What is your experience in P2P lending?
I find this intro funny. It has the look and feel of a cliche AA meeting introduction. Hello, I'm Rich Lather, and I'm a lender. My last loan was this past Friday.
I joined in December 06 with $200 to loan. The more I looked around, the more I saw this site as a huge scam to throw money at deadbeats....and that was only at the first glance at the borrower applications. I had not explored the extensive data-sets of ericc or lenderstats. I pulled my money back out. That's the downside of having an intro screen to the lending page--the turds are the most visible.
In August, my roommate wanted to redo his finances. He had been paying excessive amounts on interest on credit card balances, and wanted to get ahead of the game. I pointed him to p____.com and funded 10% of his loan. I have already been burned at lending to longtime friends and felt p____.com added a layer of security and accountability to the whole transaction--which it did. I started lending to "unknowns" after that. I started off lending rather carelessly, but after finding and analyzing Ericc and lendingstats, I have been a bit more scrupulous with my lending. After a while, I came up with some personal lending rules that have played out so far, and I hope it continues as the loans age. So far, only one loan has gone south, and that was one made during my learning process.
Now, after lending $2k, I am just reinvesting interest to see how this whole game plays out. So far, only one late, possibly going to default......from California of all places--go figure.
Why did you end up at Prospers.org?
I got kicked from the prosper forum for not having a correct registration. It had something to do with my use of my screen name rather than my email login or something. I find the whole thing to be rather bizarre. Prosper has a vested interest in maintaining a good PR, but to host a forum, and then try to censor it is a bit heavy handed. Did they change management, or did they move from naive startup to cold, hard corporate mentality? I've not seen a company go from Google's "do no evil" to Microsoft-like "command and conquer" in such a short period.
I found Prospers early on, but did not know it had a forum. Recently, I did a sanity check on p____.com's model by searching Google and found this site along with a number of others. I would list the source story leading me here, but I just don't recall. Needless to say, I feel somewhat more comfortable posting here than I did on a forum with the capacity and history of banning people from lending based on their posted opinions.
Where to do you live?
Tallahassee, FL
What do you do?
Engineer
Other Hobbies?
Travel, fishing and hunting.
