Can Peer To Peer Personal Loans Be The Solution For You?
As much as this old world of ours changes, there are some concepts that work so well they keep coming back, and peer to peer personal loans may be one of them. Hundreds of years ago, before the development of formal trade and commerce, there existed no banks or other lending institutions. Based on who needed the money, and who had a bit of money they were willing to lend out, lenders and borrowers usually found each other in an informal marketplace. This is the core of person to person, or peer to peer lending, at its absolute basic. As our society and its institutions became more formalized, specific businesses were set up for the main purpose of lending funds in exchange for the payment of interest. Many times, these businesses were formed as savings and loans, so that they would receive savings deposits from individuals who wanted to receive a return on money they were not using. The financial institution acted as an “intermediary”, taking funds from depositors and paying them interest at a given rate, then lending that money to borrowers at a higher rate. And, needless to say, they got to retain the difference as their profit.
Today, an old but new phenomenon has resurfaced, where holders of deposit funds are finding it more attractive and profitable to make personal loans directly to the people who need them. Eliminating this middle man, or intermediary, is called disintermediation. Peer to peer loans work because they are traded on a marketplace, where individuals who have money they want to invest can be in touch with individuals who need to borrow money. Sometimes these online marketplaces work like auction sites and act as a conduit for the borrower to find the lender. The site connects the lenders and the borrowers in an auction process, very much like Ebay for goods, where the lenders compete with each other to provide the lowest rate to borrowers, and borrowers compete with one another to obtain the best rate for their personal loans. With no intermediary, a major cost is eliminated, so that the lender can earn a higher rate, and the borrower can pay a lower rate.
Lenders especially like the notion of peer to peer personal loans because of the unique risk arrangement available. Frequently, personal loans are parcelled so that a lender lends his money to a number of different borrowers and, conversely, the borrower is receiving his loan from many different lenders. A good example would be a young man who decided to take out a loan for $1,000 for an engagement ring for his fiance. There may be an investor on the peer to peer lending site who is looking to lend $1,000. A lender may only lend $100 to this individual person’s romantic endeavor. But he can easily find another borrower, someone who is using the funds for loan consolidation, and lend him another $100, then locate another borrower and lend him money for home repairs, etc, until he has lent his total a$1,000 investment.
Now this investment of $1,000 has been lent to 10 different people, lowering his overall risk, since the chances of all of his borrowers defaulting no their personal loans is very small. The converse advantage for the borrowers is that they have a lot more lenders bidding for their personal loan business.
That this concept of direct personal loans from one person to another has been reborn is nosurprise, since parties on both sides of the transaction benefit greatly.
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Posted February 28, 2010