From 2011 to 2016, I was a happy member of LendingClub harvesting money every month from people who wanted to borrow my money. It was a good way to make cash and I had tipped a large sum (at the time) into it. Today the rates have seriously dropped.

For those of you who are die hard Republicans, note that Obama helped enable the rise of sites like Lendingclub by making these products available to people who are not accredited investors. By making these opportunities available to broke people like me, the left wing government at the time helped to free up a lot of capital.

Due to the greed of LC's management and the appearance of bad loans in the pool, the rates have dropped like a rock. What had been 12% net interest had plummeted to 5%, which is barely higher than a CD (Certificate of Deposit) at an online bank. I felt like a rat on a sinking ship who had to search elsewhere for free money.

Recently, many alternatives have cropped up that promise better rates than Lending Club and Prosper.

Fundrise

Fundrise is like Lendingclub but it's more of a closed community. When I started off, you had to give your email in and wait for an invite. You then had to activate your account within a few hours of receiving the invite. That's how secretive it was, it's like joining the Stonecutters. (Who controls the british crown? Who keeps the metric system down, We do, We Do)

Fundrise is not a site that lends money to individuals, it's a site that collects small portions of money and funnels them into real estate. You get money off of the mortgages that are linked to large buildings, like a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust). Except that this is a fake, cyber loan shark REIT and it's not tax advantaged either. You also get to see pictures of the buildings and where they are located.

I was inspired to join Fundrise when people around me started renting out houses. It's really annoying to do this and it takes a lot of work in terms of carpentry. I hate doing carpentry. With Fundrise, you insert money and that's it.

Unfortunately the returns on Fundrise are still kind of crappy. They try to make it look nice but you don't really get an idea of how much money is actually made per dollar or how long you've been a member, unlike Lendingclub whose obfuscation is less advanced.

I added my beginning and ending balances and divided by 2: 7500.
I took the total amount of money I made: 1,145.13.
I divided the whole bit by 1.75 years, since I had joined in May of 2016. 8.72%.

This is crud, but not as bad as LC, whose ~real~ net yield is probably like 3%. For the past couple of years, I've been sucking money out of LC and just transferring it into Fundrise like a brain dead zombie.

So I'm now looking into other resources.

What have your experiences been with P2P networks such as Patch of Land?