Prosper
Read an article a couple of weeks ago (WSJ perhaps?) reminding me of Prosper dot com. They are a personal/business loan site that hooks up people with a little extra cash looking for more interest than they could normally get legally, without getting lucky in the stock market or hitting the lottery. People looking for cash create a listing stating why they want the money and declare what kind of interest they'd be willing to pay- up to and beyond credit card rates. I checked them out some time ago and thought the concept had merit and the recent article got me thinking.
Why not expand the cash pile for the bar? It could speed things up by allowing me to hire a couple of people and reduce the inevitable stress when the inevitable things go wrong.
The first time I tried to register I was missing my bank account info as my checks were tucked away in a box from my recent move. Dug them out the other day and tried again.
The process seemed kind of pushy as I created the account (of course they are asking for personal info), and then I was encouraged to create the listing, which I actually wasn't ready for. I did a quick and dirty job figuring I'd go back and edit. I sent out a bunch of emails through the site to folks asking for personal endorsements (picked at random from my address book, sorry if you got one and didn't like it), did a quick check of my account page and signed off. The next day I was busy with lawyers, landlords and my damned car.
End of the day yesterday I got an email as one of my friends responded and wrote a nice bit of endorsement. Trouble was Prosper wouldn't allow me to publish it as it contained my actual name- which is against their privacy policy. My only choice it seemed was to reject the endorsement. They suggested I ask my friend to rewrite the bit, which I did, and he did. Prosper then wouldn't accept the new endorsement because I rejected the old one.
Next up was a phone call from another friend asking for my help understanding the listing. I called up the listing page and was appalled at what it looked like. There were things I was sure I wrote that were not there and my credit rating was a negative six hundred thousand or something. Apparently, after spending months paying off bad debt to numerous collection agencies a few years ago, one of them didn't report my account paid. I need to deal with Experian about it.
I then found out I couldn't edit my listing and my only choice was to pull it and do another one. I'll try to get at it today and post an update here if I get it done. Then you can join Prosper and help fund the funnest and bestest bar in west central Panama.
I'm not bitching, really, because I think the concept is pretty cool. Just a warning for those of you who run across this post thinking about using Prosper: have your sales pitch down and take your time posting it.
