ThinCats

Apples2

It's always worth declaring if you have a connection with a site you are promoting.

paddyrg

emperorbruce wrote: »

My apologies; I thought that this was a place to discuss our actual experiences. On that basis I would have thought that people who are members of Thincats and have actually made loans should be encouraged to discuss the facts as they find them.
I've now checked out some of your other posts I can see that you have had a hard time as a borrower before with P2P lending so I can understand that you might have a jaundiced view of these things.
Perhaps I should have done my homework before posting - I will not make the mistake again.

Seems somewhat a coincidence that 2 people join on the same day specifically to praise a new website to the heavens, no? A new site that probably doesn't have *that* many lenders. Maybe it is an insanely wild coincidence, or maybe you are trying to plug the site, have a vested interest. Both of you. You can see how untrustworthy that looks, eh? And with trust being the core of p2p, not a chance.

And you may want to re-do your backreading about me, I have never applied to borrow a penny p2p.

jamesd

emperorbruce wrote: »

My Independent Financial advisor was able to access a database of such SIPPs together with details of their charges.

I don't really want to be paying an IFA for such a service about an investment that I may never use. It's something that the site concerned should be promoting or at least mentioning.

emperorbruce

jamesd wrote: »

I don't really want to be paying an IFA for such a service about an investment that I may never use. It's something that the site concerned should be promoting or at least mentioning.

There appear to be a wide range of SIPPs many of which are actually limited to a narrow range of investments controlled by the SIP managers - presumably they take a cut each time the SIPP invests in one of their products and that's how they manage to appear cheaper. These should be avoided! My IFA will only charge me if I actually take out a SIPP after receiving his advice but the best choice of SIPP for me will not deal with customers directly only through an IFA.
I think you should accept that setting up a SIPP is not going to be cheap and to make it financially worth while you are going to need perhaps £50k or more in it. Setting one up is a serious business and not a DIY job,you need to get advice from someone you trust, not from someone on a forum like this.
Once the SIPP is set up you can invest it in a wide range of things and the tax savings are very attractive, particularly if you pay tax at the higher rates.

jamesd

I have a SIPP already. But don't know of one that allows this investment and do want to have some idea of the options first. I'm even expecting to set up a new pension and transferring some money to it and would like to know which offer this investment option so I could consider them.

emperorbruce

jamesd wrote: »

I have a SIPP already. But don't know of one that allows this investment and do want to have some idea of the options first. I'm even expecting to set up a new pension and transferring some money to it and would like to know which offer this investment option so I could consider them.

Why not ask your existing SIPP manager first? If you want to get some free advice I notice there are a couple of SIPP related discussion groups on LinkedIn such as "sipp-UK-Pension-Investment" that you could post the question on. I don't know enough to give any advice myself.

jamesd

I'm transferring away from that SIPP provider. I'm expecting that ThinCats might somewhere tell people who the distributors for its product are. So far I'm not seeing that. Asking in a random web message boards like this one is not really the place to be doing this. It's something ThinCats should be providing the answer to.

I don't participate in places like LinkedIn or Facebook that make their money by selling my personal information.

50quidonRED

Just rename it FATCATS newbs tryin to get rich

emperorbruce

jamesd wrote: »

I'm transferring away from that SIPP provider. I'm expecting that ThinCats might somewhere tell people who the distributors for its product are. So far I'm not seeing that. Asking in a random web message boards like this one is not really the place to be doing this. It's something ThinCats should be providing the answer to.

I don't participate in places like LinkedIn or Facebook that make their money by selling my personal information.

I have just made my second newbee mistake in trying to post a link to the relevant page on the ThinCats website (apparently that is not allowed) but if you look there is already a page devoted to SIPPs. Granted it could be better.
Just for the record, I AM a founder of ThinCats and I am setting up my own SIPP with which to lend. My omission was not an attempt to mislead, just a failure to understand the etiquette.
When I have set up my SIPP I intend to publish a note on how I did it. I hope that it will be within two weeks but IFAs and pension providers move very, very slowly.
It is not my intention to give any investment advice and it's certainly not something that ThinCats should do. Independent financial advice is very important and unfortunately it has to be paid for.

jamesd

You might be thinking of the Using a SIPP to lend page. That's the one that left me frustrated and wanting a list of SIPPs that distribute the ThinCats product.

The £1,000 minimum loan is also inconveniently large, requiring £100,000 invested to get the sort of diversification I'd want within the product (100 loans) and two million in my SIPP to get there (at 5% per investment type maximum exposure). If other think the same way that's a required SIPP amount above the lifetime allowance. Since I don't have that sort of money at the moment the effect of the minimum investment amount is to raise the risk level by reducing the diversification level. A £100 minimum offer would reduce the minimum level for really prudent diversification to £200,000 and that's reachable by a lot more people. May be too low for this product, though.

There's a balance to be struck with the minimum investment level but at the moment it's too high to allow sufficient diversification within the product for most of the UK population. No need for this product to target most of the population - there's plenty of room for high net wroth products - but it's worth considering the cost of obtaining sufficient diversification for the target market.