I currently have 19 notes. They’re all chugging along. The excitement seems to have worn off for me. I check my account once every two weeks or so and purchase a new note whenever I have enough in the account to do so. I haven’t transferred any money into my account since November.
Since I opened my LC account 5 months ago, I’ve received $114.33 in payments, of which $19.24 is interest. This is on my $500 investment which, according to my calculations means that my effective interest rate is 9.4%, which is much, much better than I can get from any bank. Maybe I should just take the plunge and throw $10,000 in there.
I finally got around to giving all this a closer look and wouldn’t you know it: Oregon is on their shit list (or vice versa). How do I get around this, when they ask for your address?
I hear there are ways around it, but it sounds kind of sketchy to me, so I won’t repeat it here.
What I did was sign up under their trading platform called Folio*fn, *because my state, NJ, also doesn’t allow its residents to use the Lending Club main site to lend. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing so. For me, the pluses outweighed the minuses, the main plus being that I make so much more in interest than I could from any bank, so I jumped in.
I gather you sign up as an investor and then have to do a separate folio application (which is trivial). Onamatopoeia can tell you more; I have a folio account but have never bought / sold there.
You won’t see it on the home page, or login page. What you have to do first is to create an LC account. If your state doesn’t allow you to use the main LC platform to fund notes, you will be given an option at that time to sign up with Foliofn, but again, you must create a Lending Club account first.
To date I’ve realized 13.6% annualized return. Wow! I really just kinda remembered I had this account. I’m bought 2 more notes today with the $30 I had sitting in there doing nothing, and I’m transferring in some more funds as soon as I verify my bank account. I had 6 loans with 5 active and 1 paid in full, bought 2 today and I’d like to get up to 25 or so. I have to trade on the Foliofn platform because of where I live, but I kind of like that you can see the history of the loan before making a decision to buy.
I limit my search parameters to loans that are current and less than 36 months, then I only purchase loans that are offered at a discount.
I just went to the account creation page and, you’re correct, Oregon is not on the list. I just called Lending Club and spoke to Blake for you. I told him I have a friend in Oregon who’s interested in investing. Blake told me that Oregon is one of the states not approved to invest in either the Lending Club or Foliofn side.
He did say that if you are an accredited investor, they could make arrangements for you to invest, but you’d have to speak to them for the details, and an explanation of what would make you an accredited investor.
Don’t know what an accredited investor is, but I’m reasonably sure that I don’t qualify. What a pain in the arse. I wonder what the hell Oregon’s problem is.
I think it’d be worth the phone call to find out what you can do, if anything, through them. None of my other investments are returning anywhere near the rates I’m getting from Lending Club.
Just for giggles I went and looked through foliofn, holy crap there are some morons posting stuff over there. Either that or there are really ugly typos…people wanting $250 for loans with $22 in principal remaining… or better yet, who posts $500 on a D loan…then tries to sell it for more than $500 when their credit drops.
It’s not stupidity, it’s laziness. Over time, the outstanding principal goes down. People post an offer of, say, $250 for $250 outstanding, and it doesn’t sell. 12 months later, it’s only $25 outstanding and the offer hasn’t been updated or deleted because the seller forgot about it or doesn’t care enough to come back to it. It’ll be there until the loan has been repaid in full.