When I started this blog in May of 2006, I was pursuing all kinds of interesting investment opportunities. One of them was condohotels, which fortunately I didn’t pull the trigger on. (If you haven’t heard of condohotels there’s a good reason.) Another opportunity was P2P Lending. I had been one of the first people to jump in and invest in Prosper. I had a little money to play with and my theory was, “It’s likely to be an inefficient market and if I’m one of the smarter people there, I have a chance to leverage the inefficiencies to my advantage.”
Turns out that nearly everyone investing in Prosper at the beginning lost money or just made a percent or two. I was no exception. The Prosper system didn’t really seem set up very well. I believe they allowed borrowers who shouldn’t have qualified to receive loans on the platform – without their being a pay day type interest rate attached. They’ve since tightened their system up and people seem to make double digit returns on average. Lending Club, in my opinion, used Prosper’s initial growing pains to “get it right” from the start and it seems like a vast majority of their lenders make over 8%. In a world of CDs that lock up your money for years and give you about a 1.5% interest, it very well might be worth taking a little risk to get a lot more of a return.
At the beginning of this year, I decided I’d spend more time looking into P2P Lending. I was making something like 3-4% in Lending Club, and the average was around 9%. I was clearly doing something wrong. I wrote a post about what it Revisiting Lending Club about a few of the changes I’ve made and now I’m making more than 7% (and that has a lot of those 3-4% loans dragging down my average). It became clear to me that there’s a right way and wrong way to invest in P2P Lending.
Enter Peter Renton of SocialLending.net
Peter Renton, runs Social Lending, left his first comment on my site on that previous post. I could tell that he definitely knew his stuff. However it wasn’t until the middle of September, that he left a series of comments showing his expertise.
Two weeks later, at the Financial Blogger Conference, I happened to meet Peter in the most bizarre speed networking things I’ve been a part of. You had literally less than two minutes to talk to the person before the buzzer sounded and had to move on. You can barely exchange a hello and get an explanation of one website out in that time, much less have any meaningful dialog. At the very least I was able to put a face to the name. Six weeks later, I found myself at dinner with him thanks to Prosper who was sponsoring a get-together about creating an industry standardization for P2P rate of return. It was at that point that Peter told me what he was making interest rates of around 23% at Prosper and that he’s been doing it for over a year. (Please don’t hold me to those numbers, I could have misheard him, but I was amazed.) He was quick to mention that anything like that can’t, and won’t, continue long term. He’s right. If that’s your expectation in investing, you will have a very disappointing life (well as far as the investment aspect goes). However, I’d take half that all day. After all, if you take the rule of 72 of around 12%, you’d be doubling your money every 6 years. That’s not too shabby.
Learn from the Expert
Today, Peter Renton is sharing all his secrets in his P2P Lending Wealth System. Personally, the name comes off a little Tom Vu-ish to me. The system consists of nearly 3.5 hours of video spread across 8 modules. The first module is short introduction and history of P2P Lending. So if you are new, you can hit the ground running. Then he details the risks and tells you what you need before you get started. There are two extensive modules on Lending Club and Prosper. Each of these modules actually are two separate videos, because there’s just a lot of information to cover. The 6th module is the one I’m most interested in. It’s over 42 minutes of maximizing your ROI. This is the kind of thing that I did when I increased my Lending Club interest from 3% to 7% in a few months. I just scratched the surface. The 7th module is on the trading platform (you can sell your loans for liquidity purposes). I’ve never looked into that area of P2P lending. Finally the 8th module is what Peter himself is doing with his money, including his Lending Club and Prosper filters – so you can find the same loans he finds. All the videos are available as MP3s, so you could add them to your portable music player and listen to them in the car or on the treadmill the gym (nothing like multitasking!)
I’d like to say that I’ve gone through the entire system and tested it, but it is 3.5 hours long and it just launched a few hours ago. I hope to carve aside some time this weekend to look it over.
Everything is puppies and sunshine, right? Well, there’s a catch. And I’m guessing you know what it is. Peter clearly put a lot of work into this and there’s a lot of value to be had here. So he’s looking to make some money for his efforts. His price: $97. In true salesman form, Peter tells me that it is a limited time launch, it will be available for just a few days and he’s limiting signups so that he can give a high level of support.
Does this sound like a fit for you? Let’s say that you invest $1000 and you think that you can earn 6% (which is nothing to sneeze at). That’s $60 a year in interest. If Peter’s tips can help you get that up to 11%, you’ll bring in $110 of interest – a gain of $50 in the first year. At the end of the second year you’ll be ahead of the game (especially with compounding). The rewards would get bigger the more you have invest.
Click here to get the P2P Lending Wealth System.