An Interesting Point About PPI Claims
Apparently the largest number of PPI claims have been made from Croydon.
Any ideas why?
Boiler Room Scammers Boiled
I like this story. Let’s hope these three don’t ever get out of jail to fleece people of their money.
Despite Help From Ed Milliband, Aquascutum Goes Bust!
Aquascutum has entered administration, as is reported here on the BBC today.
This is despite the publicity of Ed Milliband wearing one of their suits at his wedding last year. It must have been the colour!
The Zopa Return Rate Is Up
The Zopa rate so far this year has been 7.4 % before tax, including all costs and bad debts. This time last year the rate was 5.98 %
From my figures, it looks like they are short of borrowers. Have the banks finally got their act together or is it that the economy is turning?
It could also be that the bad publicity of payday loans is rubbing off! Their only connection is that they have a snappy name and they give loans, but they are a peer-to-peer lender, not a payday loan company.
The Bank Holiday is Not Good for Zopa Lenders
I’ve just looked at my Zopa statistics over the Bank Holiday weekend and the amount of money requested by borrowers has dropped by nearly 20% since Thursday. A similar thing happened last year, but in the last part of the Bank Holiday week borrowers returned to finance those cars and other goods they’d seen over the weekend.
Lenders seem to have kept up their funds in Zopa.
So perhaps now might be a good time to borrow from Zopa, as there is plenty of funds available.
The Speed of Lending on Zopa
I have been asked a few times about how long it takes money to be lent out in Zopa. A typical question might be something like “If I invest £1,000, then how long will it take to be lent out to borrowers?”
On Friday, I transferred £1,000 into Zopa and it had all been allocated to borrowers within eighteen hours. Remember that the system is continuous and on-line, so borrowers can probably turn up at all hoursimaginable. All of these contracts and there are about thirty of them are now being processed and they will appear in my account as Lent Out over the next day or so. If you have ever borrowed money or been credit checked, you will know this is a process that can be variable in time. Also some borrowers will be turned down and the money will be available for allocation to another borrower.
So don’t think your money has disappeared, when it is just very slow getting to Lent Out.
I’ll let you know when my thousand is fully lent.
Update on the 3rd April.
I’ve still got £750 being processed before loans are approved. It looks like only a handfull have actually been so. But then we’ve only had one working day so far.
Funding Circle Gets More Backing
Funding Circle is one of Zopa‘s peer-to-peer finance rivals, that concentrates on small businesses. An article in today’s Sunday Times has said that they have just raised an extra £10m of finance.
From my point of view, the most interesting thing in the article is this quote from Neil Rimer of Index Ventures.
Even if the banks were to get their acts together overnight and were suddenly to start lending, they would struggle to compete with Funding Circle. The Internet didn’t exist when the banks set up their infrastructure to deal with small buisinesses.
He doesn’t go as far as I do, but I definitely think that those who hold bank shares need their heads examined.
The American Lottery
The news this morning carries a story that the Mega Millions lottery in the United States
It used to be the case, that American lottery winners paid tax on the winnings.
So that might be the worst prize as well!
One of My Zopa Bad Debts Has Gone Missing
Ever since the 3rd of March, I have had 13 bad debts, that have cost me the sum of £413.77. As I have the sum of nearly £ 38,000 invested with well over 2,000 borrowers, that doesn’t seem to be too bad to me.
A strange thing has just happened in that the bad debt count has dropped to 12 with a total of £405.34. I suppose the explanation is simple in that some money has been recovered from a debtor.
I’ll check in the morning to see it is not a figment of my imagination. It’s the morning now and it is still missing, so someone must have paid it.
Paying Credit Cards
I have two credit cards; one with my bank and one with John Lewis. Today I paid the bills and transferred some money to each from my on-line account.
I used the bank’s faster payments system for the John Lewis account and it disappeared from my account immediately, but on past form it’ll take a few days to get to my account there.
The internal transfer hasn’t left my account yet and it hasn’t been credited to the other account, which I suppose is fair.
As I’m in all day. I’ll be updating this post during the day.
The Anonymous Widower 