Steadfast Finances

 Banking,Investing 101,Peer to Peer Lending         20 comments

After posting my Lending Club investment strategy and returns for over a year now, I thought today was as good as any to post a quick summary and track my net annual return volatility. Summary Outperforming Lending Club’s benchmark index of 9.7% by ~4.5%. Loan payments generate ~$250/month of cash for reinvestment. Defaults: 2 loans [...]

 Investing 101,Peer to Peer Lending,Small Business         17 comments

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. – Thomas Jefferson. Like all things in life, if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do a little bit of work, the chances of something good happening are in your favor. It doesn’t happen [...]

 Financial Crisis,Humor         No comments

One of the upsides to having insomnia is you watch all sorts of things you wouldn’t ordinarily watch. Case in point, this humorous quote from an old James Cagney flick One Two Three filmed during the Cold War which couldn’t have sarcastically summed up the Achilles Heel of capitalism and forecasted the financial crisis any [...]

 Investor Psychology,Real Estate         No comments

So you think 30 year fixed mortgage rates over 5% is a bad thing? You think an interest rate above 4.99% has some sort of mystical, psychological barrier to entry? How does 10% sound? What about 18.5%? So quit your cryin’… we all knew 30 year mortgage rates in the 4% ballpark couldn’t last forever. [...]

 Banking,Investing 101,Peer to Peer Lending         6 comments

They say you always remember your first more than the others… So yes, after 1 1/2 to 2 years as a Lending Club investor, I finally got hit with my first default where a small $24 loss took my pretty little 15.64% NAR out behind the woodshed to a tune of 0.86%. A 14.78% NAR [...]

 Financial Crisis,Investor Psychology,Real Estate         1 comment

I speak quite a bit about the dark side of investor “confidence”, and no where is there a better example on the fallout from manipulating investor psychology than the latest Vanity Fair piece by Michael Lewis on the Irish financial crisis. The endless flow of cheap foreign money had teased a new trait out of [...]

 Economy,Infographics & Chartology,Investing 101,Peer to Peer Lending         6 comments

One static component of my constantly evolving Lending Club investment strategy is identifying borrowers who have a fairly long history of employment. In other words, that means: the older the better (but not at or beyond retirement age). 10 years plus with a single employer. decades of experience often imply management material. As the above [...]

 Investing 101,Peer to Peer Lending         No comments

Some time ago, I mentioned that P2P lending investors should no longer believe that a peer to peer lending loan to federal or state government employee is a “sure thing” or that government employees can never be laid off. Since then, lots of supporting evidence has manifested. Not only from state governments eying bankruptcy court [...]

 Banking,Business Trends,Entrepreneurship,Peer to Peer Lending         No comments

In an older post that made the rounds with the entrepreneurial and innovation crowd, I touched upon the idea that the Internet is making middlemen obsolete. This isn’t a novel concept, but if you’re in a business where you’re acting as an intermediary – a centralized position where you purposely keep your customers away from [...]

 Banking,Personal Finance         2 comments

The problem I most often run into when talking basic personal finance metrics like FICO scores, credit reports, and overall creditworthiness is that many people fail to realize that your FICO score is based on pure statistical evidence with no consideration for judgment and does not allow for human emotion. So a recent “Come to [...]

 Banking,Business Trends,Real Estate         No comments

In my 2010 financial market predictions, I predicted that strategic defaults (e.g. a homeowner stops making mortgage payments even though they can afford the payments, but feel they have made a bad investment) would be a small trend that continued to gain momentum. Follow up data from PBS Newshour suggests this prediction has been proven [...]

 Banking,Real Estate         No comments

For anyone who thought it was a good idea in the mid 2000s to buy that weekend getaway condo or a second home near their favorite vacation spot, I have some bad news for ya… it probably would’ve been a better idea to wait. As you can see (per Zillow.com data), the no brainer real [...]