Lending Club: First Impressions

The Internet is a wonderful place. Thanks to a few tweets back and forth with the CEO Director of Product Strategy for Lending Club, I landed myself a few bucks in my account to test out the growing P2P site. I've invested about $500 into Prosper over the past two years, but it's in a silent period now and I've got a hankering for P2P lending, so it makes sense to try out the ever-popular lending club.

I haven't done much so far. Signing up was easy (then again, I remember signing up for Prosper was easy too. It's always easy to sign up when the company wants you to give them your money.) The interface is nicely designed and clean... at least from a noob perspective.

I'm about to make my first loan... I just need to figure out how to do that. It seems like the rates are set by credit scores and such, as opposed to somewhat randomly ala Prosper. I guess that's good? I failed at Prosper by lending $50 to a person with a B credit rating who was looking for money to study abroad. It was her second time posting the listing. Yea, that one defaulted. Everyone else has been paying on time. I'm not seeing the interest rates I'd like... even though the performance is still wayyyy beating all my stocks.

Ok, so I'll write more about Lending Club once I've figured out how to pick my loan(s). They first took me to a page that - similar to Prosper - would set up an investing plan for me based on my desired risk allocation. I never used that on Prosper... I like to hand-pick my loans. So that's what I'm going to try to do... I'll report back when I figured it out and get my first loan set up.