Finance Travels

I just received the following email from Prosper:

We are writing to inform you that we have made the decision to discontinue accepting new lender registrations, and new bids from existing lenders, from residents from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Our decision to make this change was based on our ongoing discussions with regulators in Pennsylvania, which led us to believe the change was necessary to comply with their current interpretation of their state regulations.

You will continue with your existing lender agreements, have your existing loans serviced, and be able to transfer funds out of your Prosper account. However, you will not be able to place new bids on listings or transfer money into your Prosper account.

This change does not affect borrowers residing in Pennsylvania, who remain free to create loan listings on Prosper.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change may have caused.

We thank you for being a member of the Prosper community. We hope to make Prosper available to lenders in Pennsylvania again soon.

Regards,
Prosper

Well, my decision whether or not to continue investing in Prosper just got a whole lot easier.  The vaugeness of the letter tells me that it was illegal for Prosper to operate in PA from the start and are just now getting called on it.

I had actually been doing fairly well on my Prosper portfolio, but I haven’t put any new money into it for at least a year.

We ended August 2008 up $650.  Considering that we took a vacation, paid for another vacation, and had our other normal summertime expenses, I’m pretty happy to be up this amount.  Our liabilities decreased by almost $1,000 (although about $200 seems to be accounted for by some mishandling of the mortgage amount from previous months, I’m just going to start grabbing that amount directly from the website from this point out).

We are still trying to break the $200,000 mark before the end of the year.  We’ve vowed not to make any of the planned large purchases until we hit $203K so that we can have a little breathing room once the milestone is reached.

Childcare costs should decrease a good bit starting in September.  I’ll be continuing the 4-day work weeks and our oldest has started kindergarten which will lower daycare costs by one-third.