Words of Loss

I took a look at all loans that were made on Prosper up through the end of 2007 to see what words people who failed to repay their loans used most often. Looking only at words that were used more than 1000 times, the bottom 10 list is quite interesting:

payday
chance
behind
son
daughter
mother
children
child
track
deleted

Requests where the word 'payday' was used were 22% less likely than average to repay their loans. Requests containing the word 'deleted' were 13% less likely than average to repay their loans.

Most interesting, in my mind, is all of the words that invoke family. Son, daughter, mother, children, child -- half of the bottom 10 words are family members. Husband, at 10% less likely than average to pay, is 24th from the bottom.

In the next post I'll take a look at the words which were associated with a positive loan outcome.

Update Aug 30: I have added a post on the methodology used to find these words.