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So now that March is here, I wanted to give an update on my new “portfolio”, which is really more of a savings vehicle than a portfolio when you think about it. By using my debit card instead of my airline rewards card, I “saved” $9.32 in February via Keep the Change transfers in my Bank of America account. I rounded this up to $10 and initiated a transfer to my Lending Club account this morning. This money will be invested in a new loan note as soon as I have $25 in cash available.

Now to the even better news. Based on my first month of investing at Lending Club, I am currently earning a Net Annualized Return of 13.74%!

All ten of my notes are issued and current, and I have roughly $9 in cash in the account. Combined with next month’s payments and March’s transfers from Keep the Change, I should be able to invest in a new note next month.

This graph makes me feel pretty good about how things are going so far:

As long as I continue to stay on the right side of this distribution I will be satisfied, and continue to invest more and more money into the Lending Club system.

See my original review of Lending Club here.

This may not be of value to very many, but for those few it may be VERY valuable. For those with a “traditional” IRA or a “rollover” IRA, you may be one of the people that it’s VERY valuable for. As we’ve covered before in our “Do the minimum” retirement post, there is one major difference between a traditional (or rollover) IRA and a Roth IRA. With a traditional, the earnings of the money in the account are tax deferred. With a Roth IRA, they are tax free. This is a large advantage of the Roth for those that will have large amounts of appreciation in their IRA accounts. The traditional IRA does have something in its favor however, and that is it reduces your taxable income for the current year. For example, if you make $50,000 and contribute $5,000 to your traditional IRA, you will pay taxes on $45,000. Continue Reading

Here is the first post since joining Project 52.
I recently signed up at the web site Lending Club after considering doing so for a while.  A friend of mine had signed up for it and it looked intriguing.  It’s nothing new for sure, a quick search into their crunchbase profile tells us they got started in May 2007 as a Facebook application to promote peer-to-peer lending.  In a nutshell, it means if you need $100 and I have $100 to loan out, they put us together.  You don’t need to go to a bank for a loan, and I can get more interest on my money than a savings account would give me.
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It took a long time, but over the past few years, more like almost a decade, I have been working to get out of credit card debt and never return.  The day has finally come.  No balances.  The only debt I have now is my mortgage and my car.  So my next goal is to pay off the car.

Debt Free Youth

I’ve been pretty busy this week so I haven’t made any posts. But I wanted to give a quick update on a few things going on, so I will just touch on them all quickly.

• I took some photos for an upcoming article. I think people will enjoy this one.
• Thanks to the advice from livingoffdividends.com, I bought some NLY stock the day before it announced it was increasing its dividend.
• I survived my two midterms in my first semester in business school, getting an A and a B.
• I started making the purchases for my father’s high dividend portfolio, but I will provide more details on that later.

And that’s about it. I have a bunch of homework to get done today, so I am going to get back to that now. Peace!

I’ve been a big fan of Mint.com ever since I first heard of it. They’ve been in the news lately since they’ve announced that they are being purchased by Intuit for $170 million dollars. While many people have congratulated them on creating a great product and now reap the financial benefits of it. Others have thought it would have been better for them to continue independently and continue to drive innovation in their product. Regardless of how you feel about their corporate situation, very few people are critical of the product that Mint has put together since they started up.

In the short amount of time since they launched, they’ve added a lot of features that customers have asked for on their forums, one of which being investment tracking. For obvious reasons, this was something I really wanted to see them add, but when they did I was somewhat underwhelmed. And now that I have re-visited the tool, I think I know why. One of the things that makes Mint so great is its vast amount of data that they have. And when the investment tracking first launched, they have very little data. Fast forward a year, and they now have much more of both my data, and everyone else’s (anonymous) data.
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