negative annual return on plus

Looks like a similar experience to mine. Infact your result is worse. Sign of things to come I suspect - looks like they have seriously underestimated the default rate. I might do some probability analysis on my results to see what the probability of my outcome is assuming the default rate is the expected 5%. Pretty unlikely I suspect

Why the hell are you reinvesting when your returns have been so poor??
My Plus results seem good compared to others with me estimating 3.5 to 4% after losses. This is still bad enough for me to be withdrawing all money as it's repaid. I had £20k in and was increasing by £2k a month until I realised how bad Plus was doing. I'd bail out altogether if it wasn't for the fee. Since the loss of the provision fund I've lost interest in Zopa. Why would anyone think Core will perform nearer to the promised rate than Plus has? They're very similar products just with different levels of risk. I'll keep a nominal amount in my account when I've withdrawn what I can just because I get the early adopter rate which I'd like to hang on to for the time when Zopa becomes good again. Because I'm sure it will one day.
Rest of my savings are going in to AC, RS, my S&S ISA, and now even premium bonds. I've always slagged off premium bonds but in the current markets it's just nice to know that money is safe (ish) and tax free. I feel bad times are ahead for markets, jobs, property, and lending etc

So if I've got this correct you have invested 20k in classic and 20k in Access both of which are covered by Safeguard until December and even then the existing loans are loans are covered until they are finished. So only the 20k in Plus and that in Core are not covered by SG and any defaults there are potentially at risk.


My question is are all the defaults you are considering in the non SG loans or are you just grabbing the default status.

Also assuming defaults are in Plus and the Core element is negligible at the moment isn't your  defaults rate £653/£20000 = 3.2%. I'm not sure this is that high for Plus (today its posting "At 9.1% Projected return of 5.7%" ).

All defaults are a pain but my experience of real defaults in the past is that eventually most of them pay. I have some defaults appearing in Plus, nothing like you so far thankfully, most of my defaults are from pre-safeguard days and in that instance I think 5 of them have failed completely - bankrupt, settled etc. Rest are either paying off slowly. Some have paid up and some are even paying some interest. I'm not sure i'll be alive if some of them go to end as at the rates some of them but I guess that's a whole other story.

One thing I did in the SG days was limit my Plus exposure to 10% of mine and Mrs aju's total investment. I guess that has helped us so far.

I have also made sure that our recent investment in ISA is similarly limited although it's not so advantageous as SG protections. For the most part I have dribbled new money into both of these so as to limit lending to £10 per loan - ignoring that we could both be invested in the same loan of course. I did get some £20 loans one day when I was too quick to top up the lent amount but I managed to stop that the same day it happened limited it. 

I hope things improve for you and I definitely hope they don't get as bad for us.

aju

Just had a quick look at the all time loan book, I've taken out all the loan which have been repaid and are now closed
which now shows that I have 4940 loans of which 46 are showing a status of Default all bar 1 (Pre Safeguard) are in Plus
of which bar 2 (£100) are £10 or less loans

The point I was making was that it seems to me that of the total earnings during 2017 todate it seems to be a high
amount of defaults compared to the amount I've earned, I'm no maths expert or financial wizz kid, I'm just letting people
reading this my observations.

I'm still getting a better return from Zopa than I would get from a bank

Have had about £64,000 on loan this year. Been in + since the start and get a 1% early adopter bonus. Split is approx 40k in +,  24K in core/classic/pre-SG. No withdrawals yet. About 6,000 loans. Been with ZOPA since 2005.

Interest year date £2,284, of which £98 was repayments from defaulters.

About what i'd expect, maybe a bit more. Still dont understand how some manage to lose money.

Yes, its 3.5% but thats year to date (7 months) if i annualise the £2284 its £3915. About 6%.

What actually surprised me was that 4% of the interest received was from "defaulters."

Last tax year i had £4,600 interest from zopa, but i made a few withdrawals so had more invested, probably just over £70K.

Still find it weird how you can lose so much...