Prosper.com Experiment Update III

It’s been about a month and a half since my last Prosper experiment update so I thought I would share what is going on with it.

Well not much new to report, and that is good news! All 37 loans are still current, and I was able to pick up another $50 loan (Credit Rating: AA @ 11.00%) with payments from the outstanding loans. This puts me now at 38 loans with an average interest rate of 13.01% One of my loans is also being paid off, so should have enough in my account to pick up another $50 loan. I think I am going to go a little riskier this time to increase my overall loan percentage. One of the loans went late last week, but then was paid up in a few days, so I received a late payment fee of $.03. That loan was an AA Credit Rating, so I assume he just forgot to pay it. I’ll definitely take the late payment!!

One thing to remember is that if you decided to get involved in lending on Prosper, make sure as soon as your account reaches $50 (minimum loan amount) you bid on another loan as the prosper account does not pay interest on the cash balance in your account. To keep that loan interest rate up there you need to keep all your money into loans.

So far things are going well and I hope it continues this way. Only time will tell what a possible recession my do to my loans, but as I said before this was throw away money for me, as had I invested it the stock market, I would have lost it all!

Yahoo Toolbar Lets You Keep All Your Bookmarks In One Place

For a while now I have been plagued with having 2 pcs. One at work and one at home. My biggest issue was trying to keep my Internet Explorer bookmarks in sync between the two computers. One of my coworkers mentioned trying to Bookmark fucntionality that comes with the Yahoo! Toolbar. I was hesitant since I hate installing thid party browser programs since they all tend to just give you more spam. Since it was from Yahoo!, I figured it would at least be spam free. It was free to download so I thought I would give it a try.

After installing, I noticed that it gave me all the shortcuts for the Yahoo! sites I usually use, such as Mail, Calendar, Yellow Pages, etc. It is configurable to add almost any page that Yahoo has. You can also create your own buttons as well. I also liked the fact that I can see if I have new mail just by looking at the tool bar.

I then started to look at the Bookmarks function. It was very straight forward to add bookmarks and bookmark folders. You just click “Save This Page” and a little pop-up asks you where in your bookmark folders you want to save it. And that is it.

So I spent 15 minutes moving all my bookmarks from IE into Yahoo. I then installed the Yahoo Toolbar on my work pc. And sure enough all my bookmarks were there.  Another great feature is that if you ever use another PC where the toolbar isn’t installed, such as a public pc at an internet cafe or something, you can go to http://bookmarks.yahoo.com to have access to all your bookmarks. (You need to sign up for a Yahoo account to store bookmarks on their server).

This is a time saver for me since I no longer have to go back and forth between PC’s to sync bookmarks. I also think Google has a feature like this on their toolbar, but I prefer Yahoo’s since I get the new mail alerts for my email account. I am not sure how long features like this have been around and I am kind of amazed that I never realized it. Simple things like this can make my day so much easier since I spend most of it on the internet for work.

For those of you that use the Firefox browser, Yahoo also has a version of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox.

Dental Insurance – You Need It! Do You Have It?

Dental Insurance seems to be more of a luxury these days as more and more employers don’t offer it. My current place of work only offers health insurance to keep costs low, so I finally decided to start looking around of some Dental Insurance on my own as we have been too lucky with no dental issues and I expect the other shoe to drop soon. Obviously it is not as important as health insurance, but in the end it is nice to know you have some sort of protection if needed.

Geez, where to start? There has to be over 10,000 ads and scams out there regarding Dental Insurance. Everywhere you go on the internet you see  Dental Insurance ads. Most of them don’t look legit, so I thought I would share my personal exprerience with you. I stumbled upon DentalPlans.com. They seemed to be legit enough from the look of their website so I thought I would see what they had to offer. It was comforting to see that they had some bigger name plans from GE and Aetna, rather than fly by night shops I have never heard of that would disappear the day before your root canal.

Since I am married with a baby on the way I needed to look for Family Dental Plans. Now don’t forget that since you are getting the insurance your self it is gonna cost you a bit more, especially if you are needing family coverage. There is still going to be out of pocket costs, but the idea is to minimize them as much as possible. My main goal was to find a plan that picks up 6 month checkups. Since we both get 2 a year I wanted to make sure that we weren’t paying more out of pocket just for the simple exams.

After going through pretty much all the plans, we decided on GE Wellness Plan (Dental Only). This plan costs $159.95 per year for a family. It covers 6 month checkups up to $43 per visit. So for two people twice a year, the plan will already pay for itself. We will just need to pay for the cleanings which run about $60 per adult which are discounted from $83 per the plan. So there is still some cost involved, but at least it isn’t full price and is managable. Like with health insurance, the real savings come in when you need major dental work done, which thankfully neither of us have needed, knock on wood.

The whole process using DentalPlans.com was pretty painless. You don’t need to sign up to register to see pricing. You just sign up when you are ready to enroll in a plan. I did call their 800 number since I had a few questions and they were very helpful and courteous ( a rarity these days when dealing with health-care folks!!!).

I did notice that they currently are having a promotion that if you use the coupon code: SELECT you will get 10% off of any plan. Unfortunately I signed up before this promo, but just having the security of dental insurance is good enough for me. Now all I need to do is get all my teeth knocked out!

Amazon MP3 Music Store Review

Since the URGE Music Store has been purchased by Rhapsody I have been looking for a new outlet to buy my music. URGE was alright, but it required a software install into Windows Media Player. URGE also used DRM (Digital Rights Management), so I could not play the songs anywhere other than my PC I downloaded them on. There might have been a way to do this by copying the licenses but I could never figure it out.

Fast forward to today. I decided that in my next music store, I wasn’t going to go with a site that had DRM or that required me to install software. I have 3 pc’s and a WindowsMobile Smart phone, I want to play the same song on all 4 devices easily.

After some research I decided to check out the Amazon MP3 Music Store

Bingo! I think I found what I was looking for:

• No DRM!
• No software to install (there is an application you can install if you want easier music management, but it is not required. You essentially just download the raw .mp3 file)
• Most all songs are .89 or .99
• Large selection of artists (They are not focused on just Pop or Rap)

I have been using the Amazon MP3 Music Store for a few weeks and am very satisfied. Also, since I buy from Amazon regularly I am not concerned with site security and know they have a good customer service team in place to help me with any issues.

This is not really a “Saving Money” post, but I have been able to save time by not having to burn a DRM song to a CD then RIP it back off just to get the song to play on other machines. Hey, didn’t someone say TIME=MONEY?

Google’s GrandCentral Phone Service Available To All

Google’s GrandCentral virtual phone service is now available for anyone to sign up.

GrandCentral is a very cool free service that issues you a phone number (you can get a local number in over 47 states) and allows you to really control how you handle incoming calls . You can have this number forward to any of your existing phone lines, so for example when someone calls your GrandCentral line you can have it ring your cell phone and home phone simultaneously. There are also powerful call screening features. You can block callers based on their caller-id, send others straight to the included GrandCentral voice mail and others send to a different phone number. You can also set up distinctive ringning and distinctive voice mail greetings based on caller id and change the ring tones the caller hears. There are tons more fearures, be sure to check them out here.

I signed up for GrandCentral about 6 months ago back when it was invite only and use it to this day. Now whenever someone asks me for my number, I just give them the GC number since it rings all my lines without having to give out my cell, work and home numbers.  Plus I can check the voicemail via my cell phone.

This is a great way to get a free extra phone number to give out to others. Then when you get tired of them calling you, block them!

Sign Up Here

Capital One Auto Finance Review

Due to the baby coming in the near future, we decided that a 5 year old Kia Spectra wasn’t going to cut it in terms of safe transportation. So we decided to look around at new cars. Since neither of us have had a car payment in a while we have had some time to save up for a down payment on a new one.

We ended up deciding on the Honda Pilot. I have gone through 2 Honda civics and have driven them into the ground. (one of them literally!). I really had no major issues with either of them so the Pilot was an easy choice in terms of reliability and safety. We decided on buying new since I didn’t want to deal with any hassles of a used car since taking cars in for service is not convenient for us since I work so far from home and the dealer.

Being Honda, they really don’t ever give good financing rates. So I was on my own for this one. My father turned me on to Capital One Auto Finance. He had used them prior to Capital One buying them when their name was People First.

Basically everything is done online. You apply they mail you a blank check that is approved up to a certain amount, you go to the dealer and buy the car.

Here is how it worked for me.

• 2/3 Applied Online for a loan
• 2/4 Received approval email
• 2/8 Received Blank Check in the mail
• 2/9 Purchased Car

Once the check clears Capital One Auto Finance the loan payment process will begin. This process was amazingly simple and had no issues at all during the process. This also saved me the time and mess of financing through the dealer. That process becomes complicated as they try to tell you how much you are gonna pay a month with the interest baked in the payment rather than giving you actual price you are paying on the car since there are too many numbers involved. Using Capital One Auto Finance I knew exactly the price of the car I was buying, so I could bargain with the sales guy on price alone.

I was able to lock in a 5.7% interest rate on a 60 month loan. This obviously isn’t as good as the 0% that the American Card Dealers are thowing at you, but it is worth it for us since we love Honda’s. So I definitely recommend these guys to you. It was almost too easy and that is evident with the car payment I know have for 60 months!!

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