Entries from September 2007 ↓

Lender/Borrower Activity on Prosper

The number of active lenders on Prosper took the first dip ever in September. (An lender is active if he/she made a bid in that month.). If your an active lender on Prosper this is probably good news for you since it means less competition. On the other hand the number of active [...]

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Advanced Search of My Portfolio

Recently I had a startling discovery while Analyzing My Late Loans on Prosper. I made this discovery becasue it is a fairly simple thing to look at my 14 or so late loans and see their extended credit.  The commonality jumped off the page.  However, now I want to go back and look at my entire [...]

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Smava - 6 month after start nearly all current

On March 24th Smava.de launched its peer-to-peer lending service in Germany. Time for a recap on how Smava fared in its first 6 month of operation. How Smava operates can be read in this earlier article.First the very positive news: So far in only 3 cases borrowers missed payment dates and in two of these [...]

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Revolutionary Blog Contest

CyberCapital.Org, a blog that gives you latest Tech news and Firefox Tips, is going to Show your Google ads on their website for a Week. You can enter the contest by writing about it on your blog. I just did that and I’m in the contest now, Wish me luck and Join in if you [...]

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Loaning on Lending Club For the 1st Time

So my money cleared and this morning I started to put it to work at Lending Club.
Starting with the negative (ending with the positive)…  

It took a long time to review each listing to make sure it had the extended credit parameters that I wanted.  Advanced search is needed asap.
I can’t seem to find a way [...]

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MortgageFit — World’s Largest Mortgage Community

MortgageFit’s premise is
There is no common answer to varied mortgage issues. So as a community, our members provide personalized knowledge and guidance on mortgage and related issues.
That end they have built and grown a community of mortgage professions, interested observers, and a public in need of answers.
Personally, I rely on Google whenever I have a [...]

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The Best Credit Grade

I was playing around with the customization on the lender profile pages and came to the conclusion that the best credit grade to invest in is C.
How did I come up with this conclusion?
1) C credit grade of lender portfolio’s seems to return the highest ROI.
2) AA, A, B borrowers tend to have their rates [...]

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Weekend Round-up: Red Sox Clinch Edition

With the Red Sox clinching the AL East for the first time in 12 years, I can finally relax a little bit. That relaxation is going to last only a couple of days. The playoffs start on Wednesday of next week, so it will be nail-biting time again. For the next [...]

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Take time to celebrate

Something amazing happened last weekend: we were very fortunate to be featured in Barron’s only 2 weeks after our public launch beyond Facebook, and as a result saw more lenders signing up over that weekend than in the 2 weeks before! The Barron’s article came shortly after the Reuters piece last week, which also contributed [...]

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New Stats and Customization Features

A number of things have been added in this update. Here are the highlights:
- The Lender Breakdown page has been updated and renamed the Lender Overview page. You can use this page to get an overview of lender ROI.
- Added an “Active Lenders and Borrowers” chart to the Prosper Membership Growth page. (Steve)
- The “Customize” [...]

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Friday Linkfest Junket

I’ve been having a linkfest every Friday. Why stop now?
And on we go…

TechDumpster has a rundown on the (hypothetical) Zopa versus Prosper match-up:

Although Zopa is the only service of its kind in the United Kingdom,
when they do finally make it t…

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President Clinton loves Kiva.org!

President Clinton was interviewed by Greta van Susteren of Fox News yesterday and told her all about Kiva.org! Check out the video.

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blog.lendingclub.com - Site Maintenance - 9/28-9/29/2007

The blog will be unavailable starting this evening until tomorrow morning.
This site maintenance will not affect the main Lending Club site.
WHEN: 11:00 PM – 6:30 AM EDT Friday–Saturday September 28th 2007
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MyC4 now in public beta

MyC4.com switched today from closed beta to public beta. Now it is possible to browse the site without registering. For example click on one of the opportunities on the left of the screen and you get a good idea of the concept.
MyC4 allows lenders to do microlending to entrepreneurs in Africa. Lenders do get [...]

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Student loans revisited

Colleges will often offer student loans as part of their financial aid packages, coming in two varieties—subsidized and unsubsidized. These two types of loans differ substantially, because subsidized loans are much more beneficial to you.
If you take a subsidized loan, the government will pay the interest on the loan while you are in school. You [...]

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Universal Default

As I was browsing through loan requests on the Lending Club site, I saw one user recounting how his credit card rate jumped from 13% to 25% without warning. Such jumps are quite common. While the cause of the jump in this situation was likely the end of a teaser rate (a low rate when [...]

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Connecting

Eleven years ago, when I first moved into the neighborhood where I now live, I held a block party. I wanted to meet my neighbors - didn’t want to drive home, politely nod at folks I hadn’t met, but lived next door.
So, I had a block party. It worked. In fact, for the past ten [...]

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His person

What is this?  Another blog entry where I tell you how famous Kiva has become?  Well, sort of.

This week is the Clinton Global Initiative, a mecca of sorts for philanthropy in the US.  Premal, a co-conspirator and Intl micro-financier at large, was given the honor of speaking for the second year in a row.  I couldn’t think of a better person to do it.  Nobody can convey the message of Internet micro-lending with the passion, sincerity and intelligence that Premal carries on his person (in addition to his blackberry)

Thanks, in part, to Premal, we are being hit with a new deluge of lenders, loans and enthusiasm.  A big thanks goes to President Clinton himself, who has unexpectedly become a spokesman for Kiva as well.

Mr. Clinton, do you read blogs?  If you do read this…"Thanks".  It’s not just me thanking you;  there are thousands of entrepreneurs in the developing world for years to come who will have you to thank.  You have taken this cause to a new level.  Of all things you could have devoted your post-presidency to, you chose philanthropy.  And you are not just posturing either, you are serious and we can see that.  Kiva will widen its sails to catch the wind you have created. 

Read on.  This, from a recent interview with the President on MSN. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21020060/page/2/

CLINTON:  Well, I can just give you an example of that — we can all be micro-bankers now thanks to a little Web site called kiva.org, which made its introduction here last year.

They came here for the first time.  And one of the people who followed us on the Internet, of the 48,000 people, several hundred of them made their own commitment.  One of them said, I’m going to loan $25 to somebody in Africa to start a business or expand a business.

When I featured them in my book and then went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and she brought them there, within three days, all of the people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Afghanistan, every one of their businesspeople was fully funded within three days by people giving between $25 and $200.

It was amazing.  So now they all will get reports and when their loans are paid back, they can keep them or turn around and lend them again.  These are the kind of ideas that are circulating in the world.  And we can increase the visibility of the good idea.

And people, even with a very modest amount of money can have a huge impact.  Just think about it.  You and I could become bankers to people and we could monitor their progress and people in their neighborhoods will see and they will look for micro-loans, they have their own ideas, so we can give them a chance to raise their kids with dignity, send their kids to school, and in troubled places like Afghanistan, we marginally increase the chance that peace can prevail because people will see there is a positive alternative to conflict.

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Prosper T-Shirts for Referring Lenders

Several months ago Prosper introduced a referral program. Under that program Prosper members can receive $25 dollars for referring a lender, and up to $125 for referring a borrower. I referred my brother and my wife, both of whom became lenders and f…

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Great money rules to live by

CNNMoney recently published an excellent article on money rules to live by. The author wrote 20 tips based on the wisdom of some of the best investors, inventors and risk-takers of all time—so these are tips that have been tried and tested for hundreds of years. I’ve been recommending most of these rules since I [...]

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Dear Politicians, Please Adjust Roth IRA Limits for Areas of High Cost of Living

As my regular readers know, we are a dual income, no kid, couple in Silicon Valley, which has one of the highest costs of living in America. I was flipping through a real estate magazine the other day and a 1000 sq. ft, 3 bed, 1 bathroom, with no updates was going for [...]

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James Alexander, Zopa co-founder, on peer to peer lending

Intruders TV did a long interview with James Alexander of Zopa.com covering the development of Zopa, regulation, market approach, lender and borrower advantages, the competition and other topics. The video starts of with polling passers-by on the street whether they heard of Zopa and would use peer-to-peer lending themselves.

(Source: Intruders.tv) P.S.: Noticed the bulletpoint on the [...]

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Another website about late borrowers

I think there may be several group leaders who post information about the late borrowers in their group at least somewhere but since I have a late loan with this group, I thought I’d blog about it.Lend2 is one of the largest lenders on Prosper.  He started a group at one point and one of the things he mentioned on his group page was, “I said I wouldn’t do it but I started a group anyway.” or something to that extent.  Later, he closed his group for personal reasons although I’m thinking he may have seen the hand writing on the wall–that his group wasn’t performing up to his expectations.Anyway, he still maintains contact with the members of his group who are late, or at least attempts to.  He has this website that he updates with information he has received from the borrowers who are late.My late borrower, missouri_veteran, says among other things that she was hoping to make a payment by the end of the month (in August) but she’s now a month late and rapidly headed towards 2 months (payment due on the 12th).It is nice to know some information but frankly, unless a payment is attached, I don’t hold out much hope anymore for borrowers who are more than a month late.I know, because I have several borrowers like that in my own group.

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Lending Club Advanced Search or Investment Credit Filters

I started a similar topic at the P2P No Bank Forum on this subject: Lending Club Advanced Search or Investment Credit Filters
However I wanted to post here as well…  My money has not yet cleared into Lending Club, so I have been using the site and trying to find loans I would like to bid [...]

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Amortization Methods

Most people who have loans are familiar with the term amortization. In its simplest form, it simply means the reduction of the loan balance through regularly scheduled payments. For a given loan balance, interest rate, and term, the full amortization amount is the principal payment that will reduce your loan to zero over the normal [...]

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Kiva.org (Brad Pitt) heats up the Clinton Global Initiative

Michael Roston, blogging to the Huffington Post from the Clinton Global Initiative, asks if we care as much about Brad Pitt’s “Make it Right” project as we do “the use of micro-loans through Kiva.org to offer up seed capital and help the world’s poor?”…

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Changes…

When I arrived here I was told that Phnom Penh was changing so quickly that even in the two months I would notice the difference in the city between when I arrived and when I left. It’s true that the city have been moving extraordinarily quickly. In 2000 there were no paved roads – now [...]

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First day in the field!

First day in the field
On the morning of the 5th September, a credit officer, a man who works in the office and speaks both English and Khmer, and I headed out to the field. The credit officer had his own motorbike, and I sat on the back. Despite being early morning the thick heat hung [...]

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Prosper Responds!

Prosper has asked me to publish the following response:Dear Fred93,Thanks for keeping up-to-date on the latest Prosper newsletter.  In the Borrower Success Story that you’ve quoted (above), we faithfully reproduced his submitted story without changes.  The user’s Borrower Success Story quoted the interest rate of “13.4%” when, as you pointed out in your blog, his borrower rate was actually “14.3%.” Going forward with the newsletter, we will diligently fact-check each story before publication.Thanks for posting,Prosper Hey, whadda ya know, they read my blog! 

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The Next Forum Revolt Brewing Over Fraud

It’s looking like the next big forum uproar will be over Prosper’s actions in the forums to stamp down the revelation of personally identifiable information (PII). Where does this information mostly come up? Why, when lenders go hunting for fraud. This…

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So you want to start a business?

Saving money and building wealth is a great thing, but building a big account isn’t the ultimate goal. The point of your money should be to use it, somehow. Saving for your retirement is important, and a lot of people also love to consume movies and clothes and jewelry and electronics. Still, some others dream [...]

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Implied Call Option In Prosper Loans

Tanta over at Calculated Risk has gone off an obscure topic for mortgages, but it has relevance for Prosper lenders and borrowers. She had previously touched on the idea of an embedded option in a previous post, but really rounds it out here. From her …

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In Defense of McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger

Trent from The Simple Dollar has been on a cheeseburge kick lately. He’s gone through quite a bit of time and effort to write about his experience buying a McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger and making his own. He comes to the conclusion that “it was more time-effective to make the homemade cheeseburgers”, which [...]

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Credit Card Problems Get Top Billing

With all of the other newsworthy events happening each day in the world, you probably wouldn’t expect an article about credit card fees to be the lead story on a major news website. But that’s exactly what happened on the afternoon of Thursday, September 20th. MSNBC.com featured an article on credit card rates by Herb [...]

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Analyzing My Late Loans

Here is a quick Prosper portfolio update…
Total Account Value: $8,715.32
Cash Invested: $7,692.69
Active Loans: 144
Avg Loan Age Active Loans: 172 Days
Avg Rate: 18.52%
Avg Credit Grade: B+
Estimated ROI according to EricCC: 10.34%
Estimated ROI according to LendingStats: 4.03%
Conservative Estimated IRR according to RateLadder: 2.75%
This paints a fairly rosy picture, however if you scratch the surface you will see [...]

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What lenders will do…

I was just directed to an interesting website. It illustrates the creative ways lenders on Prosper will vent their frustrations about defaulting borrowers.I present to you, wallofsham.com. I don’t know if this has been mentioned in any of the other blogs out there but I feel like it is certainly worth checking out. 

Continue reading → What lenders will do…

Changed the blog name

Due to numerous complaints i have changed the name of this blog.

Continue reading → Changed the blog name

Afternoon Links: GoodBye Business 2.0 Edition

I received news that I’ll be saving around $10-12 a year and I’m mad about it. It looks like Time Warner is closing down the Business 2.0 magazine. It was my favorite of three magazine that I subscribe to - the other two being Men’s Health and Money. Perhaps I’ll have [...]

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First post from Samoa

Talofa! I can hardly believe that I am writing this from Samoa, the “Treasured Islands of the South Pacific”. I hope you will bear with me over the next 13 weeks as I share my experiences of working at the South Pacific Business Development (SPBD), Kiva’s partner MFI on the island.
Departing Los Angeles on a [...]

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Zopa demand figures

Lenders at Zopa do not (yet) select an individual borrower but rather select a market and a rate at which they want to lend their money. This is matched to borrower demand and if a match is found, money is lend out.
There is a 3rd party site tracking the development of the Zopa demand volume [...]

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Talking about money: How much is too much?

Growing up in my family the issue of money was rarely, if ever discussed. My middle-class parents worked hard, but if they struggled with bills or money issues, they certainly never shared any of those struggles with me.
I really wish they had.
In school, I never learned a thing about a “credit score.” If someone had [...]

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GlobeFunder Soft Launch October 2, 2007

Tim of the Globe Funder team has told the P2P No Bank Forum — Independent P2P Lending Forum that Globe Funder will be soft launching on October 2, 2007.
GlobeFunder will be “soft launching” on October 2, 2007!
Please sign up on our interim website to stayed tuned to updates.
Tim
GlobeFunder Team
Check it out here: When will Globe [...]

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Micro Lending and Muhammad Yunus

I’m travelling and blogging has been a bit slow lately. I did want to share a quick link though. JD, over on Get Rich Slowly, just posted Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. It’s a book review for Banker to the Po…

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Your Credit Isn’t “Too Good” for Lending Club

If you have excellent credit, you may not think that a P2P loan from Lending Club is necessary. You may feel confident that you can get approved for a loan at your bank. You may also think that Lending Club is only for people with no other alternatives who are forced into a non-traditional [...]

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Another Gong

I was fortunate to be able to join Tim Parlett last night to collect another award for Zopa’s you-beaut, patent-pending, multiple-Consumer-Credit-Act-document-electronic-signing-widget.
This time it was Financial Services Technology Project of the Year at the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards 2007. And it was interesting to note that we were the only retail application nominated [...]

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Automated Housekeeping

According to Google, I’m the second laziest man on the web. I jokingly grabbed the Lazy Man name because I abhor housekeeping. It’s a chore which never ends. I hate the feeling that I’m not making an progress. So it got me thinking, What can I do to eliminate or at [...]

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Opaque banking practices

Those doubting that we live in a ‘globalised’ world would do well to recognise that the Northern Rock mess of the last couple of weeks actually had its beginnings in the credit crisis in the United States.
Across the Atlantic, American lenders lent too much, too easily, to too many sub-prime borrowers. Rather than savers’ [...]

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Prosper - Don’t Mislead… again

Back in April’07 I wrote an open letter to Prosper.com titled “Don’t Mislead People”.  I think that’s a pretty good mantra.  I don’t know how people write entire books on corporate ethics, when you can say most of it in 3 words.  That letter contained a long list of things that Prosper was doing that I thought were misleading.  To Prosper’s credit I think someone understood at least some of what I was saying, because some of ‘em got fixed.  I don’t think they really intended to mislead.  They just weren’t thinking clearly.  End of story, right?Recently a few more have appeared.  There was a recent Prosper.com online advertisement that used a screen image of a listing page where the interest rate was “photoshopped” to show a lower interest rate than the actual loan.  To their credit, Prosper fixed it after a member pointed this out.  I wasn’t on the ball, and didn’t save a copy of the original photoshopped ad.  Must have been some overzealous marketing person, eh?  End of story, right?Oops.  They did it again!  The September borrower newsletter contains a story about a borrower and his loan.  It says he obtained an interest rate of 13.4%.  Here’s a picture from the newsletter.  (I have added the red oval.)Note that it says he “obtained 13.4%”.  We have to assume that they mean the interest rate that he actually had to pay.  On the prosper.com system, that’s called the “borrower rate” to distinguish it from the lower interest rate that lenders receive.  In fact, it is very clear from context of the ad that they mean the rate he had to pay, because in the quote he compares this to “14%” that the bank wanted to charge him.  Well, 13.4% is indeed lower than 14%, so this sounds great until we look at the actual listing page.  It tells a different story.Again I added a red oval, circling the borrower rate this borrower actually obtained.  It doesn’t agree with the story.  It is even a higher interest rate than his bank wanted to charge!  I assume this was an accident.  Surely no employee would intentionally write a misleading story, eh?  But its one more in a series of confidence eroding developments. 

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Time to blog again

Yes,i still visit my own blog to see the counter at the bottom of the page.Zcommodore is trying to outblog me with graphs & things but i have him beat on pure entertainment value.Besides i have ZERO lates in my group.

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Where does Mario keep all his gold coins?

Do you ever remember depositing your gold coins in any of the Super Mario games? I sure don’t. Sure, 100 coins would get you another life, but what if you wanted to save or spend those coins? Where would Mario keep his gold coins? Where should we keep our gold coins? Let’s examine the options.
Where [...]

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Save Money on the Web

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a software engineer living in Silicon Valley. Such an occupation forces you to stay alert with all the technology advantages in the field. Often that includes keeping up with the latest technology gadgets. Financially, it’s quite a curse. Back in my “gotta have it first [...]

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Are You Ready for a Financial Crisis?

It’s amazing how quickly your financial situation can change. One minute you’re sailing along smoothly, making good progress towards your goals, and the next you’re in a downward spiral with little chance for recovery. Many times, there’s a single event that triggers the change. Preparing for that event can significantly reduce its impact.
Typical triggering events [...]

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Lending Club vs Prosper — The 1st 100 Days Recap and Modest Proposal

Last week week I wrote a comparison of Prosper and Lending Club based entirely on loan volume in reaction to the Lending Club claim: 100 Days and a Million Dollars in Loans! Prosper had 2.6 times the loan volume: Lending Club vs Prosper — The First 100 Days Take 3
Lending Club took exception to the claim [...]

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Weekend Round-up: Jekyll and Hyde Edition - Part 2: Jekyll

Yesterday, I mentioned how the Red Sox season was flailing out of control - not unlike Mr. Hyde. Today, it’s time for the opposite, Dr. Jekyll.
I’ve mentioned more than a few times that I’m a Patriots fan, despite all the shenanigans over the last couple of weeks. However, unlike the Red Sox, [...]

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2nd, 3rd, and 4th Kiva Loans