In Funding 0
Issued & Current 528
Fully Paid 75
Late 16 - 30 Days 3
Late 31 - 120 Days 7
Default 0
Charged Off 10
I’ve been “harvesting” since last year, as my mortgage is about 4.5% and I’ll take the guaranteed profit (i.e. savings) from paying that down over the risky “9%”. The rough 20% number was 20 bad / 95 finished.
As for misbehaving, this particular loan took me by surprise:
So that sucks. It only had 12 payments left, but I still lost money. Oh well. Could be worse. I could be that guy. Of those 10 late payments, I think 3 will come current again. One guy sent a check in, one guy always goes late but pays once the collections people call him, and one person just made a payment so I don’t even know why he’s marked late.
So the good news is the collections department actually works sometimes.
Well, on the deceased guy: if his estate had any money, debts must be settled out of the estate proceeds, so while your payment might be delayed, you may well eventually get paid.
That Chapter 7 loan just got charged off. Weirdly, my returns haven’t taken that big of a hit - either they haven’t recalculated yet, or the 14 dollars wasn’t enough to make a big difference. Still 8.88% (I think it was 8.9something before).
Oddness: I have 2-3 class D loans. One was initially funded in June of this year. The first payment was in August. I looked at the credit score history and they haven’t updated that since August. It’s paying (this month’s is processing right now), but it’s strange that the score change graph hasn’t been updated. All the others I glanced at have scores as of November.
My B4 wedding loan that plummeted (5 rows on the chart in November) just completed a payment. So who knows how that’ll go. I don’t hold up great hopes.
Mine may have gone straight from Late to Charged Off. Certainly the last time I looked (last month, a few days before the payment was due) it was still at Late status.
I suspect that with the Chapter 7 filing, they decided it was never going to be recovered so skipped the step.
My annual return is at 8.93% right now. No loans are late, though there are a few that have had rather precipitous credit rating drops which might be harbingers of Bad Things To Come.
I think a couple of my borrowers must have gotten Christmas bonuses though. One paid off entirely right beforehand (an A3 that was less than a year old) and one substantial prepayment of 10 dollars (a B1 that had an interesting purpose: to buy new trumpets for a musician who’d just gotten a position at a major symphony orchestra).
Something I just noticed and I don’t know if they’ve done this all along: on that partial prepayment, the “remaining payments” count was reduced to 17 on the loan’s page. That makes sense with the remaining principal; the loan was only 3ish months old so the remaining payments figure would have been more like 33.
I currently have 64 issued/current loans, 1 in funding, 2 charged off, and 8 fully paid. I’m not adding much new principal, just an auto-transfer of 20 dollars a month. As of November, I’d gotten about 9.50 in interest for the month, 85ish total for the year, minus that 14 dollar writeoff.
My current annualized return is 8.78%. That wedding really killed me.
I’m up to 50 loans now, but that’s just from reinvesting my earnings. I’m now at the point where I receive a credit into my account every business day. Yeah, it’s only between 2 and 5 a day, but it still puts a smile on my face to see more there today than yesterday.
I also had another loan pay off last week. I was thinking Christmas bonus as well, Mama Zappa. I really don’t like the early payoffs.
ETA: My interest for November was: $9.61. YTD was $84.73
I am at -1.61%, having started in April and have had 3 loans go bad out of 50. I was about to post that nothing happened over Christmas, but today a loan (E5) went into the 16 - 30 day late category. The borrower paid each of the last three months during the grace period. There is a note that the borrower contacted Lending Club on 12/20. Sounds like s/he is struggling.
Ouch (for the borrower as well as you, I suspect s/he’s out a lot more than 25 bucks).
For late / dead loans, what grades were they? (not just you, but others as well). Mine are both C-class (one C1 and one C2). One went bad after roughly 6 months, the other went into a payment plan after 17 payments, followed by 2 partial payments, then nothing else. In the latter case, the borrower actually went into Chapter 7; the first borrower just disappeared.
I’m in Tennessee and wasn’t able to sign up for Lending Club. I did make almost a 20% gain on the IRA I’m managing for my mother’s estate. I’m disbursing it to my siblings over 5 years. I started last year at $97K and ended the year with $115K before I took out this year’s payout. I was pleased.
Never making a single payment takes it out of the “bad luck” category straight into “outright fraud”
Fortunately I haven’t yet had a loan go bad, but does the Lending Club have any sort of legal action that they pursue against these people?
I’ve been following you folks for several months now and thought I’d make myself known. I appreciate all the info I have picked up here.
I started with Lending Club in April of 2011.
My loans look like this:
In Funding 2
Issued & Current 211
Fully Paid 5
Late 16 - 30 Days 0
Late 31 - 120 Days 1
Default 0
Charged Off 0
As you can see, five have paid off early. One paid off on the first payment and the rest made two or three payment before paying off.
The one that is +30 days late is a C3 debt consolidation.
I only purchase A, B, and C loans and my return at present is 8.2%. My reason for starting with Lending Club was to attempt to beat the low rates on CD’s so I will be well satisfied if the 8.2% holds up.
Anyway, hello and thanks again for all your insights.
Doug
So, you dove right in to the deep end, eh? I estimate you started with approximately $5K. What’s been your monthly return in dollars? [please don’t feel obligated to answer this question]
For around 6 months or so, I’ve been contemplating going in bigger, but have become a little gun shy because of a default and ultimate charge-off.
I’ve been doing this for a little over a year now. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to add more to it, and I’ve lost a little money since I opened the account. I also have to trade on the secondary market because the laws of my state don’t allow me to actually fund loans. As soon as it’s worth it for me to sell out, I’m going to do that and close the account. It’s just not worth it.
I’ve been slowly cashing out as well. I’ve got 22 in late/chargeoff with only 83 paid fully. And as you know, some of those 83 paid off early, leaving me no interest. I don’t see this going well in the end. I won’t lose money, but I’m not sure it’ll beat the market these days.
My charged off loans:
A4, A5, B1, B2, B3, B4, B4, B5, B5, C1, C2, C2, C3.
My late loans:
A3, A4, A5, A5, A5, B3, B4, B5, C1
Thus far I’ve been satisfied with my investments. I started with just some seed money of $250 to test it out a little over a year ago.
I’ve gone through 15 notes, 14 in funding (never a late payment) and 1 fully paid.
My return has been 9.3% over approximately 14 months and I have a portfolio that tends to run around 55/35/10 for A/B/C, which I think is rather conservative.
My results lead me to believe that I’m good to start putting more in. I may bump it up to 1K sometime soon. But there are two things that concern me about this Lending Club.
The first is the sheer number of unverified pieces of information in each person’s request. At best I’ll get a verified income, which can suffice, but I’d really like to know that everything is being verified as truthful or what’s the point? People can start putting in anything they want, leading to…
The second piece is the huge risk of fraud in this endeavor. Like was mentioned in amarone’s post above, people can grab $20,000 in funding and ride off into the sunset. What then? Where’s our protection? Sure, the Lending Club can make some legal moves but their interest is just in ensuring that we remain faithful and continue investing. Their interest is not about getting their own money back because they have no money invested. So what’s the incentive on their end to fully pursue costly legal action as opposed to handwaving and saying they’re trying their best to get that money back? And with $25 invested it’s certainly not worth my time or effort to go after them. So what then?
Of those 10 late payments, I think 3 will come current again. One guy sent a check in, one guy always goes late but pays once the collections people call him, and one person just made a payment so I don’t even know why he’s marked late.