Endless Gibberish

Awhile back I wrote about an organization called Energy in Common that provided micro financing for green projects. This is a basically a follow up to that post and a further review of the organization.

I logged in recently and noticed that there had been no updates on my loan to Patience Ampong. The loan was disbursed on 6/3/10 and the term was 3 months so I would assume there would have been an update as to repayment or delinquency by now.

I wrote an e-mail to Hugh Whalan, the CEO of the organization asking if there were any updates:

Hi there,

I’m writing about energy in common on my blog and a few months ago I made two loans on your site as a test. One of the loans http://www.energyincommon.org/lend/detail.cfm?eeid=32 was disbursed on 6/3/10. As of date there have been no updates on loan progress, entrepeneur progress or repayment progress.

When should I expect an update or repayment?

-Danny

Huge wrote back:

Hi Danny,

Thanks for the email.

We actually visited Patience on our last trip to Ghana and wrote about her in our blog: http://www.energyincommon.org/about/filledwithenergy.cfm

We are constantly upgrading our website and building in monthly repayment progress is something we are currently focusing on.   At the moment, loans are repaid at the end of the loan term.

Please let me know if you have any more questions,
Cheers,
Hugh

This puzzled me as the loan term already expired so I wrote back to Hugh:

The loan term is 3 months. If it was disbursed on 6/3/10 shouldn’t the end of the term be 9/3/10?

Best,
Danny

I guess Hugh noticed that something was amiss and wrote back:

Danny – You are correct.  This was our mistake and it was our fault for not being quicker to update lenders about Patience’s loan status.

I apologize about my previous email.  I should have taken more time in responding to your email to check what is happening with Patience’s loan.  Basically Patience’s loan has recently become delinquent because of a shortage of availability of gas in her region of Ghana.  We found out only recently and have been trying to ascertain what the exact problem is to figure out if we can provide any technical assistance.  In the process, we have neglected our most important job – communicating with the people who made the loan happen in the first place.

Believe me when I say this won’t happen again.  You will be getting a more thorough update on the situation tonight.

Again, please let me know if you have questions, 
Hugh

Later that night I finally receive an update on the loan:

Dear Danny,
Your loan to Patience Ampong was scheduled to be repaid last month.  We have been informed by the MFI that there is a compressed natural gas shortage in the region where Patience lives.  She has been unable to use her clean burning stove for the past two months.  The cost savings associated with her efficient stove help to facilitate her repayments and the fact that she hasn’t been able to realize these savings has caused her to fall behind.

We typically credit loan repayments once they have been fully repaid, but due to the delinquency of this loan, we are going to use the amount that has been repaid to date to credit your account.  We are in constant contact with the MFI and we hope that the full amount will be repaid soon.

We apologize that it has taken this long to contact you regarding the delinquency, but we were hopeful that it would be resolved by this time.  We will do a better job of updating you on the status in the future.

You will receive an email indicating that your account has been credited a percentage of your original loan.  You can choose to re-loan the funds or withdraw them at that point. We hope to credit your account for the remailder of your loan amount as soon as the loan is fully repaid.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

-The EIC Team

So it turns out that Patience has been unable to use the gas stove because of a natural gas shortage in her region and this has resulted in her being delinquent on the loan. I also received $40 of the $100 I loaned later that night. I decided to put in a request to withdraw funds at this time.

In summary while I believe that Energy in Common’s goal is a noble one the organization and website still need a lot of development to be effective in attaining their goals. Having a loan term pass without any update on the status of the loan illustrates there are fundamental issues with the way the site works at the moment. My advice for anyone interested in the organization is to hold off for the moment.

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In a past post I described how BigCrumbs referral structure can make it worth your while to refer people to them. If you’re a seller on eBay I suggest you promote BigCrumbs on your listings.

Generally a message in a prominent place detailing how to get cashback and directing users to BigCrumbs.com. Don’t make it too intrusive as the individual is ultimately there to buy your item.

BigCrumbs doesn’t give a set percentage back of the item amount on eBay purchases but rather they give a percentage of the eBay fee the seller pays back to the purchaser. Since most people who purchase things on eBay have no idea how much sellers pay in fees they probably don’t know exactly how much cashback they’ll get but this usually amounts to 2-3% on most items.

For instance on a $100 item in the “other” category will generally amount to $9.35 in seller fees. Since BigCrumbs pays 35% of the fee back in cashback the purchaser would get $3.27 in cashback. That’s 3.27% cashback! If you referred the person you get 5% of the fee and would get $0.46 which isn’t much but think of it as a small rebate on the seller fee you paid to eBay and the potential for the person to make purchases at many other outlets including eBay in the future.

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You’re the consumer, if you’re smart then you realize it’s your job to get the lowest price possible on airfare to get to where you’re going. The airlines are in business to make money, that means it’s their goal to get you to pay as much as possible. Getting the best airfare involves so many factors that’s it’s almost impossible to win at the game (unless you just decide to stay at home).

A month or so ago I’ve been planning a group trip with a bunch of my friends the weekend before Christmas. When everyone was okay with the itinerary I started looking for the cheapest tickets out of the three NYC airports (EWR, LGA and JFK). Generally it’s easy to get the cheapest airfare on any given day but the flight was 2 months away. The tricky part is trying to time when you’ll be able to book the lowest fare between now and the flight.

The first tool I used was SideStep which aggregrates airfare from numerous sources and gives me a pretty good picture at what the lowest fares are at the time. The cheapest flight I found was $325.

The second tool I use is Bing’s travel search engine which acquired FareCast. There you can learn what the chances are if the lowest fares are going higher or lower based on past historical data and other factors. Since the greater NYC airports are in their prediction markets the search gave me an indiction to wait since fares have a good chance of dropping within the next 7 days.

The third tool I use is the website of the airline who was offering the lowest fare. In this case it was Continental. I plugged in the itinerary which I found earlier on SideStep and before you even get deep into the booking process you can see the seat map which told me that over 60% of the seats on the planes were not even assigned! Although people are ticketed but not assigned seats this told me that a good portion of the seats on the plane was unsold. Therefore I could afford to wait.

Over the next couple days the lowest airfares I could find actually rose and continued to rise! Over the course of a week it went from $325 to $380. A lot of my friends started saying that they should just book already before prices rise even higher. I told them to hold off since I firmly believe that those prices are way too high. Over the next couple days prices fluctuated up and down but nowhere near what I was comfortable paying.

Then finally it went down to $269 after two weeks and I booked the flight thinking it was a short term drop so I better lock in the price. It continued to stay at that price for 4-5 more days and then dropped another $15! I’m not gonna cry over $15 since I have the peace of mind that my itinerary is booked already. I’m glad I paid 30% less than originally planned. In the end all it took was patience whichs mean you should plans your vacations and trips as far in advance as possible to watch airfares (but not book them) and it helps if you are flexible with the dates a little bit (I wasn’t).

About 5 minutes worth of work for 500 miles. Great way to pad your account and reset the mileage expiration timer.

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