Peer to Peer Lending- some advise please?

Jonbvn

agent69 wrote: »

Not a fan and a long way past being a boy.

However, I'm as mercenary as the next man, and will be happy to openly support any platform if the money's right (no reasonable offer refused)

I joined FC in the very early days. I have minimal funds with the platform now, since it is just too labour intensive to make a decent return. Furthermore their debt recovery is poor.

N1AK

arbster wrote: »

Hopefully it should be the exception rather than the rule where investors are aware of an impending bad debt situation before FC are able to downgrade a loan and/or prevent sale of loan parts.

That's probably true, although I take exception to FundingCircles refusal to allow auto-bidders to opt out of the 2nd hand market. It certainly does happen though, and even if only 1 loan in 200 bought was a duff 2nd hand loan it would have a sizeable impact on a lenders return.

N1AK

Just done some totting up. I've actually lost money on FundingCircle in the period between August & today... Not exactly a stellar performance when they've predicted ~8% pa and I've got less than 0.7% invested in any one loan!

Fortunately I'm still a couple of hundred up overall.

Chris_Vidler

Hi

My experience might not be typical but recently I put some of my savings into Zopa, Ratesetter and Funding Circle. Unforeseen circumstances have forced me to withdraw some of these savings - the process was painless and more or less automatic with Ratesetter and Zopa but not so with Funding circle. In short my request to them to withdraw funds has now gone on for a month. I have complained and they have pointed out that they do indicate that withdrawals are not automatic but I dont think this is made clear on their website. Mine might be an isolated example but I would be interested to learn of the experience of others.

best wishes

Chris

arbster

Chris_Vidler wrote: »

My experience might not be typical but recently I put some of my savings into Zopa, Ratesetter and Funding Circle. Unforeseen circumstances have forced me to withdraw some of these savings - the process was painless and more or less automatic with Ratesetter and Zopa but not so with Funding circle. In short my request to them to withdraw funds has now gone on for a month. I have complained and they have pointed out that they do indicate that withdrawals are not automatic but I dont think this is made clear on their website. Mine might be an isolated example but I would be interested to learn of the experience of others.

I think it's relatively clear that if you need to get your money out of Funding Circle you have to sell down your loan parts to free up the capital. There's an autosale function, but if you want to free up funds more quickly you could use the "Sell Individually" function to offer a preferential rate to buyers to make your loan parts more attractive, obviously at a cost. There's also an element of trying to ensure you secure the best possible rates when buying loan parts, which will increase their resale potential.

Having said all that, P2P lending is really only for funds that you're happy to lock away for the 3-5 years of the loan. I realise you said it was unforeseen circumstances, so you didn't plan to sell down your FC loans early. I hope you manage to extract the remainder of your investment soon.