Initial payments received for my Kiva micro-loans

February 15, 2009 was the due date for the initial repayments for some of my initial micro-loan made through Kiva.org. Although 2 of my original 13 loans were fuly refunded due to problems with their field partner (before the money was actually disbursed by Kiva), the remaining 11 are doing fine. I used part of the repayments to fund a new micro-loan, my 14th (12 now outstanding.)

Of my 11 outstanding micro-loans that had payments due (or made a payment in advance of the due date), repayments to date are 20%, 33%, 25%, 10%, 20%, 8%, 11%, 13%, 8%. That amounted to a return of 9% of my original "investment." Not bad at all for a batch of loans made in December.

My intention is to fund a new micro-loan each month from repayments.

I still have not decided what to do with the money from those two refunded false starts. They were both in the Dominican Republic. Maybe that is not the safest place to lend at this time. I may simply make two replacement micro-loans. In both cases I lent several times the size of my usual micro-loan, so if I make two normal-size micro-loans I will have a moderate size pile of cash sitting idle. I already had a modest amount of reserve cash in Kiva. I may withdraw the excess cash from Kiva and only keep a modest reserve, enough to assure that I can make a new micro-loan next month even if I receive no additional repayments before the end of March. We'll see.

I do wish that Kiva would actually pay us lenders some interest. That would be an incentive to fund significantly more micro-loans.

-- Jack Krupansky