Peer-to-peer lending sites: MSE guide discussion

masonic

shoi wrote: »

They have said that they had expensive legal advice that the authorisation was sufficient

The authorisation would have been sufficient if they had it. They didn't. The authorisation of a different, dissolved company was fraudulently altered to make it look like it belonged to Collateral.

Much like valuation reports, legal advice is dependent on the quality of the information upon which it is based.

shoi wrote: »

I must have blinked. What tells you that?

It has been discussed at length over in the P2P Independent Forum. Collateral was not authorised to facilitate P2P agreements. As such, these could not have been P2P loans as defined in Article 36H of the FSMA 2000 regulated activities order . HMRC further clarifies its definition of a P2P loan is "based on the definition used to define peer to peer lending as an activity that is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority" and "A platform that arranges article 36H agreements will be carrying on the regulated activity of 'operating an electronic system in relation to lending' and will need to be authorised by the FCA".

In short, I wouldn't try to claim income tax relief on your Collateral losses if I were you.

MoneyGeoff

I was quite surprised that Martin kept saying 'P2P Saving' instead of 'P2P Investing' on TV last night.

He did correct himself at one point and say it's investing, not saving. But then he continued to say 'P2P Saving' for the rest of the show and then again on twitter last night.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic but I would have thought in Martin's position he'd be very clear on the difference and not jumble up the terms.

george4064

I can't login to my RateSetter account at the moment.

After entering my username and password, and hit 'LOGIN' nothing happens. My internet is working fine.

Anyone else having issues?

AdrianC

george4064 wrote: »

I can't login to my RateSetter account at the moment.

After entering my username and password, and hit 'LOGIN' nothing happens. My internet is working fine.

Anyone else having issues?

Just tested, and RS are working fine from here.

masonic

MoneyGeoff wrote: »

I was quite surprised that Martin kept saying 'P2P Saving' instead of 'P2P Investing' on TV last night.

He did correct himself at one point and say it's investing, not saving. But then he continued to say 'P2P Saving' for the rest of the show and then again on twitter last night.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic but I would have thought in Martin's position he'd be very clear on the difference and not jumble up the terms.

You are not being pedantic. The FCA considers any association of P2P with 'saving' to be misleading and has even made one P2P platform change its name because it included the word 'Saving'.

Nardge

Quick Query -

When I first invested in P2P, large sums were invested, and autobid 'parcels' were equally large as a result...

Funding Circle 'Balanced' has defaulted a single loan part (£49.60), and Zopa 'Plus' several (£97.50 in total).

I believe that if I'd drip-fed the initial funds, the 'parcels' would have been smaller, and consequently,
the above default losses much smaller too? Is my thinking right?

Therefore, where no charge to sell loans is incurred (Funding Circle) and so as to create smaller 'parcels',
it'd be a good idea to sell all FC loans, reinvest the sum again in FC by dripfeed (turning autobid on and off),
thus creating tiny 'parcels', and only tiny losses as a result? Is this correct?

I know neither of the above P2P have a safeguard, though that hasn't been to my great detriment as yet.

With Kind regards

JimmyTheWig

Hopefully a quick question - when does the interest count in terms of tax purposes.

I opened a Ratesetter account in December with a 1 year product.
In January that settled early and I earned £2.97 interest.
The money went automatically into the Rolling product (see earlier posts).
I took it out of Rolling into another 1 year product and earned £1.22 interest for the period it was rolling.

Assuming that I leave the money in there for the whole year, in December I'll get a load of interest. At which point I'll probably withdraw the whole lot back to my current account.

Do I declare the £4.19 interest in this tax year, and the rest of it when it is paid in the next tax year?
Or do I only declare it when it comes back into my current account on the basis that I might not get all of it back?

masonic

JimmyTheWig wrote: »

Do I declare the £4.19 interest in this tax year, and the rest of it when it is paid in the next tax year?
Or do I only declare it when it comes back into my current account on the basis that I might not get all of it back?

You declare it as being received in the tax year in which it is paid. It does not matter if you later lose it, although you could get bad debt relief against other P2P interest at the point it is declared irrecoverable.

You will have access to a tax statement after the end of the tax year. That will summarise what you need to declare.

JimmyTheWig

Ah, ok. That makes sense.

83705628

The same thing will happen to your money either way. Funding Circle and Zopa will automatically do what you are thinking of (I think, based on my understanding of the platforms and based on the way I read what you wrote) by ensuring no more than 1% of your money goes to any one loan.

Personally I don't even worry about this. The only thing I do is, with my parent's accounts, I staggered them by a month. i.e. Mum's money was fully invested before I got Dad's account open. This ensured that they weren't both buying the same loans at the time they opened this account - diversification. A year down the line and Dad's had one default, Mum's had 7. You can't predict this stuff!