7.9% ROI on my MyC4 loans in the past year

wiseclerk

MyC4About a year ago I started lending money to African entrepreneurs via MyC4.com.  So far it did meet my expectations. The process of uploading money worked without problems, there were always enough loan applications to select from and the offered interest rates were high enough to allow for good returns despite the risks. The only point, where the usability need to be vastly improved is a better status overview for the payment status of all loans in the portfolio. MyC4 does show the payment status in detail for each loan, but its hard to get an aggregate overview.

I invested at 13.8% average nominal interest rate. 194 loans are currently running, 29 are repaid in full, 12 are open/pending (not yet disbursed), 1 defaulted and 4 were cancelled.

To roughly calculate estimate my ROI I looked at my account display at MyC4

MyC4

About 12-13 months ago I uploaded 1,506.94 Euro. Now my account value is 1,625.24 Euro (9,09 Euro available + 124,62 Euro pending bids + 1.491,93 Euro Outstanding principal). That results in an ROI of 7.9% so far. Naturally it would drop, if the outstanding principal is not repaid in full due to defaults.

The ROI is much lower then the average interest rate, since it does take weeks before an investment in a loan becomes active – and unlend money does not yield interest. A further point is that several late loans affect the ROI.

Read all MyC4 posts from the past months.

Kiva repayments now immediately available for reinvestment

wiseclerk 2 Comments

UPDATED: Kiva states in an email that this action returned 10 million US$ from partially repaid loans to lender accounts – available now for re-lending.

In the past Kiva used to credit repayments to the lender accounts only after a loan was repaid in full.

That changed last week when I received the following email from Kiva:

We are happy to announce that Kiva will now return repayments to lenders
as soon as those repayments are received by Kiva. Because of this
change, you’ll be able to re-lend funds right away instead of waiting
until the end of the loan term. We hope you enjoy this new feature!

As a result of this change, $231.44 in Kiva Credit has been released to
you and is now available for you to use. You can re-lend these funds,
donate or withdraw them.

Continue reading →

It takes weeks to withdraw money from my Kiva account

wiseclerk 1 Comment

When I decided to withdraw some money from my Kiva account, I was informed:

This email confirms your withdrawal request of $25.00. You can expect the funds to be deposited into your paypal account within 1-3 weeks.

This astonished me. The withdrawal is conducted via paypal (as is the upload). The upload was almost instantly. Therefore I did not expect the withdrawal to take weeks.

BTW: So far my Kiva loans all pay on time.

Some Prosper news

wiseclerk

Short news update on Prosper.com developments:

  • Changes at the Prosper management team: John Witchel (former CTO) and Tom Pigoski are no longer listed as part of the management team. A comment on this blog post indicates that John Witchel has left the company while Tom Pigoski is on family leave. Chris Denend is now CTO.
  • Prosper says it will enable faster listings for qualified borrowers. In a streamlined process some borrowers may post loan listings without adding a title, description or picture.
  • Reading statistics published by Prosper? Have a good look on the definitions! In the market survey results, published on Aug. 12th, it looks like on some parameters the year to date figures for 2008 are rising compared to 2007. However looking in the definitions, Prosper compares 7 months in 2008 to 6 months in 2007. (quote:
    2008 Year-to-Date: January 1, 2008 through July 31, 2008.
    2007 Year-to-Date: January 1, 2007 through June 30, 2007.    )