Personal loans are unsecured loans you can use for almost anything — debt consolidation, home improvements, medical bills, weddings, or emergencies. Unlike a mortgage or auto loan, the lender doesn’t take an asset as collateral, so the rates and terms reflect your creditworthiness more than anything else.
How personal loans work
You apply with a lender (bank, credit union, online lender, or peer-to-peer platform), get approved or denied based on your credit history, income, debt-to-income ratio, and employment. If approved, the lender deposits a lump sum into your account and you repay it in fixed monthly installments over 2 to 7 years, usually.
Where to get a personal loan
- Banks and credit unions — usually best for existing customers with strong credit
- Online lenders — fast approval, often higher APRs
- Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms — like Prosper and historically LendingClub; rates set by marketplace
- Credit cards or HELOCs — alternatives worth comparing
Read our deeper guides on personal loan basics, how lenders evaluate you, and what to do before you apply.
From the archive
P2P Personal Loans
Old School Personal Loans or New School “P2P Personal Loans”?
Personal Loans are individual unsecured extensions of credit, traditionally by a bank or other lending institution, to an individual person. P2P lending networks, such as those covered on Peer-Lend, allow individuals to borrow and lend with one another, online, without the necessity of a “traditional” financial institution (and, therefore, lower transaction fees, due to lowered overhead). Personal loans extended from many users (“lenders”) to one end-user (“borrower”) are P2P personal loans, P2P representing the fact that the loans were made through a marketplace or financial networking hub.
Directly providing personal loans, without a bank to use for customer acquisition, requires a transaction platform of some type to sit in the middle of the transaction, one which allows platform/market participants to interact with one another for the purposes of transacting business. An initial test market for this type of online transaction community might be based upon a military model, for the extension of
military personal loans, an example that gives us a close-knit and pre-structured “community”, with clear, pre-established channels of communication (as well as some level of financial/career security with only a single employer, plus some fairly well defined pay grades / pay scales, which give a good idea of each borrower’s base income), with which to begin.
Debt Consolidation with P2P Personal Loans via P2P Lending Markets
P2P personal loans offer a convenient (and more efficient, price-wise) alternative to borrowers, as compared to a traditional bank personal loan or revolving credit account from a provider such as VISA or MasterCard. Balance transfers are tempting to use as debt consolidation loans, but they often come with time limits or unfavorable terms (such as upfront percentage fees and the like), whereas fixed term, fully amortizing loans offer a more stable solution to paying down (or consolidation) debt. Distributed allocation of capital over many borrowers (at small dollar amounts), for lenders, can reduce risk exposure and ensures that, if a few borrowers fail to pay, lenders will still likely see positive returns.
Types of Personal Loans (Financial Information Resources)
- Personal Loan Rates (rates will depend on borrower credit scores)
- Credit Card Consolidation (available to refinance and consolidation existing credit card debt)
- Unsecured Personal Loans (all loans are unsecured, w/no collateral requirements)
- Debt Consolidation Loans (for consolidation of credit card debts and/or any other personal debts)