Lately I have been thinking about selling my modded xbox and a few other things on ebay. I was browsing around ebay and I found something I never knew was there. Its a page called the Hot List. It shows you what the top selling current things on ebay are. For example the top selling tech items currently are:

Bushnell Digital Binoculars Canon PowerShot SD1000 Blackberry Pearl Unlocked Nokia N95 Cell Phone Unlocked Motorola H700 Bluetooth Headset Motorola RAZR2 V8 Unlocked Apple iMac Garmin nuvi 660 TomTom One Sling Media Slingbox Sony Bravia 46″ LCD HDTV

Apple iPod touch 4GB Garmin Forerunner 305 iPod Shuffle Kicker Amplifier JL Subwoofer Classic Movie DVD Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Video Game Nintendo Wii Remote Controller Guitar Hero III Rock Band Video Game Bundle Sony PSP 2000

Got some of that stuff you need to get rid of? Might be time to give it a go

Peer to peer lending ( or p2p lending as its commonly referred to) has been picking up steam lately and I have had a few emails from readers asking about what exactly is peer to peer lending and is it really all that useful after I posted about lending club.  Well here is a quick rundown of what peer to peer lending is and how peer to peer lending works.

Lets start with a definition (from wikipedia):

Peer to Peer lending

Peer-to-peer lending is a means by which borrowers and lenders may transact business without the traditional intermediaries, such as banks. It can also be known as Social Lending. The ripple monetary system is a software project based on a similar idea. An enabling technology for peer-to-peer lending has been the Internet, where peer-to-peer lending appears in two primary variations: an “online marketplace” model and a “family and friend” model.

The marketplace model of peer-to-peer lending on the internet enables peer lenders to locate peer borrowers and vice-versa. This model connects borrowers with lenders through an auction-like process in which the lender willing to provide the lowest interest rate “wins” the borrower’s loan. The marketplace process may include other intermediaries who package and resell the loans but the loans are ultimately sold to individuals or pools of individuals.

The “family and friend” model forgoes the auction-like process entirely and concentrates on borrowers and lenders who already know each other, as with two friends or business colleagues formalizing a personal loan. Whereas the primary benefit of the marketplace model is the “match making” aspect, the family and friend model emphasizes online collaboration, loan formalization and servicing.

Sounds interesting, does peer to peer lending work?

I have tried out a couple of the places, most notably lending club that I was using extensively and actually had a full review written up about that I ultimately had to throw away because they are now semi defunct. In my experiences with both Lending Club and Prosper (another one of the most well known sites) it has worked very well. On the lending side, lending is fairly easy and straightforward. You can have money transferred in from your bank and be ready to go in a couple days.  Default rates are a bit higher than regular lending, but a lot of this is because you can get a loan on (at least Prosper) with basically completely wrecked credit.  Whether or not anyone funds you is a whole different story.  There ARE collections agencies that are used so even on default there are odds of recouping your money.

On the borrowing side it is a little more involved but still fairly no hassle. You give out information and people decide if they want to fund your loan or not based upon the information you’ve provided and on your credit history. I never actually took out a loan but had one up to test it out.  People are generally trusting and I found it fairly non stressful to put a loan up.

Do you recommend peer to peer lending?

I actually really like the idea of cutting out the middle man: the bank.  Sure whoever is administrating things is going to make some money as a middle man but the returns are better for investors and generally the loans are reasonable for people with good credit.  There are also a lot of situations where bank’s will not make loans when it makes sense (some business ventures for example) and I find that p2p lenders are more open to lending to businesses, albeit at a higher rate.

Everyone likes spending. Well, ALMOST everyone likes spending. Need help controlling your desire to spend? I could just tell you “ahh young padowan, just get control of yourself.” But I wont. There are many different ways to insert financial self control into your life. One way that you may not have thought of is to take control of the power that America’s marketers have over you and your desire to spend your hard-earned money needlessly.

Some of the most talented marketers in the world ply their trade in America every day, crafting TV commercials, radio spots, print ads, billboards, Web ads, direct mail pieces, telemarketing scripts, and other forms of marketing communications to “inform” you about various products and services they want you to buy. If a talented marketer can attract and hold your attention for just a few precious seconds, that marketer can use powerful techniques to tempt you to voluntarily hand over your hard-earned money in exchange for the product or service the marketer has to sell to you. Unfortunately for you, most marketers are really, really good at what they do. They know how to attract your attention and then work their marketing magic on you – possibly without you even realizing it!

Nonetheless, you are not completely powerless in the marketing game. You can take specific actions to significantly reduce the power that marketers have over you and your desire to spend needlessly. Here are nine tips – some easy, some hard – that can help you insert financial self control into your life by holding America’s extremely talented marketers at bay.

1) Hide Your Telephone Number

The best way to put a stop to unwanted telemarketing calls at your home is to pay your local phone company a few extra dollars a month to make your telephone number unlisted and/or unpublished. You can’t receive unwanted telemarketing calls if telemarketers cannot get access to your telephone number.

2) Register Your Telephone Number

You can also place your telephone numbers on the Federal Trade Commission’s National Do Not Call Registry. By law, telemarketers must remove your telephone number from their call lists if you are on the federal registry list. If the telemarketers call you anyway, they could be subject to federal penalties. To add your telephone numbers to the Do Not Call Registry, call 1-888-382-1222 or go to www.donotcall.gov.

3) Mask Your Telephone Number

Do not give out your real phone number when filling out forms on a company’s website unless you already know in advance that you would like for the company to contact you in an emergency (e.g., so an airline can let you know your flight has been canceled) or to tell you more about a product or service you are considering but want to talk to a company representative about it first (e.g., a used car you saw at a car dealer’s website). Sometimes, an online form will require you to put in a phone number before you can submit the form. What to do? Simply enter your area code and then 999-9999.

4) Opt-Out Your Credit Report

If you wish to reduce U.S. Mail solicitations for credit card and insurance offers by companies that target you based on the information contained in your credit reports, there is an opt-out program operated by the four major credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion. Once you opt-out, your name stays on a “do not contact” list for five years. There is also a permanent option. For more information, call 1-888-5OPT-OUT or go to www.optoutprescreen.com.

5) Tell them to screw off

The Direct Marketing Association also maintains a database of consumers who prefer not to receive U.S. Mail solicitations. DMA members must remove those consumers from their mailing lists. Once registered, your name stays on the list for five years. Send your name, address, and a request that the DMA add you to the opt-out list to:

Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 643
Carmel, NY 10512

Or, for added convenience, you can pay a small fee and do it online at www.dmaconsumers.org.

6) Flag Your Account

Do you already do business with a company that continuously sends you offer after offer by U.S. Mail each week – or worse, several times a week? There are many credit card companies out there that do this all the time, sending out credit card offers, convenience checks, and short-term loan offers by the millions each and every week. The easiest way to get them to stop sending offer after offer is to mail a polite letter to the company’s Customer Service or Consumer Relations department simply asking them to put you on a “do not mail” list, if they have one. Be sure to include your account number in the letter so that they know you are an existing customer and can flag your account as being on a “do not mail list.” Do this once, being sure to make a photocopy or two of the signed letter before you mail it. Then, wait at least two months to see if the offers from the company reduce in volume or stop altogether.

If after two full months the company’s offers keep coming to you at the same rate as before, make your request more serious by writing a new letter addressed to the company’s General Counsel, the attorney the company keeps on staff or on retainer to handle its legal matters. You might be able to find his or her name on the company’s website. If not, just address it to “General Counsel” at the company’s headquarters address. Again, be polite in your letter to the General Counsel, and simply repeat your original request. Be sure to let the General Counsel know that you wrote the company about the request at least two months ago and experienced no change in the number of offers you received each week. For the General Counsel’s convenience, attach a photocopy of your original letter to the new letter. Getting the attention of the company’s attorney should help get you on an internal “do not mail” list at the company.

7) Monetize Your TV

You probably think your TV exists primarily to entertain you with your favorite TV shows, but you’re wrong. Your TV exists primarily to allow America’s marketers into your home where they can market products and services to you and your family while you are relaxed, in a safe place, and mentally open to a quick sales pitch. It is no surprise that TV has been the American marketer’s most effective marketing tool for over 50 years.

How best to cripple the marketing power of TV in your own home and render it useless to marketers? Simply turn off, unplug, and sell your TV sets for cash on craigslist.com, at a pawn shop, or at a local thrift store. Then, add the cash to your savings account or use it to pay down your debts – that’s an instant increase in your financial security. With all your TV sets out of your home, you will never even see all those pesky TV commercials “informing” you about new products and services you don’t really need and tempting you to go out and buy them.

Yes, at first you will miss your favorite TV shows, but not for long. You’ll soon forget that TV shows even exist because the principle of “out of sight, out of mind” really works. You’ll soon rediscover that there is so much more to life than sitting around on the couch watching the “boob tube.” Yes, your friends, family, and colleagues might think you’re a little strange for not having a TV set in your home and not knowing all the little details about all the latest TV shows they want to talk about, but so what? While they will possess useless TV knowledge and be tempted by hundreds of TV commercials every week, you will soon discover that TV ignorance is wealth-building bliss!

Kill your radio

What works for TV also works for radio. The morning drive shows on most major radio stations are designed to hold your attention while the on-air personalities talk about companies’ products and services in a clever, casual way. Take control by turning off the radio and putting in a CD or using an iPod containing your favorite music, audio books, or podcasts. You’ll arrive at work fully entertained and informed, yet none the wiser about what marketers want you to learn from their radio commercials and on-air plugs about products and services you probably don’t really need.

9) Put Down That Magazine

Mass media magazines like Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, People, InStyle, Time, Esquire, Vogue, US Weekly, Money, Sports Illustrated, and others are designed to be helpful to you and the lifestyle you lead. But, they can also leave you feeling insecure or inadequate about yourself as if something were missing from your life. Conveniently, within their very pages are advertisements – designed and paid for by marketers – that feature slick, high-quality photography showing happy, attractive people seemingly without a care in the world enjoying some great product or service that they supposedly just spent hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousands of dollars, to own or experience. Of course, the people in the advertisements are just actors and models, not real people like you, but the advertisements seem to tell your brain that you could be transformed to look and feel just like these shiny, happy people if only you were to plop down hundreds or thousands of your own hard-earned dollars for the same product or service the actors and models are enjoying.

How can you take control of the power that marketers have over your brain through their picture perfect advertisements? You guessed it – simply choose to not read mass media magazines. “But what about all the great content in those magazines?” you ask. Sure, the content may be fun, informative, and of interest to you. But, think about it: the content is only there to act as bait to get you to spend time with the marketers’ slick advertisements and be tempted to buy products and services that you probably don’t really need in the first place. So, decide which is more important to you: the content in mass media magazines or the contentment that you and your family will enjoy from knowing that you are well on your way to being financially secure thanks to you no longer being tempted by marketers’ slick advertisements in mass media magazines.

10) Practice self control

Yeah yeah this one seems obvious but the truth is you can cultivate self control through deliberate practice.  Take five minutes before you do anything to consider if it is really worth it to you.  You might be thinking “what difference will five minutes make?”  And the answer is, a world of difference.

Frontier Airlines files for bankruptcy. Those five words are a bit of a shock to me. According to the AP:

NEW YORK (AFP) — Denver-based Frontier Airlines said Friday it had filed for bankruptcy after a credit card processor said it would start withholding receipts from the sale of the airline’s tickets.

Frontier said in a statement it would continue to operate without disruption during the bankruptcy proceedings, offering its full schedule of flights, honoring reservations and paying employees and suppliers.

The company said it was forced to file for bankruptcy protection in a New York court “following an unexpected attempt by its principal credit card processor to substantially increase a ‘holdback’ of customer receipts, which threatened to severely impact Frontier’s liquidity.”

Frontier flies with a fleet of 62 aircraft (Airbus A320s) and a workforce of 6000. They fly Denver-70 cities and quite frankly they are my favorite airline so it saddens me to see this happen. I have written in the past that I like their business model (similar to Southwest). Apparently they filed after its credit-card processor (First Data Corp) started holding back proceeds from ticket sales. In my opinion it was a good move because a massive cash hold back would have had massive ramifications as far as threatening their liquidity.

So what about my Frontier shares? eek?

I too have a few shares of Frontier Airlines and this bankruptcy did of course nail us. Stock plunged 73% to 42 cents as of one hour ago.

Should I pull out?… I mean Frontier just filed for friggin bankruptcy!

No! Frontier has a sustainable business model and I believe they will recover (see Southwest article). Hold tight, they have as much in assets as they do debt (somewhere between 500 million – 1 billion) so they are in ok shape considering the circumstances. The rising cost of oil will be a problem but travel is NOT drastically declining and I believe Frontier will come back. At least lets hope!

Well, this is my first post here on TPS. I figured Id start with something we love (ok maybe just some of us)…investing.  Ive been trading for a long time now and something I thankfully learned toward the beginning is that brokers aren’t in it to make you money – they are in it to make themselves money.  They make you just enough money to keep you coming back and thats it.  So here are ten things they really don’t want you to know…

Your broker wants you to buy what makes them the most…not you
I can hear honest, hard-working stockbrokers screaming and tearing their hair out as they read this. How could any law abiding, honest individual forego every shred of decency in the name of larger commissions? Easy, just like you and I, they need to put food on the table. A bang on explanation comes courtesy a scene in the movie Wall Street where Charlie Sheen explains to his dad why he’s always broke. The overhead just overwhelms. Suits, cars, dinners, expensive cigars, golf games, etc.; somebody has to pay and it isn’t going to be your friendly broker. Always ask two questions: why are you recommending this investment and how much do you make for doing so?
Your broker is the one making the big bucks
The 1940 book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street points out that the only one making money in the traditional broker-client relationship is the person getting all the commissions. The truth is, your broker makes money whether you’re buying or selling. It doesn’t matter that the $10 stock you bought is now worth half that amount. Your adviser will convince you to sell your holdings, preserving your capital to invest another day. Once you’ve licked your wounds, your broker will return insisting the time is right to jump back into the markets to recoup your losses, which they remind you are deductible against future gains, diminishing their negative impact on your portfolio. It’s a nice story but so was Alice in Wonderland.

Diversification protects you against….good returns
Financial commentators will tell you to avoid putting all your eggs (assets) in one basket. They reason that properly matched, non-correlating assets are the best way to protect against market corrections of any kind. The average investor, in order to achieve such a level of diversification, goes out and purchases eight mutual funds from their complicit financial adviser. The only problem with this scenario is you’ve removed any potential rewards by eliminating all possible market risk. In this case, once again, only your broker makes money.

Analysts are just as clueless as you and me
Have you ever wondered why analyst estimates can be wrong so often yet investors hang on their every upgrade or downgrade, moving the price of a stock each time they revise their opinion. Investment professionals use fancy mathematical models to come with these estimates and generally, only after much schooling. It’s a given that most if not all of them are extremely bright. However, bright doesn’t necessarily make you right. When it comes to being correct about a stock, more often than not the intangibles win out. Investing is about understanding how a business makes money, not the numbers themselves.

IPOs are a chance to make anyone but you richer
Initial public offerings are one of the primary vehicles venture capitalists and other early stage financiers use to exit their investments. Every pitch for venture capital comes with an exit strategy. Without it, you have no hope of receiving funding. Private equity investors’ want to know where the end zone is; it’s human nature. In addition, investment houses make substantial fees from these deals so it’s natural for their brokers to peddle these offerings. Always remember one thing: you’re not being given a piece of the pie because of your good looks. Pass on the IPO and buy the stock after a year of trading. You’ll make a lot more money this way.

Buying on margin can bury you
Every large brokerage house advertises the availability of margin accounts on their home page. Their rates for borrowed funds seem reasonable and generally, they are. Here’s what they don’t tell you: if you buy 100 shares at $10 for $1,000 in stock and it goes to $5, you’ve lost $500. If you use margin to buy an additional $1,000 worth of stock and the price drops by 50 percent to $5, you’ve lost your original $1,000 plus the outstanding interest. Sure, it can work the other way but rarely does it happen. Once again, the only one who gets rich is your broker. Avoid margin accounts like the plague.

Investing in stocks whose products you actually use makes sense
If you were to buy the stocks of 8-12 companies, one’s you loyally support through frequent purchases (think Nike, Starbucks, and McDonalds) and whose financial statements were reasonably healthy, over a 10-year period you’d easily beat the markets as a whole and most active money managers. Why: because you wouldn’t be trading like a lunatic racking up the commissions and paying taxes left, right and center. Besides, how can a broker provide any advice if you fully understand the stocks he’s recommending. It’s much better to put you in stocks you can barely spell, let alone figure out what they do. Remember, BS and bafflegab always beats common sense on Wall Street.

Stockbrokers are really well dressed salespeople
The Charlie Sheen’s of the world loved being stockbrokers. The name was a badge of honor. Now, Wall Street gives them all sorts of fancy titles in hopes that you’ll spend excessively for over-priced commissions on stocks selected solely by the complexity of their business model. I’m being a tad facetious here but why not call a duck a duck. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. Brokers are nothing more than very good salespersons; you’d have to be to bring in $5-10 million in new business your very first year just to keep your job.

You’re really not that important as a client
Unless you bring a six-digit investment portfolio to the table, many brokers won’t even take your business, let alone give you the time of day. Don’t expect to get full-service from a full-service investment firm if you bring a measly $25,000 to the party. The investment business is all about asset gathering, not advice. Why else would Separately Managed Accounts be the fastest growing segment of the wealth management industry.

Independent investment research isn’t really independent and is definitely not unbiased
In the late 90s, conflicts of interest in investment research were the norm. The tech craze was out of control and brokerage firms and their analysts were more than amenable to giving a suspect investment its seal of approval all in hopes of keeping the gravy train rolling. As we know by now, it all came to a grinding halt. In order to placate securities regulators, firms moved to provide their clients with independent research; research free of any perceived conflicts. The problem with this solution was it simply pushed the conflicts farther down the line. If you own a research firm and look to cover two firms in a specific industry but you know the big boys are only interested in one of them, why would you cover both? You wouldn’t and there lies the problem. The conflicts may be different but the result is the same.

This is just an announcement, TPS has added Matt to our blogging team so that Jesse can actually have a day off every now and then to frolick around in non-writing land.  Traffic can now increase by 100X.  Hallelujah!

Matt has his bachelors and masters degree in economics from William and Mary, likes mountain biking, swimming, and stock trading.   He also hates cats.

The price of gas has been going crazy lately but even now gas is one of the cheaper liquids that we buy on a daily basis.  Sure we use more of it, but as a whole its still a lot cheaper in comparison.  If we were to take off the government’s piece of of the cost (up to a dollar in places) it would be even cheaper.  So I did a little research and few price comparisons to see just exactly what we pay per gallon for the rest of the things we buy in ascending order.

1 gallon of gas = $3.37 

Quart of Milk 16 oz for $1.59 = $6.32 per gallon (gallons can be found for cheaper – $4ish a gallon)

Gatorade 20 oz for $1.59 = $10.17 per gallon

Snapple 16 oz for $1.29 = $10.32 per gallon

Water 9 oz for $1.49 = $21.19 per gallon

Starbucks 8 ounce coconut almond mocha for $4.43(what I used to drink) = $70.88 per gallon

Good thing our cars don’t run on starbucks, eh?

Believe it or not, out in the business world you can save yourself a whole lot of moola. Heres five ways

1) Lay off the starbucks
Eating out is expensive but sometimes it cant be avoided. Drinking out is expensive but sometimes it can’t be avoided. Drinking starbucks is expensive and can ALWAYS be avoided. I used to drink starbucks a lot, and I mean a lot. Then I realized I was spending almost $200/month on freaking coffee. I learned to like regular coffee and diet dr pepper. Both much cheaper.

2) Split lunch with another person
Personally I eat about six times a day and I can’t handle huge huge dinner and lunches. If there is someone else that you go to lunch with that is the same way, there is no harm in splitting something. Some foods (Fajitas) lend themselves well to this. Other foods do not.

3) Bring your lunch
Ok ok this one is obvious but its more flexible than you might think. I have someone on my team at work that brings his food to work but will still “go out to lunch” to hang out and not miss out on a lot of the planning and work talk that goes on at lunch. If you have to buy something, buy something small and then gorge your huge appetite on your lunch you brought from home…or the other way around, take your pick.

4) Learn the lunch specials
Learn where there are lunch specials and then suggest those places to colleagues. I can think of one place I like to go that if I can hit the right special day I can eat and be full for 3 bucks while everyone else spends 15. Hell you can work this out with dates too.

5) Use coupons
There are entertainment books for almost every bigger city or town that have coupons for local restaurants. There are also websites that allow you to print coupons out for various restaurants.

Lets go through and see just how much that can save:
1) we’ll go easy and say $7/day on starbucks: $7 – $1 diet dp = 6$ a day Monthly savings: $180.00

2) Say 3 days of the work week you split a lunch: Instead of $15/meal, $7.50/meal. Monthly savings: $22.50

3) Say 1 day a week you just plain bring lunch. $60 – $10 in groceries for the month Monthly savings: $50.00

4) Say 1 day a week, $12 savings. Monthly savings: $48

5) Lets say for dinners you normally go out 3 times out of the week and spend $30/meal. If you used coupons and cut that down to $20/meal. Monthly savings: $120

Just doing a few little things can save you literally a hundred bucks a week. Lets put that in perspective…lets say you did that and put that extra $400+ a month in savings instead. In a year you’d have almost 5 grand…just by cutting back and eating smarter.

I know this is extreme case and if you are reading this, you probably don’t spend that much on food…then again many of you might. So go ahead, save yourself five grand.

There have been a couple articles lately on “middle class” that have caught my attention. First there was the discussion thread on the simple dollar, and then Mrs Micah wrote “Whats Wrong with being in the middle class.” So am I just a gigantic jerk?

Maybe but let me explain. My beef is not with being middle class: I am middle class, my friends are middle class, and my family is middle class. My beef is with “settling.” For anything. My beef is with the idea that “middle class is good enough so I am going to settle for it.” I am not including people who choose to live to live in middle class or live their lives in middle class. To many people money is not a priority and thus they do not apply here. I am talking about people who settle because they do not want to try. That is cowardly.

Success in life can only come from truly apply yourself to all things that matter to you. Everyone says they want to succeed in life but very few are willing to push themselves and do what it takes to achieve their goals…this is why two twins can be separated at birth and be raised by very similar families but one will succeed and one will fail.

I would hate to think on my death bed “boy I settled with my life.” I want you all to think of more than just financially, though I don’t think you should settle financially either. What are the things that are important to you right now? Are you settling on any of them? I’m not talking about situations that are outside of your control, I am talking about things within the sphere of your control. Are you spending $50/day when you could be spending $10/day? Could you be going to the gym regularly but haven’t? (my current point of action that I need to take – get back into a regular workout routine).

We live in America, which means you have unlimited opportunity. Take advantage of it.

Its the sound of lending club landing in the trash can.  I guess I will have to replace their banner on my sidebar with a gigantic “X” because I got this email from Lending Club early this morning (emphasis mine):

Dear Jesse,

Lending Club has started a process to register, with the appropriate securities authorities, promissory notes that may be offered and sold to lenders through our site in the future. Until we complete the registration process, we will not accept new lender registrations or allow new commitments from existing lenders. We will continue to service all previously funded loans during this period, and lenders will be able to access their accounts, monitor their portfolios, and withdraw available funds without changes.

The borrowing side of our site will remain generally unaffected by this registration process; borrowers can continue to apply for loans and new loans posted after April 7, 2008, will be funded and held only by Lending Club.

Until the registration process is completed, the company will undergo a quiet period and will not be able to respond to press and other inquiries about Lending Club or the registration process during that time.

Q&A:

Q1. What about money I have begun moving, but is still in transit to Lending Club?
A1.1. If you are in the process of verifying your bank account, you will be able to complete that verification but will not be able to add new funds
A1.2 If you have initiated a transfer, the funds will be displayed in your Lending Club account balance as soon as those funds are available.
A1.3 If you have uncommitted funds, you may request that Lending Club return those funds via the same method used to load the funds. For example,
• If you have initiated an ACH to add funds, these funds will be transferred into your Lending Club account but you will not be able to lend these funds out. You can go into your Lending Club account once the ACH transfer has been completed and withdraw funds back into your linked bank account..
• If you’ve wired funds into your Lending Club account and have not yet committed these funds into loans, you can send a request to support@lendingclub.com for us to wire these funds back to you at no charge.
• If you’ve sent funds by check, and have not yet committed these funds into loans, you can send a request to support@lendingclub.com for us to send you a check by mail for the same amount at no charge.

Q2. What about referrals?
A2.1 The current referral program is terminated. If you have referred someone who has already signed up as a lender or a borrower, or if you have been referred by someone and have already signed up as a lender or a borrower, you will be receiving your referral payment within the next few days.

Now, Prosper was able to do this same process without having to stop lenders so if I were a betting man I would say that Lending Club has something else going on here. I want to apologize for all of you who I have referred to them because I know there are a decent amount. The reasons I liked them over Prosper were numerous, but I suppose I shall have to look into Prosper now.

My take is that chances are good this will kill them as a P2P lender because it is hard enough to build loyalty…when take something away for who knows how long (my guess is 1 year +) its even MORE difficult to get people back. If I know any updates Ill let all of you know.