Peer to peer lending in Canada?
Yes and no, P2P Capital Markets is similar concept but is more geared towards business loans. Community Lend used to offer this service but has stopped.
A friend recently bought an 800€ TV on 0% financing. Sounded like a sensible thing to do. Why pay 800 when you can pay 80pm for 10 months? It took 30mins to set up the 'loan'. She had to sign all kinds of documents, giving away much personal information (age, employment info, income, email address etc). She now has a financial relationship with an institution which has nothing to do with the item purchased. She is bombarded with all kinds of financial offerings. She regrets taking out the finance. She had the money. The hassle and the unwanted links to banks make the deal unattractive. Perhaps she should have tried to make a cash deal... "Credit scores are not such a big deal in Canada as they are in the US and even some European countries.  One reason for this: the Social Insurance Number (SIN number) isn't used for so many purposes like the Social Security Number (SSN) in the US.  The SIN number isn't even required to get credit (but with some exceptions it is needed to open an interest-bearing savings account, so that the interest income can be reported).  You can refuse to provide the SIN number to most private companies. Canada also has one of the highest per-capita immigration rates of any large country, so new arrivals are expected, and services are geared up for them.  Most of the banks offer special deals for ""New Canadians"".  You should get a credit card (even if just a secured credit card) through them with one of these offers to start a credit file anyway, but there's no need to actually use it much.  Auto-paying a utility bill through the card, and paying it off in full each month, is one way to keep it active.  No need to ever pay any interest. Most major apartment rental firms will expect a good proportion of their renters to be new to Canada, so should have procedures in place to deal with it (such as a higher deposit).  You should not give them your SIN for a credit check, even when you're more established. Same for utilities, they can just charge a higher deposit if they can't credit check you.  For private landlords, everything is negotiable (but see the laws link at the end of this answer). You will later need a credit rating for a mortgage on a house (if not paying cash), so it's worth getting that one token credit card.  Useful for car rental also. Here's a fairly complete summary of the laws on renting in Canada, which includes the maximum deposits that can be asked for, and notice periods." Yes, it is.  Got to start somewhere.  Typically directly through a company itself. Check out this site that lists a bunch of them and their minimum requirements.  Not many only accept $100 but there are a few. ie. ACTIVEnergy Income Fund, CIBC, COMPASS Income Fund, Suncor Energy Inc. and a few others. Lending isn't profitable when interest rates are this low.  Consider what's involved to offer a savings or checking account.  The bank must maintain branches with tellers.  The bank has to pay rent (or buy and pay property taxes and utilities).  The bank has to pay salaries.  The bank has to maintain cash so as to make change.  And pay for insurance against robbery.  All of that costs money.   At 6% interest, a bank can sort of make money.  Not great money, but it takes in more than it has to pay out.  At 4% interest, which is about where ten year mortgage rates are in Canada, the bank doesn't make enough margin.  They are better off selling the loan and closing their branches than offering free checking accounts.   An additional problem is that banks tend to make money from overdraft fees.  But there's been a move to limit overdraft fees, as they target the most economically vulnerable.  So Canadian banks tend to charge monthly fees instead.  UK banks may also start charging monthly fees if interest rates stay low and other fees get curtailed. In the United Kingdom, there is a leading company that has been offering Progressive business funding solutions to the businesses for the last 120 years. Their service areas are South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Australia, USA, etc. The idea is great but US securities laws impose a huge burden on these businesses.  Specifically [Rule 502(c)](http://taft.law.uc.edu/CCL/33ActRls/rule502.html) of Reg D prohibits 'general solicitation and advertising' - such as using the internet.  There is currently pending legislation to amend the [US Securities act of 1933 sec. 4(2)](http://taft.law.uc.edu/CCL/33Act/sec4.html) regarding public offerings to help reduce such barriers, but as it stands there are significant barriers to entry in the market.  SEC filing and reporting requirements, especially after Dodd-Frank, are onerous to say the least, and running direct lending services are at the moment largely cost prohibitive due to these requirements. The best description of P2P lending process I saw comes from the SEC proceedings. They are very careful about naming things that are happening in the process. Prosper got back to business after this order, but the paper describes succinctly how Prosper worked when its notes haven't yet been registered by the SEC. These materials contain a lot of responsible comments on how crowdfunding, including P2P lending, works. If money is more expensive (costs more to borrow) then fewer people will be able to qualify to make the payments for a particular size of mortgage.  This reduces the number of potential buyers for property at that price.  As sellers still want to sell, they will move their prices down to where more people can afford to buy. So rising interest rates create downward pressure on housing prices. But Toronto is the biggest city in Canada.  I'd expect part of the high prices there is the location: lots of people want to be close to lots of activities, action, and opportunity.  Unless something catastrophic happens, I don't see Toronto losing that advantage.  If anything, it's going to get a tad warmer up there in the coming decades. I was active in Prosper when it started up. It was very easy to get attracted to the high risk loans with big interest rates and I lost about 14% after all my loans ran their course. (There's 10 still active, but it won't change the figure by much). Prosper has wider standards than Lending club, so more borrowers with worse credit scores could ask for loans. Lenders could also set interest rates far lower, so they could end up having loans with rates lower than the risk implied.  This was set up with the idea of a free market where anyone could ask to borrow and anyone could loan money at whatever interest rate they wanted,  It turns out a lot of lenders were not as smart as they thought they were. (Aside: it's funny how people will clamor for a free market, but when they lose money will suddenly be against the free market they said they wanted, this seems to apply to both individual p2p lenders up to massive multinational banks.).  Since then Prosper has tightened their standards on who can borrow and the interest rates are now fixed. So I expect going forward it will be less easy to lose a bunch of money.  The key is that one bad loan will erase the return of many good ones. So it's best to examine the loans carefully and stick with the high quality.  Simplified Example If you have 10 1 yr loans of $100 each paying 10% interest/year, you get 10% return at the end of the year, so $100 (10% of $1000.). BUT if one loan goes bad at the start, you have lost money. So a 90% success rate in picking borrowers leads to a loss. You want to diversity over quite a few loans and you want to fund quality loans.  I think really enjoyed investing through Prosper, because it gave me an insight into lending and loss ratios that I had not had before. It also caused me to look at the banks with even more incredulity when the case of the no-doc loans and neg-am loans came to light. Canadian here: the US is our biggest customer, so we were impacted economically. I expected that within a year or two of the US housing collapse, we would also be hit, but something else happened: when the US dropped interest rates like a stone, we were also forced to drop interest rates. This meant that suddenly, money was being handed out for very very cheap, so cheap it was almost free if you had a decent job and good credit. The housing market here paused for a brief moment, and then continued climbing. It never stopped until some new rules were implemented, aimed mostly at foreign buyers and investors, and put in place this year. It appears however that this current drop in prices may be a temporary dip. The average cost of a home in Toronto is still around $1m CAD, and our real estate is still among the most expensive in the world if you look at how much we pay compared to our incomes.  In some places, houses have basically tripled over the past decade.  My point here is that Canadian home owners were not impacted negatively by the 2008 crisis. In fact, once the free money started flowing and prices went up accordingly, Canadian home owners were enriched as a direct result of the 2008 US housing crisis. The situation is clearly unsustainable, and the market is irrational. It's easy to say that we are in a bubble but it is  impossible to tell when it will crash. In Canada, it's harder to walk away from mortgage debt; if you're underwater on your home, and the bank forecloses on you and sells the house for less than you owe, you still owe the bank the remainder of the money (in most provinces). It has to do with return. I don't know if Canada has a matching feature on retirement accounts, but in the US many companies will match the first X% you put in. So for me, my first $5000 or so is matched 100%. I'll take that match over paying down any debt. Beyond that, of course it's a simple matter of rate of return. Why save in the bank at 2% when you owe at 10-18%?  One can make this as simple or convoluted as they like. My mortgage is a tax deduction so my 5% mortgage costs me 3.6%. I've continued to invest rather than pay the mortgage too early, as my retirement account is with pre-tax dollars. So $72 will put $100 in that account. Even in this last decade, bad as it was, I got more than 3.6% return. Social Lending may help you qualify for a loan, but doesn't necessarily provide better rates. You have to shop around to get the best rates, this is a market as any other, so don't expect one place to be consistently below the market - either the market will move, or the place will move eventually, everyone wants to earn the most for the buck. On pensions, part of the issue will be how well funded they are.  Most pensions are not completely funded.   In the US pension payments are insured to an annual cap by the PBGC. So you can loose out on part of your pension payment. I don't know what/if there is an equivalent in Canada. I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:  - [/r/metacanada] [Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Invests US$400 Million in WME│IMG](https://np.reddit.com/r/metacanada/comments/6sdk52/canada_pension_plan_investment_board_invests/)  [](#footer)*^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*  [](#bot) I am not entirely sold on investing in start-up companies, but I really like the idea of crowdfunding investments. I've been an investor at [LendingClub](https://www.lendingclub.com/) for 10 months now and am quite happy so far. For those of you who don't know, Lending Club is where you can crowdfund consumer loans.  I'm also very interested in [Solar Mosaic](https://solarmosaic.com/). Once their quiet period ends I am planning on investing in solar projects through them. Of course I'll want to see some data related to their risk and returns, but I love the idea of earning a return from funding solar projects.    I think that crowdfunding allows you to invest in areas that are normally off-limits to those of us who aren't rich. At the very least these investments offer a nice source of portfolio diversification.