SteamyTea

So this P2P: the Wikipedia entry: not checked in any detail and this Peer To Peer lending defined are not the same thing.

I have suggested that to keep things readable, we merge all the crowd/P2P/F2F money lending post together as I can't follow it all.

Can we merge some of these threads about money, it is getting hard to follow them. I think there are 4 going on at the moment.

Can we merge some of these threads about money, it is getting hard to follow them. I think there are 4 going on at the moment.

Can we merge some of these threads about money, it is getting hard to follow them. I think there are 4 going on at the moment.

Can we merge some of these threads about money, it is getting hard to follow them. I think there are 4 going on at the moment.

I shall make it count then

I didn't, or his mates.

Yes Jeremy can reread it now. I have not misbehaved enough to be excluded from a website yet.

No @JSHarris posted a while back that to be taken seriously you need £100k. I just relayed the message. All I can say is what are the opportunity costs. For £100k we could set up a consultancy, a timber frame house factory or buy a tropical island and be done with planning laws

I never found a local when I lived in MK

JSHarris Posted 20 May 2013 - 01:55 PM After reading an article on peer-to-peer lending over the weekend, I got thinking about whether or not it could work for short term finance for a self-build project. We've found ourselves in a bit of a financing black hole. We own our current house outright (no mortgage), own our building plot outright (no mortgage on that either), have enough savings to do around 50% of the build, but need short term finance (perhaps for a year) to cover the finish of the build, to be repaid when we sell our current house. The banks and building societies all have a problem with short term finance, essentially they don't offer it, full stop. Bridging loans are available from the "loan shark" type operations, but the fees are high and the interest rates are sky high (best I could find was 0.8% per month, well over 10% APR). Mortgages seem out, because as soon as we declare the reason for the mortgage we get told that what we're after is commercial development funding, so it's no deal. A self-build mortgage is a problem, because it would have to be on a repayment basis and as I took early retirement this means they won't lend for a period of more than 10 years, with hefty penalties for early repayment. So, reading about peer-to-peer lending got me wondering if it might be an option for us. Interest rates seem around the same as the mortgage rate (typically around 5%). Repayment periods are fairly flexible, with no penalty for early repayment. The only snag seems to be that they are mainly used for commercial lending, AFAICS, plus I've not seen peer-to-peer lending on the sort of scale we're looking for (around £100k or so). On the face of it is seems worth exploring, although it's a whole new way of looking at borrowing, and a wee bit intimidating. I've had a poke around one or two of the peer-to-peer lenders sites (like Zopa: http://uk.zopa.com/), but I'm not really that much wiser about the way it works. Has anyone looked at this as a way to get cost-effective short term finance? temp Posted 21 May 2013 - 06:44 AM I looked at peer to peer as a potential investor a few months ago. Didn't find much about mortgages in the UK. Unfortunately most seem to be limited to buy to let like this one.. http://www.easier.co...-investors.html I wondered if there was a problem with FSA rules or something that needed to change ??? This talks about it becoming regulated for the first time.. http://www.mortgagef...o-peer-lending/ This looks like one about to start lending? http://www.crowdmortgage.co.uk/ West One Loans looks liks a peer to peer (aka private funding) bridging loan specialist.. http://www.westoneloans.co.uk/ I suspect there would be high demand for something like this. I wondered what would happen if the peer to peer lender went bust meaning you had to deal with perhaps 2,000 investors yourself :-( JSHarris Posted 21 May 2013 - 07:06 AM Thanks for those links, Colin, your search karma must be better than mine! I'm sure you're right about the demand, especially for short term borrowing. From all I've found out in the last few weeks there is a growing problem in the self-build area because of lender restrictions on short term finance. It does seem daft, as everyone I've spoken to has said that we present a very low lending risk (no bad credit history, relatively high guaranteed income, no health issues, more than enough unencumbered capital assets as surety for the loan amount) yet we're still in a bit of a black hole. We may well have to buy a caravan, move it on site and live in it and let out our current home on a short term assured tenancy (or just leave it empty) just to be able to raise a mortgage on it, which seems daft. As I understand it, peer-to-peer lending isn't regulated at all, as the peer-to-peer companies are nothing more than introduction agencies, in effect. It's the individual lenders that are taking the risk, and the FSA has yet to come up with a way to provide any form of workable regulation for this sector. As a future investor (once the house is built and we've sold our current house) I'm quite intrigued by the idea of peer-to-peer lending. The returns are pretty good, even taking account of the risk, and there is a social benefit element that makes this seem more attractive in some way than investing via the banks. temp Posted 21 May 2013 - 07:41 AM From what I can tell the reguation will be mainly concerned with how p2p companies explain the risks to investors and borrowers. I haven't really had time to follow up investing but this is what made me put it on the back burner..... the sites I looked at allowed you to choose which business you lend to. They basically had a list of people wanting loans, their risk and what they wanted it for. The p2p company quotes two interest rates. The headline rate and what you can expect to get after taking bad debt into account. Clearly you need to spread your money over several companies but it turns out to be a lot of companies. If you only lend to say 20 companies and one turns bad then 5% of your money is gone. That has a big effect on the actual rate achieved. Discussions on some forums suggest to achieve the claimed "after bad debt rate" you might need to pick >100 companies. That seemed like a lot of work. More investigating needed. Joiner Posted 21 May 2013 - 10:51 AM J, Colin is actually physically wired into the web. How else do you think he always knows precisely where to go? jamiehamy Posted 21 May 2013 - 12:42 PM I asked myself the very same question the other day. P2P is only going to grow, and has the potential to cause the banks some headaches in future years. Funny thing about applying for a mortgage, it's all focussed on £'s and a credit score. There was no need to put a business case togther, something I half expected, and would actually have enjoyed - getting in front of the lender, being grilled and being able to demonstrate how serious you were and how committed, what your contigingencies were and so on. P2P would have to be more like that I reckon, to ensure people really understood the individual borrowers circumstances, expertise, commitment and so on. I would have liked to go down the P2P route to borrow, but I know that I would definately lend to P2P Self Build projects in the future if I could afford it. It's a whole new market just waiting to explode. And generally, that must be a good thing for self builders, who are constricted by backwards thinking lenders and who are being fleeced left, right and centre by lenders, brokers and all the conditions they impose.

Going a bit left field, have you thought of making the caravan more liveable?

You not heard the news then, Bitcoin has crashed by 20% in the last 24 hours from a peak of around $10000

A quick google and just picked the first result that seemed appropriate: https://www.p2p-banking.com/tag/default-rates/ Nearly 20% default rate. "Never a lender or a borrower be".

Great way to release stored CO2 !

Difficult to discuss a polarising topic. Every objection can have holes picked in it, as can every positive. Really down to what people think agriculture.

Really, life imitating art!

Best to just get Godwin's Law over and done with at the start of a conversation

Bit out of date this reply. But is this really the kind of builder you want in general. When I go to work, I am there to do that job, and that job only. I don't sneak off and do another one when I have a few minutes/hours/days 'free'.

55 billion euro worse by the looks of it. And that is before we have to default to WTO rules.

We are currently seeing just how fantastic this government is at negotiating a deal. If you really wanted to do this, then you need to get the companies that stand to gain the most, so the DNO/Power Generation companies.

And that was in a lab, just about ideal growing conditions. At that sort of level there would probably not be a need to reinforce the grid and it would, in effect, work as daytime storage. Trouble is that it is very costly. It is not the cost of the modules. A roof time is pretty cheap, getting it changed is pretty expensive (if done properly and legally, not some pikey up a ladder). I think we run the risk of just going over what Dr MacKay said a decade ago: https://www.withouthotair.com/download.html A quick, slightly out of context, quote: "Energy crops as a coal substitute If we grow in Britain energy crops such as willow, miscanthus, or poplar (which have an average power of 0.5 W per square metre of land), then shove them in a 40%-efficient power station, the resulting power per unit area is 0.2 W/m2. If one eighth of Britain (500 m2 per person) were covered in these plantations, the resulting power would be 2.5 kWh/d per person." There is also no lack of land suitable for agriculture, just look at a picture:

If you decided to burn all the biomass that the world produces, and that includes the oceans, it would last around 400 days with the worlds current primary energy usage. Not a lot of 'storage' really. Be a bit smokey as well. But yes, there does need to be a mix, but we are nowhere near even starting on replacing fossil fuel globally, so now is not the time to stop project because of something that may be a problem in 25 years time (going to take us at least that long to build a new nuclear power station).

You may find that the modules they buy are larger than are normally fitted on domestic installations. Much of the profitability is down to how they are selling the power, but they would not be doing it without a decent rate of return. There are more than just FiTs (and I think this is too large for that scheme anyway) for selling electricity. The issue about growing a few crops and grazing sheep is a bit of a sop to 'greenies and nimbys' they have a surprising amount in common. The last thing that a solar farm operator wants is a sheep nibbling though a 1000V DC cable. Weed killer usually sorts out the grass growth. You could ask them why they are not building some agricultural/light industrial units under some of the modules. A few thousand square metres of single story units could come in handy and give a secondary income to help the impoverished economy. Tattoo artists and nail bars are popular. As are tanning salons. If you want a bit of fun, ask what grade the land was and how many kWh of food energy it can produce a year (about 0.25 kWh.m-2 if they are lucky, and that is before inputs). Also ask if there is any coal in that area, Kent is a coal area after all. You could also point out that when I lived in Kent, I was taken to Whitstable in 1973/4 and shown the sea frozen over. Has that happened recently? You could also point out that 350MW peak power should produce about 375 TWh/year. If Hinkley was up and running at full power, it would produce about 7140 TWh/year. If Hinkley takes another 19 years to be built, it will still be behind this PV farm on production (I think Hinkley got the nod 11 years ago and it wont be ready on time, and then our government can get out of the contract). Or, you could point out that during the summer, it will produce about 0.3% of the nations power, in winter about 0.03% (check those numbers as they seem low and my eyesight is failing).