Opinions on ZOPA

I was a bit reluctant to take a chance on them, but I put £1,000 into the account a few weeks ago after being tempted by their offer of 3 free bottles of champagne. That's now loaned out at 4.9%, with a Zopa bonus of an additional 2%. So far so good.

They're now offering another 2 bottles of wine to customers who put an additional £1,000 into their account before the end of March.

Chris

"Chris Blunt" wrote

Send me 1,000 and I'll give you

"Chris Blunt" wrote

Go on then - send me another

Must be expensive wine!!! Just as well that you can afford to lose the original investment. Your chances of getting your money back long term IMO are not that good. Just ask yourself this - if your have a good credit rating why bother with Zopa? You would just go to a proper bank and get a loan for 6.9% or whatever. The only people that will gain are the untrustworthy.

Do you know of anyone who has actually lost their money with Zopa?

The idea behind Zopa is that by cutting out the big banks you get a better lending or borrowing rate than you would otherwise get.

Zopa don't lend all your money to one particular individual, they divide it into £20 lots, and you actually lend to many different people at the same time. They also carry out the same credit assessment checks on borrowers as the traditional lenders do. The estimated worst case bad debt on the particular group I'm lending to is 1.3%.

I don't think I'd risk a large amount of money with these people. I just wanted to give them a try with a small amount to see how it goes. So far its been fine, and the repayments are already starting to come in. If I get a 6.9% return on my £1,000, plus the 3 bottles of champagne I already have, I'll be happy with that.

Chris

I hope you'll let us know what does in fact happen, good or bad, long-term.

Tiddy Ogg.