and use Kiva.org, a site that facilitates P2P microfinancing AKA adopting a developing world business . It works like the sponsor a child programs that we see infomercials for, however by giving to these loans you are practicing my friend Jammy’s motto: “You buy a man a burger he eats for a day; you find that man a job he eats for a while.”
When you have selected the business to donate to, you can even subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates on the business! Also, after a little bit of poking on Kiva’s site, I found that the repayment rate on these loans are upwards of 95%. And if you’re just not quite VC material, and the business you chose fails, just think of it as a donation to a good cause.
Here is the link to the business I chose to give to, please contribute too! However if you are a grinch this holiday season and want to make money off your loans, give Prosper.com a try. It’s a site where you can bid on loans, like on eBay. Here’s the NY Times article covering the launch earlier this year.
Happy Holidays!
Which do you consider more personal: What you did last weekend or what your money did last weekend? There are no shortage of places to find out what happened in my social life last weekend. Hit up the social networks and you can see my dirt.
Now there’s a financial planning social network called Wesabe which makes some of your spending habits more public. When I first discovered this site last Friday I was intrigued by the idea. As a somewhat financially responsible young professional, I look for financial advice from equally/more financially responsible close friends, family and some internet peers. The idea of social financial help brought Socialpicks to mind but instead of the investing angle, Wesabe goes after controlling spending habits. Think Web 2.0 meets Quicken.
After a painless sign up process it was time to configure my account. Wesabe offers a client that will pull data from your bank, credit card and savings account. I am a little weary of giving out my passwords to 3rd party websites, so I used Wesabe’s manual upload tool. I was able to download 3 months worth of data from my various accounts into Quicken files and then upload to Wesabe. This seems like a smart move by Wesabe to all new users to experiment with the service without requiring access to their financial account (Wesabe has the standard privacy statement saying you can trust them, they will never share it, yada yada yada).
Once uploaded, I was able to go through each of my statements line by line and tag items. Once an item is tagged as a certain type (Say Gordo’s burrito tagged as food), all other instances will be auto-tagged as that too. Pretty handy. Over time as the Wesabe community cleans up the imported credit card data, items will have more meaningful names. (”Pir sho Val” becomes “Pirate Shop on Valencia Street“). So far, so good.
Based on your tagging, Wesabe reports back how much you’ve been spending and how much you’ve been making. This is where I discovered some issues. For instance, I made a transfer from my check account to my savings account and tagged it as “Savings”. The way Wesabe counts it, that is spending. I would think the service would have some logic to figure that money going from a checking account to a savings account is not “spending”. There seem to be kinks to work out and this feature isn’t worth much until the software gets smarter.
There are two other areas of Wesabe. The first is “Tips”. Basically they look at your tags and match you with other users who have written tips on those items (You can write tips too!). Think of a message boards built around tag names. This is an interesting idea to provide relevant advice about my spending and savings but when I tested it there wasn’t much advice for me and it wasn’t very relevant to me.
The last tab on Wesabe is “Goals”. Users can create goals or subscribe to other users’ goals. Again these are like message boards based around specific goals. Again this is an interesting idea but my goals of “lower spending” and “buy a house” (rated as some of the most popular goals on Wesabe) didn’t have a lot posted.
In time as the community grows, Wesabe could become more helpful but I see a chicken and egg issue here. I am not likely to come back to Wesabe until it provides more value and it won’t provide more value until there is more content or more features. I felt the same way when I used Socialpicks. I would like these two to merger to build a really solid community of knowledgeable people who want control of their money.
The days of free love and hippies are gone and it’s nearly impossible to get picked up by sticking out the trusty ol’ thumb anymore. However, if you are a free lovin’ hippie missing the good ol’ days or a n00b like me, the newly launched Hitchsters.com has brought hitching to the 21st century, using the trusty cellphone and the good ol’ net.
The concept is simple, go to their site, enter your flight information (departing/arriving), select where you are taking the cab to/from, and whether you would rather ride with a dude/chick/either. Pop in your email and cellphone number, and they’ll send you an email and text with the person you are supposed to coordinate cabs with. Then you’re on your own to figure it all out: who’s picking who up, where to meet, when to leave, etc. etc. There is one rule though: the first one out pays 60% of the fare. As it says on their FAQs the reason for this is basically so that the last guy out doesn’t get screwed for the tip.
This all sounds great so far, until I read how they paired you up. They will only match you with people who are on the same flight as you and are travelling to/from the same neighborhood as you. Think about it this way: There are about 200 people on a sold out flight, of those 200 people, how many of those people are coincidentally going to the same area of the city you are, and how many of those people also signed up on Hitchsters.com? Not many. So with these matching rules, it seems pretty tough to get a match going. Of course, the site just launched about 5 days ago, so when more people starting using the site, making these matches will be a lot easier, so spread the word.
Hitchsters.com service is currently only available in NYC to and from JFK/La Guardia/Newark, but they are hoping to expand to other airports soon. However I would love to see some of this hippie/taxi co-op action from one part of the city to another, like for example being able to get on my phone and putting in a request at 11pm after a few pints to get from one bar to the next, or maybe making that trek home from the bars after closing time, I’m sure those rides would make one helluva adventure. Hitchsters.com, where you at?!?! Get more people on your site! I don’t want to pay the full $45 to get to and from JFK anymore!!!
P.S. Boomtrenders heading out to NY or coming home from NY - show Hitchsters.com some love and let us know if it worked out for you, and crazy cab stories are always welcomed!
