JUNO Autumn 2021

When downsizing his family home, Tom Enright was left with a stash of extra money to invest.

“I had cash flow from my flying career and from the sale of my Remuera house that I was looking for a home for.

“But I wasn’t very happy with what the banks were offering,” he says.

He started looking for ways to make his money work harder.

The traditional institutions were his first thought, but he says the 2 per cent interest on a term deposit at the time wouldn’t offer him the retirement income he was looking for.

Then he found an investment that’s relatively new in New Zealand.

Enright’s son, lawyer Robert Enright, suggested he add peer-to-peer lending to his investment portfolio with Zagga.

Now Enright has had two years of what he considers to be high returns and easy investing.

Now the savvy grandfather of nine has funded many Zagga investments, and the rest is history.

Zagga is an online platform that matches investors to borrowers, using their property as security. Usually those borrowers have a good credit history, but for some reason don’t qualify for bank lending criteria.

Some may have irregular incomes from running their own businesses, some are developers in need of funding for projects, others are investors needing money more quickly than banks can respond.

Investors like Enright fund loans in full or in increments of $1000, after seeing the details of the loan, the borrower, what the money’s for, the borrower’s equity in their security property, and their credit rating.

“My view remains that there are two cardinal points to watch for in investing,” says Enright.

“One is the integrity of the people you’re dealing with… at Zagga, people know what they’re doing and are completely above board.

“The second thing is, of course, to ensure that one does have adequate security, and that means a decent loan-to-value ratio.”

Enright’s Zagga investments are secured by mortgages on real property, the same as what banks use, which he’s actually gone and seen.

They’ve all been paid back on time, too.

His first investment of $542,000 funding a residential remortgage in Auckland earned him a net return of 7.84 per cent.

His second, smaller investment also earns over 7 per cent interest – a noticeable step-up from his previous investment elsewhere, which earned him only 3 per cent.

Enright recently remarried and has published a book on his flying career, Many a Close Run Thing. He says peer-to-peer lending hasn’t compromised his core beliefs. In fact, it’s helped strengthen them.

“I don’t regard myself as a guru, but I live by the old-fashioned rules… have a variety of investments in case one goes wrong.

“There’s always someone ready to say the stock market’s about to collapse,” he says.

“I would say don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but I find Zagga is a good one for a proportion of my money.”

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