This question is aimed at others who have liquidated their LC accounts. I'm to the point where I have about 45 notes in my Taxable account, and about 500 notes in my IRA account. These would seem to be the notes that for whatever reason no one wants. (At any cost)
Selling them is becoming more and more difficult- I'm up to an 11% discount now and not really selling much of them. A good day of sales is 20-30 of them, a typical day is 5-10.
Here's the question:
1. To sell your remaining notes- did you have to put an extreme discount on them to move them?
2. What was the discount?
3. What other strategy did you use that I may not have considered or thought of?
I'm not looking to have a fire sale as I've lost enough money between chargeoffs and discounted sales. If the general consensus is to just let them run off on their own, I may do that.
Curious to hear other's thoughts/experiences.
Great thread as I'm moving my Taxable money as well as some ROTH IRA money to other investments.
To your point for your taxable account, you could let them ride and your only hassle is dealing with the tax docs for a couple (36-month loans) or few (60-month loans) and transferring the money occasionally to your bank account. The IRA account is complicated if you get below 10K as you have a $100 AFAIK.
Will be interested in some of your questions answers.
You are having the same issue as me. See my Topic Listing "Notes on Folio For Lending Club Not Showing Up On Browse For Loans". Your notes are not showing up on a general "browse". Look to see if you can find your listings. According to Folio, "only certain investors can see these with certain criteria set".
I too have been attempting to sell off the notes in my Lending Club IRA account. I've been at it for several months and probably won't finish for another month. I've been writing a blog, billlanke.blogspot.com, for about a year dealing with my Lending Club experience. I've currently posted the method of selling notes and the issue surrounding this. I assume all of the readers in this forum are familiar with the process.
My next post will deal with the process I use and contain some numbers showing daily progress. I'll follow this with an updated status on how the overall fire sale is going. Then I hope to try to make a stab at computing how much selling out early cost me. Follow along if you wish.
I've been trying to sell a current note with a perfect payment record. Its last completed payment date was 3-7-18. It appears to be available to sell, but after entering the price and "submit" I get this: "One or more of your Notes cannot be sold. Note Id(s): 70825904, 73176492". The actual note ID is 82606235.
I asked LC about it, but have not yet received a reply. Weird. The only reason that could apply is if there is a pending BK. There are no comments under the payment history.
When the sell function works, dropping the price is the way I get notes sold. They have to be priced to sell--not priced to keep. I sold the worst notes first, and am letting the best live out their lives until something regresses. I keep an eye on the monthly FICO trend chart via the sort function on the Folio SELL page for what to sell.
Haven't read OleBill's blog yet, but am looking forward to doing that! Thanks!
Edit to add: P.S. On the 14th now, I am now able to list the note, although I did not yet get a reply from LC.
2nd Edit: 8 min. after listing for -2.56% it sold.
I'm continuing my selloff of notes. Yesterday I sold 8 more and decided to look at these in detail. They had been offered with an average discount of about 8.5% and not sold. When this average increased to about 11%, they sold. However the 2.5% increase in discount failed to get many others sold. I've put the details on my blog.
I'm nearing the end of my selling off the notes in my IRA. I've sold 10 current notes at discounts from 19% to 39%. I also sold one in it's grace period for $5.00 (a 77% discount), and one over 30 days late for $0.20.
I still have 4 that are over 30 days late but apparently can't offer them for sale on FOLIOfn. I guess I'll have to hope they make a partial payment and I can then list them, or hope they get charged off soon.
I think I'm getting to the end of the road as well. Taxable account is down to 30 notes, about $300 is sellable, the rest will charge off at some point. Discount is currently at 16% and not much is selling. I'm not willing at this point to go any farther to get rid of the last notes through Folio- I think what's left at this point probably has black marks and will not sell.
My IRA is down to 300 notes with ~ $5k sellable, and ~ $1K will charge off. Again, selling has really tailed off. Really hating the thought of a long goodbye on the IRA. Might go a few more points down to see if anything else significant sells but I have a strong feeling it won't.
If you don't mind keeping the Taxable account open longer, you can simply transfer notes from your IRA to Taxable account through FOLIOfn. This will unblock you from closing the IRA account with LC. You can let these unwanted notes mature in your Taxable account.
Today I went to -35% and sold a Grace with a perfect 47 payment record and a green arrow. Started at -10, yesterday.
Short answer, previously stated: if it isn't sold, drop the price. Investors know what they're looking for.
I can't find my own notes for sale on Folio either. Crazy system.
This is a general question for those of you who are selling IRA accounts to liquidate. Were you trying to clear out your entire IRA so you could do a one lump sum transfer of all idle cash from the IRA custodian (Millennial Trust) to another institution?
I looked at the fee schedule and, as best I can tell, it is a $150 fee to transfer out assets to a new custodian. I have a local credit union IRA in 5-year term deposits at 3.2% that I want to move my money too. The problem is that I have about $7k in idle cash in one of my Lending Club IRA accounts and I have about 400 other notes (approximately $4k) with some time to go before the notes will mature.
The dilemma I face is that I think I've already bitten the bullet for the worst of any defaults. So if I want to sell notes to get a clean IRA exit in one fell swoop, I'll probably have to discount those notes on Folio, some heavily. But I am reluctant to do this though because my reasoning is that I think what remains is has made it this far and the yields are pretty good (survivorship bias- most of the bad stuff is already charged off). However, if I keep pulling out money every so often out of the IRA, then I'll get nickel and dimmed by the IRA custodian for each asset transfer as far as I understand. So essentially I'm trying to figure out which will be less painful:
1) Do nothing: let idle cash sit in my LC account earning no interest while I'm waiting for the portfolio to wind down
2) Transfer out IRA money periodically without selling notes on Folio and get hit with IRA transfer fees each time
3) Take the losses that will occur by liquidating notes on Folio and get out in a one-and-done fashion
Any insight as to what you did and why would be appreciated.
I don't understand this discussion about a $150 fee. I moved a chunk of my LC IRA funds from Strata to a broker, and Strata charged me $25+$20. The $25 was for "asset/cash transfer fee", and the $20 was for "overnight processing fee".
The "overnight processing fee" is an obscenity. They didn't do anything overnight. They actually took ONE MONTH. Strata told the broker that they would not accept a fax, so the broker sent the paperwork via an overnight service. On the first attempt, this paperwork was lost. A month later I intervened, asked Strata for status, found out they couldn't find the paperwork, and had the broker send it again. Then Strata charged me $20 for the extreme burden of RECEIVING a package sent via an overnight service.
While this is obscene, it isn't anything like $150., so I have no idea what you fellows are talking about.
I've seen it both ways!
On 11/01/2016 I was charged $100 real time transaction fee for a $75k check disbursement.
On 03/28/2018 I was charged $25 real time transaction fee for a $55k check disbursement.
They both look pretty much identical in my Strata transactions register (except the amount).
Both were initiated by a Fidelity TOA letter.
Go figure.
Thanks Fred, Rob, and Dr. Everett for your insight. I think the LC appointed custodian for my LC IRA is Millennium Trust. I recall talking with a customer service rep from Lending Club a few weeks ago and they said they were in the process of migrating all Millennial Trust IRA customers over to Strata at some point. I think the rep mentioned that I might be able to request to have my custodian changed sooner, though I might just be making that up; I'll have to call back to confirm. If I find anything out, I'll be sure to post to this thread.
Based on the insight that I have received thus far, it seems like the best thing for me to do will be to just move the idle cash over at periodic intervals into my new IRA set up at a credit union. That seems to make the most sense since it appears that their transfer fees are quite a bit less. I don't think I'll mess with liquidating with Folio because I'm sure that any buyer on the other end of the transaction is going to have a lot more experience than I will be as a seller and will, as a result, likely get a better deal in the transaction. Unlike others, I'm ultra conservative at this point so I'm find just going for something that is a guaranteed 3.2% and risk-free to move my savings to at this point in the economic cycle.
Im still selling months later between 5 and 15% and still have about 5% of my notes left to go. Any late loans I instantly mark at a 75% discount and they still dont go.
All of this makes me realize how much time I wasted with private lending. The returns were bad compared to the general market and if the market tanks, loan defaults would go up even more as people get demolished. And couple that with the fact that it takes forever to liquidate an account... imagine handling an estate where someone has 50k or more loans?
Cant wait for this last 5% to go, unfortunately I cant say the same for my prosper account where I have to wait years to get my money out. Oh to be young and dumb.
I've been trying to get rid of all of my remaining notes in my Lending Club IRA and had only 3 very late notes remaining. I contacted Lending Club to see if there was an alternative to waiting for these notes to be charged off. There is, forfeiture. They sent me the form required to do this and close my IRA and Strata accounts. I completed it and submitted it today. All of the details are on my blog, billlanke.blogspot.com.
Hey, that's great to know. Thanks for the information.
So thought I'd post my update as OleBill did. My taxable account has one 31-120 note left that when it comes off of Payment Processing (fails) in the next day or two will get sold.
I'm down to 10 notes in the IRA account that are in the same state. Once I sell them, the Taxable account will sit dormant for a while to capture the recoveries that may come in. Since it doesn't cost anything to maintain it, I'll leave it for a while.
I've heard from others that the IRA account is a different story. Assuming that they charge for the fees either on the anniversary date, or at the end of the year, I'll keep an eye out for both and close it before either occurs.
In the end, I did make money on both accounts, even with the losses incurred from excessive chargeoffs, and losses due to selling. Just no where near what I expected, what was advertised, or what I was receiving at the start.
I do have a large position in their stock- will play with that for a while and try to make the money there that didn't end up coming in through loans.
Finally off to other things that make more money and take less time/effort.
I just wanted to give everyone an update on my winding down of my Prosper and Lending Club IRA accounts. I decided that I didn't want to sell my notes on Folio, mainly because I felt like I would be better off letting them run out to maturity rather than progressively lowering the discount on each note in order to sell them. I've spent the last 3 weeks interacting with customer service from Strata and Equity (both custodians of my IRAs and Lending Club and Prosper, respectively). With some work, I finally got about $10k transferred into a 5-year CD at a local credit union at 3.2%. Keep in mind, my LC and Prosper IRA accounts are still open, so these were basically partial IRA transfers. The credit union that I'm using has their own form and I had to follow several steps in order to 1) Get free cash transferred from LC/Prosper to IRA custodian and 2) have the requesting IRA custodian pull the funds from the current one.
It has been mildly frustrating, but doable. The fee for Strata was about $20 for this transfer. I will repeat the process once or twice more as more notes in my IRA account are paid off in full. Prosper assured me that I wouldn't be assessed a low balance fee as I continually drain my IRA because I did at one time hit the $10k benchmark for having the fee reimbursed for them. Lending Club did not offer that assurance, but they said that they were moving to a new custodian anyway and migrating their customers over, so that any fee would likely be much lower than Strata is charging now (also, the CS rep said I could call back when the fee is assessed and see if I could have it waived, which I probably will do).
Partial Quote
Posted by: dr.everett
« on: May 26, 2018, 10:38:23 PM » Insert Quote
"On a side but related note- I find it interesting that a lot of the automated tools seem to be dying off. Bluevestment has folded, InterestRadar isn't far behind, Lending Robot seems to be slowly divesting away, etc. I think Peercube is the only one left. (Keep it up Anil!)" --dr.everett, in reply to .Ryan. .
If I had the size portfolio I did from 2 years before, the loss of these tools would really raise my stress levels. Using the tools as I did to liquidate when I did, while time consuming, minimized my losses and my stress levels."
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I agree 100+%! The thought of losing PeerCube (Thank you, Anil!!) along with Folio, after already losing the P2P aspects, did me in. "It ain't what it used to be" is the follow-up reminder to self that finally got me out. One thing it used to be was fun. I started in Oct., '08.
Thanks, LFS and Dr. Everett for your comments about PeerCube. Luckily we made some good business decisions earlier like pricing our service appropriately, keeping our costs low, and not raising external funding that is helping us now in continuing to provide the service. Of course, it wouldn't have been possible without the help of and input from long time supporters like LFS in shaping PeerCube.