Zopa Lending?

Scorpiomarie

Hi all, I've come across a website called Zopa and I am thinking of lending money with this website because it has over 5% interest with a five year loan, and it sounds like a great place to make money with my own money that I'm willing to put into the website. I've looked into it a lot and now I think I should get opinions from people who have already started lending to them, how much did you lend and how much did you make in the end? I'm really interested in this, thanks very much :j

Here is a their website: http://www.zopa.com/

System

While I'm sure you would get an answer here you may well do better on the investments/saving part of the MSE forum:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=17

There are lots of mentions of Zopa and I personally have heard good things about them.

Ypaymore

You can find out how it works, how it's regulated, what the risks are, etc in this article by MSE .

See here: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/peer-to-peer-lending

Scorpiomarie

Thanks for the replies, okay I will post this on the savings and investments forum because I want to hear how much money members of zopa have earned

ahomemadetouch

Scorpiomarie wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, okay I will post this on the savings and investments forum because I want to hear how much money members of zopa have earned

be awake its not risk free - i have had loans defaulted on its defiantly a long term thing

andydiysaver

ahomemadetouch wrote: »

be awake its not risk free - i have had loans defaulted on its defiantly a long term thing

that actually astonishes me due to the stringency of the checks to do it the other way and get a zopa loan


so to my mind this so called defaulting is zopa taking even more of a cut - their rates are right where they should be - above a high interest account but not much more above than that. It's the market setting the rate, and I would argue that if you offset their pickiness in who applies at one end versus the frequency of default on the other, you see that a sizable chunk of money is missing -because the two are not of equal weight but should be


that's what stops me lending , this greed which must be the gap between the small fraction of a percentage who actually do default and the published number of defaulters. It is this number that makes zopa a good bet if you run zopa, a bad bet otherwise...

Wizzbang

I would advise you listen to some of the MoneyBox Live podcasts on the BBC Radio 4 website regarding this. I'm afraid most of the reports on there have been negative about this kind of lending. Sure, it sounds good on paper- but as another poster said- a lot of loans are defaulting. They advise you only do it if you have money you can't put elsewhere or are more than happy to lose.