Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Tricia

I’ve been feeling a little apprehensive lately about the ability to have a trouble-free first payment with Prosper. In fact, there is even one borrower who had Prosper take out her funds twice! For anyone looking to Prosper for a loan, a double-dip like that could wreck havoc on their bank balance. For me, I better keep a buffer in place because normally I run my checking account VERY low. We’re talking $40 in it sometimes, and that’s for a few reasons: you can’t spend it if you don’t have I am just throwing as much as I can towards debt.

UPDATE: So far, my payments have been taken out as they should (no double-dipping).

The process of making a payment is really easy. After logging into my account, I clicked the “Make a payment now” link. I was taken to another screen where I have the following choices:

1.) “Make next monthly payment of $112.77 now – Your next payment is due on Jul-20-2006”

2.) “Make an additional payment of $ (fill in amount here) – Your next monthly payment will proceed as scheduled for Jul-20-2006”

3.) “Pay off entire loan balance now”

Of course, being able to do #3 would be awesome but I’m not there yet 😉 So, I went with #1 and I am just paying my first payment a little early. After I indicate that I would like to do #1, I am taken to a page where I confirm the information and click submit. After that, the next screen states the payment was successful and I was given a transaction number. I’d highly recommend that every borrower keep track of the transaction number for each payment. I just include it in my memo line in Quicken.

Next, I head on over to my account overview and I see that I now have $0.00 due July 20, 2006. So far, so good.

Now, where’s the interest info? If you click on the “View loan details” link, you will be taken to a page that shows the status of your payments and it also breaks down how much of your payment went towards interest and how much went towards the principal. My payment split ended up being $18.99 interest and $93.78 principal.

I sure hope my loan payment goes off without a hitch and my payment is made early and no duplicate payment occurs. If not, I have a buffer in place and if the payment doesn’t go through I will have a few days to try to work it out before lenders start worrying about a late borrower. Luckily, I have the ability to contact most of my lenders to let them know if there is a problem – and for those who check in on me here, you’ll find out here as well 🙂