Archive for the ‘ Referral Program ’ Category

We are pleased to announce a $100 Thank You Reward for every new Borrower you refer to Prosper.  The borrower simply has to apply, become fully funded and make the first payment on the loan. $100 will be deposited directly into your Prosper account for every approved Borrower you refer. Continue reading Refer a friend to Prosper and earn $100

Welcome to Prosper – the marketplace for loans —America’s only true auction- based peer-to-peer lending company. We are in a constant pursuit to ensure you can invest on the world’s most transparent and durable personal loans trading platform. Prosper delivers competitive rates of return ranging from 7.18% for AA listings to 4.59% for E Prosper Rating listings, based on return on investment for all loans as of 6/30/2009. These are healthy returns that confirm peer-to-peer lending is a viable alternative asset class in which to invest.

Individual Listings: increased layers of safety

Those of you who are returning lenders will be familiar with our bidding system on Direct Peer-to-Peer loans.

New borrowers are now required to meet the new minimum credit score requirement of 640.  They can request up to $25,000 for a three-year fixed rate loan.

Lenders can now start their bidding with $25.00 (previously $50.00) which will make it easier to create a diversified portfolio. 

Prosper has also improved its risk rating system with the introduction of a new proprietary system called Prosper Ratings ranging from AA – HR.  Each Rating represents a loss rate range. Prosper Ratings are based on historical loan performance data and are designed to better convey risk. The Prosper Rating letter grade will now be shown in the listing along with an estimated loss rate, and a narrower credit score range. Credit scores shown will be in 20 point ranges (previously 40). Click here to learn more about Prosper Ratings

You can search listings by either Prosper Rating or specific keywords. You then bid on listings of your choice—offering a great rate for both you and borrowers. Portfolio plans are also available.

Fine-Tuned Bidding for Lenders

Prosper has enhanced its auction model to include a hard bid floor for each listing. This helps our Lenders identify the absolute minimum they can bid. This is an absolute minimum: Lenders should always price for risk in order to achieve an adequate return. Remember the higher the risk, the higher your bid should be.

No matter which listings you choose to bid upon—or whether you’re a lender or borrower—you remain in control of your bid at all times. Learn more about the bid rate floor

Lenders will now be bidding on yield. The minimum bid rate is now net of the 1% servicing fee. Previously, if you bid 18% and were a winning bidder on a loan, you would receive interest at 18% and after paying a 1% servicing fee, your return on the loan would be 17%. Now, your equivalent bid would be 17%, which we call bid yield. Learn more about bidding on yield

Trade Existing Notes

With Prosper’s new Trading Platform, you can now put your Notes up for sale on our Note Trader by Folio Investing for quick and easy trades. You will be able to browse and purchase Notes there, too.

The Trading Platform will give Prosper lenders the ability to sell a Note if they need access to the funds before the full loan is paid off. It will also give Prosper lenders more investing options by giving them an opportunity to bid on loans they missed out on when the loans were first listed, or to invest in loans with durations that meet their specific investing objectives.

All loans made after July 13, 2009 are eligible to be placed on the Note Trader platform.

Prosper—Ushering in a New Financial Era

As we’ve seen, the old ways of investing and banking are broken.

Prosper offers you a different—and better—way to get competitive rates. We provide a financially and socially rewarding way to invest in our nation with unparalleled openness and transparency.

We’re firmly committed to the idea of Americans helping Americans and driving our country’s economy. Why not join us and become a financial hero today?

Finally… the moment we and so many supportive and loyal Prosper community members have been waiting for…

after nine long months of navigating the rapidly changing regulatory landscape, we are thrilled to announce that Prosper’s registration statement with the SEC has been declared effective. Continue reading Prosper is Back! (We mean it this time)

As you may have read, Citigroup recently agreed to purchase Wachovia’s banking operations for about $2.1 billion in a deal brokered by federal regulators. Wachovia’s troubles are similar to those of Washington Mutual, whose assets were seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week and sold to JPMorgan Chase. Wachovia sold thousands of adjustable rate mortgages that offered low introductory and deferred interest payments. The delinquencies and defaults on these types of mortgages have been increasing, resulting in huge losses for banks.

Wachovia is the latest casualty in the banking industry. The Citigroup acquisition will now reduce the number of major national banks, leaving only Citicorp, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.

Financial institutions have tightened credit guidelines and restricted credit to the regular guy so severely that it’s all but impossible to get a personal loan in many states. What are regular people like you and me to do? It’s frightening. Most of us are fortunate enough to still have a job and a home, and are able to go to a restaurant or sporting event once in a while. But you may know of someone who has recently fallen on harder times, even though they have a good credit history. Where can they go for relief?

They can come to Prosper. Why not tell someone you know about Prosper – help your neighbor out. Perhaps they have not heard of person-to person lending. What’s more, if someone you refer gets a loan successfully through Prosper and makes their first payment, you can even get a $50 reward.

And why not tell your friends about helping others out through Prosper – suggest they become a lender.  It can be a rewarding experience.

Saving as much you can is important, but it is equally important to reach out to help others in need.

[This article may only be relevant those of you who have blogs/websites.]

When I started lending money on Prosper nearly two years ago, I didn’t think too much about it. I deposited $100, lent it out, and then didn’t think about the money for another two months. I went back to look at my Prosper account and put a little more money to work about the time that I started Lazy Man and Money. I continued to add money at a regular pace, writing about my experiences, and trying to maximize the use of my money. After a few months, some important people at Prosper noticed my writing and we began to correspond regularly.

As luck would have it, Prosper decided to start a referral program. By joining it, I could earn money from Prosper doing what I had always done, writing about Prosper. I could have gone back to all my old articles and added my referral code (probably still should) . However, I’m much too Lazy for that. So, I simply insert the referral code in any new article about Prosper. [Editor's Note: Any Prosper page not part of the Blog or Forum can have your referral code added to the query string -- http://www.prosper.com?referrer=<screenname>]

It was around day 10 of the program, when Prosper called and said, “What are you doing to attract so many people?” I told them the simple truth - I didn’t know. I explained what I did, but I couldn’t really tell them why it worked. Without being able to track where people are coming from my hands are tied. There’s no easy way to know if people are coming from a button on my site, an article that I wrote three months ago, or the link that I put in my RSS Feed. A couple of months later someone different from Prosper asked me my thoughts on the referral program again. They specifically wanted to know how it could work better for me. Most recently, they asked me to write this article to share my “secrets” with you. I prefer to write articles about how to handle your finances rather than ones on how to make money online, but hopefully this will be of help to someone. There’s no one secret to referring people. My successful recipe requires many ingredients.

1. Have a personal finance blog My blog has a broad appeal since everyone deals with money in some way. However, my blog is also focused in that it deals with only core concept - money. I don’t ramble about my cat one day and Ron Paul the next. I would caution against being too focused. If all you write about is Prosper, you’ll likely only have people from Prosper visiting your site. There’s nothing wrong with that, but your readers have already made the decision to join Prosper.
2. Write about Prosper - This sounds like an easy one, but I know a lot of people with just a button on their website. That’s their whole plan for referring people to Prosper. While a button is nice, your readers like to read what you write. Of course, writing about Prosper is a lot easier if you’ve used it at some point. I’d recommend making sure you are diversified, before you sign up.
3. Network with other Bloggers - I didn’t do this just for Prosper, but I wanted to learn from people. One friend of mine is a powerful blogging source, who has had millions of visitors to his blog. I noticed that he had written about Prosper, yet didn’t join the referral program. I politely asked him if I could pay him to add my affiliate code to the link in his article. He was kind enough to do it for free. This is one of the many reasons why he’ll easily have 5 million people visit his blog this year: What’s It Like to BORROW Money with Prosper?
4. Place ads on your RSS feed - I run my blog on Wordpress, which gives me a few options to do this. I use Text Link Ads’ Feedvertising product. However if you don’t want to join their program, you could simply grab this sig2feed plug-in.
5. Focus on Lenders - Perhaps it’s the nature of my blog, but I’ve had very little luck getting borrowers to sign up for Prosper loans. I had thought that there would be some people with big credit card debt that could benefit from Prosper. I can’t say why this is the case, but I’m not going to swim upstream and try to write how borrowers can benefit. Your experience may differ from mine.

That’s all I do. If I really wanted to spend a lot of effort promoting Prosper I’m sure there are other ideas that I could implement. However, I’m going to continue to do what I’ve always done. I don’t want to get caught up in the trap of writing specifically to try to generate money. My readers would realize that I’m not providing any unique ideas and stop coming. Every blog owner knows that readers are the lifeblood of the blog.

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Lazy Man has been a lender at Prosper since February 2006. His lending has been written up in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper. He is the author of the personal finance blog, Lazy Man and Money. He enjoys watching Boston sports while sipping diet cola.