No More Prosper For Me

I've decided to stop investing at Prosper.com. Maybe its the credit crunch and the general near-recession in the economy, but my borrowers are dropping like flies. If all my current lates don't start making payments soon, I'll be almost in negative returns. I'm still showing a 19% return, but that's only because most of my borrowers are still current and also Prosper.com doesn't sell the loans off as quickly as they used to. I think that's because they'd have a hard time selling them, so they just hang on and hope their collections agency will eventually convince the lates to start paying again. Not much hope of that...so far my 7 hard-core lates have made half a payment between them. Yes, one of them made half a payment. Many of those 7 made either 1 payment or NONE before dropping out. One guy declared bankruptcy after just 2 payments.

Don't lend at prosper.com; it's too hard to pick the winners.

I'm still *fairly* confident that I'll be able to start investing there again under two new conditions: the economy has to turn around and I should pick slightly less risky loans (yes, I went hell-for-leather on risk, I know). Also, avoid ANYONE involved in real estate.