Kiva is awesome. It's fun to take small amounts of money, pool it with others and lend to people that need a helping hand. Many of these people are in very poor countries and they would not have access to traditional funding sources of any kind. The next part is really fun to me - when someone pays back their loan (or any part of it) it goes back into your account and you can lend it out again! That keeps your money working over and over again and again. Pretty neat to see those payments roll in each month and be able to send it out again to help another person.
Sometimes of course the person is not able to pay back the loan for various reasons. Naturally this means that you will not get your money back on that loan. I say this means that you should never lend money that you're not able to risk losing. The upside is that typically it's done in small increments of $25 and doesn't mean a large loss. Even those loses seem to be few and not the typical experience. Some lenders have found that if they lend in particular part of the world that it may get struck with a natural disaster for instance and could cause many borrowers to have to default. I like to keep my loans diversified and spread out over many countries and many different types of industries. Lending to some stores, some agriculture and some manufacturing for example will diversify your portfolio.
Kiva also has really cool lender pages that each lender can take advantage of. You will get a nice webpage that showcases all of your loans and gives breakdowns and charts with all of the details of the types of loans you've done.
It's interesting that people participate in Kiva for many reasons. But mostly it's about helping others.
Here is one lender profile: http://www.kiva.org/lender/jesuslovesyou
If you've been a kiva lender, why do you lend?
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