LearnPersonal Loans
Subscribe
About the editor

We teach personal-loan math. In English.

Learn Personal Loans is a no-spin teaching site for personal-loan shoppers. We review every major lender — SoFi, LightStream, Upgrade, Discover, OneMain, Best Egg, Upstart, LendingClub, Achieve — and we teach the math behind the offers. APR vs APY, origination fees, hard pulls vs soft pulls, when consolidation actually saves money, when neither a personal loan nor a HELOC is right. We earn affiliate commissions on some links; rankings are independent.

How we got here

Learn Personal Loans grew out of a frustration that personal-loan content online is overwhelmingly written for the affiliate clickthrough — not for the borrower. Lenders are graded on superficial signals (a fast website, a celebrity endorsement) rather than the four numbers that actually determine whether a loan is good for you: APR, origination fee, term, and prepayment terms.

We do it differently. Every lender review on this site includes a real amortization example. Every loan-math lesson shows its work. We rank lenders by who you'd want to be in a five-year contract with — not by who's running the highest commission rate this quarter.

Editorial standards

  • Independent reviews. No lender, affiliate network, ad agency, or PR firm sees a review before publication. Period.
  • Math, shown. If we say a loan costs $X in interest, you can see exactly how we calculated it.
  • Updated when terms change. When a lender raises its APR floor or changes its origination structure, we update the review and re-grade.
  • Corrections, labeled. When we get something wrong, we publish a correction at the top of the article — visibly, dated.

Affiliate disclosure

Learn Personal Loans earns affiliate commission on some links to lenders and lender-comparison marketplaces. When you click through and complete an application, we may receive a referral fee. This never changes our editorial ranking — every lender we cover, including ones we've graded poorly, may have an affiliate link.

We disclose specific lender relationships on each individual review. Where a lender does not have an affiliate program, we say so plainly. We never accept editorial input from lender partners.

Who writes this

Everything on Learn Personal Loans is published under one desk byline, The Learn Personal Loans Desk. We don't attach individual names or personal credentials to our articles — check any figure against the provider before you act.

Contact