It is in times of desperation that we are the most likely to overspend. When we’re in a jam, we may have no choice but to pay a little more. Many convenience stores charge a premium over chain grocery and drug stores because their owners know that people often would rather pay more to avoid crowds of people and waiting in longer lines. For situations where small amounts of cash are involved, keeping some emergency cash on hand may help to avoid such wastes of money.

I call this the “tuck method” because I always used to keep $20 tucked in the back of my wallet away from my normal money. The method simply involves keeping a small amount of emergency money in a separate location. The “tuck” money can only be used in cases where not using it would cause you to be charged more. This discussion centers around a small transaction, such as buying lunch on a workday when you are out of cash.

A few examples of how you might be charged more are as follows:

1) If you regularly carry a balance on your credit card and charging a small purchase would subject it to interest and fees

2) If the only convenient location for withdrawing the necessary cash is an ATM that will charge you a fee

3) If you’d have to drive to the bank or ATM (and incur the gas usage costs, etc.) for no other reason than to cover the purchase

In any of these cases, the few dollars that you spend on a sandwich, coffee, etc. could end up costing you considerably more.

The second aspect of the tuck method is that you have to replace the money as soon as possible after you use it. That usually means a trip to your bank or fee-free ATM at your earliest convenience, without making a special trip.

The tuck method should help you avoid occasional charges that arise from not having sufficient cash on hand. If you find yourself turning to your tuck money on a more regular basis, then you probably need to change your habits as well. If you are not budgeting for your daily needs correctly, you may want to consider carrying a little more cash to avoid using credit cards. If you don’t pay your credit card balance in full each month, then consolidating your debt with a P2P loan from Lending Club may be a great solution for you. Doing so will help you to pay down your debt more quickly, and it will also put a little extra cash in your wallet each month.

Have you ever been deep in debt? Debt can be taxing and unhealthy, but for many Americans it is a way of life. If you're at this site, you probably are interested in making sure that you don't have any bad debt.

Getting out of debt is difficult. Still, even once you are out of debt, protecting yourself from falling back into old habits isn't easy. If you are recently out of debt, you are especially at risk for falling back in, so it is important to be careful and not backslide.

So what can you do?

1) Look back at your previous failures and see what went wrong
Most people go into debt for a specific reason. For example, you might have spent too much money using your credit cards, or you might have really loved to spend money while going out with friends. Regardless of the reason, look at your past failures. These are the things that are most likely to get you into trouble. If you used to spend a lot with your credit card, be careful to make purchases only when you have enough money to afford them. If you have a big expense you need to cover, find a smart alternative to credit cards such as a P2P loan on Lending Club.

2) Continue setting goals
You achieved your first goal: get out of debt! Now you need to make more. Why? Because without goals, you have no idea what you really want. Setting goals makes achieving your dreams more possible. Do you want to set up an emergency fund? Do you want to start investing? Write down a list of goals and actionable steps to achieve them.

3) Check your progress
Set a date every week or month to see how well you are doing towards achieving your goals. Have you slipped at all? Make sure you know exactly what is happening with your expenses.

By following these steps, you can prevent yourself from getting back into debt. We at Lending Club want you to live a debt-free life!

The start of a new year is an excellent time to review your budget. If you don’t yet have a budget, it is also a great time to start one. The changes that inherently come with the New Year are the main reasons why a budget review makes the most sense at this time.

The main reason that a yearly budget review is appropriate now is that seasonal and one-time expenses from the previous year can be analyzed to help you plan your budget for the coming year. Whether you budget more for seasonal items when they are expected to occur, or spread the costs out over the entire year, looking at the previous year will help make your estimates for the current year more accurate.

Another reason why budget reviews make sense at the start of the year is that your income and expenses may have changed. Depending on the elections you made during your benefits enrollment, which typically take effect at the start of each year, you may see a change in the amount withheld from your paycheck. Many companies also offer year-end bonuses or salary increases that become effective January 1st.

Understanding your potential expenses, including planned purchases of big-ticket items, will help identify any borrowing needs you may have. Your budget review may also uncover areas for potential savings or categories that you hadn’t planned for in the prior year. You may be able to free up money for investments in such vehicles as a person-to-person loan portfolio on Lending Club just by analyzing the aspects of your financial life that have changed. Remembering to include savings and investing in your budget will help to automate this process and thus make you more likely to meet your financial goals.

The information from the previous year and the knowledge of any income or expense changes for the coming year should enable you to adjust your budget accordingly. Getting off to an accurate start will help your finances all throughout the year.

We are focused on making our person-to-person lending site as simple and reliable as possible. As Barron's wrote this weekend, Lending Club and other P2P lending sites strive to be "highly automated, remarkably transparent, and employ Web 2.0-era ways of matching borrowers to lenders." To that end, we are releasing a series of improved and clarified pages starting with our statistics and lender ranking pages.

The intent of these pages was to provide a measure of current performance, similar to what you get on an online trading Website like Etrade or Schwab. Feedback from several of our lenders indicate that the ROI section was in some cases interpreted as a projection of future performance. With the amount of data we have gathered other the last 6 months, we cannot offer projections of future performance in a meaningful and reliable way. Faced with the risk that some current and potential lenders would use the ROI section as projections, we took that entire section down and will keep it that way until we have sufficient data to make reliable projections of future ROI. We have put up a new statistics page and lender rankings page to clarify the statistics and make our help page more helpful. This is an intermediary step that fixes a couple of statistical issues and clarifies the help file content.

We will release another version of the statistics page in the next few weeks that shows more details, including late loans as percentage of loans issued for more than 45 days and a breakdown of late loans by age. Thank you to all for your continued input and suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you on these improvements.