On behalf of the Lend Academy team I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. If you don’t celebrate Christmas I hope you have an enjoyable and relaxing time this Holiday Season.
All the best.
Peter
20 Things You Didn’t Know About P2P Lending
This past weekend I attended the Financial Bloggers Conference commonly known as Fincon12. Around 400 personal finance bloggers descended on Denver to discuss, learn, chat and generally have a good time.
On Friday night of Fincon12 there was an Ignite Event. This is where participants are given five minutes to speak about a personal or professional passion. My presentation was titled 20 Things You Didn’t Know About P2P Lending. While I have been told a video of all the actual presentations (there was about 14 of them) will be available online at some point I recorded a screencast video of my presentation this morning so you can see it for yourself.
At an Ignite event there are strict rules. There are only 20 slides, not including the title slide, and each slide is auto advanced every 15 seconds. So every presentation is exactly five minutes long.
[Update: My presentation from the Ignite event is now online – keep in mind this was done in bar at 10:30pm on a Friday night, it was not a typical seminar setting. And it is not G-rated.]
Now, I realize long time readers will know many of the points in my presentation; the target audience here was other finance bloggers most of whom only have a limited knowledge of p2p lending. If you can’t see the video below then you can watch it on YouTube here.
Can You Help Me With The Rebranding of my Blog?
The Social Lending Network is changing. It is being renamed and rebranded to become Lend Academy. And I would like your help in choosing the new logo for Lend Academy. Since I am big believer in the peer to peer space I have decided to turn over the final branding decision to my peers.
I am running a design contest on 99designs and I have decided on the eight finalists. Now, I am leaving it up to you. Whichever design wins the most votes will be the new logo for Lend Academy. You can vote in the contest here.
Why the Change?
The current blog name and logo is one I inherited when I bought this blog back in October 2010 and I always intended to give it my own look. It has also become clear to me that the name Social Lending Network is somewhat confusing and can even be misleading. I get 2-3 emails a week from people asking me for money because they think I lend money directly. Also, the term social lending is never used by Prosper or Lending Club these days. Prosper uses peer to peer lending and Lending Club uses the term prime consumer notes or just consumer lending.
I wrote last year that peer to peer lending needs a new name but there has been no consensus on what that name will be. But I do know this industry is all about lending and investing. And my mission here is to educate the world about this type of lending – hence the name Lend Academy.
So, I would appreciate it if you would vote for my new logo here. Nothing is going to change right away, this is quite a large project to do a rebranding like this. But stay tuned. And thank you.
Get a Free iPad Every Year with P2P Lending
I read this article on USA Today earlier this week about Apple stock. Basically a reader sent in a letter asking if he could have Apple pay for a new iPad by investing $10,000 in Apple stock and using the gains to buy a new iPad in a few months.
Are you kidding me? I am a huge fan of Apple and the stock has been on an amazing run. But it is currently close to an alltime high and it has the largest capitalization of any company on earth of nearly $600 billion. This reader wants to eek out a 7-8% gain so he (I am assuming it is a guy) can use the gain (net of taxes) to buy a new iPad.
Let’s just look at Apple’s stock performance in the first quarter. If you had invested $10,000 in Apple stock on December 31st 2011 and cashed out at the end of the quarter you could have afforded to buy yourself six iPad’s even assuming a large tax bite on your gains. What’s not to like?
This flies in the face of pretty much every piece of investment advice you will ever read. So I am surprised not just that USA Today printed the article but gave the question fair consideration. At the very end of the article the author did provide a caveat that this may be a risky proposition but he also said those fateful words: “maybe this time is different”.
Shred Your Credit Card and Win $1,000
One of the main reasons so many Americans cannot get ahead financially is credit card debt. If you resolved this New Year to get out of this vicious debt cycle now is your chance to do something about it. Cancel your card….and then shred it.
Last month Lending Club and PerkStreet Financial launched a fun new contest called Shred Your Credit Card. The way it works is this. Once you cancel your credit card think of a creative way to destroy it, take a video of the destruction and then submit the video to their contest. There are $50 winners every week and then a grand prize winner receives $1,000 at the end of the content. Two runner-ups will receive $300. The contest runs through January 28th. [Read more…]