This is the fifth in a series of post on my experiences with Prosper, the Peer to Peer lender.
See Part 1 , See Part 2
, See Part 3
, See Part 4 , See Part 5
Prosper has finalized my first 10 loans and I had some extra cash lying around, so I decided to add another $250 to my loan portfolio. Since I recently setup a Facebook account, I wanted to see what this instant transfer of cash thing was all about.
I went to the money transfer page and looked at my options. It said instant transfer was not available to me yet, but I knew if I installed their Facebook application it would let me. I followed the link to Facebook and installed their application. It may just be me, but Facebook applications are very grabby. They want access to all your info, to place ads in all locations on your page or other peoples pages that you view. I deselected all but the most basic access, and even now I want to cut it back even more. Since I'm new to Facebook, I haven't figured out what everything means yet and how to change the all the options.
Once I installed the Facebook application, I had to associate it with my Prosper ID. This only took a second to do , and then I was ready for instant transfers. With the Facebook app installed, you can instantly transfer up to 90% of the value of your current portfolio. This means I could have transfered up to $450, but I stuck with my original plan and only did $250. Sure enough, the money was instantly accessible after the transfer. Two days later, my bank account still has not been debited. So even though the funds are made available to you on Prosper, it still takes the standard 3-5 days to process a transfer.
Once funds were available, I had to edit my auto bidding program. I was thinking at first that if you had an automated bid program in place it would take any cash in your available "pool", but this is not the case. Apparently when you give the program a cash limit it only grabs enough cash to meet that limit. I had originally limited it to $500 since that was all the money I had available at the time. That meant the new money I transfered in was not instantly grabbed by the program. So I raised my limit to $750. That means that when I finally earn enough money in interest and principal payments to meet the $50 minimum, it will not automatically be entered as a bid on a loan. I'm not sure what would happen if I increased my programs limit to ,say, $800. Maybe it would then bid automatically once my cash pool reached $50? That would be useful feature. As Ronco would say, you could "set it and forget it".
Here is what my summary looks like now. Click to enlarge. I was initially confused by my account balance being $777.21 when the total of my deposits and bonuses was $775. It's too soon for any payments to have been made. Then I realized that Prosper was predicting the value of my portfolio as if interest was paid daily. This is something I do not like. It's basically counting your chickens before they hatch. Granted, I don't want any loans to default, but it will happen and that total will not be accurate when it does. Overall, I like Lending Club's summary page better than Prosper's.
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