Kivanniversary

[gement]

February 13th was the one year anniversary of my first loans on Kiva. This was closely followed by the more meaningful celebration of a full year on Kiva, my twelfth Credit Day. (Every month on the 15th, a pile of money flows back to the lenders.)

While I'm no longer in the first blush of obsession, I seem to be administering the loans for four other people. In addition, I just looked at the nifty complicated spreadsheet app that slices and dices all my numbers to discover that...

For the first time in a year, my lifetime repayments are greater than my lifetime new money. That's right, on average, every dollar I've put in has gone through the full loan cycle once. (For a while I was putting in money quickly enough that this day looked a very long way off.) I really did just clear it today, by $1.42.

As always, I'm happy to geek out about microfinance with anyone who will listen. Questions? I field them! Interested but not sure how to start? I'm good at getting people hooked.

Comments

[gement.livejournal.com]

The other half of the appeal, which I share with a non-zero but smaller section of the Kiva fandom, is the statistics. Do you know why I can tell you how often $100 gets recycled? Because I wrote a spreadsheet, from scratch, to tell me exactly that when someone gave me a $100 certificate last summer.

This is why I am now helping four other people pick loans. :) If you want some advice on filtering out some of the data noise, I can know all the noise for you. (Quick version that works for most casual lenders: Don't put more than $25 on each MFI. Past that, loan to what you like.)