Archives for September 2014

New Look for Peer & Social Lending

September 29, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 6 Comments

I pictured my ideal site design for Peer & Social Lending frequently over the last few months. It was obvious to me that the simple blog style didn’t fit for the content I was providing. With the previous site, I imagined new readers coming to my site, glancing at the most recent article and being completely overwhelmed and confused - frustrated, the reader left, never to return again. There had to be a better way. Working with my limited budget, I put my plans in action and what you see today is the result. [Read more…]

Quality sites

LendingRobot Now Free for up to $10,000 of Managed Investment

September 23, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 4 Comments

Well well well…it is hard to believe that just a year ago that the third party automated investment tool LendingRobot was in private beta. Back in December of 2013, they opened to the public and in April of 2014, they were registered with the SEC as a Registered Investment Advisor. Today I’m excited to share that it is now free for users with up to $10,000 managed investment. New users will be able to start using the service without entering their credit card information. If you’re an existing user, you’ll see your bill reduced accordingly. Have more than that to manage? Don’t worry, you’ll still see a benefit.

I reached out to the great folks at LendingRobot to get the details:

We’ll subtract $10K of accounts’ value before calculating the fees. So for someone with $9K managed, it remains free forever. For someone with $50K managed, they’ll only pay our 0.45% fees on $50K - $10K = $40K.

For the people in ‘trial’ mode, the trial will end once we invested at least $10K for them. To continue using LendingRobot, they’ll have to enter their credit card.

As longtime readers know, I’m a big proponent of keeping all (not just p2p lending) investing fees low, so this is a welcome change. LendingRobot is the only third party company I’m aware of offering automation for both Lending Club and Prosper that is open to the public. If you haven’t created an account with LendingRobot, I highly recommend you sign up and take a look around.

Have questions? What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Investing with BTCJam - Peer to Peer Bitcoin Lending

September 17, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 5 Comments

In my last post, I gave an overview of BTCJam which is the world’s first and largest Bitcoin lending network. I have had an account with them for several months was given $50 worth of Bitcoin to test out the platform. Keep in mind that this only a trial and my investing returns may not be typical of other investors as I will point out below. BTCJam is still relatively new and certainly if you’re expecting a platform with all of the functionality and data that Prosper and Lending Club provide, you may be disappointed. With that being said, there have still been some major improvements (even in the past few weeks). One is the social dashboard as pictured below. [Read more…]

BTCJam Review - World’s first and largest Bitcoin Lending Network

September 2, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 3 Comments

There is a lot of innovation right now in the p2p lending space. We’ve seen niches for Mining, Student loans, recent graduates and even airplanes. However, one p2p lending company is able to provide loans all of the world. This is probably the most fascinating thing about BTCJam - the world’s first and largest Bitcoin lending network. In order to understand the need for BTCJam, It is important to realize that not every country allows people to access to credit like the United States. [Read more…]