It’s not always easy to spread your money across hundreds of P2P property loans, because the deals are bigger and fewer in number. To counter for that, you have the extra protection of being able to repossess and sell the property if the borrower can’t repay. That…
Until more P2P lending websites have a longer record, searching for patterns to improve loan selection is not possible at most of them. But there’s one way to select loans that I think will work everywhere. Keen investors like to scour through past loans to…
Zopa latest: Speed of getting money on loan: up Proportion of loans accepted: up Riskier borrowers: up Interest rates: stable Zopa has taken steps to help get lenders’ money on loan faster and to stabilise rates, and set a scene which could lead to…
Proplend has now launched a “secondary market”, which is where you can buy and sell existing loan parts. Previously, with Proplend, you could just lend your money at the start of a new loan and there was no secondary market where you could sell it…
Welcome back to the third course of my 4th way. For my returning readers you’ll know that I began to look at the idea of venturing into P2P lending in Follow Me As I Learn to P2P. When I had reduced my selection down to…
Sometimes I read in the financial pages what some commentators are saying on P2P lending and I’m quite unimpressed. The general message seems to be that if you dip your toe in with a small investment, you’ll learn quickly that it’s safe, and then you can go all…
Last Friday I chaired a panel show for the first time. It was the property peer-to-peer lending panel at the Property Investor Show in ExCeL, London, and there were a lot of great questions from the audience. The panel were representing P2P lending websites that do…
Buying buy-to-let properties is a very different investment to lending to buy-to-let investors. But both are great investment opportunities in very different ways. Landbay is a P2P lending websites that offers loans to landlords with tenanted residential properties. 4thWay® rates it as one of the safest P2P…
In the past year, SIPPclub has been working with a number of the P2P platforms to enable them to accept SIPP money. This is good news, for it enables you to earn your interest tax free. Compared to lending money personally, the effect of earning…
Zopa lenders have so far lent £800 million and this week their grand total interest earned hit £50 million. That’s since Zopa launched in 2005. But over one-third of that interest has been paid to lenders in the past year alone, as Zopa grows rapidly…
Low-risk RateSetter has overcome considerable regulatory barriers to become the first personal loans P2P lending website to allow its lenders to lend through a pension. Indeed, two pensions. Lending through a pension means you pay no tax on the income you earn. Pensions come with…
UK Bond Network will be the next P2P lending website to be added to the 4thWay® comparison tables this week. UK Bond Network is for high-net worth investors or those classed as “sophisticated” only. If that’s not you then you should probably look away now. The most…
The loan acceptance rate can be incredibly useful for lenders like you and me, since it can be a strong indication that a P2P lending opportunity has strict borrower selection standards. If a P2P lending website accepts no more than around 20% of applicants, rejecting…
Lenders can use the bad-debt rate to see how low bad debts have been in the past on a P2P lending webste. An average annual bad-debt rate of 0.5% during a moderate or good economic backdrop is very low, for example. Any bank would be…
One of the first measures of risk in a P2P lending company is its historical – or “actual” bad-debt rate. This shows how many pounds of loans have gone bad as a proportion of the money lent. The bad-debt rate is variously called the “loss rate”, the…
Forecasts might not be the best way to decide whether to lend through a particular P2P lending website, but there are plenty of other ways to do so. UK Bond Network, a P2P lending website, recently sent 4thWay® enough data to get listed in its comparison…
I remember working at stock-market investment website The Motley Fool when Stuart Watson was the editor. He was a smart guy. That’s why, when I told him a friend was re-mortgaging his house to invest in the stock market, he had a very intelligent response,…
Here’s a short, but certainly sweet, article. I just had to pull a recent 4thWay® article explaining how 13% earned interest and 6% bad debts could leave you with a profit of less than 2%, all because we are taxed on the bad debts that…
The Bank of England is asking the UK’s biggest banks and building society to perform stress tests again. Like last year, the tests are not as extreme as the events of 2008-10. The argument is that that period was seen as a rare event that only happens…
The founders and directors of LendInvest, Wellesley & Co. and Assetz Capital have over two dozen limited companies between them either as part of their P2P lending operations or as companies very closely related to them. Why? More specifically, is this an extra risk that we lenders…
