A Penny Saved answered my questions about his Prosper Marketplace loan.

My major concerns were about home ownership terms and conditions and how quickly the loan would be paid back.

The question:

It says you are a home owner. Can you give the details of your loan (rate, term etc) and your current estimated equity situation in the home? Secondly, how soon do you plan to pay back the loan considering it is only for credit building?

The answer:

“30 year fixed, 5.25%, 30k equity give or take 1 year most likely as far as pay back time (Jun-19-2008)”

I am thinking more and more about bidding on this one despite the poor lender guidance rate of return.

• Loan Money on Prosper to “The Penny Saved”?
• What NOT to say in your Personal Loan Application
• Review My First Prosper Loans and Win a Book!
• Kiva.org Goes Wanting for Borrowers! $1 Million Loaned this week!
• Donald Trump Saves Ed Mcmahon’s Mansion

Since my new feed is now working in P2P No Bank Blog Aggregator, I have added several WordPress plugins to make my P2P Lending blog work better. Thanks to Rate Ladder for adding it back to the aggregator.

And thank you for your patience while I work out the new theme.

If you are into WordPress or comment often on this blog, you will be interested to know that I added the following WordPress Plugins:

• Do Follow Plugin Lucia’s Link Love: If you comment three times, your name becomes followed. After commenting five times any link you post in your comments becomes followed. This plugin recognizes that the people who comment on a blog contribute to the content.
• Most Commented Posts
• Gravatar Display but I am a little unhappy with the default Gravatar. Sign up for a Gravatar if you comment regularly to have your picture display by your comments.
• Top Commentators – I’ll probably update monthly. Regular commentators will have a followed link on each page.
• Social Bookmarking with NoFollow. I had hacked Social before myself, but Andy released the pre-hacked version after explaining why you should nofollow social bookmark links.

Technorati Tags: wordpress plugins

• Review My First Prosper Loans and Win a Book!
• Requesting Advice on P2P Lending
• First Two Months Blogging P2P Lending
• Lending Club Referral Program – It’s Official!
• Pennsylvania loans or what were early Prosper lenders thinking?

I have been intending to update this theme for a while because Kevin and I could not make Personal Loan Portfolio aggregate into P2P No Bank. To rule out the theme as a possibility, I have updated it.

This theme is not Adsense optimized like the theme from Dosh Dosh that I was using. I liked the one from Dosh Dosh, but need to check if it was impacting the RSS feed.

I decided to try Free BizFresh Theme from PremiumThemes.Net. I think it looks good and it was quick to modify and set up. I’ll probably keep it if it works with P2P No Bank. After testing that, I will tweek it a bit more like returning commnts to be “DO FOLLOW” and adding back some Adsense ads.

Let me know if you like it.

• More Website Updates Including Following Comments
• Lending Club Quiet Period: Is a Secondary Loan Market Coming?
• Zopa Promises to be Different
• Rex Dixon: Social Media Director of Lending Club Blog
• Prosper Allowing Choice of Collection Agency

I extended the deadline to March 1st to win a finance book for reviewing my first Prosper lending strategy.  I thought that this would be a fun way to gather more knowledge around lending and reward those who assist.

I typed up lots of rules at the bottom, but don’t let that intimidate you.  The meat of the rules simply say to post your review of four of my loans (or bids) and what you think I should do differently next time.  Did I miss anything important in the loan review process?

You will have a great chance to win the book since no one has submitted any feedback so far.

Thanks!

• Review My First Prosper Loans and Win a Book!
• Update on New Lending Club Screen Difference
• Submit for the next P2P Lending Carnival
• P2P Lending Carnival #4
• Vote For P2P Lending: Crunchies and Change.Org

I looked up the Prosper Book on Amazon and noticed a link to the P2P lending site DUCK9. The author of the book, Roger Steciak, states in his blog on Amazon:

I was interviewed recently by the SocialLendingWatch.com blog and realized there are now seven sites in the United States offering or planning to offer for-profit people-to-people lending. Duck9, LendingClub, and Prosper are up and running now, while GlobeFunder, Loanio, Microplace, and Zopa have announced their intentions of launching at some point.

Since it mentions Zopa is due to launch, we know the post is out of date because Zopa launched several months ago.  However, I was surprised that I had never heard of Duck9 since it merited a mention from “The Prosper Book” author. I searched for reviews of DUCK9 but found little information. I browsed over to the site DUCK9.com. It seems like a small niche lending site for students, even smaller than Fynaz will be. The DUCK9 site also has some information on auto loans.

The name is odd but they give a reasonable explanation. DUCK stands for “Digital Underground Credit Knowledge” since a portion of the goal of the site is helping students with their credit score. The number nine is for the code used on credit reports for charge offs. Personally, I would like to avoid the number 9 being anywhere near my P2P lending portfolio, but they state the goal is to reduce the number of charge offs — 9s.

The page about how Duck9 works says that you can earn up to 9% on your loans guaranteed or around 12% not guaranteed. Nine percent guaranteed sounds fantastic with today’s interest rates until you read that they are not FDIC insured. Funds are DUCK9 insured. That guarantee is not worth much to me considering that I have never heard of the site.

They do offer some nice features to borrowers like sending reminders via SMS when bills are due to try to help the borrowers remember all bills and not just the DUCK9 loan.

I see several red flags on a web site asking me for money for peer lending:

• I already mentioned the unclear targeting — auto loans and students.
• The site has Google AdSense advertisements on a few of the pages. See this one. Information sites use AdSense for revenue, but I don’t think that a P2P lending site should be using AdSense to earn money. It looks cheap.
• The registration page is not encrypted. It uses HTTP rather than HTTPS.
• The site also sells an eBook on improving your FICO score — link.
• The cheesy home page and the inconsistent site layout look unprofessional.
• Incorrect punctuation and capitalization in the site copy.

If you want to take a risk on both the service and some students, you will have to wait. According to the lender registration page, there is a significant wait list to be a lender. Fire the marketing department! They can’t find students in need of money. How hard can that be? Quote from the page:

Become a Duck9 lender

This is open to US residents only. The maximum you can lend out is $10,000. You must have a valid social security number.

Duck9 might ask you for recent bank statements, credit card statements, mortgage statements, etc.

NOTE: there is a SIGNIFICANT waitlist to be a lender.
Money isn’t accepted while you’re on the waitlist

With all the other P2P lending options coming up in the near future, I’ll skip DUCK9.

Has anyone else heard of DUCK9 or have any information on it?

• Glenn Chapman on P2P lending at Prosper, Virgin, Kiva and Zopa
• Zopa Open for P2P Lending in the USA
• Contest for Prosper Loan Reviews Still Open
• New Blog Theme
• Review of Lending Club Update: New Portfolio View, FICO Score, & More

Are you a current P2P lender? If so, which of the following services are you using? If you are not a current P2P lender, are you considering it? If you select another P2P lending site, please mention in the comments which one. Thanks for voting.

If you are considering P2P lending, sign up with Lending Club or Prosper for traditional P2P lending, Zopa for risk free CDs, or Kiva for philanthropic mico-loans.

• Glenn Chapman on P2P lending at Prosper, Virgin, Kiva and Zopa
• Lending Club ROI Bonus: 5% extra return as a “Thank You!”
• Poll Results: Investing Next $500 with Lending Club
• Vote for Uncrunch America at Change.Org One More Time
• Zopa Promises to be Different

CNN is reporting that congress is planning to examine credit card company practices. One of the main policies under scrutiny is that many credit card companies have started raising the interest rate if the card holder’s credit score declines — even if they have never made a late payment on the card. If congress outlaws some of the more abusive practices like this, it may hurt the P2P lending market since many of the people borrowing are attempting to refinance credit card debt. From the article:

At a hearing Tuesday, Levin’s subcommittee, which has been investigating the industry, plans to look at how credit-card issuers raise consumers’ rates, to as high as 30 percent, when their so-called FICO credit scores decline – even if they’ve paid credit card bills regularly and promptly. In many cases, consumers have little notice of the increased rate, which is automatically triggered by declines in FICO scores for reasons left unexplained, the subcommittee found.

In some cases, just opening another account, such as a department store credit card, could trigger the downgrade in credit score.

Some interesting debt statistics from the article include that Americans have $900 billion in credit card debt — $2,200 per person. With debt statistics like that, why can I have trouble finding someone to extend a loan to at Lending Club?

congress, credit cards, debt

Technorati Tags: congress, credit cards, debt

• Lending Club Posts Rejected Loan Statistics
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• Examining the Lending Club Risk Rating Score

Update: Advice for new P2P Lenders has now been posted. 

Some guests stopped by my house tonight so I have not had time to compile all the great advice that I have received so far based on my request for P2P lending advice. Plus, my funds still have not arrived to Lending Club so I have not been able to bid on any loans. Therefore, you still have time to send in your advice.

In my search for advice on lending forums, I have found some bad advice that I will also share when I have time to post the compilation of advice. If you have a few moments, please visit this posting to answer the questions and be included in the posting on P2P lending advice. So far I have received some fantastic tips via email that am excited to share with you soon.

I apologize for the delay in posting the advice, but I do not have time tonight to provide the proper attention fitting the advice received. It will likely be next Monday or Tuesday before I have time to complete the post since I am out of town for the weekend.

So how about the new Prosper forum changes? Responses are not positive. And Prosper in general is being reviewed poorly in comments on the blog posting at the WSJ.

• Review My First Prosper Loans and Win a Book!
• Prosper.com Lending Tools Webinar Cancelled
• O Loanio, Loanio, Wherefore art thou Loanio?
• Submit for the next P2P Lending Carnival
• Requesting Advice on P2P Lending