Tricia at Blogging Away Debt has a listing up on Prosper for $3,500. The listing number is 18825.

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The payment on the late Prosper loan apparently failed.  The loan is now marked “late”.  Looks like this one might turn into a default after all.  This is sort of screwing with my mojo as I try to place the $750 I just transferred…  I find myself only looking at lower risk loans with less attractive returns.  Maybe I’ll just wait a day and get my perspective back.

Overall you can still get an attractive rate of return by investing in A and AA credit loans.  However, I am prepared to take a bit more risk in search of a higher return.  I just need to settle down and quit second guessing myself.

I’ve still got a couple thousand dollars from our last 0% balance transfer sitting at Netbank earning a yawn-inspiring 3.52%. I’ve been moving it to HSBC in $5,000 blocks by buying 28 day T-Bills every week. This is a great way to avoid losing interest on the money in transit, though I probably break even by keeping it at Netbank for the extra few weeks…

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The late payment I had coming from one of my Prosper loans appears to have been made. The loan is still marked as late but the payment is showing as being in transit as of today. Hopefully the payment will clear and the loan will stay current from here on. Apparently the borrower had insufficient funds for the payment. This could still be the case and if so I’ll find out next week.

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It was bound to happen sometime. My first late loan payment from Prosper showed up on my account today. Apparently the borrower either didn’t make their first payment or it failed for some reason. The borrower has “D” credit which statistically means a 6.2% default rate. Hopefully this loan won’t go into default however.

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As I write this post, my latest $100 transfer slowly makes it’s way from my bank to my Prosper account. On May 11th at 5 PM, the deposit will become available for me to bid, bringing my total investment to date to $1000.

Either I’m good at picking loans or just lucky but I’ve funded 18 of them, received payments on 10, and have not had any late payments to date. In this post, I’ll provide the details of my performance as well as provide some tips for maximizing your returns from Prosper. Bear in mind that I am not an expert at this, I’m merely providing you with my opinion and what’s been working for me. There is a good chance that one or more of my loans will default at some point. Please do your own due diligence on any loans you make.

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So it’s been a month since my first loan was funded at Prosper. In my initial exuberance I had lent money to some borrowers with riskier credit. I have to admit I was a bit worried about them defaulting on the loans. Today the payments were due and I am happy to report that both payments have been made!

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So I’ve invested a total of $300 in prosper.com so far. I’ve split that among 6 loans with an average interest rate of 13.12%. My last three loans have been to people with AA level credit in order to off-set the higher risk loans I placed early on.

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My first winning bid at Prosper seemed to be stuck in limbo for about a week. Turns out the borrower had not verified their checking account with Prosper and the loan was cancelled after 7 days. Frustrating because it locked up the money ($100) for the entire time. The money was released back to my account and I bid on a couple other loans.

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It seems the interest rate I offered was too low (5%) and my listing only received 1 bid for $100.  I withdrew the listing in order to free up that person’s money (a winning bid is essentially held in escrow and cannot be bid on any other loan requests.)

I may try again in a bit but since I can still borrow more money at 0% from a couple of credit cards and even more at 1.99% I may just pass.  For now I think I’ll wait and slowly increase the number of loans I have until there is some cash flow coming in.   Once that is happening I may consider borrowing even at 1.99% and loaning the money out.  It should be relatively easy to earn better than that even with a default or two.  The loan payments could then go towards paying off the credit card and whatever is left could be used to finance further loans.  Will have to see how smoothly things go with the money I am prepared to lose 100% of before committing any that I am not…