-2 hours a week scouring loans to invest in. He has been an investor for 18 months and has no defaults as of yet, although there are five loans running late. But even that has changed as he shared on Twitter yesterday with two of his late loans returning to current status. Here is one of Matt’s helpful hints:

Don’t invest too much too fast. I know the temptation of investing in something new and cool is difficult to fight, but as with most things in life, exercise some patience by easing into P2P lending. Learn the ropes, get comfortable with the concept of investing in P2P lending before investing $10,000 into your account and end up investing $1000 per person. In my opinion, that’s the wrong way to go about it.

Bible Money Matters – Peter Anderson has also had zero defaults and just one out of 79 loans is running late. That is an impressive effort after almost two years on Lending Club. His NAR is running 9.64% and his focus is on smaller loans, those under $10,000. He has mainly invested in Grade A and B loans but after he has read the updates from Matt with Steadfast Finances he has decided to stray into the higher risk loans a little bit. He believes in investing in borrowers with a low debt-to-income ratio and also looks for loans that are over 60% funded. Here is another helpful hint from Peter:

I like to ask questions from potential borrowers. You can tell a lot about someone, and about how they’ll do repaying the loan, by how they answer the questions.

Investor Junkie – the return for Investor Junkie (IJ) fits between Steadfast Finances and Bible Money Matters. IJ (the blog author doesn’t reveal his name) is currently enjoying an NAR of 11.42%. He has one default in about 18 months on 189 loans (graded primarily B, C, and D), and there is one note that is currently late. IJ’s philosophy is to only invest in 36 month notes and because of his strict criteria he only invests small amounts at a time. It took him over six weeks to invest the $2,000 he recently added. Here is another great tip from IJ:

I have very few ‘A’ rated notes. I’ve deemed them actually riskier for the rate of return than the lower grade notes. I would rather take risk on a higher NAR loan with what Lending Club deems riskier and has a higher rate of default. If you look at the statistics this is what they show.

There was another Lending Club review posted just yesterday but it didn’t delve into the detail that these three bloggers did.

Just one point I want to make about these NAR’s. These p2p investors have all been investing in Lending Club for less than two years and because they add new money regularly the median age of the loans they are invested in is likely to be well less than a year old. So while it is very impressive that there is only one default between them, most of their loans are still relatively new and have not had much of a chance to default. So my guess is defaults will rise for all three but with their stringent investment criteria they should be able to keep the number of defaults low. But any default will negatively impact their NAR.

I appreciate these three gentlemen sharing the details of their investments, it helps the entire p2p lending community. I will be keeping a close eye on them as they to continue to report their progress. Speaking of NAR, stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog post for an in depth look at NAR and how Lending Club and Prosper’s stated NAR differs somewhat from the actual real world return.

Filed Under: Investing/Lending Tagged With: Bible Money Matters, Investor junkie, Lending Club, NAR, p2p analysis, Steadfast Finances

Views: 9

Comments

  1. Pete says

    January 6, 2011 at 11:38 am

    Thanks for the link love! I expect to see a few defaults over time, but to be honest to have not had one so far was surprising to me. In the end, the returns are a whole lot better than having the money sitting in a savings account earning close to 1% interest!

    Reply
  2. Investor Junkie says

    January 6, 2011 at 1:23 pm

    Thanks for the mention.

    https://lendingclubstats.com/

    Has some great stats on Lending Club.

    Reply
  3. Mike says

    January 8, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    I’ve been investing with Lending Club for two years now, and am only moderately satisfied with my returns (about 10%) given the risks involved. I no longer invest in A loans, either. The return is too paltry. With respect to term, I favor the 60 month notes because of their higher interest rates and lower service fees. My 20k is split between two accounts. One is a SIMPLE IRA. This represents a very small percentage of my total investment portfolio, and I am no longer adding funds to either account.

    Reply
  4. Peter Renton says

    January 10, 2011 at 10:30 am

    Thanks for adding your details here Mike. I am also no longer considering A rated loans because their return is not enough in my opinion. It is great for the borrower but not for the investor.

    Reply
  5. Peter Renton says

    January 13, 2011 at 12:21 pm

    Investor Junkie/Pete, Sorry your comments made it into my spam folder, just noticed it now and published them. Thanks for the Lendingclubstats.com link. I also think https://lendstats.com/ has some great info as well.

    Pete, best of luck on the defaults. But I couldn’t agree more. This is more fun and a way better investment than a savings account of CD.

    Reply
  6. Dan Blakely says

    January 22, 2011 at 7:24 am

    Peter – thanks for the link. I’ll be checking back to see how my fellow bloggers are doing.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. What are the Default Rates with Lending Club and Prosper? says:
    January 12, 2011 at 12:20 pm

    […] as well as conducting in depth research on the loans you are interested in. As I pointed out in my post last week three successful Lending Club investors have very low default rates by having strict criteria when […]

    Reply

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LendIt Fintech News, Powered by Lend Academy, has been bringing you all the news and information about fintech and online lending since 2010 when it was founded by Peter Renton. We not only have the industry’s most active news site, but also the largest investor forum and the first and most popular podcast.

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