At the height of the crypto markets I was apt to Dollar Cost Average some out into more traditional investments.
One that I wanted to try out was LendingClub. LendingClub manages loans between borrowers and investors. They split the loan up into $25 shares that anyone can put money towards. The money gets locked up for about 3-5 years depending on when people pay.
I put in $2,500 worth to start off with 100 loan notes. I figure this splits my risk enough that if a few of the people decide to not pay then it doesn't shut me down.
I'm using their autoinvesting feature as I don't want to sink too much time into this investigating good loans, although you can certainly do that as well.
The autoinvesting feature gets a new loan whenever you have a spare $25 in your account from payments.
This shows that I should be getting a class D or E note sometime tomorrow.
I'm about 2-3 months in, I started this at the very end of December 2017.
So far by re-investing the monthly payments I've picked up 7 new notes, although 2 were able to pay themselves off fully already. I applaud them even though it means I make less money, good for them. Most of the loans are debt consolidation, but there are the few for things like home improvement and the mysterious 'Other'.
With this amount of notes I should get about $85.61 in payments of principal and interest, with about $23.50 being interest.
That's almost a new note every month from the interest alone :D
I expect to gain the 3 new notes every month or so for a while unless the markets pick back up and I can throw money at it again.
So far it's been a good experience, but this isn't investment advice and you should do all your own research, etc. All these people could suddenly decide to not pay and I'd just be screwed (although hypothetically it would hurt their credit rating, if they care about that.)