My jaw is bruised and the pain still persits, five days after my wisdom teeth extraction. I went to work today, but while home on lunch the pain became too much to tolerate while on the clock so I decided to dope up on more pain medication and stay home.

I want to continue to work on the house, but I know its counter-productive to recovery to use my rest-time to work. Unfortunately, the house hasn’t changed much - except accumilate more messes - since I went in for surgery. So I’m laid up in bed, watching Daily Show reruns, blogging, and dozing off. While resting, I’ve also been playing Texas Hold’em at MSN Games. There are always people playing so it never takes more than a few seconds to hop into a new game.

I also re-discovered a few websites that I haven’t been to in a while. The first is mint.com. It logs into your bank and credit cards, evaluates balances, sends you alerts, and helps determine how to best manage your debt and finance. It’s all completely free, too.

The other is prosper.com. Prosper is a very cool website to make or loan money. Users are either “lenders” or “borrowers.” Borrowers can ask for money for things such as business loans and debt consolidation. Lenders can submit a bid for all or part of the loan requested by offering money and an APR. As little as $50 can be given by a lender and, if the borrower accepts, the lender will pay back the lender along with interest over 3 years (with no pre-payment penatly). Borrowers and lenders both must be verified to help prevent fraud. Experian gives a credit score to borrowers and borrowers must fill out information to receive a debt-to-income ratio. This helps lenders with establishing risk as well as APRs for their loans. Wikipedia, however, shows that about 10% of borrowers are one or more month late on their payments after 3 months of repayment. Prosper takes a very small fee from both lenders and borrowers. So, after these fees, the average rate of return on 20 loans older than 6 months is 4.89%. Nonetheless, this isn’t a bad ROI - espcially on principles as low as $50.

Categories: Miscellaneous