Many or all companies we feature compensate us. Compensation and editorial
research influence how products appear on a page.
Personal Loans

Earnest Personal Loans via MoneyLion: An Unnecessarily Complicated Way to Borrow [2025 Review]

4.3 /5
View Rates
Via Engine by MoneyLion

Our take: While Earnest personal loans via MoneyLion are decent, the application process feels needlessly complex, and it’s unclear why you’d choose this route over working directly with MoneyLion. For a simpler experience and broader rate comparisons, we recommend Credible instead.

Personal Loans
  • Compare rates from many lenders
  • Current Earnest borrowers can give their lender a kickback
  • Unnecessarily complicated
  • Unclear benefit over using MoneyLion directly
Loan amounts$1,000 – $100,000
Term lengths6 to 144 months
Rates (APR)“Competitive,” with fixed and variable rates available

Earnest specializes in student loans, although it offered personal loans for years.

Recently, its parent company, Navient, decided to cut costs by removing personal loans from the picture, but it didn’t want to lose out on that revenue entirely. So it began referring personal loan customers to MoneyLion in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Table of Contents

What are Earnest and MoneyLion?

Earnest is a San Francisco-based lender that launched in 2013. It specializes in private student loans and refinances, with its hallmark offering being ultra-flexible term length options (up to 180 choices, to be exact), which helps borrowers better dial in a payment amount they can afford. 

MoneyLion, on the other hand, is a fintech company that offers a wide range of financial products, including a marketplace that allows people to compare rates for personal loans from a wide variety of other lenders.

Why did Earnest partner with MoneyLion on personal loans?

In 2015, Earnest began expanding its services to offer personal loans in addition to its student loan business. Two years later, Navient, the larger student loan giant, acquired Earnest. Earnest continues to operate under the same name today.

In early 2024, Navient announced unspecified cost-cutting measures at Earnest. Exactly one year later, it announced it would be cutting its personal loans business. Instead, it would direct interested customers to MoneyLion, which pays Earnest a cut of each loan referral it funds.

In other words, Navient is saving money by shuttering its personal loan department and instead adopting a model that essentially just involves affiliate links.

How are Earnest and MoneyLion personal loans different?

Earnest no longer offers new personal loans, although some customers are still paying off old ones. Instead, it directs interested borrowers, whether they’re current Earnest customers or not, to MoneyLion through a form on its website.

Even then, MoneyLion itself doesn’t offer personal loans. It only connects you with other lenders that do, via its marketplace. Checking your rates through a personal loan marketplace can be a great way to scout your potential loan options, which can save you time and money. 

But here, it’s a roundabout and unnecessarily complicated process. If you’re approved for a personal loan, it will ultimately be through a lender such as LendingClub or OneMain Financial

But to get there in this scenario, you’ll have:

  1. Used MoneyLion’s marketplace to check your rates.
  2. Gotten a referral from Earnest to get to MoneyLion.

You’re introducing two other companies into the mix when neither is actually required to get the personal loan you end up with.

Pros and cons

Here, we’ll compare the pros and cons of using Earnest to compare options at MoneyLion to get a personal loan from a lender.

Pros

  • Compare rates from many lenders

    Ultimately, you’ll be able to compare the best rates among several major lenders, which is a great strategy to save money. 

  • Current Earnest borrowers can give their lender a kickback

    MoneyLion gives Earnest unspecified “compensation … on a per-funded loan basis.” It’s an easy way to give back to Earnest at no cost to yourself if you’re already a happy customer. 

Cons

  • Unnecessarily complicated

    It’s easy for borrowers to confuse MoneyLion or Earnest with the lender they’re ultimately matched with. And while using MoneyLion’s marketplace can save you time, adding Earnest into the mix definitely does not; it only muddles things further. 

  • Unclear benefit over using MoneyLion directly

    Earnest and MoneyLion don’t provide any clear benefits over using MoneyLion directly. They don’t outline any discounts, perks, bonuses, or any other way to reward you for your extra button-clicking.

Alternatives

There are far easier ways to compare personal loan rates using a marketplace than going through Earnest to go through MoneyLion. Here’s how the MoneyLion marketplace compares to other options:

Company What to Know Rating (0-5)
Best Marketplace
User-Friendly Interface
MoneyLion’s Marketplace, Not Earnest’s

  • Credible: Credible specifies 20 personal loan lenders in its marketplace, far more than MoneyLion’s list of nine options. Credible also allows for a larger range in loan amounts: up to $200,000, twice as much as MoneyLion’s lender network. 
  • Splash Financial: Splash is less transparent about its lending network (we found. that you only see some of its lenders once you complete the prequalification stage), but it’s a more direct way to borrow as much as $100,000 than Earnest via MoneyLion.