Our other new baby

So we had been planning on purchasing a van for awhile, and with Madelyn's due date getting so close, we thought we would check out minivan's.  I ended up stopping by Roseville Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep on Friday (before Madelyn was born) and had Joe quote me a price for a basic Grand Caravan Crew, and appraising my Golf TDI '05.

The quote for the Crew was good, a couple hundred over Edmund's invoice, the quote for my Golf was a bit less than I thought it should be ($7500).  Long story short, we ended up going back on Saturday and buying the van for the price he offered, and $9000 for my trade it.  We received $8000 in cash for the trade and financed the van at 0%.  I like having the money to invest, and not feeling like I should pay off the car sooner rather than later :)

A happy note as well is that, I had signed up to do a test drive when I went to look at the van, and I received an email for a $50 gift card if I went through with it.  We received the gift card today :)  So don't just delete those emails.

Lending Club

I joined Lending Club in January so I thought I would report.  According to lending club I have made a return of 9.8% since joining.  Pretty nice return, though I am not sure how they will report taxes.  If they report as income then it will be taxed more then if it is reported as dividend income.

In any event I put in 3k at the end of January and have $3200 now, 6 months in.  $100 of that was a bonus for investing over $2500 to start with, so it seems a bit high of a percentage, but they probably know better than I.

The promo they are doing is that if you sign up and invest $2500 you get $100.  I think you invest over 5k you get an additional 1% as well.  I think prosper has a promotion going on as well, I might look into that as well.