A few months ago, I gave away a few Kiva Gift Certificates — one via this blog, one via Twitter, and one via Facebook. I wanted to share with you where they went.

Tom at Prosper Lending Review used the first Kiva Certificate. He selected a loan for a restaurant owner in Kabul Afghanistan:

Ghalam Nabie is the son of Share Ahmad, and lives in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ghalam, 54, lives near the Afghan Hotel and is married with five children. He has a small restaurant in the city and has good experience in this field and would like to expand his business to support his family. He is requesting an individual loan of 50,000 Afghans ($1050) for a term of 18 months to enlarge his business and to buy a new desk and table and other necessary things for his shop in order to further his business with more success. Ghalam is very happy to be involved in this loan process and is especially grateful for the help of the AFSG and Kiva. He thanks all lenders around the world.

Erin Coyne, a friend from the Peace Corps and author of a book on Russian Slang that I have pre-ordered, picked up the certificate via Facebook. Erin loaned the money to:

Mr. Yous Ba Try, 35, is married and lives with his wife and a ten year-old child in a part of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is the head of the family and works as a sculptor designing and making Buddha statues and historical statues from cement and will then sell up for a profit. From his business activity he can moderately make $3 a day of income. Moreover, his wife, Lay Sarorn has a business at home washing motor-bikes and vehicles and makes $3 a day of income.

Yous Ba Try would like to ask for a loan from Kiva to purchase more cement to expand his business. Half of the loan will be used to fix a roof of the building where his wife has her business.

Daniele picked up the certificate linked to from Twitter. She posted in the comments:

I just redeemed your gift certificate, and immediately used it to fund a loan to the Grace group in Uganda, led by Dezilantah Pamba, for the purchase of sewing materials for their tailoring business. Thank you for helping spread the word!

Thank you for letting me know where the money went. It was fun to help spread the word about Kiva this way.

Want the next certificate?
Subscribe to the RSS and follow me on Twitter to find out when I will give away Kiva gift certificates again.

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Lending Club is offering a 5% ROI bonus in the form of a “Thank you!” to investors who lend more than $5,000 before February 3rd 2008. If you lend $5,000 before the deadline, you will receive a bonus of $250! If you use my Lending Club Affiliate Link and open the account with $1,000 initially, you will receive an additional bonus of $50! That will add up to an extra 1% to your P2P lending ROI. The best news is that the more you loan, the more bonus you will receive, so if you loan a total of $10,000 before the deadline, you will receive a $500 bonus payout. Even better you can take the bonus out in cash or reinvest it at Lending Club.

How would the Bonus Impact your Lending ROI?

If you lend $5,000 in $25 increments, the bonus will give you 10 “free” defaults. If you use my affiliate link to open your account, you will receive another two free defaults. This means you can select 12 bad loans at no negative impact to your P2P loan return on investment. Considering that the average reported loan portfolio ROI is about 12% (I forecast it will actually be a bit lower), this could possibly bump your returns at Lending Club up to 18% (12% + 5% + $50 affiliate bonus). That would overcome the income tax implications of P2P loans.

Even Higher Returns are Possible

To even earn even crazier returns than 18%, you can also refer people to lend which will earn you up to $50 per lender. If you refer 10 people at a $50 referral bonus each, you could possibly earn a 28% return on your investment. The S&P 500 has only toped a 28% return only one year in the last 20 years!

New to Lending Club?

I created a video of the Lending Club Portfolio creation process. It is quite easy to select loans for a risk risk level that is comfortable to you. By the way, Lending Club was my first choice over Prosper.com even before this bonus return on investment program.

Start Now!

It can take up to eight days to fund your Lending Club account and might take a week or more to find $5,000 worth of loans that you want to invest in. So if you want to earn this outstanding 5% bonus plus have the chance to earn more through recommending this program to friends, you should sign up now!

Another Suggested Promotion

According to my experience, Lending Club might have been better off offering a discount to borrowers because I found borrowers lacking. Maybe Lending Club should offer payment forgiveness on the last three payments to borrowers. Lending Club would not need to pay anything for deadbeat borrowers and the actual cash outlay would be significantly delayed which would mean a lower NPV on the promotion. Image the tag line to potential borrowers – Three Free Payments!

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