imho
MB
Jake Stichler
Hobo
JeepersP2P Loans and Baseball
I participated in my very first “blog carnival” this week. Yay for me. Let’s have a party…
But seriously, I feel like I’ve been getting to know a lot of personal finance bloggers lately, and by the most part, it’s a fantastic group. I really feel that meeting them, and my readers here are a big help to my whole motivation and direction to get out of this mess I’m in.
So I had a general overview piece about p2p lending that can be found over at Moolanomy. Pinyo is a top notch guy and if you haven’t checked out his site I’d recommend doing so.
Baseball, yes! So, my bother got tickets for an upcoming Seattle mariner’s game! I’m pretty excited, I’m not a huge baseball fan, but actually going to games live is a blast at Safeco. We got a steal of a deal on the tickets (friend of a friend had them, sold them to us cheap), which is good, because apparently baseball has become quite expensive these days.
Off to do some late-night business strategy work….I’ve got a zillion ideas going right now and trying to figure out if any of them can fit into my business budget. Most likely not….which is too bad ’cause they are darn good!
I'm 300K in debt. Gulp. I'm 24 and day traded away a fortune. Now I'm trying to crawl back to zero. Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and join me on this journey. You can also subscribe via e-mail. I appreciate tips and feedback! ~ DebtKid
on April 4th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Really? that was your first carnival? In that case, welcome to the club.
PS: And thank you for the nice thing you said about me. You’re a scholar and a gentleman.
on April 4th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Sounds fun, they do have the coolest stadium! I’m totally jealous of you Seattle people with all your amazing venues. If I lived there I would never get anything done between the outdoor opportunities and all of the shows.
Congrats on the carnival!
on April 5th, 2008 at 7:59 am
P2P lending is an easy way to lose money. Take a much closer look at the facts and you will see that prosper.com loans have a very high default rate after a few months. This is not a good way to make money, and certainly the yields do not offset the risk to make it worth while. There are lots of reports coming out now about P2P not living up to the promises. Run fast, run far. This is NOT a way to get decent gains. Extremely high risk. Put your money somewhere safe!
on April 5th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Prosper.com has a fairly high default rate because it has a low limit on the FICO score of who can be a member. 520 - which is in the sub-prime zone. I just joined LendingClub.com, which has a higher minimum score, 640, which is just a hair below the prime loan category. Low rate loans for even people with prime scores is becoming very hard to find. I have an excellent FICO score, and my credit cards rates are increasing and averaging about 18% now, when 5 years ago it was about 9%. The borrowers on Lending Club are generally people like me - middle class income with excellent payment history and are looking to consolidate their rising credit card rates to a lower fixed rate.
I do my research - I only lend small amounts and spread it out among many loans. I read each borrower’s requests, look at their credit scores, payment history, and debt to income ratio. Right now I’m playing it rather conservative and won’t loan to anyone with less than 740 FICO. People with credit scores that high tend to be people who work aggressively to keep those scores high (I know I do).
They payout on Lending Club seems lower than Prosper.com, but I think the risk is lower and I feel more comfortable with it. I like that I get to read the stories and can help people get out of credit debt or improve their small business, which traditional banks often won’t do. I like that I’m helping real people, rather than brokers.