Prosper, a popular peer to peer lending program where prospective borrowers can request a loan up to $25,000 at an interest rate to be determine through a bid-down system by individual lenders.

The results can vary from borrower to borrower. Borrowers with the same credit “grades” will often find their interest rates varies wildly from each other. There are several reasons such as the type of loans they are requesting for such as whether it for personal or business use. Another factor is the borrower’s home state interest cap rates for loans.

Since Prosper loans are unsecured loans, if the borrower defaults on the loan, you may or may not get your money back if any at all. You are really making a bet the borrower will pay back the loan in full with interest.

By having a tracking system, you can create a report that will help you better understand past performance of the borrowers who share similar credit grades but different interest rates.

While past performance are not an indicator of future performance, it can certainly help to know where your bets went wrong and which bets helped you succeed in achieving your lending portfolio goals.

After having been a Prosper lender for a little over a year now, I have been examining my approach to investing in this area. Since lending is a form of investment, specifically related to my own personal finances, it is important to question my prosper strategy to ensure I am on track with my goals.

Tracking your Prosper lending portfolio can be done easily enough with Money Plus Deluxe. The problem is that Prosper does not have an integration feature with any personal finance software.

With a little time and effort, I learned how to add my Prosper portfolio to Money Plus Deluxe so I could take advantage of the Cash Flow feature built into Money Plus.

This is useful for those who want to see the growth of their investments. This is not a perfect system because of the potential for late payments and borrower’s defaults. After having tracking my Prosper portfolio for a year now, and experiencing different scenarios, I more or less managed to figure a way to fine-tune this to accommodate my tracking needs.

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated to help develop this even further. Let me know if you found this useful as well.

Any investment you make comes with a degree of risk that you will loose your money. While you can make every attempt to minimize your risk, you also know you want to create a return on your investment.

After all, you are not lending your money for nothing, if that was the case, your money might as well be sitting under the mattress or in a safe deposit box.

The first question you should be asking before you make an investment is how long will it take for you to get your money back. If it is going to take you a 100 years to get your original 100 dollars back, it better be a damn well productive investment because you can get a better return on a CD or a bond.

Prosper which is a popular peer to peer lending program where prospective lenders can decide how much they want to lend to a borrower. The standard length for each loan is 36 months, or 3 years.

That answers the question as to how long before you can get your money back. There is a possibility you will get your money back sooner if the borrower decides to pay in full sooner than later. As with unsecured loans, there is also a possibility you may never get your money back should the borrower default on the loan.