Does anybody have money in there as an investor?

There was a thread on here a while back about savings (that I cant find) and if I remember correctly, a few people said they used it and it was good.

Somebody else commented the other day that they had a hard time getting money out of them when they wanted to sell up and wouldn’t recommend it.

I’m not talking massive sums of money, but I’d still rather not lose it and have a load of grief if I can help it.

I do — a small-is amount that sits around getting interest. It was set up with quite a wide remit of loan class initially (or they moved the specification) so although would get decent interest, there was a lot of bad debt getting written off too.

I recently got an email that implied as above they would be revamping how you got money back out again. It has performed OK but not sure if I’d be in for the really long term.

They’ve been in the financial press a lot as the loans aren’t very liquid, so if you want to get your cash out, they have to find someone else to take on the loan you funded. Currently they don’t have enough new lenders offering them money, so taking months to get your cash out.

I was a fairly early user of it. I put in ~£1000 for a few years and got it back quite quickly (but not instantly) as they need to sell your loan parts. I made a small return on it, nothing really over and above what i would have got from using 3 years of fixed term monthly savers.

It’s an investment, look at the risk/reward and decide if it’s for you. A stocks and shares ISA would be another idea, and not very difficult if you just stick to buying funds.

Somebody else commented the other day that they had a hard time getting money out of them when they wanted to sell up and wouldn’t recommend it.

That was probably me. It took me two attempts to sell up, and about 6 months in total to get all the money out (not counting the £50 or so that I still can’t get out, and I expect never will, although interestingly they add that number to my net earnings). In between the two attempts the queue to take money out went up from 6 weeks to 4 months. My concern would be if they had a wobble and there was suddenly a high demand to take money out and you get stuck. I think my return was a bit better than I said in that post, just over 5%. Not terrible, and I think it is actually a good company and helps a lot of small businesses so I’m not totally against it but I won’t be putting any more in.

Hmmm. Do they invest in building projects I wonder?