Passive Income with Peer to Peer Lending

Many investors these days are looking for new passive income ideas. Passive income means making money for an investment or asset without doing any regular work. Types of passive income include royalties and licensing fees, revenue from content and advertising fees, interest income and a variety of other sources which people are taking advantage of. Many of these streams of income are available on the internet although some are offline. The common denominator is that they all require no significant effort on the part of owner/investor.

One option for those looking for passive income is peer to peer lending investing. Peer to peer (also known as P2P) lending platforms allow individuals to invest in personal loans to borrowers. Investors can see borrowers credit information and select loans they want to invest in. The minimum investment is $25 so a hundred or more investors may be funding each loan. Investors normally spread their money across a hundred or more loans in order to diversify their portfolio and minimize risk. The risk in this type of investment comes from the possibility that a borrower will not repay their loan. Loan defaults can happen and that is why people invest in many loans.

Investors in P2P loans can expect to earn anywhere from 4% to 7% depending on the particular loans that they invest in. They can choose higher rated borrowers with loans at lower interest rates, or lower rated borrowers with higher interest rates. There will be more defaults with the higher rate loans but the return on investment will normally be higher for these investors. Compared to other common investments P2P lending investing has a good risk/reward ratio. This means that the risk is relatively low compared to the return on investment.

At this point, you may be wondering how P2P loans can be a passive investment since we have described how the investor selects loans to invest in. The investor can choose to use a tool called automated investing. This tool, which is available on most platforms, allows investors to set certain criteria for selecting the best loans which they think will be repaid in full. Once the tool is set up, it will automatically choose loans. Whenever the investor has funds available, either through deposits to their account or payments made on other loans, the tool will reinvest those funds immediately. So, the investor does not have to do any work, which is why this is a passive investment.

Based on this ability, peer to peer lending can be a good part of a passive investors portfolio. While it is not recommended that people invest all of their money this way, it does help diversify a portfolio and soften the blow when the stock market is down. The ease of managing this investment is very attractive which explains the explosion in popularity over the past several years. While many people actively manage their accounts, just as many are using the automated investing tool to do the work for them.