Update on Prosper

I just thought I'd give a little update on my experience with Prosper so far. I posted about it earlier, primarily as a response to another blogger who (I assume) deleted a comment I made about it thinking I was spamming for it. I got responses from others that it sounded interesting, so I decided to do a followup post.

I bought into my first loan a couple of weeks ago. I bought in for $50.00 to a $15,000 loan that will pay back to me 20% interest. It is a 3 year loan (as they all are at Prosper) and will pay me back $1.88 per month for 36 months unless it is paid off early. He actually mentioned in his posting that he hoped to pay it back early, and that is one reason I picked it - it would make a good trial run. If it is paid out over the whole 3 years, that $50.00 investment will pay back to me $67.68. A decent investment I believe. The first payment is due to me 9/22/2006 and I will update here as things progress.

I also recently got a newsletter from Prosper (they do this regularly) that informed me about a new publicly available page at Prosper.com about their loan performance and deliquency numbers. This is information about all outstanding loans, and is searchable by date range, etc. Check it out here if number crunching is your thing.

Again, I get absolutely no kick back from Prosper for this. They aren't paying me for "blog ads" or anything. In fact, I doubt they even know I'm writing about them. It just sounds like an interesting idea and something I'm willing to toy with. I'll let you know how it goes.