My Story

Why I Built LoanLoop

My mom came to the United States as a refugee at sixteen. She learned this country from the ground up, and somewhere along the way she became a genuinely sharp real estate investor.

Her signature move was seller financing. Instead of selling a property for cash and walking away, she would carry the note herself, collecting payments over years instead of one check at closing.

The spreadsheets

Her entire operation ran on Excel. Genuinely ugly spreadsheets, with a decade of patched formulas and color-coding only she understood. Eventually the job of maintaining them fell to me: updating amortization tables, marking payments as they came in, working out what was still owed.

That's when it started keeping me up at night. What if I fat-fingered one formula and it quietly compounded for years? What if I forgot to record a payment somebody actually made? When you're lending to people you know, a bookkeeping mistake isn't just a wrong number in a cell. It's a relationship.

What I wanted instead

I wanted the schedule to generate itself, correctly, every time. I wanted every payment recorded with a date and a trail, so nothing rested on my memory. I wanted late fees applied the same way every month instead of by mood. And I wanted the year-end interest totals to just be there in January instead of being reconstructed in a panic.

But the feature that mattered most turned out to be the one I didn't expect: letting the borrower see the same numbers the lender sees. Most tension between a lender and a borrower isn't bad faith. It's two versions of the truth. When both sides look at one shared record, a borrower can see exactly where they stand, and they can tell me if I forgot to mark a payment. Private lending runs into slow payers sometimes, and a neutral shared record does the reminding so a person doesn't have to. That takes the awkwardness out of a conversation that used to strain relationships.

Priced for real people

The other thing that pushed me: every tool I found was built and priced for professional note investors with large portfolios. But most private lending in this country isn't that. Sometimes it's seller-financing a single house. Sometimes it's lending a friend $20,000 for a car and simply wanting a clean shared record so it never gets weird between you.

That shouldn't cost professional-software money. So LoanLoop's free plan is the full toolkit for one active loan: amortization, payment tracking, late fees, year-end summaries, the borrower portal, payment reminders. Paid plans exist only if you're managing many loans at once. Nothing is held back from the free plan to punish people with small portfolios.

What LoanLoop is, and isn't

LoanLoop is record-keeping software. It never holds, moves, or processes your money. Payments go directly between lender and borrower exactly as they always have, and LoanLoop records what happened and keeps both sides looking at the same page. It isn't a bank, a lender, or a loan servicer, and it doesn't issue tax forms.

My mom still lends. Her spreadsheets are retired. If you're the person keeping track of a loan for someone in your life, this was built for you.

Savannah, founder