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Kiva – My personal experience and how to pick the best loans?

A few days ago, I wrote about Kiva.org and how you can go about lending money to those in need, help a great cause, earn miles in the process and essentially get all your money back.  I have been loaning money every month on Kiva for a few months now.  I wanted to just share my experience with the organization.  When you log into your Kiva account, you can get a summary of your loans, how much you have loaned, how much you have outstanding etc.  Below is a summary of my account:

Kiva account summary

As you can see, I have made 398 loans, loaned $10,075 over the last few months, and earned at least 10,075 miles or points depending on which credit card I have made the loan payments on.

In addition, you can see that I have only lost $2.46 so far.  I currently have 4 delinquent loans with $20.68 in arrears (payments that are past due) that potentially could default.  A delinquent loan just means that the lender is behind in making payments.  It does not mean that the loan will default and not get paid back.

I am doing pretty good with a default rate of 0.04% vs 0.98% for the average kiva user, and a delinquency rate of 1.09% vs. 3.15% for the average Kiva user.

How I pick low risk Kiva loans?

Once you log into your Kiva account and click on the “Lend” button, you can filter the loans.  You will see the screen below and in the left column see an “Advanced options” tabkiva advanced options

Once you click the “Advanced Options,” you will see the image below:

Kiva advanced options menu

Then, you can basically scroll the bars as you please.  I like to change the delinquency rate to below 1% and the default rate to 0%.  Once you do that, the loans that show up will meet your criteria and are the best loans available on Kiva.  It’s that easy!

One other tip is to pick the loans with the lowest repayment term which should be obvious because you want to get paid back as soon as possible, so you can repeat the process over again and earn some more miles.

Please keep in mind that each person’s delinquency and default rate will vary.  However, in my experience, just doing what I showed above is effective in keeping the delinquency and default rates extremely low.  Hope the trend continues.

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