Personal Finance

The Wealth, Money & Life Network
One thing I have to admit I appreciate about having a member of our network who is very thorough on dividend stock investing is the education I am receiving from his blog.  D4L talks about his Progress Update - April 2008 with his dividend paying stocks.  While I quite don’t […]

After having been a Prosper lender for a little over a year now, I have been examining my approach to investing in this area. Since lending is a form of investment, specifically related to my own personal finances, it is important to question my prosper strategy to ensure I am on track with my goals.

Editor’s Note : I will be posting a weekly roundup of postings on personal finance topics I enjoyed reading in the personal finance blogosphere. These bloggers can be found my Blogroll page. Whenever possible, if I come across a new one I like, I will add them to the Blogroll.
It is a little late for […]

This is a little late but I wanted to spread the word that the Wealth, Money & Life Network is hosting our first carnival at Dollar Frugal.  The theme of the month is Emergency Funds.
If you have a post you wrote on the topic of Emergency Funds, you can submit your post here.

Prosper, a popular peer to peer lending program where prospective borrowers can request a loan up to $25,000 at an interest rate to be determine through a bid-down system by individual lenders.

The results can vary from borrower to borrower. Borrowers with the same credit “grades” will often find their interest rates varies wildly from each other. There are several reasons such as the type of loans they are requesting for such as whether it for personal or business use. Another factor is the borrower’s home state interest cap rates for loans.

Since Prosper loans are unsecured loans, if the borrower defaults on the loan, you may or may not get your money back if any at all. You are really making a bet the borrower will pay back the loan in full with interest.

By having a tracking system, you can create a report that will help you better understand past performance of the borrowers who share similar credit grades but different interest rates.

While past performance are not an indicator of future performance, it can certainly help to know where your bets went wrong and which bets helped you succeed in achieving your lending portfolio goals.