Yes, I’m a Kiva lender. Awesome service. I’ve written about it on here before. A quick search should pull that up.

I understand that you are getting some satisfaction from the lending that needs to be added to the equation but from a purely matematical standpoint, you are not getting enough of a return to justify the risk you are taking.

Finally, have you tried kiva?

Muleshoes was active in the first round of Prosper forums, and he didn’t listen to anybody. You can find an archive of the original official Prosper forums here: http://prosperreport.com/

The portfolio that you linked to, Pensioner, is a sad story. I met him at both Prosper Days, in 07 and 08. He was interviewed in a magazine, and admitted to using several hundred thousand from a home equity loan to get in early because such high interest rates were too good to be true. He’s a really nice guy.

In November 2007 Prosper took down the official forums and replaced them with heavily moderated forums. Prosper was unhappy with the tone and lack of control of the forums. When the archive was made available, Prosper accused prosperreport.com of cybersquatting and threatened to sue. Funny how that was the only cybersquatting action they took, even though several other sites used Prosper in their names.

The front page of Prosperreports has links to a fraudster that used Prosper, and an extortionist. The Jessica Wolcott story is nearly unbelievable. The Victoria Crawford fraud was uncovered by active Prosper lenders.

http://www.rateladder.com/2008/04/03/vintage-curves-04-2008-amount-late-by-credit-grade-from-origination/

Rateladder, aka Kevin Gillette, who know works for Prosper, does a monthly chart showing lates by credit grade.

The cure rate for anything 30+ days late is so low that most people (other than Prosper in their official speeches, et al) consider it defaulted.

Prosper makes an API download available for developers, that’s what LendingStats, Eric and Rateladder use for their data. You could download it and play around it with, too.

You can also obtain a lot of data by using the performance data available on Prosper’s website. It’s under Bid on Loans, then Performance. Keep in mind that a loan is not eligible to be 30 days late until 30 days after the first payment is due. So if you wanted to look at all loans with a credit grade of B, the best representation would be use 2/1/06 (or was it 4/1/06 it become public—anything from 11/05 through 2/1 or 3/1/06 was test/internal use) through 4/1/08.

Regarding collections, I’ve had 2 B loans go bad. It doesn’t appear that collections are more successful with prime/near prime borrowers than sub-prime borrowers. Across the board collections are broken. PMI hired a ops guy to handle collections, Doug Fuller, last year. He’s trying, but it hasn’t improved too much.