trium
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Post by trium on Nov 14, 2018 2:55:57 GMT
...or just a train coming the other way?
I've been moaning a bit lately about higher-than-expected defaults in Plus. I was so fed up I even got estimates for selling out. 3.6% unsaleable, 1% to Zopa (who don't deserve it) and £9.20 to cover market rate shortfall. This last item I find particularly annoying - Zopa saddled me with crummy rates and now I have to compensate someone else! All in all, the cost of selling out cancels out the last 14 months earnings.
I've turned reinvesting off on both standard and ISA accounts while I decide what to do. I thought I'd have a good look at my loan book and see what's on the horizon. I'm fairly encouraged.
Merging both books I find I have 1936 non-closed loans of which 94 are defaulted/settled. 2 are deceased, 13 are in arrangement and 31 in Collections, another 12 are simply late.
Only two loans are due to miss a fourth payment within the next month. 17 loans are 2 months behind. I don't know how many typically get back on track after 2 months - possibly not many - but a month's breather from relentless defaults will be very welcome. Maybe some arrangements will go bad, or a couple of IVAs will spring some unanticipated duds, but for now I'm hopeful.
Nevertheless, even at projected rates Zopa does not look great at the moment. I've been here 8 years but that's not of itself a good reason to stay. I get 8% on AC with well-secured loans. Others mention RS with its provision fund.
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Post by newlender on Nov 14, 2018 8:57:33 GMT
As you say, returns are not outstanding. But in these uncertain times I feel happier with a large and well-established company which is still offering rates which are over double those available from the banks (even after defaults). I establish a % of my portfolio which I'm prepared to risk in P2P and have reached that now so no more new money, just reinvestment. I'm at £1200 profit on my ISA since June 2017 with no negative months so far.
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Nov 14, 2018 9:43:23 GMT
It took me 3 months to sell 96% of investment total of the Zopa plus.
On the positive side, I managed to make real profit sometimes this year, withdrawn more money than total amount deposited on Zopa. I didn't lost a penny in real terms.
Compared to stock, zopa manages to beat FTSE 100& 250 this year.
Also, I now earn a steady stream of income from bad debt repayment. The amount from October and November from bad debt repayment seems a bit less, but I am still hoping to make 3% of all time zopa investment in the next 5 to 10 years from bad debt repayment.
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Post by stevexxx on Nov 14, 2018 13:27:22 GMT
Ive been with Zopa for 8 years now and have never seen it so bad. I've also turned my auto invest off, the large amount of defaults have been concerning me for a while now with many borrowers never paying back a penny. Its obvious proper checks are not being made on people and I see zopa doing nothing to recover debt either. Last month my defaults were more than interest earned, this month within 3 days I've had defaults more than my months interests, so another month in the negative .. Previous months have seen 1 to 3% earnings falling from the 4% I used to be getting. Until I see regular earnings of 4% plus again I will no longer be investing in zopa and switching to Ratesetter with 5.6% and lending works with 6.5% which are giving good results...
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aju
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Post by aju on Nov 14, 2018 14:52:10 GMT
Ive been with Zopa for 8 years now and have never seen it so bad. I've also turned my auto invest off, the large amount of defaults have been concerning me for a while now with many borrowers never paying back a penny. Its obvious proper checks are not being made on people and I see zopa doing nothing to recover debt either. Last month my defaults were more than interest earned, this month within 3 days I've had defaults more than my months interests, so another month in the negative .. Previous months have seen 1 to 3% earnings falling from the 4% I used to be getting. Until I see regular earnings of 4% plus again I will no longer be investing in zopa and switching to Ratesetter with 5.6% and lending works with 6.5% which are giving good results... I checked our loans we have info on defaults for and found that for our loans in ISA's there are quite a few defaults but there is are no loans that have made any recovery payments. Both myself and Mrs Aju started ISA's in June 2017 and the first defaults started to appear in Jan 2018. Looking back at Mrs Aju's non classic Invest lending since 2015 she picked up defaults starting in Mar 2017 but it took until Feb 2018 before she received a recovery payment. Therefore I am wondering if it take 12 months before payments on defaults start coming in anyway. Just a thought. It hard for me to see this in my Invest as I have had defaults for a number of years before the statements screen started detailing this info and I have monthly recovered payments. (I could use my payments checking tools to check each loan but its a bit too cumbersome to check many loans in this way.) So from what I can determine It can take quite a while before payments are made on any defaults if our data is to be believed. I can't remember who it was who gave me the idea but last year I decided to find all my defaults in Invest where there had been Zero payments in the last 2 years. I think it was about 15 in all but not all had reponses. I then poked Zopa for updates on all of these lapsed loaned and whilst they did not really have that much of an update what it did give them was the incentive to start looking at these again. If more of us poked Zopa in this way then they might start looking more closely at these and better than that might start to trigger them (The cynic in me also thinks that they may be a bit busy on all these defaults anyway. One thing to be aware of is that in many cases Zopa has no idea where some of these people may have skipped off to. A quick look in the comments field can see some have skipped the country. Just to give you a flavour of the updates I got on the loans I queried - when there was a response. I did not subsequently check to see if any of these responses made it the comments of the relevant loans.
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trium
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Post by trium on Nov 14, 2018 15:38:52 GMT
Apart from a couple of small pre-Safeguard recoveries some years back, recoveries in Plus began 12 months after the first defaults and have continued for 5 months now (though only small amounts - 1.42, 4.29, 1.08, 0.93, 0.66). No recoveries in the ISA yet (1st bad debt Sep 17 but didn't really start until April this year) except one which was only in default a few days before repaying in full (I think your wife had the same one aj) So that seems to support the idea that recoveries take maybe 12 months to start trickling through. |
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aju
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Post by aju on Nov 14, 2018 15:49:12 GMT
Apart from a couple of small pre-Safeguard recoveries some years back, recoveries in Plus began 12 months after the first defaults and have continued for 5 months now (though only small amounts - 1.42, 4.29, 1.08, 0.93, 0.66). No recoveries in the ISA yet (1st bad debt Sep 17 but didn't really start until April this year) except one which was only in default a few days before repaying in full (I think your wife had the same one aj ) So that seems to support the idea that recoveries take maybe 12 months to start trickling through. Perhaps, benaj will have data to support this too.
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paule
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Post by paule on Nov 15, 2018 11:44:13 GMT
well lets hope so, I have just checked again and -£700 since may in income. Thank you zopa, roflmao.
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trium
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Post by trium on Dec 5, 2018 15:19:35 GMT
Maybe some arrangements will go bad, or a couple of IVAs will spring some unanticipated duds, Well, that couple of IVAs unfortunately did turn up last week. But apart from those two I've had no defaults since 12 November. However I now have 7 people looking set to miss a fourth payment in the coming month (I had only 2 when I last posted) and 18 loans have missed two or more (up from 17). I've switched recycling back on for now but I'll be watching closely.
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Post by GentlemansFamilyFinances on Dec 5, 2018 16:05:26 GMT
I'm still getting monthly repayments from bad debts on loans taken out over 7 years ago.
That's some light I guess.
My other Zopa account - which had money lent between 2016 and 2018 - has suffered from some bad debts but not half as bad as I hear from here. I think that maybe I was unlucky the first time round and lucky this time - but the returns are not smooth and not great. My hope is that I'll keep getting repaid some of this bad debt forever!
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