Anyone do this???

Seems like a better return on an investment than stocks and shares ISA’s (looks like about 4%) or savings accounts
The risk seems minimal with a bigger company like zopa. Or ratesetter.

Good or bad experiences I’d be interested to hear

I put some money in Zopa about 4 years ago, the way you lend is safer now, but out of the 300 or so I lent money to i only had one bad debt and lost about £8 to them. I’ve averaged over 6% per year over the time it was in. It was just a taster with some money I could afford to lose at the time, I just wanted to see how it went. Given my good experiences I have recently put considerably more in 3 different peer to peer schemes.

What he said ^ but realistically 4-5% over the last 3 years

Yes. various ones, all evens out in the end, couple of ‘bad debts’ but updates are prompt.
Can’t com pain, difficult to navigate the rate setting though sometimes.

Ratesetter user here. Nothing but good things to say about them

Has anyone borrowed rather than lent?
What sort of rates do you get?

I borrowed with zopa to buy my last car, great service, you can see your balance online anytime and make overpayments anytime without penalty. I’ve often thought about borrowing money to lend back to others on a higher rate but I’m sure they wouldn’t allow that.

Is it up to you to chase defaults?

Nothing but good experience of Ratesetter. It’s worth noting that rather meanly, you can’t offset bad debt against interest earned for tax purposes. Ratesetter’s provision fund is quite a neat way round this, in that a provision for bad debt is deducted from the interest, and the fund pays out to cover bad debt. I think Zopa may have something similar now.