November 16th, 2009 — Site Review
SpendonLife.com is an easy to navigate website offering your credit report and credit score instantly online. Through the website, you can access your credit information from the 3 major credit reporting agencies: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. But more than just helping you get this information, the website helps with credit monitoring, and highly informative articles about what the reports mean and why the information should matter to you.
SpendonLife is broken down into sections that are clearly marked in a navigation bar near the top. There are sections on debt, identity theft, credit reports, loans and a link to their blog where informative posts go up regularly with more information about current credit-related news and statistics. Occasionally, services are recommended in the blog that they think might be of interest to their website visitors.
Not only can you get your credit information, but you can find out just about everything you could possibly want to know about your credit report. Dozens of articles help visitors do everything from reading their credit report to preventing a child’s identity theft.
A website with this much information could be dense and hard to get through, but this one isn’t. The articles are balanced with helpful illustrations and images of things like example credit reports. In addition, the articles are reader-friendly. They don’t read like technical instruction manuals but rather as clear, friendly advice and tips on how to get your financial life in order.
You’ll find advice on important financial and credit matters including:
- How to get your debt under control
- How to keep medical bills from destroying your credit
- What to do if you become a victim of identity theft
- What to do to protect yourself from phishing, and what to do if you’re a victim
- What to do if your credit cards are stolen
- How to know which debts are better than others
- How to establish a good credit history
- How to know whether credit card charge-offs are a good debt-reducing option
- How to know if you should deal with a credit repair specialist or agency
- How to know if you’re overpaying on your mortgage
- How to handle tax time
Those are just a few of the informative articles at SpendonLife.com, but there are dozens more as well as the blog posts which keep the information fresh and current.
You’ll be immediately aware that the website offers you a free credit report as well as other credit services, but there’s such a wealth of information on the site it’s far more valuable than just the free credit information it offers.
The credit monitoring service offered at the site allows you to keep tabs on your credit score so you’ll be alerted if anything changes that could signal errors or identity theft. And with all the up-to-date information on the website, you’ll know what to do if this happens. The website is a helpful credit resource that encourages you to get your finances in order so you can spend more on your life instead of on your debt.
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August 19th, 2008 — Green Note, P2P Lending, Site Review
Green Note
P2P student loans have exploded onto the scene this past year, due in a large part to a lack of availability of traditional loans. There has never been a better time for a p2p site to start offering student loan assistance, and Green Note is one of the newest entrants into the marketplace.
The concept here is pretty simple. A student signs up for the service and fills out a profile stating how much money they need for their education. They can either set up or join a community to try to get assistance. Emphasis is placed on inviting your own friends and family to your community, so it is not clear on whether or not you will be able to seek outside assistance for your loan as a borrower.
Once you have your network built up and you have people that are ready to fund your education, they go through the process at Green Note to fill out all of the paperwork. All loans carry a 6.8% fixed rate and will be due upon graduation. This could cause problems for those looking for an instant return on their investment, but the site is pretty clear about what lenders can expect.
We liked the fact that this site caters to students, regardless of their credit history. Basically, if your community feels you have merit, you’ll have a pretty good chance of getting funding for school. They also focus on having several people lend on one loan, which does spread the risk around quite a bit. It’s similar to going to a family reunion and hitting up all of your relatives for a few bucks, only a lot more organized.
There is a lot of protection here for lenders and we appreciated the fact that they are formalizing the P2P process to make it safer to lend. We would have liked to see a little more information on how collections are handled, but overall, it’s clear that Green Notes has everyone’s best interests at heart.
One very interesting point is that no co-signers are needed for a loan and that citizenship is not necessary. While this is terrific for foreign students that have decided to study in the US, it does raise some concern for lenders, especially if the student returns to their home country and it is impossible to reach them. There is a potential for abuse here, and this was probably our main concern. However, given that the site is still in formation, we’ll give them a chance to address this point.
Overall, Green Note is perfect for those that already have a good community of family and friends that are interested in lending towards their education. It’s not really meant to be a way to find new people to help with funding, but it does help bring these communities together and make the entire process of lending money a lot safer for everyone involved. It will be interesting to see how this site grows over the next few months and how well it is received.
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July 23rd, 2008 — Prosper.com, Statistics, Strategy, Tools
The methodolgy or the sql for obtaining the data these curves from the private data export have already been explained in detail, but briefly…
- The Y axis is the percentage of all loans orginated of a given age that are currently 1 month late or worse…
- The X axis is the days loan origination.
- The curves stop when there is less than 250 loans in the “bucket.”
- These curves are for all loans of a given Credit Grade. One would get different curves (flatter slopes=better); for exmaple, if you were to choose loans with 2 or less inquires and 5 years of credit history you would see flatter slopes.
The range is 7-8% for AA all the way to ~55% for HR.
(Click Graph for Larger Version)
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