I have 2 Lending Club accounts - 1 IRA and the other taxable. I opened these accounts over 4 years ago, with the hope of diversifying my portfolio, and eventually generating monthly income for retirement.
A couple of years ago, I decided to liquidate the taxable LC account. This was mainly because of the headaches it caused at tax time - writing off bad loans, accounting for partially recovered bad loans, etc. I've been passively liquidating this account for about 2 years now, withdrawing any available funds each month, and have a grand total of 6 loans left for a total of less than $50. If things continue normally, the last loan will be paid off next year.
I was willing to let the LC IRA ride a little longer, since it didn't have the tax reporting headaches, investing was pretty much on auto-pilot, and the returns were good, even with a conservative mostly A and B loan portfolio. Returns were something like this:
First year: 12%
Second year: Total average of 10%, or about 8% for that year alone
Third year: Total average of 9%, or about 7% for that year alone
This year: Total average of 7%, or about 3% for the first 6 months of the year.
Since all of this happened in 'good' economic times, I can only imagine what will happen with the next recession!
Given the poor results so far this year, the liquidity issues, the desire to simplify my life, and the desire to simplify my wife's life in case something happens to me .... I decided to liquidate the LC IRA, and transfer it to Vanguard, to join my other Vanguard accounts.
So, for the past 6 weeks, I've been actively selling my 900+ LC loans on the secondary market (Foliofn), starting with a 2-3% premium, and ending with some steep discounts, especially for late loans. Selling hundreds of loans this way isn't that hard, since you can Select them all at once and assign a consistent markup/discount. I started with a 3% markup, and repriced them once or twice a day: 3% -> 2.8% -> 2.6%, ..... until they were all sold.
As of this week, I have 0 LC loans left, and in the process of transferring the IRA to Vanguard. Yes, I will wince a little at the extra costs for closing the account with SDIRA. :-/