Hi all,
Has anyone here looked at Lending Club and One Desk? Curious if anyone has some thoughts on these …
Anirban
I have not personally done it, but my brother just started putting money there. So far its worked out well for him, but we’re just talking a matter of months so its really too early to tell.
When I initially talked to him about the Lending Club, he pointed me to this article on the personal finance site, Mr. Money Mustache:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/the-lending-club-experiment/
If you go to the end of the table in the article, it was last updated at the end of February 2015, and the blogger states he has gotten a 12.21% annual return thus far.
I don’t do it because I would think the longer a loan goes on, the likelier the chance the loan is defaulted on. I mean nobody takes out a loan with the intention of defaulting, but things happen. And I wouldn’t want to trust a total stranger in doing the right thing like picking up a second job so he/she can meet all their financial obligations instead of just declaring bankruptcy. Hence, I would expect you might start out with great returns, but over the course of time those returns would diminish as more and more people defaulted.
This seems to jive with the table on the site, as in his first year Mr. Money Mustache saw 17% returns (from Sept. 2012 to Sept. 2013), his second year those returns dropped to an average of 13% though, and they are now down to the current 12.2%.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s not bad, but it’s just not my cup of tea. Also, if I had a much larger portfolio (mine is currently pretty small), I might do it just as a way to further diversify. I hope this helped.
- Matt
3 Likes
Thanks Matt.
I was thinking of the company and the stock. Google has a stake in the company and it IPO’ed late last year.
I will dig around a bit. I find the peer to peer lending model quite fascinating. What bothers me though is that online banks can also achieve some of the efficiencies these P2P platform tries to achieve.
Anirban