Personal Loans & Investing with Peer Lending

Lending Club

It’s been around for a while, but Lending Club is still pretty fricken revolutionary. Instead of taking out a giant student loan, line of credit, or burning out your credit cards with the big, greedy old banks, consider borrowing money from a real person. You heard me. They’re called micro loans.

And if you happen to have some wads of cash laying around (hopefully they haven’t just been through the laundry if you know what I’m saying), then consider being a lender. You’ll actually make 6-9% interest as your borrowers pay you back, so I could see this thing totally catching on. Kinda like Kiva —a micro loan site designed to help foreign entrepreneurs, but a tiny bit more selfish.

I don’t think this organization is a not-for-profit. I looked around but couldn’t find anything on whether or not Lending Club takes a cut of every profit. My guess is it does, or it wouldn’t make sense for it to have this gigantic payment gateway.

I’m still paying off this damned student loan at a 20% interest rate—four years and counting.