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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
When Erica Townshend’s dog Buddy cut his paw last November, the vet gave him a clunky plastic lampshade collar to prevent him from chewing on the wound.
But Townshend hated the idea of torturing Buddy with the cumbersome contraption. Instead, she sewed an elastic strap onto a long sock, placed the strap around the dog’s body, and put the sock on his leg. She dubbed it the Strock.
Townshend, who had been making Strocks in her home using a sewing machine, needed money to fund mass production. But both her local bank and the U.S. Small Business Administration turned down her loan applications.
Then she saw a TV news segment about Prosper.com, a new person-to-person moneylending website designed to connect those who need cash with people willing to lend it. In May, under the username All4Buddy, she landed a $9,500 loan from a group of 77 individual lenders. The money appeared in her bank account two days later.
Townshend is part of a small but growing cadre of business owners taking advantage of person-to-person lending sites. For entrepreneurs with poor credit ratings and unproven track records, the sites offer a chance to raise funds when banks and other traditional lenders say no.
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Howard Giske on August 24th, 2006 10:01 am
what a way to go. Even the charities try to be rip offs. See this: Charities Sort Out What is Appropriate Compensation -
After various scandals involving executive’s salary in Non-Profit corporations, the question comes up, what is appropriate compensation for such executives. That isn’t at first clear, so let’s look at a number of problem cases.
Mr. Oral Suer was convicted of two felony charges for stealing $500,000 from the United Way charity organization. He had been head of the United Way for 27 years.
According to Charles W. Anderson, Mr. Suer actually stole over $2.4 million over his 27-year term in office. The head of the charity complains that their organization suffered “irreparable harm� and large reductions in donations. It also stopped direct solicitations from federal employees. Mr. Suer was sentenced to 27-months in federal prison in May 2004.
Some Congressman have for a while questioned the relatively high salaries that Non-Profit organization heads receive. There is a danger that this can shade into demagoguery against entire organizations, which is done in order to shut the organization down or question their entire budget. . This is the case with some of the rhetoric over funding of the Head Start program, a Federal program to help low-income children.
One director of the KCMC Child Development Corp. was cited as being scandalous for receiving over $800,000 in pay over the last three years, with one year being paid over $300,000. Crompton oversees 11 Head Start centers in the Kansas City area, in Kansas and Missouri. In a letter, the Department of Health and Human Services told KCMC that they had to explain why the compensation did not violate federal regulations on paying “reasonableâ€? wages or face having to repay all or some of the money. Nearly 80 percent of KCMC’s $26.6 million in revenue in fiscal 2002 came from federal tax money.
However, Mr. Crompton contends that he is being scandalized in retaliation for his expose of attended cuts in the budget, and changes in the program that he oversees. Although this salary may be considered fairly high, it could be argued that this needs to rival salaries in the private sector, in order to attract top executive leadership for Non-Profit Corporations.
In another example of fairly high salaries for executives at non-profits, in the San Antonio, Texas area, the 20 leading executives make an average of about $386,000, with all making above $200,000 per year, according to the San Antonio Express News.
The largest salary listed is for John C. Hagee, a television evangelist, employed by a church who made in 2003 over $1.2 million. You have to question, that if such persons wanted to be involved in human service work, wouldn’t they understand that they would receive salaries less than the private sector? Apparently this is not the case.
These scandals have become a hot topic since Richard Grasso, the former executive of the New York Stock Exchange, resigned after a pay scandal late in 2003. Mr. Grasso is currently being sued for receiving $140 million in “unreasonable compensation� during his term of chairman of the NYSE which is a Non-Profit Corporation. The non-profit sector has grown at a high rate, to now 1.2 million Non-Profit Corporations, which include hospitals, churches, museums, child and youth programs and others.
Igor M. (BizMord Blog) on August 24th, 2006 10:42 am
Excellent idea and site. You got me hooked for 30 minutes there.
I’d say this … with little investments (100 to 10,000) it’s just not worth the time.
If you plan to invest at least $25K spread around by each borrower, then you’re making money. Great post.
Howard Gibson on January 24th, 2007 2:44 am
Yes, Mr. Big Stuff, who do you think you are? You think you can afford to mess with globalization? Are even the big guys on Wall St. getting tired of being pushed around by mad global capital, operating through hedge funds? It looks that way.
Now John Castellani is worried about hedge fund takeovers. Mr. Castellani is the head of the business rountable. In an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal, Castellani argues against a pending SEC (security and exchange commission) that would allow stockholders to have direct voting rights in electing board members. He warns that short-term speculators (meaning hedge funds and private equity funds) will use the new ruling to movi in and loot the companies. A suit brought by AFSCME trade union against American Insurance Group (AIG) is the venue for the SEC ruling, although Castellani appears to be more concerned about speculators.
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