On second-charge loans approved on or after 1st November 2025, Somo* is providing 10% first-loss protection on the money you lend. The total Somo will ever pay out for the guarantee is capped at £1.2 million. Somo’s guarantee cuts in when all reasonable attempts to…
Unbolted’s IFISA And Classic Account are Unrated, because we don’t receive sufficient data to conduct our full assessments. Unbolted has only sporadically provided information and sparse data to 4thWay. Lenders seem to be offered around after bad debts, if you re-lend your loans and interest….
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…
We’ve had a loooot of emails from lenders about recent changes at Kuflink, as well as one or two about bad debts. I’ve finished my investigations into the changes and re-interviewed key people at Kuflink. I’ve also done some preliminary research on bad debts in…
Annualised returns after costs and losses have averaged 7.49%, with no losing months. The graph above is not smoothed but actual results over time. I note that, if all write-offs from bad debts were squashed into the same period of time, it would have meant…
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…
Downing Crowd’s Property Development Lending & Wholesale Lending is unrated, due to lack of information. These loans have been paying lenders around interest before bad debts. Visit Downing Crowd or keep reading the Downing Crowd Review.
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…
P2P lending, IFISA lending and other online lending is pretty simple and straightforward to do well, but only if you do all the routine things right. Neither 4thWay’s lending tips nor any other educational information from us or elsewhere online can save you from disappointment,…
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…
I’m super proud of what 4thWay has done for many lenders and of our record. We have made some mistakes, but our ratings, research and guidance has been very accurate. More accurate than it needs to be for lenders to comfortably make satisfactory returns over…
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…
I don’t often write about the ethical, ecological, responsible, “doing good” or social aspects of lending. Hardly anyone clicks on headlines like that. Yet now that I’ve tricked you into this one with my vague title, would you give me a few minutes, as: We…
LEND.ch is a Swiss peer-to-peer lending provider offering lending in Swiss francs (CHF). It hasn’t opened up to 4thWay’s specialists with data and access to its key people and therefore we haven’t conducted our usual week’s long assessment of it. So this is kind of…
Update: the first answer was corrected on 10th June after a stupid error by me. My apologies. On the positive side, on the 11th June HMRC explicitly confirmed to 4thWay that our second answer is correct. We have two questions on flexible ISAs and one…
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…
Occasionally lenders reach out to 4thWay and describe what they are up to, how they’re doing and what their experiences have been when lending. I really appreciate the contact from you! Recently I had an email that inspired me to write this page today. I’m…
The people normally using 4thWay’s research are all very lucky. I mean, I presume you have money to spare if you’re lending it. There are an awful lot of people who can’t say the same. Yet I think it’s worth looking at the other side…
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…
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