It’s time for my annual Prosper check in. Like many things in my life, this year was not as good a year when it came to our peer to peer lending. Unlike many other things in my life, I can tell you exactly why- lack of diversity. When you only have 5-6 active loans and two of them default, even if they default at having paid at least 75% back, it makes a big impact. However,read more…
Do you ever have the thought ”I could do X and my spouse would never know”? When it’s about buying yourself a piece of candy at the grocery store, it’s probably not a big deal. We’re at a point right now where I could throw $1,000-2,000 into our Prosper account and C would have no idea. I’m not going to do that, because that’s not the kind of relationship we have, but after doing the researchread more…
Has it really been a year? It is time, once again, for Women’s Money Week. Let me be honest, everything I say in any of these posts applies to men as well as women, but I do think it is important to have events that focus on women and their relationships with money. Why? Because in a lot of ways, men are still seen as the bread winners and financial decision makers. It is less trueread more…
Today is Election Day in the United States, where I, and most of my readers, live. Because this will post around the time that most East Coast polls are closing, I have to imagine that if you are actually reading this today, you are looking for a break from election coverage, and that if you are reading this on Wednesday, you are happy to be done with election coverage. With that in mind, I thought itread more…
Last August, I wrote about our experience investing with Prosper. At the time, we had had money invested there for 4.5 years. Given that that is still one of my most popular posts, I thought that maybe it was time for an update. Hence, this post. On some level, not a lot has changed since last August. We have not added any new money to the account. No notes have been paid in full since then,read more…
Here’s the Deal We are loaning my brother $3,000. I can hear all the financial bloggers screaming at their screens this very second “No, don’t do it!” “Never lend money to family!” “That’s a bad, bad idea.” And I suppose for some people, that is true. It’s never been true in my family. Let’s start with the fact that Charles and I would not be where we are today if family had not been willing toread more…
Recently, the Jumpstart our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was passed. What is it? Well, in its most basic form, the JOBS act is micro-investing. Kind of like Prosper in that startups will be able to seek funding from the ordinary guy – not venture capitalists or angel investors or even the small business administration, but regular people like you and me – and pay them with stock options. Right now, there are a ton of regulationsread more…
This post is inspired by Brave New Life, who posted about his strategy for lending in a peer to peer network in Lending Club Investment Strategy Back in March 2007, we had some extra cash from yearly bonuses and decided we wanted to try peer to peer lending. I’ll be honest, I do not remember exactly how this came up. One of us probably read an article about it and thought it looked interesting. Then weread more…
