So, just to add insult to injury, Prosper has issued a 1099-B for the loans that defaulted and were sold. I supposed if I had a large balanced portfolio I could use this as some sort of loss against some other gains. Given the size of my portfolio, it’s mostly an annoyance and an extra set of forms to fill out. Ah well, it’s a learning experience.
Maybe CNN is trying to tell me something: Five reasons to find a new job.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I enjoy some part of my job, but the folks I enjoy working with are all burning out and either leaving or becoming hard and jaded. And the company I work for is having some financial issues and cutting back on things like 401(k) match and raises. The writing’s on the wall, I just need to get up off my butt and do something about it.
So now I’m trolling sites for various tips. I’ve just run across the frugal law student’s posts:
Make Your Resume Pop With These Resume Writing Tips
Make Yourself Stick With These First Impression Tips
So I’ve been ignoring my Prosper account for a while since I know it’s not looking great. Anyway, I took a look just now and it’s just about what I expected. I made a total of six loans in six different credit “grades”. One (the AA loan) was paid off very quickly and made very little interest. Two (the B and the HR “high risk”) are current in all their payments (11% and 24.85% interest respectively). Three loans have now completely defaulted and been sold to a collection agency for pennies on the dollar (the C, the E and the NC “no credit history”).
So overall it was a bust. On half of my loans I lost more than 80% of the principal. On one I got the principal back and made about 2% interest (for less than a year). Only 1/3 of my loans are paying on time/as agreed, and it’s not really the ones I expected.
I might be bad at choosing loans, and if I’d had a larger “porfolio” the loss of a few loans might have still left me in the black, but I’m not ready to put any more cash into it. So far I’m looking at a net loss of about 36% (and that assumes that my two current borrowers stay current for the next two years!). That doesn’t count the “opportunity cost” (the interest I could have made on the money by putting it into a savings account) which probably pushes it up another 4-5%.
All Financial Matters posted in July that my wife’s company will begin offering the roth 401k next year.
My company starting offering the Roth 401(k) July 1. For some of the reasons mentioned above (e.g. tax diversity) I decided to split my contributions as well. Interestingly our plan doesn’t make clear what happens with the employer match, and the call I made to HR July 1 landed me with someone who wasn’t sure either.
I left the 6% contribution required for employer match in the regular 401(k) and moved 4% over (I contribute 10% of my salary in total) to the Roth. I didn’t know if the employer match stays with the regular 401(k) or gets split 60/40.
As far as I can tell from the year-end paperwork (delivered “tree-free” online) the employer match all counts as “pre-tax” no matter what I do. They aren’t going to be paying any taxes for me. I’m not sure how that would work if I had only the Roth, would they still have a regular 401(k) for the employer contribution?
This site AdPerk allows you to earn free magazine subscriptions by watching ads. They’ve got Good Housekeeping, Popular Science, and ODE. More magazines coming soon!
For cash, you need to review a product on video at ExpoTV. If you’re already experimenting with video, it could be a good way to practice. Not a great way to earn money if you have to buy equipment.
From the New York Times: The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters. An appropriate article to start the year, with many folks waking up with hangovers or a few extra holiday pounds and holiday bills.
Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.
We all have regrets, but the article mentions that some people have better ways of dealing with them than others.
And since it’s New Years, I’ll have a post about goals and such, but this has been a busy couple of weeks so I’m taking a few extra days to think about them.