Freezing in NH

I was just re-reading an old post at No Limits Ladies, Charlie Munger And Continuous Learning.  The part that struck me was about investing:

Investing is a lot like continuous learning. Every day, I try to do something to advance my net worth, even by a dime (picked on up on the sidewalk today, people just throwing money around). For the first few years or so, the changes are so small, you won’t notice them. Then all of a sudden, you have money in the bank when that emergency comes up. Or you have enough to get into the more juicy investments. Or you obtain financial freedom.

Makes sense to me.  Even if I have a huge project to do, if I do one little part, no matter how small, then I’ve made progress.  (What was that TV commercial about, the one that said “make progress every day”?)  It may take a very long time but if I do something every day to move myself forward from where I am to where I want to be, eventually I’ll build up momentum on the path.

I got an email August 1 notifiying me that my post had been approved.  So now I just need to wait for them to do their second check in 30 days and I’ll get the money.  Not great for instant cash but if you get on a roll you can have them coming in regularly after a while.

Second Update

So I finally signed up for payperpost.  Everyone else has been talking about it (it’s easy, they pay on time, etc) so I figured I had to try it.  So far it seems easy, just sign up and you’re able to do an introductory post (which this is) and they’ll review your blog fairly quickly which will allow you to take on some additional post opportunities. PayPerPost has a blog network of people to review sites.

Some of the opportunities require being a certain google pagerank or Alexa rank, but there seem to be enough that require no rating to keep me busy for a while.  I don’t want this blog to devolve into just advertising, so it will be at most a post a week. 

It will be nice to make a little side income off of the blog, and I figure the occasional post is better than a lot of crazy flashing ads.  I think there are companies I’m going to boycott just because their ads are so annoying. 

Anyway, I can’t say how fast PayPerPost is with payment yet, but if you want to sign up I’d appreciate you using my affiliate link (so I get some cash too).    I’ll post a followup with details about how hard it was to submit this post (looks like a piece of cake) and how long it takes for the benefit to hit my account and then how long to get paid out. 

An interesting article from Fortune magazine:

Brad Duke, 34, a manager for five Gold’s Gym franchises in Idaho, pocketed a lump sum of $85 million after winning a $220 million Powerball jackpot in 2005. He spent the first month of his new life assembling a team of financial advisors. His goal: to use his winnings to become a billionaire. Here’s what Duke has done with his money so far.

I think this is one guy that isn’t going to look around in five years and wonder why he’s more broke now than before he won. 

My chronically late borrower (Who hasn’t made a payment since Sept 06) was a credit grade E, homeowner, verified, with a 7% debt to income ratio.  Correction, the borrower has never  made a payment.  Most of the other loans fluctuate around “on time” and “<15 days late”, and the other rather late one is a C credit grade.   

My HR (high risk) borrower with 30% debt to income and 6 delinquencies is currently paying on time, and the NC (no credit) borrower is chronically just a bit late (the < 15 days).  So I’m not sure that credit score is helping me here.  I’m kinda disappointed, I wanted Prosper to work out.  Maybe if I’d stuck more money into it and had a bigger “portfolio” of loans the one person who is apparently never going to pay wouldn’t have been as big a deal.    

The high cash balance is mostly because I had made a sixth loan that was paid in full after a couple of months.  Now I’m not sure whether to pull that cash out or to put a bit more in and try one more time.  Probably I’ll just wait around a bit until it comes up to $50 and loan it out again.  I want this system to work, I guess there’s just a high risk with the high reward.