Lending Club is a social lending network that brings together investors and creditworthy borrowers.

How Lending Club Works

There are two things that you can do at the Lending Club. You can borrow money or you can invest in the loans of borrowers.

Borrowers with good credit can get personal loans from $1,000 to $25,000 at interest rates that are often significantly better than those of conventional sources. You simply create a post on their site that describes your business or personal needs and how much you are seeking. The individual investors read your post with your request and then if they wish to support you they will make a contribution towards funding your loan.  Typically a loan gets hundreds of investors, each one pitching in as little as $25.

Investors (or Lenders) get to pick the loans they want to invest in, and their money goes immediately to Lending Club's approved borrower members.  What’s exciting about this whole concept is that you can diversify across hundreds of borrowers very quickly and easily. Since many borrowers are entrepreneurs just like you, investors get to help many companies take off.

Never invested before? Me neither, which is why I am thrilled to learn that for simply setting up an investing account with Lending Club through our partnership, you will get a $25 bonus instantly to start investing (it costs nothing to open or maintain the account).  If you choose to select a business to support, you get to select any of the qualified borrowers to fund -- that means us ladies! Think about it... we could all open a free account, get $25 and invest money supporting each other’s businesses!

For example, if Sally wants to start a Fitness Bootcamp program and decides to finance it through Lending Club, we can all sign up and invest our $25 sign-up bonus in Sally's loan.  What this means is that you have signed up with Lending Club as an investor for free, helped Sally by investing $25 into her business, and you are earning interest on it!

In fact, if you open an investment account by the end of August, Lending Club has agreed to award the Mom Inventors community a double bonus! So you can help 2 different businesses right away!

I don't know about you, but I find it particularly rewarding to earn interest on your investment while helping other members. Once you’ve tried it, I encourage you to keep investing on other loans.

Click here to get started, and open an investing account to get your bonus.

We will be posting loans of our Mom Invented community members who sign up to be Lending Club borrowers so that you can contribute to fund those loans supporting other women.

Isn’t this what it’s all about? I hope you’ll join me!

-Tamara

Enter Mint.com, an award winning free personal finance tool that helps you track your finances, stick to a budget and maximize your money by providing recommendations for bank accounts, credit cards, CDs and more that can give you the best rates. Mint can hook up to all your online accounts, from your checking, savings, credit card and brokerage accounts to your car and property loans, education loans and more, bringing in your numbers automatically and even categorizing your purchases and fees without any work on your end. The site also lets you connect on the go, with an iPhone app and text message alerts that can give you updates when bills are due, when you're running low on funds or when you've gone over budget.

With no fees, helpful graphs, and multiple ways to delve into your spending data, Mint can help you take control of your finances and get on track to finding your financial trouble areas and creating a better financial future. It can even help you maximize your credit card rewards -- whether you want air miles, cash back or points -- and you can compare your spending and savings to national averages to get a bigger picture view of how you're doing.

Learn more at Mint.com and let us know what your experience is. If there are any other great personal finance tools you're using, we'd love to hear about those in the comments as well.

If you are like me, when you first thought about getting money from an investor, you thought, “If I had X dollars, I could get my product/company to Y. So, I need to find an investor, share this vision, and voila! We will both become wealthy.”

Before you take that leap, though, there are some things you need to realize, in terms both of time and money.

1. Raising capital is nearly a full-time pursuit with finding investors, preparing presentations, delivering presentations, listening to feedback on presentations (often contradictory to the feedback from the prior investor), improving the presentation (it always gets better over time and with feedback), communicating with investors, then juggling and revising the paperwork.
2. If you have children, you need to consider child-care. I flew in the grandparents from one state to babysit while I jetted off to another state to give a presentation. I would estimate that raising my first $500,000 consumed at least twice the amount of time that I spent writing my first two books!

Continue reading the rest of my July Inventions column, "Money Isn't Everything" on Entrepreneur.com for more considerations and tips...

Enter SmartyPig, a new online banking site that lets you save for specific goals. You just set your goal amount, when it's due, and SmartyPig helps you figure out how much and how frequently to contribute. It also gives you monthly encouraging status updates and other graphs on the site. And if you want others to help you reach your goal or track your progress, you can make your account public and share it on your social networks.

Partnered with West Bank, your money is FDIC insured, and you earn 2.75% interest -- much better than most savings accounts. And SmartyPig doesn't have any fees for opening an account or withdrawing your money, though you do need to set up a monthly direct deposit from your bank.

What are you saving for?

When President Obama signed the 2009 Recovery Act, the America's Recovery Capital (ARC) loan came into being to help struggling small businesses. ARC loans are meant to help you pay off your debts on one or more existing small business loans. The SBA says, "The best candidates for ARC loans are small businesses that in the past were profitable but are currently struggling, yet have been making loan payments or are just beginning to miss loan payments due to financial hardship."

The loans are being offered until September 30, 2010, or until the appropriated funds run out -- whichever comes first -- and you can apply for up to $35,000. In addition to not paying interest, you won't have to start making payments for 12 months and there are no SBA fees associated with the loans. Repayment can extend up to five years.

Learn more by visiting the SBA ARC Loan Program Center and reading about the criteria for eligibility.

Photo courtesy of Wadester16 on Wikipedia licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license

We women can have a complicated relationship with money, from not knowing our real worth in dollars and cents to being afraid to deal honestly with our business finances. It's great to get these short, informative tips to help stay on track and learn some new things as well.

One recent email that struck me was a tip from Claire Poole about small business taxes and had an informative link to The Motley Fool. Part of it said:

Accountants keep running lists of ways to audit-proof tax returns, and you should to. For starters, avoid using any round numbers on your return. For example, if you report that you earned $45,000, instead of $47,890.26, it sends a red flag to the government that you're not keeping good records. If you manage your own tax return (or simply want to know more about tax returns), we recommend Audit-Proof Your Tax Return.

Another I thought was particularly poignant was a piece on apologizing written by Cristina Adams and inspired by Social Media Strategist Jessica Smith. Part of it said:

We're sorry when we win, when we lose, when we promote ourselves and our business, when we get ahead or fall behind, when we outdo our friends or colleagues, when we miss the tennis ball and lose the match. What is up with that? It's okay to be good at what you do, to beat the competition, win praise (and a raise) or promote your abilities.

Where do you turn for daily inspiration? Share your favorite sites, newsletters and more in the comments.

Image courtesy of DailyWorth.com