(I recently visited Sharebuilder’s corporate office in Bellevue. This is the story of my field trip. Sometimes I just need to get out of the house…)

Wanting to know more about Sharebuilder - Buy Stocks for $4 - I discovered that they were just across the pond (no, not London) over in Bellevue, not 20 minutes from where I live and work. So, I e-mailed and requested a visit to checkout Sharebuilder headquarters in person.

Meet and greet

I arranged to meet with Ashley, a friendly company PR spokesperson, to show me around their large warehouse office in Bellevue.

Their building was in the middle of remodeling or “Oranging” (they were purchased by ING in Dec. for 220 million) the building, transitioning from their dominant green logo to their new “orange” powered one.

The Lobby….nice

The office had a very friendly receptionist, and front desk and a little coffee room with a flat screen TV playing CNBC (of course). The walls were adorned with some print media ads that Sharebuilder had run over the years.

After taking a few pictures of the lobby area, I got to see the main open office area (but no pictures were allowed, sorry!) which was very impressive. It reminded me of that huge trading floor that UBS has in a giant hanger…only much smaller. Lots of room to breathe though. Probably a 60 foot ceiling at least.

After seeing the main office area, I sat down with Ashley in a conference room and went through some questions I had about Sharebuilder.

The Highlights

• Sharebuilder has a very high level of female customers. 40% compared to 20% with most brokerages
• The typical Sharebuilder customer is much, much younger than traditional brokerages
• Sharebuilder has partnerships with Walmart, Costco and others. The goal being to introduce investing to the non-traditional wall street client

Sharebuilder vs. Zecco

When I asked about why someone would choose Sharebuilder over Zecco, the response I received was essential that “we are serving different markets”. Fair enough. I was hoping for some juicy gossip, but alas, my reporting/interrogating skills were not quite sharp enough.

No blog?

I asked about a company blog (they do not have one) and if that’s something they might launch at some point. It doesn’t sound like it. Sharebuilder wants to “let customers research on their own”. They offer easy to use tools for their clients, but if you’re looking for specific investment advice, you need to look elsewhere.

“Not wall-street”

Sharebuilder is very non-“wall-street” and that is intentional. Their headquarters is in a warehouse near Seattle. They cater to new investors, even if they can only invest $100 a month (or less!). The company was venture funded, and a “Seattle startup”, but they “don’t see themselves as a start-up anymore”.

When I decided to start investing (albeit a very small amount) again last month, I knew I needed to be careful. I had lost too much money, and made too many mistakes in the past with stocks/forex (learn how to trade forex).

Deciding to “invest” and not “trade” was a big step for me. I am 100% committed to long-term investing. I decided to go ahead and open an account with ShareBuilder. You can see my Sharebuilder review for more details (to which I’ll be adding too based on my trip today).

Note: the links here do earn me a small commission if you decide to sign up for Sharebuilder (like this one: Buy Stocks for $4 ). Just so you know you’re supporting my field trips (which keep me sane!). So thanks!

P.S. - If you’re a company in the financial services industry and would like me to visit and review your service or product, I’ll do it! I’m looking for more field trip Friday opportunities. Big Disclaimer: If you’re outside Seattle…you gotta pay my way : ) Sorry, but I’m kinda broke.

I'm 300K in debt. Gulp. I'm 24 and day traded away a fortune. Now I'm trying to crawl back to zero. Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and join me on this journey. You can also subscribe via e-mail. I appreciate tips and feedback! ~ DebtKid

$25 Bonus - Lending Club

Update 1/16 - $400 earned so far! Sign up now and get your $25 bonus!
Update 1/26 - $600 earned so far! Almost there!

Lending Club has announced a very generous new bonus program. You’ll receive a $25 credit in your lending account when you signup through my little link here.

I’ve been writing and doing some consulting work for Lending Club since the summer now. It’s been a great experience. Without this side job I’d probably still be living in my office. Take a look at my most recent article about cheap date ideas (it even made the digg homepage! wohoo!).

When you signup using this link, not only will you receive a $25 bonus, but I will too!

Emergency Fund Savings

I’m trying to save up $1000 for a personal emergency fund by the end of January. I’ll pledge to put every $25 referral I earn from this into that fund. Any amounts over $1000 I’ll be putting towards my most pressing debt (IRS at the moment). Please sign-up and I’ll keep a running tab of my referrals/fund amount in the comments section below.

Current Emergency Fund Balance: $250.05

I’ve been doing some part-time writing for Lending Club (kinda a side-job thing! helps pay for my place to sleep!) and spent a good amount of time putting together a list of the Top 30 Most Popular Finance Bloggers.

So…did I make the list?

No, I don’t consider this a finance blog. Plus, I wouldn’t have made the top 30 anyway. Maybe the honorable mention section. Sure, I rant about money and the like, but I rant about women as well. Anyway, make sure and go check out the list, these blogs are all top-notch!

I don’t have a whole ton of spare time at the moment as most readers know, but there are a few finance blogs out there that I find myself reading from time to time because, well, they are good! These are my top 5 and the only ones I read religiously (using google reader of course. You are using google reader, right? : )

In no particular order…

My top 5

1. Clever Dude - Two reasons I like Clever Dude. 1. He’s Clever and 2. Like me he’s found writing has helped him deal with his debt.

2. BloggingAwayDebt - Tricia over at Blogging Away Debt always has great down dirty real life tips and experiences about dealing with debt. She is almost down to 20K in debt, from starting at over 37K.

3. Get Rich Slowly - JD’s stuff is always great. We were talking awhile back about doing some sort of business contest, but it never got off the ground. No worries though, I’m doing OK and GRS continues to be a great finance blog. His latest post about budgeting with an irregular income I think was written just for me!

4. Dumb Little Man - This blog should really be Smart Little Man….maybe that was taken. In any case while posts here aren’t always finance related…many are, and the content kicks butt. His business posts, like this one on referrals is the stuff I really love.

5. NCN Blog - No Credit Needed? That’s what I want! No credit would mean no debt! NCN has a very practical blog about all things finance related. Plus, if you’ve ever listened to his podcast, you just know he might be the next Dave Ramsey.

What say you!?

What 5 finance/debt related blogs SHOULD I be reading?

I was lucky to get to be a beta-tester of the new online finance application mint.com. I wouldn’t usually write reviews like this, but I even shared this site with some of my family members because I thought it was so cool.

This is what I’ve been waiting for in a finance application

This has been the application I’ve been waiting for. The interface is slick, and the auto-updates of your accounts seamless. I easily added my wells fargo checking accounts as well as a few of my personal credit card accounts. Once I get my financial situation a bit more stable (if that ever happens), I will definitely be using mint to manage, monitor, and analyze my spending.

Main Interface

The main overview of your accounts gives a great snapshot of your latest transactions, alerts and more. Obviously my financial health is bad (and I haven’t even imported all my accounts. Mint.com can’t handle collection accounts)

Analyze Spending…easily

Mint.com makes analyzing and tagging transactions really, really easy. Sadly, it recognizes (truthfully…grrr) that my “most frequented merchant” is “overdraft fee”. Darn!

Favorite Feature

Probably my favorite feature is the ability to receive text messages when an account reaches a certain threshold. For example, lets say you want to receive a text when your checking account falls below $100.

Bugs and gripes

The one feature of mint that seemed to annoy me (that I probably just need to tweak a bit in my settings) was the e-mails I would receive of “large deposits” in my bank account. That’s great and all, but I got an e-mail this morning of a large deposit, that was dated August 28th. Not exactly current.

More Screenshots

Main Tabs

I need to update some of my “tags”

*I was thinking of going to a payday loan store to cash my ebay check (since my bank account is in limbo at the moment). I discovered that God wants me to take a vacation with my payday loan!* (an article over at Get Rich Slowly had me thinking about God and money….)

My search begins

I’m searching for a check cashing place…ohh look, an interesting Google ad:

Christian Faith Financial….that sounds great! I’m a Christian!

Oh, all I need to do is overcome evil with good! (payday loans are good!?). Look, they want to help me “the Christian way”. I’m touched. Let’s dig deeper.

OK, just filled that all out. Oh wait, what is this…

This is NOT a credit application? What did I just fill out? But, that’s OK, they want to help me in “the Christian way”. I’m sure everything is going to be fine.

Wait….are all your sponsors, partners, and advertising Christians too? Wow. That’s impressive. I’m so glad I decided to go with you guys. Wait, hang on a sec, I’m getting a SMS on my phone. Oh gosh, now I’ve got 3 SMS’s….Man, I must really be loved. I’m getting like 5 text messages a minute…wait a minute…

Christian Faith Financial. You’re official dead to me. You’re the first one on my dead to me board. I started it just for you. You make me sick.

Just looking for the Lending Club $25 sign up bonus? Go here and you’ll be credited $25 once you confirm a lender or borrower account

Since you need a 640 FICO to borrow on the new social lending program Lending Club, I obviously can’t write a traditional review of the service at least from a borrowers perspective. I will however give my thoughts on the program as a mid-twenties, very much in debt, facebook addict.

Visual Overview of Lending Club

Why Borrow with Lending Club?

Interest rates at Lending Club start at 7.5%. Last time I checked my credit cards started at 19.9%. Also, loans from Lending Club are term loans vs. a revolving loan like a credit card. You know your loan from Lending Club will be paid off in 3 years, with a fixed monthly payment. Sounds pretty good to me…think they’d float me 300K?

Yeah, I didn’t think so either. Let’s keep going…

Why Lend @ Lending Club?

The obvious attracting to parking some cashola in your Lending Club account is the returns. According to their website their average return is 12.26%. Not too shabby at all. Lending Club also gives you access to more credit information than prosper does (I have lent at both). When looking at loans to fund Lending Club shows you connections that you might have with the borrowers (geography, work, education, friends) which is actually pretty neat. This connections feature encourages a more “personal” feel to the loan and I could see that helping in their default rates.

Prosper vs. Lending Club

The obvious peer to this peer-to-peer lender (aren’t I funny?) is prosper.com. Prosper is well established, and I even wrote about their $25 free sign-up bonus here.

While on prosper you can form lending groups, the social aspect of lending doesn’t seems as emphasized as with Lending Club. You don’t get more social than facebook, where Lending Club initially launched.

More Screenshots

Here are some more screenshots from Lending Club’s site…

The Closing

Lending Club has a shot. I’ve heard lots of rumors of not so happy lenders on prosper. By limiting loans to only those with 640+ FICO scores, they may be able to keep the lenders happy. Without enough lenders, they’ll be sunk. People will always be looking to borrow money. And people lenders will always be looking for solid safe returns. Lending Club fills the niche. You can get $25 for signing up here (and help the DebtKid out, I’ll get $25. Thanks!). It’s definitly worth trying at least a $100 investing in, with their average return hovering over 12%. Beats my emigrant direct account anyday.

DebtKid, why did you write this overview?

I’m kinda bucking for a part-time gig at Lending Club, figured I’d show them I know a bit about the company. Plus, I can’t sleep because of my throat. I have an appointment later today…

Whew. Just got off the phone after about an hour of calls to creditors. This was my first time ever calling someone and having to say, “I can’t make that payment”. It was tough.

Luckily, the two citicard reps I talked with were EXTREMELY helpful. Let’s review my first call about my 4 citibusiness cards:

CitiBusiness (4 cards, total balance: $26,407)

I have 4 citibusiness cards with balances of $7,747, $9,132, $4,619, and $4,909. My ‘current amount due’ is around $2500 in total. I don’t have that cash available at the moment.

I talked with a guy, explaining my situation, and we started throwing out numbers. He asked how much I could pay a month (on one card), I said, “$150″. He said the best they could do was $346 and drop (yes, drop) the interest rate to 25%. No joy there. That doesn’t work. He said I should look into a credit counciling service that would reduce the rate to 9.99% and I would pay around 1/45 of the balance. I have read so many bad stories of this…I am quite weary. Does anyone have a good story about a service that would deal with citibusiness? Thanks in advance.

The guy did however give me one great hint. I asked, “is there anyway to lower these apr’s, or amounts each month”. He said, “well, as time goes on, new options become available”. I of course asked, “well, in my case, what time will that be?”. “tomorrow” the guy says. Apparently there will be a “cycle” of some sorts, and I will have new (and better according to his unspoken hint) payment options. I hoping for a 0% hardship program like I got with…

Citi Personal MasterCard (balance: $3,598)
Yep. I talked with a very nice lady about their hardship program, after explaining my situation. I asked, “how do you calculate the payment” She said, “Well, we basically have to have a payment amount that allows for positive amortization, and that is how we base the interest rate”. That may sound like greek to alot of people, but I work in the mortgage industry, and to me that means, “the lowest payment amount will be a 0% interest rate. find the lowest amount you can pay, and that will set your interest rate at 0%”. So, I said I could pay $50/month. She said that would then give a 4% interest rate. Not bad.

But, why get 4% when you can get zero right? (I was assuming I could get 0%). So I say, “gosh, you know, I think I can only do $40/month”, she replies, “well, than your interest rate would be 1%”. She totally knows what I am doing at this point and just says, “look, $36/month will get you 0%”. Sweet! So, I signed up for their hardship program for 12 months at 0%. The payment comes directly from my checking account, and if you miss a month, you are booted! But this was a big upper that I needed today. I’m still nowhere near budget, but I have alot more calls to make tomorrow. It’s past 8pm now, and I’m still at the office.

I realize my once great (730+ when I was 22) credit score will now be shot (under 500 I imagine by the time I negotiate everything) for years. That is the price I have to pay, just to stay out of bankruptcy. Sad that it has come to this. I should have never gotten in this far…