[HighROI]

It would be interesting to know how fellow investors came across Lending Club and Prosper.

For me, in March 2010 while I was studying and researching notes and bonds I came across Prosper's website in a Google search, from there I looked up Prosper in Wikipedia and learned of Lending Club.

[william]

Well a friend of mine asked me if I could loan him some money. I really did not want to because everybody knows how that turns out. So I did some research for him and found prosper. He got his loan and I was interested in the concept of inverting in consumer credit. I did some research and found that prosper had competition, LC. So I did a comparison and LC appealed to me more.

[Mullery]

I saw an Ad on mint.com where I manage my money.  I typically avoid the incessant ads shown on "free" websites, but I decided to check this one out.  I'm glad I did.

After doing some research I almost went with Prosper because Lending Club wasn't allowing accounts in Florida at the time.  A rep at Lending Club told me Florida was coming literally any day, so I waited and sure enough opened an account a couple of weeks later.

The volume of loans issued through Lending Club and the less-checkered past made it far more attractive than Prosper IMO.

[yojoakak]

It was 2009. Bank account/CD interest rates were going from measly to paltry.

The Big Banks had been bailed out and it was becoming obvious that they no longer needed Depositors since they could get as much free money from the Federal Reserve as they might ever want.

The final straw was when one of them sent me an ad/letter touting how great their pitiful rates were. I calculated that the cost of postage to mail that letter was more than I would make on my account with them for a whole month. They should have just given me the stamp!

So I started looking around for some place else to put my money.

I don't remember exactly how I found LendingClub. Probably one of the "rate chaser" chat boards I used to frequent, back when that still kinda made sense. It took me about a year to get comfortable with the whole idea though. I have to admit I still get "cold feet" once in a while, imagining that this entire thing could be a Ponzi scheme.

[TravelingPennies]

I also got the recommendation through Mint.com and checked it out. I had recently received a small inheritance, so I had some cash begging to be invested.

[AnilG]

I discovered peer to peer lending through a classmate in my Executive MBA class. Then I discovered Lending Club historical loan data that I used for Statistics Class Project. i later used Lending Club financial statements for my Corporate Finance class assignments.

We were looking for annuity-style investment that can generate regular monthly cash flow and also allow us to invest over time. We wanted to put the monthly mortgage payments that had freed up after paying off mortgage toward such investment. Most annuities and CDs required lump-sum large investment upfront. With the knowledge I had about Lending Club, it became obvious choice and also met our objective. Then it was just a matter of convincing Mrs RT that p2p lending is not a crazy scheme.

Though in the end we split the mortgage payments between Lending Club, Prosper and I-series treasury bonds.

[New Jersey Guy]

Watching my mutual funds is like watching grass grow.  "Oh boy!  Up a penny!".

I'm aggressive, and wanted something more hands-on, something that would challenge me and produce daily results.  But, I didn't want to be studying charts and graphs.

I have a LC loan in progress that I took out nearly 2 years ago.  While checking my loan status a few months ago, I clicked on the investment tab.  Since NJ only runs off the Folio platform, I opened my account with a small amount of money (like $50!) then purchased and resold speculative notes for a profit.  I liked it!  It was simple and it was fun.

Since then, I've constantly been building my account and am currently up to 93 notes of which 47 are up for sale.  I buy and sell everyday.  Despite the fact that BK's and Defaults are part of my game plan, my overall net gains have been phenomenal, tons better than any other investment vehicle I got going.

My goal for first quarter 2013 is to increase the number of notes I own to 150 with an average of 75 up for sale each day.   

[TcH]

Beleave it or not it was in 2010 when I was doing my taxes on Intuit.  They (lending club) had a pop up to invest your return in the LC market place.  I did it and got hooked.  I wished I had waited for one of the promo sign ups but I am currently at 16% for almost two years.  Learned everything I know about LC and P2P lending from this sit and others.

[DanB]

Back in 2008, a friend, this semi-lucid girl in her early 20's who was working PT at Jamba Juice asked me for a loan to fix her car. Since I had no desire to go down that path I did some research & found Prosper. I even filled out her loan application! Yes, properly motivated, I can be very generous with my time. 

Anyway, yes she did of course get the loan................& yes, she made "a few" payments on it.  Hey, what can I really say?

Later in 2009, when I was looking for a small alternative investment option,  I revisited Prosper & LC................& the rest is history, as the saying goes.

[Peter]

I read an article about Prosper in Money magazine in 2008 when fixed interest rates were slowly going to zero. Getting more than 1% on my money sounded appealing. I did a bit of research but by the time I got around to opening account Prosper was in their quiet period and I couldn't open an account. So I waited. And waited. By June 2009 I was getting impatient so I looked for alternatives and I discovered Lending Club.

I opened an account there and then in late 2010 I finally opened my account at Prosper. Soon after that I bought a blog called the Social Lending Network and started writing about p2p lending. Rebranded to Lend Academy earlier this year and here we are....

[rawraw]

Ponzi scheme, eh? lol

I was looking for a place to put money in 2008-2009.  I googled high interest rate accounts and there was an article putting Lending Club above all the others.  Of course it wasn't a fair comparison, but then I started learning about LC and Prosper.   I told myself that I wasn't sophisticated enough (at that time) to bid on interest rates and the overall credit quality appeared better on LC.  As a result, I went to LC.  I'm very glad I did because Prosper blew up after -- I guess a lot of people weren't sophisticated enough to bid on interest rates.

[faeriering]

My husband and I have been looking at building a tiny house (http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/) for many years.  There's lots of folks that have blogged about building there own.  One young couple borrowed money from lendingclub to do it.  They posted about their loan progress funding progress on their blog.  They didn't qualify for a construction loan because it wasn't on a fixed foundation, and they couldn't qualify for an RV loan because it wasn't built yet, so this was their option for funding.

That was back in '08 (I think).  I would futz around online reading about different strategies from different blogs for a long time.  I invested ~100$ in Jan of 2010.  I was really careful, and selected some G grade notes.  There was a default, and lots and lots of late payments, but my ROI stayed above 11% even with the minimal diversification I had.   I got more confident and continued to research. 

I did a bunch of contracting work last year so I had a bit of cash that I could invest in an IRA for 2012/2011 at LC and not get charged the fees.  I started by mirroring the investments that Ken was making public on his forum at lendstats.  I had a bit of a crisis of faith when the site went down this year, I found some old post that gave me the rough filtering strategy that I later refined into my own filters.  I transferred my filters to Excel so now I can download the browse notes file from LC and do my own filtering.  I owe a lot to Ken for getting me started on the right filtering path (at least one that works for me).

I'd like to eventually run my own statistical analysis in Excel, and automate more of how I select notes, but I'm seeing good returns (so far) and I'm not quite ready to unbury my stats book yet.