Welcome to the Peer to Peer Lending Portfolio update for September 2019!
The format of the update has changed in September based on input from readers who have commented that it was getting too big.
So I have decided to make the update shorter and more to the point with less commentary and screenshots pasted all over the place. It was getting just way too large for many people to read in the time they have allotted to read this kind of information.
If you would like to see individual Peer to Peer lender account screenshots etc. you can click on the links next to each Peer to Peer lender update and go to the account page. All the information is still there, just not all on the same page now.
Hopefully this should make the update a little shorter and more readable. I’m always open to ideas to improve readability and content even more, so feel free to comment at the end of the post or email me if you have any suggestions for improvement.
GBP Portfolio Update
In September 2019, income from the GBP Peer to Peer lending portfolio rose a little from last months £821.38 to £866.32. Funding Circle once again came in at a loss for the month because of default losses.
Overall XIRR dropped just a little to 5.80% in September from 5.85% in August. Apart from that, other numbers were in the expected range. I moved more money from Funding Circle & Mintos to Loanpad, Kuflink & Unbolted. Details in the individual lender updates.
Nothing new to report on Ablrate this month. I didn’t send over any more capital as there were no new loans. The account is still doing fine though and payments are coming in as expected.
XIRR is down a bit from 14.48% in August to 13.77% in September. The XIRR on Ablrate is high (for a UK lender). Which I believe is mostly due to some secondary market loans I bid on. When bids are accepted lower than the original loan value on the secondary market, the XIRR goes up to reflect this.
Ablrate Signup & Cashback Offers
Ablrate offer an exclusive cashback offer to readers of The Obvious Investor – when you sign-up with Ablrate and receive 0.5% cashback on your first investments.
Assetz Capital were still my top lender by actual return value in September, with a total return of £2,184.96 since I started the portfolio. Not half bad for one of the safest lenders out there with secured loans. XIRR dipped a tad from 5.95% in August to 5.92% in September. No problem there, it edges up and down each month depending on when I get the numbers for the update.
Assetz Capital Signup & Cashback Offers
Assetz Capital has extended their cashback offer to October 31st! £150 cashback for investing £5,000. Here are the details;
Open to new customers to the Assetz Capital platform from 1st September.
Customers must complete their registration by midnight on 31st of October.
They must invest £5,000 or more by midnight on 7th November.
If they keep the funds invested for 12 months, they will receive £150 cashback.
Funding Circle again showed some more defaults in September, £242.39 to be precise. Seems to be the norm now as this is the 3rd month of losses from them.
Actual XIRR slipped again from 5.96% in August to 5.47% in September. I withdrew another £1,200 which just came from repayments, nothing sold yet. Sales are currently quoted to take 114 days now, and I’m at 90 so hopefully next month I’ll be reporting I’ve sold some of the loans. Loans that are late in payment have gone down from 27 in August to 23 in September so at least something is looking a bit better.
Funding Circle Signup & Cashback Offers
For anyone considering investing in Funding Circle, I would suggest you wait and see how things pan out, there are better lenders to invest with at this time.
However if you’re a new investor and do still want to invest with Funding Circle, the cashback offer for new investors is: Invest £2000 and receive £50 Amazon Gift Certificate. Click here for more info.
Growth Street XIRR remained steady in September at 5.14%. Not far from the their quoted target rate of 5.30%. Once some of my Funding Circle loans sell out, this is where some of the capital is going. 5.30% is really very good for only having your money tied up for 30 days at a time. I like having that kind of access to some of my investment capital.
Growth Street Signup & Cashback Offers
For new investors, Growth Street have a very decent cashback offer: Invest £5000 or more for 1 year for £200 cashback.
I increased my investment in Kuflink by £500 again in September to pick up some more of their nice low LTV loans. XIRR increased a bit from 6.15% in August to 6.30% in September. They still have a good loan flow coming thorough so if you wanted to invest a good amount of capital, it would be possible here.
Kuflink Signup & Cashback Offers
Kuflink have a wonderful cashback offer right now which is well worth taking advantage of if you are thinking of investing with them. It equates to 10% at the lower level, and 5% cashback when you get to £5000. Not half bad for asset secured loans with these kind of low LTV’s.
Nothing much to say about Landbay as per usual. That’s a good thing in the investment world.
Just like having money in a bank. XIRR stable at 3.45%. Low but about the safest of the lenders, or so they say. Low risk equals low annual returns though (see my Landbay Review for more info).
Landbay Signup & Cashback Offers
Landbay currently have an incentive for new investors: £50 cashback when investing £5000 or more. 1% on top of the regular number make it look a little more attractive.
Lending Crowd is still getting a low loan flow so I’m seeing a bit of cash drag still (not much though). Delayed loans are still in check at 10 (between the 7 and 12 number). So overall everything progressing as normal. XIRR increased yet again this month from 7.91% to 8.26%. Lending Crowd are saying my targeted annual return is sitting at 8.02% while actual return is exactly the same as my XIRR at 8.26%. I have no idea how they get that number matched so accurately when the account has no provision fund, but hey, I’m not complaining. I wish their loan flow would increase a bit as I’d like to increase my investment substantially. Who wouldn’t at 8.26%?
Lending Crowd Signup & Cashback Offers
If you’re new to Peer to Peer lending and would like a shot at some higher rates; take a look at one of the last P2P lenders that still allow bidding on loans so you can get the best rates! Lending Crowd have Up to £400 cashback for £10,000 investment.
The more I invest with Lending Works, the more I would like to increase my investment to about 50% of my overall Peer to Peer lending capital and get a guaranteed 6.5% annual return. Unfortunately that wouldn’t’ be prudent, even though Lending Works are one of the safest lenders out there. Got to stick to the rules and diversify.
XIRR increased a little more from 5.81% in August to 5.83% in September. Lending Works own target numbers for my account also increased a bit to 6.22%. The reason for the discrepancy between XIRR and the target rate is that the 5 year target rate was only 6.00% when I first invested. Since then it’s grown to 6.5% so my repayments are getting reinvested at the higher rate. But much of my original investment is still at the 6% rate so it will take a while for it to grow to the current target.
You really can’t go wrong with Lending Works. Great rates with the safety of the best provision fund in the business, the “Lending Works Shield“. There’s a reason they are one of my largest lending accounts with almost £33k invested, and I’m even talking about adding some more.
Lending Works Signup & Cashback Offers
If you decide to invest with Lending Works (which if you’re getting in to P2P, is a sensible idea), they still have the 6.5% available on the 5 year investment.
Loanpad are quickly becoming one of my favorite lenders. I increased my investment again by £1,000 in September. They will be getting a lot more as capital gets freed up from other lenders. My feeling is, if there is a recession coming as the media is touting, thelow LTV’s (all under 50%, and some at around 5%) on ALL of their loans will protect capital should loans default. Plus the Kuflink loan originators 20% – 60% “skin-in-the-game” is extra protection that cannot be taken for granted. Just as important is the ability to withdraw capital with just 60 days notice on the premium account and instantly on the classic account.
I’m not 100% convinced there is a recession coming, I think it’s the media over reacting. However if it does happen, having asset secured loans with LTV’s as low as this will be a good move. You’ll note that most of the lenders I use offer good asset security. The ones that don’t (like Zopa and Funding Circle) I’m slowly starting to exit. The exception of course are Lending Works and RateSetter who generally offer consumer unsecured loans, but have well funded provision funds and a history of excellent borrower screening which makes them inherently safer.
The Loanpad XIRR is at 6.20% for September. That’s on a target return suggested by them of 5.00%. This is because the Loanpad target rate on the account is the actual rate you get, not taking in to consideration investing all of the returns for the effects of compounding. As opposed to the AER (Annual Equivalent Rate) given by most other lenders (both Peer to Peer and Banks/Building Societies) which estimates the rate based on all of the interest being invested back in to the account.
Loanpad Signup & Cashback Offers
Loanpad have a great cashback incentive right now:
£50 bonus if you invest into a lending account a minimum of £1,000 within 4 weeks post registration and keep this invested for 365 days.
£150 bonus if you invest into a lending account a minimum of £10,000 within 4 weeks post registration and keep this invested for 365 days.
Mintos GBP MoGo car loans appear to have dried up in September, so I had to withdraw some capital to keep from having cash drag. I withdrew £500. If there are no new loans in October it looks like I’ll need to move more capital as it is repaid over the month.
The lower investment number was reflected just a little as XIRR dipped just one blip from 9.52% in August to 9.51% in September.
Unfortunately Mintos are still saying that UK residents can no longer invest in Mintos loans for now. Hopefully that will be ratified soon.
Mintos Signup & Cashback Offers
If you are NOT a UK resident, Mintos have a wonderful cashback bonus, one of the best in fact. Mintos offer 1% of the value of your investments cashback for the first 90 days you are investing with them!
RateSetter rates appear to have dropped a bit again. They were still hovering around 6% for most of August. However in September they seem to be maxing out at around 5.7%. I have had my lend orders in at 6.00% for a while now, but in September I got about £700 worth of cash drag by the end of the month. I am toying with bringing it down to about 5.7% but I’ll watch it for a few more days. It seems rates go in cycles and this time last year, rates on all lenders were down a bit.
My XIRR dropped a little bit because of the cash drag from 5.16% in August to 5.14% in September. No big deal. I’ll see what happens with the cash drag in September. I really don’t want to move money from RateSetter if I can help it, but when my XIRR at Loanpad is running 6.20% on low LTV assets secured loans, it’s hard to put money in to RateSetter at an XIRR of 5.14%.
On top of everything, RateSetter are introducing their new accounts in October which are looking like they’ll pay even less than the previous accounts. They are calling the new accounts “Access” which is basically replacing the rolling rate account, “Plus” which is replacing he 1 year and “Max” which is replacing the 5 year account. I’ll leave it at that for September as I want to see how they work in the real world before commenting further so I’ll do that next month.
RateSetter Signup & Cashback Offers
RateSetter is offering £100 cashback for investing £1000 for a year.
I sent yet another £500 over to Unbloted in September. It took a little longer to get everything lent out, in fact it took the whole month to lend out the £500. I think the holidays are still having an affect on Unbolted loan numbers as they seem to be with other lenders.
XIRR settled at 8.39% which is right at their suggested target rate of 8.40%. I’ll likely send over some more capital in October. I like Unbolted’s spin on asset secured pawnshop style loans, and I certainly like the 8%+ return rates. See my Unbolted Review for more information on this unique lender.
Unbolted Signup & Cashback Offers
Although there are no cashback offers from Unbolted at the moment, they have started a bonus interest rate campaign on their Working Capital Loans which is worth a look.
XIRR for the Euro Portfolio this month came down just a little to an overall 14.30%. This is mainly due to the lower levels of short term loan availability on Mintos. Because Mintos is my biggest Euro account by a factor of almost 4, a small change in XIRR affects the whole portfolio. The other thing of course is that Swaper income is still really low until all loan payments start to kick in.
Overall I’m still very happy with the Euro portfolio. Amazing the difference in available Euro return rates compared to GBP. I didn’t send any more capital over to any Euro lenders in September, mainly due to the fact I don’t have any converted. Most of my cash is sitting in US Dollars and I’m still waiting for the Euro to come down against the Dollar some more which it has been doing slowly. I am still thinking sub 1:1 to the USD in the next 6 to 12 months.
Crowdestor XIRR decreased a little from 13.78% in August to 13.16% in September. Income is still in the normal range though so the small decrease is just based on the timing of when I took the account balance numbers. Some of the loan payments still haven’t kicked in yet so hopefully XIRR will rise even more down the road.
See All Account Data & Screenshots From My Envestio Account
Envestio did a great job of increasing their loan flow in September. They had some really good opportunities come through. Unfortunately I missed them because (as I mentioned earlier) I don’t have any more Euros to invest right now. As soon as I do though you can bet some of them will go to Envestio.
XIRR jumped again in September to 17.80% from 17.29% in August. Envestio really are the Euro investors favorite right now. At almost 18% annual return, you can see why.
Envestio Signup & Cashback Offers
Envestio have a €5 bonus for the first €100 deposit + 0.5% cashback from all investments for 270 days.
Grupeer is still plodding along. No trouble at all, and no work involved. I’m still getting zero cash drag and XIRR is still providing a very reasonable 13.54% actual annual return.
I finally did a full review on Grupeer in September if you’re interested in taking a look.
Mintos have seen quite a drop in the number Euro loans available in September. Demand dropped off quite a bit as it did with many other lenders the last couple of months because of summer. I think people are spending money on holidays in the summer months rather than setting up loans and borrowing more. That will likely come after the holidays when they’ve spent all of their spare cash 🙂
The result of this was a drop in interest rates in September because the supply (of investment money) is outweighing loan demand. Gone are the 16% short term loans, so now I’ve set my auto-invest settings to pick up 10% short term loans. If anyone is interested in how I usually have my auto-invest settings with Mintos, I did a more in-depth description in the July update. I’m not buying any longer term loans at the moment as this also happened last year with Mintos. The high-paying loans came back a couple of months later, so I want to make sure I have capital freeing up in the short term to get any higher rate loans as they arrive.
Because of the loan availability issues, Mintos XIRR decreased a little from 15.55% in August to 14.53% in September. This is still more than the Mintos target rate which also decreased a little but is still at 13.10%.
Mintos Signup & Cashback Offers
Mintos have a wonderful cashback bonus, one of the best in fact. Mintos offer 1% of the value of your investments cashback for the first 90 days you are investing with them!
Robocash is another account which requires zero time to mange. Zero cash drag and a fully auto-invest account has delivered XIRR returns of 13.05%.
They have been swapping out some loan originators over the last couple of months but still no problems with the overdue loans affecting the return rates or cash drag.
I finally did a full review of Robocash if you’re interested in taking a look.
Swaper have only been part of the portfolio for the last couple of months so I can’t really comment on them yet from personal experience. That being said, the reason I invested with them is because I’ve been watching them for some time and so far I feel like my decision to invest was a good one. Most loan repayments haven’t even kicked in yet so XIRR is very low at 3.04%. Hopefully next month I’ll be able to write a little more about them.
Swaper Signup & Cashback Offers
If you’re interested in reading more about Swaper or investing with them, click here go to their website and to read about current offers or open a lending account.
Summary
That’s the end of another update. I hope you found this easier to read than previous update and you like the new format. Let me know if you don’t of course and I’ll rethink it.
You can always go back and look at the previous updates for more details on why I’m investing in these companies and my ongoing lending experiences.
Finally I hope the month of October goes well for everyone. I wish you all the best of luck with your investments. I will update you on my P2P Portfolio investments around the same time next month.
Thanks for reading my blog! Please feel free to comment below if you have comments, questions, criticisms or suggestions. You can also email me if you prefer. I love feedback!
Please note, most of the cashback offers on this site are for new lenders to a company. I suggest you do your own research before investing as cashback offers change daily.
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2 thoughts on “P2P Lending Portfolio Update For September 2019”
My Lending Crowd account is dragging – only 1 loan despite me lowering the bars on auto-invest.
Ratsetter was at 6% – which was matching prior (thanks to your advice to sit a couple of pips higher) but now stuck. I also dropped it to 5.7% and see what happens.
Funding Circle won’t let me withdraw until I upload linked bank account evidence. Never seen this from a financial provider – perhaps they are trying to inhibit drawdowns? Possibly they are overwhelmed with requests… as for the loans on sale in the secondary market – there they sit for something like 3 months.
I mentioned some other P2P stuff at yieldkinguk.wordpress.com, regarding Ratesetter doubling property exposure, China P2P failures and PPI like car loan claims. Let me know your thoughts? I trust we aren’t liable for mis-sold car loans…
Don’t forget to use Mark’s links here on Obvious Investor as I do, I think it’s golden P2P advice. Lovin’ it.
I just lowered my rates on Lending Crowd again too. Seems there are a LOT of investors looking for the loans that come out, and their loan flow has indeed dropped off a bit.
After I wrote the update and saw RateSetter’s new lending accounts, I actually reduced my number to 5.4% which got filled the same day. It didn’t look to me like I was every going to get in at 5.7 as there was like 5 million sat there and the price was ticking around 5.2. I made a decision that I didn’t want to pull out of RateSetter as I think they are a strong platform, so I decided I would take a lower rate for now. On the exposure, I always consider RateSetter to be unsecured lending, so I’m not really sure how the property exposure will affect me. Can’t be a bad thing I wouldn’t; think if it gives them a better chance of recouping capital on defaults.
When I looked at my Funding Circle account yesterday it says it is not taking 120 days to sell out of loans. So could be even more than 3 months now.
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My Lending Crowd account is dragging – only 1 loan despite me lowering the bars on auto-invest.
Ratsetter was at 6% – which was matching prior (thanks to your advice to sit a couple of pips higher) but now stuck. I also dropped it to 5.7% and see what happens.
Funding Circle won’t let me withdraw until I upload linked bank account evidence. Never seen this from a financial provider – perhaps they are trying to inhibit drawdowns? Possibly they are overwhelmed with requests… as for the loans on sale in the secondary market – there they sit for something like 3 months.
I mentioned some other P2P stuff at yieldkinguk.wordpress.com, regarding Ratesetter doubling property exposure, China P2P failures and PPI like car loan claims. Let me know your thoughts? I trust we aren’t liable for mis-sold car loans…
Don’t forget to use Mark’s links here on Obvious Investor as I do, I think it’s golden P2P advice. Lovin’ it.
Hi Jon,
I just lowered my rates on Lending Crowd again too. Seems there are a LOT of investors looking for the loans that come out, and their loan flow has indeed dropped off a bit.
After I wrote the update and saw RateSetter’s new lending accounts, I actually reduced my number to 5.4% which got filled the same day. It didn’t look to me like I was every going to get in at 5.7 as there was like 5 million sat there and the price was ticking around 5.2. I made a decision that I didn’t want to pull out of RateSetter as I think they are a strong platform, so I decided I would take a lower rate for now. On the exposure, I always consider RateSetter to be unsecured lending, so I’m not really sure how the property exposure will affect me. Can’t be a bad thing I wouldn’t; think if it gives them a better chance of recouping capital on defaults.
When I looked at my Funding Circle account yesterday it says it is not taking 120 days to sell out of loans. So could be even more than 3 months now.
Thanks for the thumbs up!
Cheers,
Mark