Actually Lending Club is available to borrowers in almost all states. The only states that are not covered right now are Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Tennessee. It is open to lenders in 25 states.

Lending Club has structured the p2p lending model in a way that you are actually investing in Notes. Each Note corresponds to a portion of a loan, and gives the right to receive payments received by Lending Club under that consumer loan, minus Lending Club’s service charge. Each one of these notes is individually registered with the SEC. So, in a way, it’s not pure p2p lending. The regulatory headache, even for Lending Club, must be huge.

This didn’t last last. They were open less than two weeks and now they have closed again.

In connection with blogging at Prosper Lending Review, I’ve been involved in p2p lending for about 2 years. Many of the early lenders on Prosper lost quite a bit of money, by lending to high risk borrowers. In an effort to learn from their mistakes I’ve been very conservative and only invested in the borrowers in the highest credit grades.

My net annualized ROI (using LC’s method of calculation) is 7.38% – not quite as good as yours but still very respectable. The average return on Lending Club is 9.05% according to a recent LC-funded Javelin Report. In the next week or two Lending Club is expected to release a new tool that makes it easier to calculate and compare your ROI.

“Under the circumstances, we really don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about microcredit. I think it is time we classify microcredit programs according to clear, consistent categories.” – Muhammad Yunus in Creating a World Without Poverty

Last month I heard Dr. Yunus speak at George Washington University. He talked about creating social businesses and microcredit. His speech was well timed – It just so happens I am working with a small team to build a Microfinance Resource System for lenders.

He doesn’t pay for the shirts himself. The companies send the shirts to him. If they don’t have a shirt he will make one for an extra fee.

Are you sure it can only be done once? I think there are all sorts of variations that could work again and again.

Nice time sink. Level 16 took some time.

Voting ended 37 minutes ago. That’s probably the last chance you’ll get to change the world and you missed it.

On Friday, Change.org will co-host an event at the National Press Club in Washington DC to announce ten ideas and accompanying plans to form of a national advocacy campaign behind each idea. These 10 ideas will be selected after online voting closes tonight. So far there have been over 500,000 votes cast on thousands of different ideas. The popularity of change.org has grown significantly. In fact, as I write this article it appears their servers are having trouble handling the surge of last minute voting. As they manage this growing demand, the mission of Change.org is to provide a “central platform informing and empowering movements for social change around the most important issues of our time.”

A View of Jerusalem has been very well received. Here are a few newspaper articles and reviews from this week:

“Just this last month, a unique book about life in Jerusalem before and during the second intifada hit the shelves.

The book A View of Jerusalem shows how life as a college student in the Holy Land dramatically changed once violent outbreaks between Palestinian rioters and Israeli police erupted in Sept. 2000.

What seems to be the first book of its kind, this series of 38 short stories is gaining interest. Written by a former student of the BYU Jerusalem Center, Erin Tolman tells about her experiences while living in the Holy Land during a violent time."

Since you use Gmail, I would click the “report spam” button. If enough people find the email unwelcome and report it, then Gmail may start sending their emails directly to the bulk spam folder.

The other thing I’ve done for lists like this is set up a filter to send everything from their domain directly to trash.

Not all credit checks. Most credit checks when you are applying for a loan will have a negative impact on your score, but many will not.

Should submitted links be in a user’s RSS feed?

Funny you should ask. I recently wrote a post about that – Stop credit card junk mail.

Greenspan calls this a once-in-a-century crisis. The federal government rescued AIG with $85 billion bailout. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. On Monday stocks suffered the worst loss in seven years.

Many are shunning stocks based on the volatile financial sector. This is what one expert on CNN had to say about investing in stocks right now, "No. It’s not a good time to get in with brand-new money. I would let these markets kind of wash themselves out….Are you kidding? These are the markets that you just sit on the sidelines and wait on the sidelines and stay away from them until everything works out."

Six months ago, on an OmniNerd poll, we discussed what were the best stocks to buy and hold. Of smcbride’s ten poll options, Apple was a heavy favorite followed by Google and Genentech. How have we done? Six months later Apple is up over 50%, Google is up 10% and Genentech is one of only three stocks to lose ground at -4%. There are plenty of smart investors on OmniNerd and I wanted to get your opinion on another relatively new investment option – lending through peer to peer networks.

Elizabeth Weil recently wrote an article for the New York Times titled, “"When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?":http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60813FD3F540C708CDDAF0894DF404482” (reprinted here and here) where she discusses the advantages and disadvantages of starting kindergarten a year late.

In most states, kids will start kindergarten when they turn five. Generally, kids cannot start early but may delay a year at their parent’s discretion. Holding kids back a year so that they will be older, larger, and more mature is often called “redshirting” – a term borrowed from sports. Studies show that 6 to 10 percent of kids in kindergarten have been redshirted. In affluent communities, the averages are 5 to 6 times as high. Some argue that any advantage a reshirting child may have would disappear after the first few years of school. In contrast, a study in the Journal of Sports Sciences found that a disproportionate number of World Cup soccer players were older than their peers on youth soccer teams. Another researcher found that the relatively oldest students are 11.6 percent more likely to enroll in college.