RAF offers

Offers only available to the air force ? Sounds a bit niche to me. 

As for offers generally that's an interesting question. Isn't there always an imbalance between supply and demand (lenders and borrowers) ? If it tips too far one way we get cash drag and presumably the platform hits on the brokers to bring in more business and if it goes the other way they start a load of promotions to bring in more cash. So I think in that sense its normal.

Obviously if the scales tip too far in one direction or another that's not a good sign but I think a promo just tells us in what direction they are tipped not by how much.

I'm not sure how. If you say "if it sounds good to be true it probably is", then anyone giving you up to £200 for very little effort is definitely in that category. I dont think p2p cashback itself is instantly a sign of danger. Although of course sometimes it can be a warning sign.

I agree with most that and to a certain extent I've only ever been interested in making sure our nest egg is safe for as long as is possible and so I start from a very low risk position of making sure we keep inflation tax at bay and if we can get a couple of points on top then great To be honest P2P is our riskiest asset but I made sure that in Zopa, some years ago now, that I started off very light touch, £10 then £100 then just play for a very long period. Its fair to say that at that time we were getting very good returns from the current accounts and as a result had 10's of them across both of us. It was a bit of a faf at times but we were increasing our lot and bettering inflation. We didn't even bother with reg savings at that time.

Even when I left my employer on a kings shilling deal + gold standard pension (some people call it this and its good but its not a big as the press sometimes make out) we always worked with the premise if I don't understand it then we should stay well clear. Ok I did make a stupid stoozing decision with Kaupthung and a credit card transfer when 2 months later the crash made things slight sweaty but we eventually got a let off. Over the years since all that we increased our lot in Zopa under the SG and things were good never as you say being too greedy.

Recently we have lost most of our current account savings, Tesco withdrew their savings account that allowed one to have multiple DD's to cover the main banks conditions, the interest rates fell too and other stuff. We made a considerable amount of money from most of these though, especially the Halifax £5 deal that just seemed to run and run. We finally took the plunge to move our, frankly useless, Isa rates into the Zopa Isa but with a view to keep the diversification of loans to <1% ( the jury is still out whether this method is useful and it does mean that lump sums take a lot longer to be lent out). 

At the moment we are running down our non ISA's in Zopa and relending into Mrs Aju's RS at rates that we are selecting manually. We will soon be at a level where I am not comfortable with the amounts in P2p and we will run it down into something like Marcus say. That's not ideal as its an increase in the Inflation tax effect but it is safe none the less.

We have some shares but most are not that great in terms of Capital value but they are well performing in terms of dividend returns so we are happy with those.

I'm not sure if we would pass standard FCS criteria for P2p if the proposals go through but we do have a few years in p2p to at realise it's not safe and our capital is at risk. All that aside we are lucky I guess in that we are getting 4-5% returns even though the defaults are coming in more wildly. I suspect it's that the larger sums and the increase loan numbers though and our XIRR's are looking sound this year even if slightly down on previous years.

I'm not sure any of this counts for adequate understanding and the £10 loans method we used on Zopa has a couple of years to run before it will fully pan out. The main thing worrying me at the moment is this "damned EU thing" and how our borrowers may be affected.

I've wittered on a bit and Mrs Aju says I have to get up and get the papers before we can watch Mr Marr get few answers from the people he interviews these days.

Edit: Some grammar and words were amended to improve context - bad typing skills etc ;-)

Thanks for the replies.

I always look to current account switch and first year high percentage offers before P2P. But when you have a few grand it's difficult to find a home for all of it that pays more than 1.5%.