Ridiculous number of defaults, anyone else?

[DSGDSG]

Hello everyone.  I had been contributing to lending club for some time and turned on the automatic investing.  Out of 75 loans right at this moment I have:
2 in grace period
2 16-30 days late
3 31-120 days late
3 charged off

This has knocked my return down to just over 2%.  The stock market has been booming meanwhile I'm getting porked on money I've invested here.  I feel like something has changed with the way they issue loans out?  Have the standards become lax?  How can I have such a high rate of default when I'm not invested on the conservative side??  I have just now turned off automatic investing and I'm going to start taking my money back out.  This is just unacceptable.

[Fred93]

What grades did you invest in?

What is the average age of your portfolio?

[TravelingPennies]

https://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php?topic=4806.msg42955#msg88888888Quote"> from: Fred93 on February 02, 2018, 05:13:52 PM

[Wenessanut]

I want to know who is who. Is it a faulty number?

[au88]

See the post "worst month yet".

[lendingprosper23]

I experienced the same thing.

I also have been selling my notes for over 1 year, a huge amount never late, and even at 3-6% discounts they dont sell.

Private lending is dead via these sites. The returns make it pointless to invest. The volatility is not for everyone, but I moved as much as possible last august into crypto and have made quite literally 50x the profit I did from p2p lending that I did for 3 years.

p2p lending, such as ethlend, makes beautiful sense on a decentralized platform where individual lenders set terms and collateral is put up. I beg anyone still into private lending give crypto a real look because lending club and propser are a joke.

[TravelingPennies]

https://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php?topic=4806.msg42958#msg88888888Quote"> from: DSGDSG on February 02, 2018, 05:54:00 PM

[kcook73]

I am amazed to see people with $150k + salary that own their house and always had high credit rating default on their loan -- how does that happen, unless they know the ins and outs of the lending system and are running a scam against LC (knowing the loans are backed by 3rd party individuals versus the company itself)?

[Data Junkie]

I made the mistake of starting off with automated investing, and my returns have been decimated by the defaults.  I've learned a lot since then, most of it from this forum.  Why I haven't bailed on LC is that the majority loans do get paid in full (well, so far, anyway).  So I have challenged myself to find a fairly reliable way to avoid loans that default.  Betting on my own investment strategy keeps it interesting.

[SusanL]

I am a borrower and I have an answer to this.

Go to the MyFico forums and search for Lending Club. You will find numerous entries of "I thought LC was withdrawing from my account but they weren't and they never notified me of any default."

I am such a borrower. I had the money to pay my loan but LC never bothered collecting on it. There was a "mishap" on my second payment which they tried to collect on ONCE again. I was out of the country and didn't catch it. I received an email a short time later saying "Thanks for your payment" so I just assumed it was resolved. It was not. In fact, after that, LC never bothered to take any payments out. Not the NSF payment nor any of the scheduled payments. They never emailed me, wrote to me or otherwise contacted me to let me know my loan was in default. If you read through the boards, you will see that this is a pattern. Well intentioned borrowers who might have had an issue with one payment or as in other cases I saw, had simply changed bank accounts (and notified LC) are showing up as defaults and even charge-offs on your portfolios.

I personally discovered mine through a credit bureau alert. I immediately called LC and paid the past and current due (which they collected from the same account without issue) but they had already charged off the loan! Seems they charged it off after the payment which is even worse. They have since collected another payment from the same account. When I realized that they were not updating my credit file I called and asked them to stop the automatic payments. I have decided to fight this.

You can lecture me all you want on "you should have checked your accounts and known the payments weren't coming through." but the fact is, this is a lose-lose. Things happen, people travel, they get busy and they rely on auto-pay. In the absence of any communication or alert saying that there is an issue, that a payment is late, many more borrowers than necessary will default.

I am not an investor and I don't know if LC is structured in such a way that it has an incentive to stop collecting from borrowers but their policies make absolutely no sense to me. When someone calls and makes full payment to bring the account current when the loan has not been sold, LC has the option of reinstating the loan (Amex does this). So it is their policy not to. Why, I don't know. But I hope you better understand why there are so many defaults.

[TravelingPennies]

Susan, thanks for your message.

I would be interested to know WHEN this occurred. 

[pressure9pa]

Very interesting to hear this.  I can see some evidence of this in my portfolio, though I confess I haven't tracked it well enough to offer a lot of data.  What I do see is a pattern where my allowances for doubtful receivables consistently rise and my IRR slowly falls for a few weeks, then spikes very quickly back to my acceptable levels.  This may be an indication that LC is asleep at the switch as a servicer most of the time, but there is a periodic trigger for LC to either report to credit bureaus or reach out to borrowers in a different manner which suddenly results in borrower becoming current.  I'll start logging this to see if the pattern is predictable by a monthly pattern or otherwise.

Anyone else seeing this? 

[arcee49]

https://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php?topic=4806.msg43770#msg88888888Quote"> from: pressure9pa on August 23, 2018, 09:56:52 AM

[rob53]

Glad to find this thread. I've had a similar experience and was wondering if it was unique.  Been an investor with LC for about 18 months and decided that either their underwriting was easy to game or something was out of whack because it just makes no sense that someone with good job, steady income, good credit, low utilization rate, own home, etc., etc. would walk away from a loan after a month or two. Susan's post sheds a lot of light.

Disappointing to hear that LC may be so careless with our money.  Regardless of the cause, they've lost this investor.  Put in initial test of $5k on 200 loans (mostly 3 yr) and as soon as they're paid off, I'm gone.  Every time a few hundred $$ balance is there, I move it to a more productive investment.

[TravelingPennies]

https://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php?topic=4806.msg43767#msg88888888Quote"> from: SusanL on August 21, 2018, 02:15:29 PM