I know far too well what last year did to my finances.  I have been doing much better this year as far as selling real estate is concerned.  I truly dont like the feast or famine aspect of how I have been running my business.  But I have started to implement some short and long term solutions for this.  Short term I have been pretty good at setting aside 10% into savings to help cover any short comings and one of the long term things I have been doing is putting money into prosper.com.  If you haven't been there I would check it out.  I think you need $250 to open an account and you loan money to people.  I have been doing it for over a year and a half I think it has been working out pretty well.  I say this is a long term thing because I have only been adding mayber $50 a month to my account.  But I am averaging 14.26% return on my money.  I have 17 loans that I have made and three of them have defaulted(that was really my fault I got greedy and went after high interest rates) but now I am being more deligent with whom I loan my money.  As it stands right now I am making $0.25 a day with my account.  not very much right now I know but I am re-investing all the money back into prosper and still adding the $50 a month to the account.  Over time this has the possibility to provide a very good supplement to my income down the road.  I am not putting all my eggs in this basket but it is fun to be banker. 

Is anyone out there using prosper?  Is there something else that you are using for short and long term savings?

Steve Jacobs

Lyon Real Estate