I have analysed a breakdown of all of the loans, repaid and not, from the subreddit r/borrow. R/borrow is a private lending forum where people can ask for a specific amount to borrow from another person participating in the community. They describe themselves as:

“/r/Borrow is a subreddit aimed at helping individuals in the Reddit Community who are in a dire need of monetary assistance and will be able to pay it back in a short period.”

I feel this is such a unique element of human interest –especially around Christmas. I have a number of questions I feel are due for analysis:

How much money has moved on this service?

How much money is paid back?

Who uses this service the most? Do they repay consistently?

How many times are loans brokered on the service?

How successful does the entire operation seem to be?

Are the lenders working from a place of altruism or do they get something in the end?

And to this they are quite successful. As of Dec 16 there has been 4557 transactions to total $908988.89 lent. Of which $610405.42 has been paid back. 67%! Since this is almost completely based on the honour system, having over a 50 per cent rate of return on investments means that the community should keep growing.

The growth is evident over the duration for how long the forum has been in operation. While not achieving positive growth every month, the roughly 200 transactions of the first month in service has doubled to over 400 during the month Nov 2015. The amount of lending has also generally increased with December 2015 being on track to potentially break $100,000 in a single month.

I have also determined that the vast majority of borrowers and lenders have done so only once, there are a number of generous souls. One individual has lent over 500 times. On the flip side, there are many one time borrowers but there are a number that have consistently used the service.

It doesn’t look like abuse is prevalent. The most extensive borrower is identified as borrower_id 265. They have borrowed $5871.20 and repaid $3971.20 with over 50 loans. This person does not hold a perfect record, but it’s clear they are making the effort to repay their benefactors.

One untracked statistic is the rate at which lenders are paid interest. Usually the loan is for an even amount, say $500. What is then committed to is repayment which adds $25 to $100 dollars on top of the initial borrowed amount. This begs the questions if there’s money to be made here. The answer seems to be: potentially.

If you were able to do ten $100 loans and received $110 each time, you’d have a 10% return on your investment. Not bad for free money, but the downfall would occur when only a single person ends up not repaying you. All potential return is lost.

I have learned from the developer who has accrued this data that, probably due to tax reasons, the lenders do not wish interest information revealed.

With all of this fairly basic info, I feel I can make a call that the people who are lending are trying to help out of the goodness of their hearts. There’s no humongous guarantee your money will be returned but there is a steady growth of lenders and borrowers.

All of the individuals are anonymous for privacy reasons.