[Closed] Zopa....any experience of lending through them?

I ave a small amount invested (£250) which I have put in in £50 increments over the course of this year. I have not had any problems so far and the web site is easy to use.

I would be reluctant to invest my life's savings in it but I am pretty happy with how things have gone so far. I am going to keep putting £50 in when I have some money left over at the end of the month.

I put in a grand a few years back and it has steadily grown to about £1300 now. I've not done much in the way of managing it and have let it auto lend to my set markets. I've had once instance of bad debt in that time.

So no complaints really, but then I have yet to take any money out so don't know how easy that will be...

I put fifty quid in then forgot all about it, must see what happened.

I've got some with Zopa and some with Ratesetter. Both have been just fine, and it works exactly as advertised.

You should be aware that your money is not protected by the financial services protection scheme. In theory, if the company goes bust, you've still got loan agreements in place with all the people you've actually lent to, but how much you'd actually get that back in that situation is a bit of an unknown.

The other thing to be aware of is that the 5% rate relies on you reinvesting all monthly repayments for a further 5 years, so it's not a case of invest, leave for 5 year then withdraw the whole amount without penalty: in 5 years time, you'll have your funds tied up for a range of periods from 0 to 5 years. That said, the 1% withdrawal fee isn't too bad, you can choose to have your repayments reinvested for shorter terms, or you can withdraw as loans are repaid.

I've put an equal amount of money away with Zopa, Ratesetter, Funding Circle and Assetz Capital. Had the money in for a year or so. I have a bit of money to put away again and am going to Assetz, have been getting 7% out of them.