First Great National Steams into P2P

It sounds like a train service, but it’s the latest P2P lending company to offer you the opportunity to do property loans. First Great National is a new peer-to-peer lending company focuses on developer loans with a maximum loan-to-value of between 70% and 80%. First Great…

Earn 5% at Lending Works Over 3 Years

Possibly the safest peer-to-peer lending company of them all, Lending Works, is increasing the interest rates from Monday 26 January. Lenders will then earn 5%. This is up from 4.3%, so it’s a big jump. It’s the interest rate you can expect after fees and…

Peer-to-Peer Lending Rebalancing Strategy

How do you rebalance your P2P loans and other investments when parts of your portfolio do better than others? For example, when your share investments perform very well and you want to split your wealth more evenly again between shares and P2P loans. Or when…

RateSetter Awards: Now Wins Ethical Lending Badge

If lending fairly, with your borrower’s interests in mind, is important to you, RateSetter has just received an award that should boost your confidence in it. RateSetter is overflowing with awards like almost no other financial company. It’s clearly doing something right. But this new…

We Want Our Freedom…to be on Benefits!

When my colleague “tweeted” (I still think of the word “tweet” in inverted commas. How square am I?) about one peer-to-peer lender helping itself through the new pension freedoms, it really rammed home how crazy these new pension rules are. In case you don’t know From…

Secured Lending Vs Provision Fund. Which is Better?

P2P lending companies use many different ways to lower the risks of lending your money. I’m going to compare two of those ways today: secured lending and bad-debt provision funds. At 4thWay, we take great pains to avoid technical language or at least to explain it clearly…

Zopa is Hitting its Targets (Just About)

Recently, Zopa, the P2P lending website that started it all, changed the mix of loans that lenders will have their money allocated to, so that they can get higher rates. At the same time, it removed its rate promise, which means that you could potentially get less…

eMoneyUnion Offering Loans to be Repaid with Pensions

New pension rules coming into effect in April 2015 will already allow retirees to spend their life savings in one go, once they reach the minimum age specified in their pension policies, which is usually 55-65. Now, one peer-to-peer lending company is giving even earlier…

More on Why Borrower Grades Are Unreliable

More evidence that the top-grade loans at different P2P lending companies can be of very different quality. My thoughts on why you have to demand much higher interest rates from Bondora compared to Funding Circle. My colleague, Neil, recently gave an example showing that a…

ArchOver Peer-to-Peer Becomes Affordable

ArchOver*, the only secured and insured business peer-to-peer lending company, is lowering its lending limit from £5,000 to £1,000 from next week. ArchOver only lends to one grade of borrower, which it calls, variably, “grade A” and “grade A+”, although perhaps its most useful description of…

Safest Peer-to-Peer Lending Interest Rates in Mid-January

Some peer-to-peer lending companies have had zero losses to lenders. They all have funds set aside to cover expected bad debts. And they have other protections, such as lending against property that can be repossessed if necessary. Of those, the ones that have the best 4thWay®…

FundingSecure: 13% Interest + 2% Bonus Tomorrow Only!

FundingSecure is a peer-to-peer lending company has been lending your money while securing it against valuable items, such as power boats and mansions. Interest rates have been close to 13%, on average, but no lender has lost any money on loans gone bad. FundingSecure has three outstanding…

How Much Richer We Got in 2014

If you lent your money for five years in 2014, you probably got richer. If you started lending for fives in the safer, lower-rate P2P lending companies last year, you should have made at least 4% and it wouldn’t have been much trouble to make around…

Savings Vs Peer-to-Peer Lending Vs Shares in 2014

I want to show you how different savings and investments did in the year just gone by. I’ve not cherry-picked this information to make peer-to-peer lending look good. I’ve looked for precisely the information that I want to know when doing a serious comparison of savings accounts…

What Customers Say About Peer-to-Peer Lending

Peer-to-peer lending companies get very high customer satisfaction ratings in surveys. Here, we collate some of the comments from their lender customers. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to negative comments! So we have to view the few comments selected by the P2P lending companies with…

Invest in rebuildingsociety Through a P2P Pension

While eyes have been focused on the upcoming P2P ISAs (tax-free lending), individuals lending through peer-to-peer have been able to lend tax-free in pensions for six months already. The latest peer-to-peer lending company to allow lenders to lend through a pension is rebuildingsociety. The higher-risk, higher-potential return…

Same Loan Grade, Different Risk

It’s like when your say that a piece of art looks beautiful while the man at your side shakes his head in disgust. You’re both entitled to your opinions. Similarly, there are no regulations that define what an A+ loan is, or an A, or any other loan…

Lending on rebuildingsociety Till 18 Jan

Here are the latest high-rate loans that are open for you to bid on from rebuildingsociety, the P2P lending company that finances riskier loans to businesses. Lending on rebuildingsociety over the next ten days could give you a pre-bad debt interest rate of 16% to…

Lending Works’ Bad-Debt Provision Fund Got Better

Sorry that we missed this somehow, especially since I’m a Lending Works member: its bad-debt provision fund has got better from 1 January. The worst bit is that I was sort of told this by someone working there in December. Anyway… Here’s the situation: Lending…

Good and Bad News for Zopa Lenders

Zopa, the oldest peer-to-peer lending company in the world, has increased its interest rates to 5.1% and 4%, but, at the same time, it has removed its rate promise. Zopa’s rate promise has been assuring lenders for over a year now that they will get…

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