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[Mark12547]

12547 is a prime number. I'll leave it as an exercise for the Gentle Reader to discover my first name or my Prosper id.

What is your experience in P2P lending?

I first heard of Prosper.com from the "Consumer Credit / Credit Card" forum on fool.com (the web site for The Motley Fool). Later a Fool board named "Prosper.com Discussion" was created, so I ended up joining the Foolish Loans group.

I joined prosper.com on Apr-28-2006, basically spent May going through the manual id verification and bank verification process and the first transfer of funds, and started lending in June 2006. I have 24 loans dating from June 2006 to March 2007: 17 current, 2 <15d, 2 defaulted, 3 paid). I have one current bid. The last time I checked my Excel XIRR spreadsheet, my returns have been positive but not particularly impressive.

Why did you end up at Prospers.org?

I joined prospers.org on January 04, 2007. I don't recall what prompted me to join, but I think it was because I saw someone who I grew to respect post a link to over here, and not just in the signature. (I usually don't follow links in signatures.)

In spite of some of the messages deviating from "polite society", many knowledgeable people posted on these forums and continue to post, work on data analysis and retrieval tools, and discussions touch a number of topics of interest.

Where to do you live?

Oregon State (not at the coast), United States of America, Earth, Sol System, The Milky Way Galaxy, Universe.

What do you do?

I work in IT at a community college. My title is "Software Support Specialist", which basically means that I do maintenance on our administrative software packages we purchased from SunGard, and some light-weight coding for unix or Oracle.

I also volunteer some of my time off helping the Foundation at my employer, sometimes stuffing envelopes for a fund raiser, or going through scholarship applications, calculating unmet need or scoring them with others as a way that the Scholarship Selection Committee determines who gets which scholarships since we have far more applications than we have money.

Other Hobbies?

I watch a lot of movies and shows, my favorite movies tend to be science fiction, action, and musicals. TV shows are similar plus science-related and some history-related. My Netflix queue tends to reflect that mix. I tend to also look for comedies but apparently my taste is out of step with the times, usually preferring stuff closer to slapstick than contemporary humor (think, for example, the Naked Gun movies, or the short-lived Police Squad! TV series). I am usually on the web, usually in one forum or another, while watching TV.

I frequent some other boards, such as Fool.com, Morningstar.com and Bogleheads Investment Forum. Actually, more like I used to frequent them a lot until I came to Prosper.com, but I am slowly catching up on them, now that Prosper.com lobotomized the official forums.

Links

These are some sites that I sometimes make use of:
http://www.ericscc.com/
http://www.lendingstats.com/
http://www.wiseclerk.com/

Current Prosper Status

I am not banned, at least not yet.

I am in the process of withdrawing my funds; but just before Prosper Marketplace, Inc., decided to scrub their site of all references to prospers.org, a specific borrower struck me as an honest person doing what appears to be the right thing with her finances, so I had moved in a chunk of money to bid on her listing. Therefore, instead of claiming I am withdrawing my funds, I can only claim I am mostly withdrawing my funds with rare exceptions.

Other investment experience

I tend to invest using index funds or close equivalents, following a static asset allocation plan. I have long-term investments in a 403(b) at TIAA-CREF (Equity Index, Bond Market, Real Estate), in taxable accounts and a Roth IRA at Vanguard (Total Stock Market Index Fund, Tax-Managed International (stock) Fund, Bond Market Index Fund, REIT Index Fund).

My emergency fund is multi-tiered between a money market account (my credit union), a money market fund (Vanguard), and less liquid but hopefully slightly better yielding older Savings Bonds at TreasuryDirect. I still have money at Ing Direct but, because of the declining yields, I am in the process of moving money out of Ing Direct. I am also toying with the idea of getting a Treasury Bill (Treasuries with maturities under one year, typically 28d, 3m, or 6m), but I like liquidity for my emergency fund.

Prosper.com lending started as an experiment, not as a substantial investment. In the grand scheme of things, right now Prosper loans would look more like junk bonds: better yield than safe instruments, but much more risk, too. If I didn't have reservations about Prosper Marketplace, Inc., I think I could do better now than I did back when I first started because of the additional information that is now available and a better understanding of the risks involved.