Has anyone heard of Peerstreet?
"(Disclosure - PeerStreet was at FinCon, a financial blogger conference I attended last month. I had the chance to briefly meet a couple people from this company. Also, I recognize a number of the names of their financial backers. This doesn't guarantee anything, of course, except the people behind the scenes are no slackers.) The same way Prosper and Lending Club have created a market for personal loans, this is a company that offers real estate loans.  The ""too good to be true"" aspect is what I'll try to address. I've disclosed in other answers that I have my Real Estate license. Earlier this year, I sold a house that was financed with a ""Hard Money"" loan. Not a bank, but a group of investors. They charged the buyer 10%. Let me state - I represented the seller, and when I found out the terms of the loan, it would have been a breach of my own moral and legal responsibility to her to do anything to kill the deal. I felt sick for days after that sale.  There are many people with little credit history who are hard workers and have saved their 20% down. For PeerStreet, 25%. The same way there's a business, local to my area, that offered a 10% loan, PeerStreet is doing something similar but in a 'crowd sourced' way. It seems to me that since they show the duration as only 6-24 months, the buyer typically manages to refinance during that time. I'm guessing that these may be people who are selling their house, but have bad timing, i.e. they need to first close on the sale to qualify to buy the new home. Or simply need the time to get their regular loan approved.  (As a final side note - I recalled the 10% story in a social setting, and more than one person responded they'd have been happy to invest their money at 6%. I could have saved the buyer 4% and gotten someone else nearly 6% more than they get on their cash.)"
Yes and no, P2P Capital Markets is similar concept but is more geared towards business loans. Community Lend used to offer this service but has stopped. I don't have a business relationship with Hire.Bid, I just use it to get extra money whenever I am free, so I thought I could share it in the case someone else is interested. If you know any other app like this, feel free to share it, maybe I can use it too.  For GiftBac, I wanted to find out if anyone used it before and let me know if it is trustable. About PinkApp, I wanted to know people's thoughts about it to see if it was worth investing in. For now, I am looking for more ways to make money. "I feel like he's just doing this for the kicks and doesn't really believe in it. But then I see the numerous talks, the book etc and I can't decide. His entire basis for a ""idea meritocracy"" is that everyone should be truthful or ""radical transparency"". I do not see the connection at all. You cannot build an idea meritocracy because it inherently means you can judge if an idea succeeds or fails before implementing it. If you want to bias yourself toward successful ideas, it requires nothing more than allowing people to implement what they think and then rewarding the ones who succeed. Basically, I cannot see the point of this ""radical transparency"" etc.  Except for one possibility - his computer algorithm. I feel like that is his grasp at immortality and the algorithm requires stupid tons of data to function. So why not give it to the best source for such data? Top ivy league graduates and brilliant people hired by the one of the biggest hedge funds on the planet. And then sell them on this idea that ""radical transparency"" is the basis for all success in the firm, and ask them to start inputting data on it." moneydashboard.com  claims to be the UK's Mint but I have problem using it with my HSBC account right now. I have contacted their helpdesk. I've seen this tool.  I'm just having a hard time finding where I can just get a list of all the companies.    For example, you can get up to 100 results at a time, if I just search latest filings for 10-K.  This isn't really an efficient way to go about what I want. Money Dashboard and Love Money look like two best options out there now that Kublax closed their doors. Mint were making noises last year about spreading to UK/Canada, but I've not heard anything new about that. I like the aggregation a lot, but it seems like the site's purpose is designed for lead gen for those tools? Why are there not reviews or profiles of those tools on that site and instead just push their traffic to those platform's websites to download? "just for shits, i'll give you the excerpts from Liar's Poker:  ""I was living in London in the winter of 1984, finishing a master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics, when I received an invitation to dine with the Queen Mother. It came through a distant cousin of mine who, years before, and somewhat improbably, had married a German baron...  What had been advertised as a close encounter with British royalty proved to be a fundraiser with seven or eight hundred insurance salesmen...Somewhere in the Great Hall, as luck would have it, were two managing directors from Salomon Brothers. I knew this only because, as luck would further have it, I was seated between their wives.  The wife of the more senior Salomon Brothers managing director, an American, took our table firmly in hand, once we'd finished craning our necks to snatch a glimpse of British royalty. When she learned that I was preparing to enter the job market and was considering investment banking, she turned the evening into an interview... Having examined what good had come from my twenty-four years on earth, the asked why I didn't come and work on the Salomon Brothers' trading floor.""  It's a great book, I highly recommend it." I go there and all I see is an overhyped get rich quick conference that you sold tickets in groups to artificially inflate demand. I see no substance. Are you connected to grasshopper labs, where (and I quote) :   &gt; the first organization devoted to empowering entrepreneurs through technological innovation and real-world expertise  Really? Youre the first? See, hype.  Also, youre trying to sell internet phone for $10 a month? You must depend on some pretty NON-tech-savvy customers.  I bet youre a people person. Youre probably even nice. But you present yourself as very naive, and your 'goods' dont pass the smell test.  Pro tip 1 : dont brag about income. Its non-pro. Is there any truth to this, or is this another niche scam that's been brewing the last few years? While it may not be an outright scam, such schemes do tend to be on borderline of scams. Technically most of what is being said claimed can be true, however in reality such windfall gains never happen to the investors. Whatever gains are there will be cornered by the growers, trades, other entities in supply chain leaving very little to the investors.  It is best to stay away from such investments. Looks more like an idea for a business rather than an actual business -- especially since it hasn't even launched. That said, it does have its merits. What bank actually holds the deposit funds becomes irrelevant, and may actaully change from time to time as they forge better partnerships with different banks.  Think of it like a mutual fund -- the individual stocks (if there are stocks) in the fund are less important than the balance of risk vs. income and the leveling of change over the course of time. It offers services banks offer, without fees (at least that is the proposal) with the addition of budgetting capability as well. It does have downsides as well There is an increased level of indirection between you and your money. They propose to simplify the banking business model, but in fact are only hiding it from you.  The same complexity that was there before is still there, with the added complexity of their service on top of it.  It's just a matter of how much of that complexity you would have to deal with directly. With that in mind, I would reiterate that they are not a business yet -- just a proposed business model.  Even the sign up process is a red flag for me.  I understand they need to gauge interest in order to forge initial relationships with various banks, but I don't see the need for the 'invitation only' sign up method.  It just sounds like a way to increase interest (who doesn't like feeling exclusively invited), and is a bit too 'gimmicky' for my taste. But, like I said, the idea has merit -- I have my reservations, but will reserve full judgement until they are an actual operating business. "I've had a MF Stock Advisor for 7 or 8 years now, and I've belong to Supernova for a couple of years. I also have money in one of their mutual funds. ""The Fool"" has a lot of very good educational information available, especially for people who are new to investing. Many people do not understand that Wall Street is in the business of making money for Wall Street, not making money for investors.  I have stayed with the Fool because their philosophy aligns with my personal investment philosophy. I look at the Stock Advisor picks; sometimes I buy them, sometimes I don't, but the analysis is very good. They also have been good at tracking their picks over time, and writing updates when specific stocks drop a certain amount. With their help, I've assembled a portfolio that I don't have to spend too much time managing, and have done pretty well from a return perspective. Stock Advisor also has a good set of forums where you can interact with other investors.  In summary, the view from the inside has been pretty good. From the outside, I think their marketing is a reflection of the fact that most people aren't very interested in a rational & conservative approach to investing in the stock market, so MF chooses to go for an approach that gets more traffic. I'm not particularly excited about it, but I'm sure they've done AB testing and have figured out what way works the best. I think that they have had money-back guarantees on some of their programs in the past, so you could try them out risk free. Not sure if those are still around." Let me begin with very interesting article that was published in Charlotte Business Journal on August 17, 2012. According to the news - Bridgetree wins $4.2 million jury award against Red F Marketing of Charlotte and others, including its founder, Dan Roselli, in a software trade-secrets case. Putting aside whether that characterization is reasonable, it doesn't follow from what Speckles said. He is suggesting that PayPal shutting people out of its own service would make alternatives to that service *more* of a fringe thing. I don't see how. I honestly can't believe two million people care enough to pay 12.95 per month and is that a recurring charge? Wouldn't you just get your family tree and then never visit the site again? I'll be honest and say I don't know their business model well and I can't see myself ever being interested enough in investing in it to bother to figure it out.