Prosper update

Just peeked into my Prosper account. Cash balance is approaching the $50 minimum much faster than I thought. I would probably be able to bid on a loan next month with cash that has been repaid from loans I made. This would mark my first loan made with repaid cash, initiating the compounding interest part of my Prosper plan. This is pretty exciting. I'll probably throw in another $50 after I get back from my vacation to speed things along, but with my 5 current loans, I'm getting a repayment every week or so.

Of all my little projects, this one seems to be moving the fastest. I haven't done other ambitious projects, but it's nice to see returns coming in. The loans I'm picking seem to be proving themselves. No one is defaulting, so that's good. I seem to be making good choices. Let's hope that there will continue to be good ones as I get more and more loans.

Keep track of finances with Quicken Online

So after having my laptop die and losing access to my finances on Microsoft Money, I decided I need a more accessible financial tracking system. I googled Money online and was directed to their MSN Money site - just a bunch of financial articles. I knew Intuit provides financial tracking via Quicken, so I search for Quicken Online. Voila! I find a beautiful online site where you can track most of your financial accounts - exactly what I need. So I sign up at $2.99 a month; not a bad deal when you consider Microsoft Money is $49.99. So I pay about $36/year. I like the peace of mind that I can access my finances even if my computer is down. I also love that I can access my finances on any internet-connected computer. Love it. So I'm in the process of transferring all my info over so I can take advantage of this new service. I have most of my things on there now, even things I couldn't sync with before with Microsoft Money.

In other news, my bid for that high interest loan I wrote about wound up losing. But it was for the better. The HR (high-risk) loan wound up at below 20% - a rate I'm not comfortable with for that risky a loan. So I bid on another loan for this guy that's funding his restaurant with personal loans. It was E credit, but Prosper wouldn't allow him to put his business credentials into consideration. Prosper is pretty strict like that, but that's good when looking at other loans. So I bid a minimum rate of 20.99% and I wound up winning $50.00 of the loan at 24.89%. So I'm hoping I made a good decision again and that I just added another $0.50 or so to my monthly cash flow for the next 36 months.

My other four loans are still current, so it's all looking good right now. I'm thinking in another few months, my cash balance from repayments would be over $50, and I can reinvest without putting more money in. Right now I have $250.00 in the Prosper system, but I plan on putting more in until the repayments allow me to bid on a loan every month or so. Even then, I might still keep putting money in so I can continue to increase my cash flow and take advantage of compounding interest.

Got my stimulus payment!

I got a call from my landlord last night telling me that my stimulus payment from the IRS arrived. So that $600 is here now. I remember saying something along the lines of adding to my Propser.com account to increase my investment income. I just can't remember if I said $50 or $100. My current cash balance in the account is $32 and change, so I think I'll just throw another $50.00 in there for now. Once my cash balance hits $50, I will reinvest that as well. So hoping to have a total of six loans soon. The more loans I have, the higher the portfolio income.

The only hard thing is trying to pick a loan with a high rate with minimal risk of default. I'm a bit impatient with things like this, so my search criteria is usually loans that are already funded with time remaining. I look between credit grades A-C and I read into what they are borrowing for. I check out their Prosper profile too to see what their DTI and other finances look like. It's a bit of work, so I'm off to do that now. And because I have the Proper ad on my Facebook profile, my transfer will be instant. Nice!

FeedBurner

I added FeedBurner support to my two main blogs. Taking something from the website I discussed yesterday, I decided to add a way for people to easily come back to this blog. Another way for me to hopefully increase traffic here. I went with FeedBurner, because it seems I can track the subscriptions and visits better. Not sure how to do that with Blogger. Google owns FeedBurner anyway, so it's not like I'm going with a competitor. So anyway, if you look to the right, you will now see a link to subscribe. So for my one reader out there, subscribe if you wish.

Flipping/owning internet real estate for passive income?

So I was putting in key words in Google to see what would pull up my blog (by the way "passive income project" now pulls up a couple of my posts on the FIRST page), and I found this cool little blog/site: http://www.netpassiveincome.com/

It pretty much tracks the deals of a passive income investor. He seems to be buying income-generating domains or highly-valued domains, increasing the monthly cashflow of those domains, then hope to sell them at a higher price while collecting on the cashflow. Sounds like a pretty cool idea, especially since brick-and-mortar real estate is not doing that well at the moment. I'm not going to jump into it right at the moment, but I'd like to do some more research and see how I can get in on this seemingly good business.

Cash flow update - $143.88/year

I went around my accounts and updated my spreadsheet for my cash flow tracker. I am now averaging $143.88/year, up from $118/year when I first started this blog. That's $11.99/month versus $9.83/month. Not a huge increase. Most of it the increase came from the routine deposits into my ING accounts which bumps up my interest income. My Sharebuilder account has a $10.00 deposit every 15 days. The dividends are set to reinvest, so that helps a tiny portion as well. There were also the two new Prosper loans two that I funded, although the most recent one only started recently and probably didn't bump up the averages yet.

My Google AdSense isn't really producing right now, and I haven't really done much to increase traffic to my sites. So I either need to increase traffic or start writing more blogs. I have read some other passive income blogs where the owner has 10+ blogs going, but I'm just not too keen on having multiple blogs to keep track of. I think I'm all set on the blog front. I have some other shelved projects that I can dust off and see where I can go with that. My cafepress.com account is sitting idle. I had some ideas about a online comic strip, but just haven't had the time to sit down and map out and draw the strips. There were also multiple website where you can submit articles and get paid a portion of ad revenue based on page visits/clicks, but I'm not a big writer, and keeping these two blogs updated is enough writing for me as it is.

I need to think a bit bigger and come up with other ideas. But here's the update for now:

$143.88/year or $11.99/month.