Upstart Personal Loans Reviews

I just received notification from Upstart that I was approved for a loan of $4,000. The credit score they pulled for me was TransUnion FICO: 645. I am graduating from my university in about one month. I requested a 5-year loan term. My projected income is $70k (I start my job in June). I applied on the afternoon of March 10th and completed the verification call. That evening, an Upstart representative called me and asked me to provide a copy of my job offer and a screenshot of my student portal. I provided the student portal on their document submission page, but I did not have an official job offer letter. My future employer simply emailed me the job offer. Upstart would not accept a screenshot of the email, so I "opted out" of providing a copy of the job offer letter on the document submission page (I could not get in contact with my boss within the timeframe I needed the loan for).

After opting out, later that night Upstart emailed me and told me that they had received my files and would get back to me in 3-5 business days. Since I applied on Friday, March 10th, I estimated they would get back to me around Thursday. After logging in and checking the "Overview" page on Upstart, they notified me that they would get back to me by Wednesday, March 15th by 6pm PST (9pm EST). On Wednesday evening, after receiving no notification of my application status, I checked the "Overview" page again on Upstart and they had another notification telling me that they had an unusually high amount of applications and would get back to me by Friday, Mach 17th by 6pm PST (9pm EST). Alas, no notification on Friday either.

I waited until Saturday afternoon to call Upstart's customer service and the representative told me that they were still waiting on me to submit my job offer letter. I told him that I already opted out. He then told me that he would mark that on my account I would not be providing it. This upset me because I already had "opted out" of that on their document submission page. I do not know why there was seemingly a disconnect between that and what the representative saw. Anyways, he told me that they would get back to me in another "couple of days". So I waited. I finally heard back today: March 22, 2017 (12 days later from the date of my application) and was approved for $4,000 at 10.77% APR.

If you are looking to apply for this loan, be aware that it may take a while, depending on if you can provide all of the documents they request. Had I known it would take so long to get my loan, I probably would have looked elsewhere like LendingClub. Additionally, be aware that Upstart takes out an "origination fee" from the original amount you request. So, if you really want a full $4,000 loan, aim at applying for $4,500 or $5,000 with Upstart. Luckily for me, I did not need the entire $4,000. I only need about $3,300 to pay off my credit cards.

For the curious, these were my Credit Karma credit stats at the time of application:

TransUnion: 674

Equifax: 683

Credit Utilization: 55%

Inquiries: 1 (from June 2015)

Derogatory Accounts: 2 (1 30-day late payment on Macy's account in March 2015 and 3 30-day late payments on my Amazon account from Jan-March 2016)

DISCLAIMER: I was working on improving my score during the time I applied for the loan. That said, I went up about 35 points to a 713 TU/719 EQ credit score by May 21 by removing the three late payments on my Amazon account from my credit reports. That may have played an important role in getting me approved. Maybe it has not. I am not sure, but there's the information for whatever it's worth.