zcommodore

I've been a member of Prosper for over 2 years now.  Oddly enough, until this week, I had never met anyone who had anything to do with Prosper.  This past weekend, at a meet and greet organized by vsqueen, I finally got that opportunity.

First, I want to send a big thanks to vsqueen for organizing the weekend.  Unfortunately, I was unable to attend any events except the dinner on Sunday, Oct. 12 but I understand there were a number of activities planned for the entire weekend.  Either way, for the short time I was able to attend, it was fun to put some faces to the names.

I can't remember all the names whe attended the event but here are some that I do remember: vsqueen, soupy1 and his wife luana.  The warm and friendly islandmele and her friend Brenda came all the way from Hawaii. Jazzpianist and gogmagog were there also.  A couple of relatively local people showed up as well, zaun and ran-ran.  There were a couple of people who came but aren't participants of Prosper yet, namely Hillary, a friend of islandmele's and zaun's wife who's name I have forgotten.

The topics of discussion mostly centered around Prosper with complaints about borrowers not paying and people's various issues with Prosper's operations peppering the conversations.  Of course, there were some off-topic discussions as well like my discussion with zaun and ran-ran about Creation/Evolution and a few hints of the various political races.  Overall, the time was very enjoyable and I hope to have more opportunities to meet Prosper people in the future.

Finally, just today, I got to meet one other Prosper person, zadrock.  Incidentally, he is the campaign manager for Mike Hargadon who is running for congress in Maryland's 7th congressional district.  Currently, this district is represented by Elijah Cummings, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus.  Ultimately, Mr. Hargadon will most likely not win but either way, it was nice to meet both him and zadrock.

Some time ago, it was announced that a group of lenders are considering suing Prosper for a variety of reasons.  I don't remember the details and I don't even know what the status of that potential lawsuit is.  I think they're idiots and here's why:  What they should have done, instead of hiring a lawyer to investigate whatever claims they have against Prosper is to hire a good lobbyist to Congress.

As most people who aren't living under a rock know, today Congress decided to pass a huge bill that bails out a bunch of banks that made bad loans for houses and stuff like that.  In addition, there is gobs of other pork that will keep taxpayers paying for this bill for who knows how long.  Obviously, when people make bad loans, the taxpayers will bail you out.

So, these lenders, if they had been smart, should have hired a lobbyist to get Prosper loans included in all this pork.  After all, the biggest reason why so many are going under has nothing to do with the fact that some people just can't/won't pay, and has everything to do with the fact that the economy is going south and so the taxpayers should pay to fix it.  Besides, we're only talking about a few million dollars.  It's not like this would increase the bill that much.  And one side benefit might have been the lenders could have gotten Prosper to help with the lobbyist fees.  Prosper would look good for getting lenders a better return on these bad investments and it would have provided a way for some of these disgruntled lenders to get back on the pro-Prosper bandwagon.  It would have been a win-win situation!

As it is, these Prosper lenders just screwed it up.  Now everyone is mad and Prosper isn't making as many loans as they could have.  Oh well....

Exactly 1 year ago today, I made my first post to this blog.  Actually, it looks like I posted twice.  At the time, I was seeing my first group loans go late but still thinking/hoping that at least some of them would cure.  As it turned out, none of them did and I apparently didn't learn anything from them because I subsequently helped several more borrowers fund who have since gone late and will likely default.

I was also still very bullish on lending but was starting to experiment with much tighter standards regarding those not in my group that I would lend to.  For the most part, those tighter standards have resulted in much better performance.  Unfortunately, I've had so many bad results overall, both within my group and prior to tightening my standards, I've mostly quit lending.

As of now, one year later, I'm withdrawing funds every time I get $25 in my account.  Since my last loan in early March of this year, I've already gotten nearly half my initial investment back out, partly due to referral fees.  Once I get my initial investment out, I may relend using "house money" but I may change my mind by then too.

One other effect of my slowed lending has been a slowed number of blog posts.  Since I'm spending less and less time thinking about Prosper, I have less to say about it as well.  I probably won't go away for a long time but I won't be posting a whole lot either.

One thing I may post about is Prosper performance.  In my mind, I've come up with some interesting ideas for software tools to study/analyze performance of loans on Prosper over time.  Given that my real-life job is software, actually doing something about my ideas seems too much like work so I haven't actually sat down and done anything about it.  If I ever do come up with something, I'll post about it and let everyone know.  It would certainly simplify making some of the graphs that I've posted here over the last year so there is some incentive there.

It occurred to me on the way in to work this morning that I hadn't hardly even thought about Prosper all weekend.  Of course, I've been busy getting ready to go on vacation starting tomorrow but still, I used to think about it often throughout the day.  I guess you could say I'm over it now.  I've moved on for the most part.

I see that the latest controversy about Prosper involves whether or not Prosper will sell the bad debts.  At this point, I guess I don't really care one way or the other.  I'm sure someone will figure out something.  In the end, if I get anything, it will be more than I expect right now so that will be nice.  I've mentally written all my 1+ Late loans off so if any of them result in any further returns, I'll be happy.

In the end, I've had a nice peaceful weekend NOT thinking about Prosper.  And I look forward to a couple more weeks of vacation not thinking about Prosper as well.

Later all...

It occurred to me the other night that if it weren't for John Witchel, I wouldn't have a blog here.  I figured I should say thanks.

I suppose you might be wondering why it was John Witchel who is responsible for this.  Well, here's the story as I remember it.  Many of the "old-timers" might remember Black Friday (some more background here) on the old Prosper Forums.  Shortly after that, it was my understanding that John Witchel, in an effort to reach out to the community, decided to ask Ferrix, the owner of Prospers.org if he could start a blog from which he could open a line of communication.  I don't know that this was ever documented anywhere but I happened to be online in IRC when Ferrix mentioned he was looking into getting some blog software for the site.

So, in the end, Ferrix set up the blog software, John started blogging but quit soon after (later deleted it completely) and others decided to blog as well.  Eventually, I started this blog since it didn't seem that the others were doing much with their blogs.  Of course, lately, I haven't been doing much with mine either but that's a different story.

For what it's worth, I don't recall there being hardly any blogs about Prosper prior to Black Friday.  I think Hollow Oak had one and Rate Ladder may have had his.  There may have been some others too but I don't think they were specifically about Prosper.  In the last few months, it seems there have been quite a few that showed up either here or in other places.

Ultimately though, I don't know if Ferrix had thought of the idea of hosting a blog here or not but I do appreciate him being responsive to the idea and hosting mine.  Right now, I credit John with the idea so I'm thanking him for my blog.  Thanks, John.