For people with some spare cash to invest in the UK, you may want to take a look at this. (P2P lending) www.zopa.com Apologies, I've just seen the other p2p thread, but this is a new one.
Funding Circle is a better alternative IMO, better rates. And they just introduced minimum rates. So means that lending to C rate businesses for example the return will be a minimum of 10.5% before costs and bad debts.
Bad debt & costs for that site for the loan you quote amount to 4.3%, so a more accurate figure is 6.2% net. Still better than Zopa though, who's figures have dropped to under 5% now with their new "Safeguard" offer. Still worthy of consideration though (unlike Krudd).
Bad debt is quite hard to estimate, funding circles estimates of bad debt are a lot higher than the actual results currently. I guess they deliberately keep the estimated bad debt numbers high as not to disappoint investors.
Also, I am begining to think how safe will p2p lending be in the future? The UK is probably headed towards another recession / depression. At which poit a lot of businesses may go bankrupt and default on loans. So I would be careful about how much money I invest in it. I am only playing with small numbers when it comes to bank deposits / p2p lending.
