I almost forgot to update you on my Lending Club account. I’ve been opening that up for all to see:
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Last month, I had expected payments of $71.21 coming in. This month I have $74.47. A key word there is “expected.” It’s not a guarantee, but it is fairly diversified. Also, you may note that I have around 50 active tradeable notes with only 1 late. I should add that I didn’t put in any new money this month, I just reinvested payments from previous loans.
If you want to get started with Lending Club, they will start you up with $25 if you sign up through this link (full disclosure: I’m compensated as well).
Before you open a Lending Club account, I should mention that Lending Club notes are a very new type of security. There isn’t a long history of performance to rely on. As such, I would exercise caution with putting a large portion of your portfolio into Lending Club. Generally, I don’t think I’d put much more than 5% in it. I would use Lending Club as a way to diversify a portfolio. If stocks drop a lot as we saw earlier this year, the Lending Club portion could help stem the losses as it did for me last year.
Still waiting for Lending Club (and Prosper again) to become available for Michigan.
Stu, you should be able to use the trading platform right now. I’m in Iowa and can’t use Prosper or Lending Club either. But the trading platform is available and I’ve been doing very well with it.