Can you believe the world’s banking regulators actually let this happen? Risky lending triggered the 2008 financial crisis, so regulators banned the big banks from doing it. But then those same regulators allowed the banks to lend money to non-bank lenders—who could still make the…
History has shown so far that when P2P lending sites, close, few of them end up paying reduced returns to lenders as a result of closing down and winding down loans until they’re repaid. (Although, as usual, you can suffer losses from bad debts after…
P2P lending costs money for both borrowers and lenders. Because there’s no such thing as a free lunch! Firstly, I’ll explain how “free” lending actually costs you money, starting with an example from another finance-related industry that all of you should be familiar with, namely…
If you invest by buying shares through the stock market, you can be confident that most of your money is working for you most of the time. And you can reinvest with ease in seconds. It’s extremely rare when this becomes difficult. Not so with…
This is a brief look at all your quality investment options. I also make the case that there’s one form of investment that trumps the rest. And – to be candid – it’s not P2P lending. Four of the five quality investments that everyone should…
The majority of peer-to-peer and online lending focuses on development lending. That sector has gone through a very rough patch in recent years and I’ve been wondering whether too many individual lenders have not spread across other types of lending. So it’s a good time…
We had a query from a 4thWay user about tax rules on lender fees recently, so I thought we could answer that for everyone. The reader was asking about whether lender fees are tax deductible, what that even means, which P2P lending companies currently charge…
Whenever you invest (and money lending is a form of investment), you’re taking a risk that you’ll lose money. Not just lose to inflation – which is a loss that is practically guaranteed to happen in savings accounts. But I mean an actual loss in…
You have dozens of choices when it comes to peer-to-peer property lending. As far as we know, we’re listing every single one of your choices on this page that we at 4thWay consider to be P2P lending. The majority of P2P property lending websites offer…
Sometimes P2P lending companies close down or shift away from being P2P businesses. When they do, you want to see loans repaid in an orderly fashion. That’s why they have plans for this scenario in advance. These plans are intended to make it highly probable…
As of 30th June, 2024 The new 4thWay Peer-to-Peer And Direct Lending Index (PADL Index) was launched in August 2024. It enables investors to compare long-run returns to shares and other asset classes. Constituents’ returns have massively outpaced the stock market. In the ten years…
Invest & Fund lending slowed, but should pick up again 4thWay’s specialists conducted a full reassessment on Invest & Fund this month. There’s nothing at all to report on the risk-reward balance, which remains solid. This update is more about a slow down in lending…
4thWay has long collated more data on peer-to-peer lending than probably anyone else, stretching back to the very first P2P loan ever made. And now, we have sufficient data from a large enough number of important P2P lending providers to start accurately tracking performance. So…
I’m back! It’s been ages since I told you about anything through 4thWay, so I’m pleased to take you through the latest on cashback. Whatever happened to P2P lending cashback? A few years ago, the regulator banned cashback, which had been used to lure people…
Some lenders choose to lend through a type of pension called a self-invested personal pension, or SIPP. These are many and varied, but they often give investors an expanded choice of what they can invest in, albeit for a high price. SIPPs have historically suffered…
We told HMRC that, reading the rules for ISAs, “they don’t actually prohibit people opening multiple IFISAs in one tax year, provided they only subscribe new money to one of them”… Do they? A representative from HMRC has told us this “looks correct”. That’s about…
As you may know, you can only open one IFISA in a tax year, which runs from the 6th of April to the 5th of April, and this limits your ability to spread your money and the risks across lots of providers. Opening more than…
Last year, in 2023, if you invested in one of the cheapest and best share funds to cover the entire UK stock market, through Vanguard, and you did it directly through them in their own ISA, you’ll probably have made around 6.8%. That’s assuming you…
Owning property is one of the four ways that gives 4thWay its name. As we sometimes say: “there’s the savings way, the property ownership way, the stock market way, and now there’s the P2P lending way: the 4thWay”. All are equally fantastic ways to save…
Peer-to-peer lending is not a regulated phrase. By 4thWay’s definition, any online lending company is peer-to-peer if it structures itself and its loans to offer the same level of protection as direct lending, in order to protect lenders in the event that the lending company…
