|
|
Post by yorkman on Sept 14, 2017 15:00:43 GMT
OK so my holding in Plus is fairly small but it's still a good proportion of my total savings. Until May I was getting between £25 and £30 per month interest. In the last three months just £1 in total. Given that it's our money that is being given away I'm wondering what incentive there is for Zopa to proactively recover loses.
|
|
marie
Posts: 38 
Likes: 15
|
Post by marie on Sept 14, 2017 16:44:40 GMT
I have asked Zopa for more details on their debt recovery process and stats on successful recovery to be made available to us, but no reply as of yet.. I'll post their reply here when/if I get one  |
|
|
|
Post by BrianC on Sept 14, 2017 18:54:11 GMT
I can't even see how much money I'm giving away anymore due to their statements not working. I've been with Zopa over ten years and never emailed them before but in the next few days they're gonna get a very angry and rude email. There's one thing having Zopa plus massively underperforming but then to start hiding the results is unacceptable. Zopa is done with me. I'll never invest another penny.
|
|
|
|
Post by davee39 on Sept 14, 2017 20:52:31 GMT
What is the benefit of anger and rudeness? When you contact Zopa you will almost certainly be dealing with someone trying to do their job the best they can despite whatever problems are thrown at them by Zopa system failures.
I can see 3 issues here.
1) Statement for the current month not showing earnings and losses. The total balance looks correct.
Zopa have not denied that they have IT problems. Their entire system is based on dividing investments into tiny pieces, and I imaging that processing the sheer volume of data is responsible for the recent issues.
2) Zopa+ losses
I suspected that my losses were wiping out my earnings and have pulled out of plus. This was marketed as a 'money at risk product' and Zopa have recognized that the risks were not correctly assessed.
3) Recoveries
Some of our savings have gone to crooks. When a loan has defaulted without a single repayment it is fair to assume that the borrower had no intention to repay. It is also highly likely that borrower has done a runner and there will be no recoveries. Honest borrowers in trouble will usually try to make some payments. This part of the risk with unsecured lending.
Margins for quality borrowers are tight. The BOA is still lending to banks at 0.25% making the loan market very competitive. Zopa will not mind lenders going elsewhere, they have a queue of new customers waiting to join.
|
|
|
|
Post by newlender on Sept 15, 2017 7:07:27 GMT
A very sensible post and I agree completely. I too was lured by Z+ and underestimated the losses that would accumulate. But that's part of P2P lending so we need to move on with a revised strategy. I'm simply letting my Z+ pay back into Holding and then re-investing the cash into ISA Core. Zopa have clearly listened to us though, as the total defaults from the two platforms have been separated - so by clicking on the little question mark you can see total defaults for each one rather than the cumulative amount. I got the shock of my life a few weeks ago when I thought that I had >£350 of losses on my ISA but of course that was all from Investing. Now I have £0 losses on my ISA when I click the ? mark and >£350 when I do the same for Investing. I agree about the lack of a current month statement being a pain, but August was a shocker for me and so I suppose it will just depress me when it does appear as September's statement. Z+ is clearly for the brave and I am a bit concerned that when new lenders are allowed a wall of money will come in from people who don't read this forum. Cashing in a S&S ISA to plough into P2P would be a grave error IMHO.
|
|
|
|
Post by wyndstryke on Sept 15, 2017 9:16:51 GMT
... Z+ is clearly for the brave and ... This is true, albeit not the highest risk lending they've done (anyone remember 'listings'?). I've been with Zopa since 2008 and I'll only put a fraction (currently about 15%) into Z+. And I keep the chunk size down to £10 whenever possible.
|
|
aju
Member of DD Central
Posts: 3,500 
Likes: 924
|
Post by aju on Sept 15, 2017 14:53:04 GMT
... Z+ is clearly for the brave and ... This is true, albeit not the highest risk lending they've done (anyone remember 'listings'?). I've been with Zopa since 2008 and I'll only put a fraction (currently about 15%) into Z+. And I keep the chunk size down to £10 whenever possible. I can certainly remember listings I had 7 in all and 4 repaid ok. Of the other 3 one that "Settled" with a debt relief order. The other 2 are sort of still paying to degree, they both started in 2009. Loan 1 Default Owing: £7.14, Int: £2.09 Last payment: 02/03/2017 Partial Loan 2 Default Owing: £7.79, Int: £1.88 Last payment: 01/09/2017 Partial Loan 3 Settled Owing: £2.10, Int: £1.34 Loss: £0.80 Zopa is chasing Loan 1 again I guess. Both were meant to finish in 2014 so payments are slooooow. I could check them but to be honest its a long while since I wrote them off as lost so any payments are bonuses. In my Plus "Investing" I have 4x£10 loans that have defaulted so far in my case I have been fortunate that its only 1 a month so not too much of a hit monthly. In both my ISA and Investing I have tried to keep to £10 as much as possible, a few glitches along the way resulting in some £20 loans. I have limited the spread to 10% in each investment account for both myself and Mrs aju. I guess the next 18 months will be the prover for the ISA and the next 6-12months on the "Investing" side will be critical although its not explicit that these rules are for everyone. According to the statements page data I have recorded and taking the defaults into account as they occur month on month my returns for last year and this year so far are... Investing: 2016/17 Investing: 5.52% 2017/18 Investing: 4.74% (Extrapolated from average of 5 months so far) Note I have over 30 defaults from pre-safeguards as well that bring the %ages down a little but many are still paying as well. ISA: Its really too early to tell but at the moment from the 3 entries in statement so far ... 2016/17 ISA: 5.23% (Extrapolated from average of 2 months with data so far) Clearly there are no defaults to bring this down yet. Mrs AJU's "investing" is slightly lower than this with 4.89% for last fin year and 4.74% for this year so far. Her ISA figures for the 2 months extrapolated is 4.51%. It should be noted that both of our ISA's are still investing £1000 every time the current queue falls below a £1000 to keep the diversity to £10 chunks. So the returns will increase for full months of interest. Well thats the plan ;-) Also I forgot to mention that of my Core ISA lending 25% is actually covered by the safeguard so thats a bonus I bet a lot of people are not factoring in. Mind you any defaults showing as defaults are real defaults though, SG's don't show the default entry at all.
|
|
aju
Member of DD Central
Posts: 3,500
Likes: 924
|
Post by aju on Sept 15, 2017 15:47:26 GMT
... Zopa have clearly listened to us though, as the total defaults from the two platforms have been separated - so by clicking on the little question mark you can see total defaults for each one rather than the cumulative amount. I must have missed that one, are you talking about the ? next to the bad debt: new defaults text in the statements screen. I know that there were things that had been copied across from the investing side - I guess copy and paste played a big role in creating the ISA side - there is certainly a lot of evidence still especially when using a tablet/phone.
|
|
|
|
Post by newlender on Sept 15, 2017 16:05:01 GMT
No. On the Summary page for each platform it shows 'Earnings' at the top. Click on the ? mark there and it tells you your total losses so far.
|
|
aju
Member of DD Central
Posts: 3,500
Likes: 924
|
Post by aju on Sept 16, 2017 10:22:14 GMT
Ah, I see it now, thanks.
I think the dementia bug is kicking in - I'm not sure but I think I reported that issue a while back but hey its fixed now.
|
|
aju
Member of DD Central
Posts: 3,500
Likes: 924
|
Post by aju on Sept 16, 2017 10:50:43 GMT
Okay so armed with the information in the earnings info and the fact that I have £184+ of bad debt does anyone know how to get to this figure using the all_time csv to collate the data. I've tried to just reference the defaults using both status and the default date field and collecting together both defaults and settled's I have £192 in "outstanding" column.
Just using defaults I have £167 so I'm struggling to get the figure even near in my investing side. There's nothing in the ISA side to work with yet ;-).
Its probably way more complex than what I am doing. I've done this both on latest CSV and also I have a large spreadsheet that collates all this stuff and again my figures seem to bear out the manual excel checks but that's probably because I'm using the wrong data perhaps. I've tried this on current csv as that does not really allow settled's but get same £167.
Note whilst settled are technically finished I usually include them as they are bad debt losses that can never be recovered. To me that is still important in the whole picture.
Update:
So I checked Mrs Aju csv data and her earning bad debt info, she only has recent plus data that can be in default if at all. So the surprise was/is that here figure using just the outstanding column is spot on to 2 decimal places that are available on the earning info (?). So the only thing that is skewing this is probably my pre-safeguard defaults. I think I'll flag this to Zopa and see what they say.
|
|
jcb208
Member of DD Central
Posts: 838
Likes: 638
|
Post by jcb208 on Sept 17, 2017 12:19:55 GMT
I think we are just giving it away looking at my defaults which are approaching 4% on plus and I am now withdrawing all repayments. Many of my defaults have only had 1 repayment before hitting trouble. Zopa obviously never thought about the level of defaults when excepting these borrowers ,It is not there money to loose.Like many others I have also finished with Zopa now
|
|
invester
P2P Blogger
Posts: 612
Likes: 618
|
Post by invester on Sept 18, 2017 7:32:22 GMT
Over 170 loans and 7 defaults. Been lending since Jan this year so my overall rate is going to come fairly close to 0% soon.
By my experience, the defaults happen disproportionately in the earlier stages of the loan which obviously cost much more money.
I'd really like to see how Zopa can verify the claims of target returns, if there are a lot of people having really poor returns like this there also must be a lot of people sitting on the other side enjoying 9%+ to balance this out. Somehow I find this difficult to believe.
|
|
|
|
Post by davee39 on Sept 18, 2017 8:58:05 GMT
Over 170 loans and 7 defaults. Been lending since Jan this year so my overall rate is going to come fairly close to 0% soon. By my experience, the defaults happen disproportionately in the earlier stages of the loan which obviously cost much more money. I'd really like to see how Zopa can verify the claims of target returns, if there are a lot of people having really poor returns like this there also must be a lot of people sitting on the other side enjoying 9%+ to balance this out. Somehow I find this difficult to believe. The average rate on my plus account was 12%. Assuming the above loans were £10 parts invested over 8 months Interest earned = £136, Losses = £70, Net interest to date = 5.8% (Based on grossing up 8 months interest over a year) There are problems with this calculation. 1) Assuming the highest rate loans have defaulted the ongoing interest rate will be much lower 2) There will additional loans with missed payments likely to default I have exited plus, aside from the about to default loans, this was clearly a flawed product. Zopa cannot verify their claims, they got it wrong, but lending to 'E' grade borrowers @ > 30% is a high risk business.
|
|
invester
P2P Blogger
Posts: 612
Likes: 618
|
Post by invester on Sept 18, 2017 9:25:21 GMT
I agree it's flawed. In some ways I can see it's similar to Bondora (except Bondora kept the defaulted loans as part of the portfolio so investors never suffered a loss on paper at least)
I see that Zopa quote 4.5% as 'projected' and their risk management statistics page seem to be hugely out of date. Almost as if the assumption that defaults would occur uniformly across the lifespan of the loans and then they have run their models off that.
Not complaining about the risk, but then we have to assume that the interest charged was not commensurate with the risk. Essentially, underpriced.
I genuinely wonder if there is fudging of the figures to ensure that small fry private investors suffer a bit more than the institutional ones because a loss of investor confidence in the first would be unfortunate but manageable, but a loss in the second would be catastrophic. It sounds bananas, but after several debacles in various platforms nothing would surprise me anymore.
|
|
