We got into town last night, just fine. A little late because of the rain, but it wasn’t too bad. I have to say though, I am not impressed with Virgin America. Our flight had no entertainment system, and the seats are not any more comfortable than any of the other airlines I’ve flown in the past, I’ll tell you more about that later.

But in any case… now, I’m sitting at Cafe Royale, its a bar near my sister’s place. It is very eclectic I guess, they serve wine, and beer; they have a small art gallery and today they had Jazz for a while. They also have free wi-fi so that’s the main reason why I’m here.

Prosper Days starts tomorrow and its only 0.6 miles away from my sister’s place so that’s great. The only thing is that the weather has been kind of gloomy so far; hopefully it won’t rain when we head out in the morning. Registration starts at 7 and the sessions start at 9:00.

I have already had a blast today. My sister, girlfriend and I went to Golden Gate Park today. We walked by the De Young museum and took a tour of the Japanese Tea Garden. Then we walked around the Botanical Garden and that was very interesting as well.

The food so far has been great, We had Thai for dinner last night at Osha Thai Noodle. This morning we had breakfast at the Crepe House, and then dinner at Hotei Noodles. The girls are anxious to go back to the house so I will wrap it up for now. I’ll try to post some more tomorrow. Peace out.

Its been a while since I mentioned Prosper. If you don’t know what it is, check out some of my previous posts about it. I don’t have a whole lot to report, but I did want to share some of the details of the experiences.

I started back in May, my account is around 1600 bucks right now and I’ve “made” 83 and change. There is a reason why I put the word made in quotes. The reason is, after poking around and checking out my loans and progress and all that good stuff, I found that I have one loan that is now overdue. The guy has skiped the first payment, the account shows as being in collections right now. This is a bummer for me because this happens to be one of my biggest loans. In average I lend out 50 - 100 at a time. My goal for this money is to make an average of 20%, this means that I must find loan requests that will fund with a rate of 20% or higher. Now that, is a good return, well unfortunately this return comes with a higher risk. For this particular loan, I ended up with some extra cash at the end of the month and I ended up puting 180 into a single loan.

I wanted to put the money to work right away and I wanted to go high on this one, but I didn’t have a lot of time to split the 180 into 3 loans so I went to my watched list and I picked the best one I had. I spotted this particular request shortly after it went live, a few days before . It looked promising and all the information on it checked out, so I bid and put it all in there. So, I stand to loose that money now, which would make those 83 dollars in profit basically an 83 dollar cushion to ofset the 180 loss. Hopefully the collections agency will be able to get most of it if not all of it back, this would certainly minimize the impact for me. Ideally, the guy just missed the first payment and he’ll pay promptly and get back to speed. Realistically, I doubt this will happen. Hopefully I have split the money in such way that enough little loans can and will collectively compensate for any losses and turn a profit.

So what’s next? Well I have another bunch of cash waiting to be put into at least 8 new loans. I think this round of loans I’ll do all within the same period of a few days. This will allow me to get a better overview of “old loans” vs “new loans” in addition to this, I will also take a more conservative approach. My average % for these will be 14-19. I also need to make sometime to watch the Prosper webinars, I’ve missed all the scheduled times and dates but I think they have them available somewhere.

And lastly… I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone else came up with their version of the lending model that prosper is following. I will post back with any interesting info about LendingClub in another post. Oh yeah and check out the tshirt Prosper sent me for refering a friend.

So I’ve joined Prosper, I briefly talked about it earlier last month. I was excited and ready to go and become a lender to help people out. Mainly though I did it to make a buck. This is what its all about, making a buck. I must say that Prosper is not as easy as I thought it would be.

When I first learned about the site, I thought “Wow, this must be the easiest way to make a little bit of money on your *idle* money.” Simply browse through the borrower’s requests for money, read about them and then lend them some money at a really high interest rate. When I say high interest rate, I mean HIGH. Some of the loans right now are on the 20% or higher range. So if you have $100, and you lend it out at a rate of 22.5% over a period of three years, you can see what I mean by easy money. Well, it all sounds great until you actually get in and start lending money.

It is simply not easy to lend money. The marketplace in Prosper is as competitive as anywhere that offers a chance to make a profit. Geez, who was I kidding when I thought this would be simple? The problem I’m facing now is that my loans keep getting bumped off by other lenders.

This is how it works. For example, Joe Schlombo wants to borrow $15,000 to rebuild his kitchen, and he requests his loan at 25% interest rate. Happy and ready to lend I go into Joe’s loan request, read the description and make sure I feel comfortable lending him money then I make a bid. Aha! thats where the catch is, this is just a bid! I would make a bid for $50.00 to $100.00 and offer it at 25% so will about other 200 lenders. Unfortunately this is not the end of it. The loan is essentially an item we (all the lenders) are bidding for. Another lender may come along tomorrow (before the auction closes) and say… “hmmm, this Joe guy seems pretty respectable, I’m going to lend him $100.00 at %24.5″ And so one of us, the guys that bid $100 at %25 will get bumped off because of the %.5 difference.

You can see how this would be more difficult than I thought, it’s a lot like eBay where you have to constantly watch the items you are bidding on and make sure you are ready to make a winning bid at the last second before the auction closes.

As it stands right now, I made over 30 bids since I first posted about prosper and they all have been bumped off by other lenders. I should probably go into the forums and ask other people how to get some of the winning bids and actually lend some money out, it is definitely not as easy as I thought.

I joined Prosper.com recently. What is it you ask? I’ll tell you… even if you didn’t ask. After all, you are here right?

Prosper.com is a site that brings forth a great concept. In the simplest terms I can tell you, it provides the tools and mechanisms and supports all the logistics for you to make a loan to anybody.

Well almost. Someone that wants to borrow money still needs to have their credit checked and identity verified by Prosper.com. But even if they have bad credit, they may and probably will still get a loan. Unlike a bank or credit union, Prosper does not decide who gets loans or who doesn’t, you do. I do. This is the cool thing about the site. After you register and login, you’ll have to fund your account and wait some days to get your money in there before you can start lending. If you’re looking to borrow money, the process is a little different and I can’t tell you yet exactly how it works because I haven’t been through the borrowing process. I joined Prosper to be a lender.

My account should fund today and I’ll probably make my first couple loans this afternoon. I will come back in a couple days to tell you all about it and give you a better view into how things are going. The great thing about it is that you can start with as little as $50.00. Potentially, you could turn those $50.00 into $80.00 or more in a very short term. I’ll keep you posted.

check out Prosper.com.