Needs Series: Comparing to Lending Club

Of course all of this needs data does us absolutely no good if it isn't generalizable beyond the loans that it came from. Since the initial data was taken from Prosper, it seemed that Lending Club loans would be make a good comparison and continue to tell us if we're finding something relevant or just random noise.

Data Set: All Lending Club Loans made in 2007 and 2008

2007-2008 Loans	Total Loans	Percent Charged Off or Defaulted
All Loans	2996	21.2%
"Need" in title or description	814	26.8%
"Need" not in title nor description	2182	19.2%
"Payday" in title or description	7	57.1%
"Payday" not in title nor description	2989	21.1%

So there you have it, the word "Need" appears to correlate more often with a failure to repay a loan in Lending Club as well. (I included "Payday" data just for fun -- with only 7 loans the data isn't likely to be relevant, but it does fall in line with what we'd expect.)

Since so many of the 2009 loans won't be paid off until 2012, I included the >30 days late category with the already Charged Off and Defaulted loans and found the following stats:

2009 Loans	Total Loans	Percent Charged Off, Defaulted or >30 days late
All Loans	5281	10.7%
"Need" in title or description	1263	13.6%
"Need" not in title nor description	4018	9.8%
"Payday" in title or description	6	83.3%

The trend continues...

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All Articles in the Needs Series
An Introduction
Initial Findings
Correlation Matrix
Comparing to Lending Club