{"id":597,"date":"2009-11-12T00:07:20","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T05:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=597"},"modified":"2009-11-12T00:07:20","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T05:07:20","slug":"microloans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=597","title":{"rendered":"Microloans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone’s talking about Kiva as a fun place to help save the world, but I think I like Microplace better.<\/p>\n

They both do pretty much the same thing: Take your money and help support microlending. Hopefully you get your money back, but that’s not the real point.<\/p>\n

On Kiva’s Lend page<\/a>, you pick a person who apparently needs a loan. There’s a little meter that tells you how much money has been raised for that person’s loan.<\/p>\n

But what happens behind the scenes is that you lend to a microlender which has already given that person a loan. In other words, you’re supporting a microlender, not that particular person. Whether you give money or not, that person has already gotten the loan and doesn’t really get anything from your money.<\/p>\n

Microplace works exactly the same way, in that you lend to a microlender. But on Microplace’s analogous Find Investments page<\/a>, you’re not looking at people who seem to need a loan (but actually already got one). You’re looking at the actual microlenders that you’ll be investing in.<\/p>\n

With Microplace, the deal is transparent. You’re helping to support microlenders, and you get to choose the ones you want to support. That seems better to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone’s talking about Kiva as a fun place to help save the world, but I think I like Microplace better. They both do pretty much the same thing: Take your money and help support microlending. Hopefully you get your money back, but that’s not the real point. On Kiva’s Lend page, you pick a person […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net-and-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}