We are pleased to announce that Lending Club is now welcoming borrowers from Arizona. To commemorate this occasion, we thought we’d share some fun facts we discovered about the 48th state.

• Arizona has the largest stand of ponderosa pines in the world. Arizona also has more parks and national monuments than any other state, more mountains than Switzerland, and more golf courses than Scotland.

• There are more boat owners in Arizona (in relation to the population) than any other state in the US.

• Arizona is unique in many ways… it has dehydrated rivers, trees made of stone, cactus that blooms only at night, a bird that can run faster than it can fly, the only poisonous species of lizard in the nation, a river named Colorado that spends most of its time in Arizona, and a retirement community named Youngtown.

• Arizona is home to the original London Bridge - it was purchased from London and reassembled in Lake Havasu City, stone by stone.

• Camels were used in the mid-1800s to survey a route for an Arizona wagon road – it eventually became the route followed by the Santa Fe Railroad and U. S. Highway 66.

For more information about Arizona, visit http://arizonainformation.info, http://www.azcentral.com, and http://www.thearizonabuzz.com. Once again, a big welcome to our friends in Arizona who will now be able to enjoy the benefits of person-to-person lending! For more information on borrowing from Arizona, please refer to the State Licenses & Limits page.

Did you know that many credit card issuers will charge you their default rates if you are late with a payment on a completely different account? This long-standing practice is called "universal default." It can especially hurt cardholders if there are errors in their credit reports.

The way it works is that credit card issuers routinely pull customers' credit reports to see if cardholders are current on their other bills. If they spot instances of delinquency on other accounts, they raise the consumer's rate to the default rate as a way of penalizing the cardholder for late payments.

According to Consumer Action's 2007 Credit Card Survey, many of the top credit card companies claim they no longer have universal default practices. In reality, card issuers have simply renamed the penalty and moved it to the "change in terms" section of the cardholder agreement. It often goes unnoticed by consumers.

Card issuers state in these sections that they can raise their rates at any time for any reason. Consumer credit information is often mentioned as one of the factors for such rate hikes. The Consumer Action link cited above contains the policies of the top ten card issuers.

It appears that Congress is upset about these practices. The debate is now whether to force industry standards through legislation, rulemaking or to allow card issuers to voluntarily come up with their own standards that hopefully eliminate these practices.

Earlier this week, LendingTree released the results of its first annual LendingTree Smart Borrower Survey, which seeks to help improve people’s borrowing decisions and behavior. The survey, which was conducted by MarketWise, Inc., maintains that nearly half of Americans are concerned about their outstanding credit card debt.

Among the survey’s key findings:

• 85% of the respondents have debt outstanding. The most common forms of debt are credit cards (63%), mortgages (52%), and automobile loans (37%).
• 47% of the respondents spend about half or more of their gross income on their total debt expense.
• 30% of respondents who carry a balance have credit card debt of $10,000 or more outstanding.

If these findings aren’t troubling enough, there’s more. According to the survey, a significant number of respondents have experienced some of the negative sides of credit cards we’ve mentioned in previous posts.

Apparently 35% of surveyed online consumers have been surprised by unexpected charges and fees associated with their credit cards, including: teaser rates (14%), over-limit charges (12%), annual fees (11%), finance charges (9%), and fees for ATM (9%). For more details on this, we recommend scanning through the GAO study.

It’s time to leave your credit cards behind, once and for all!

We are pleased that we have the TRUSTe seal of approval, certifying that our privacy and security practices meet their high standards of excellence. We are committed to providing a safe place for you to conduct business as borrowers and lenders. So committed, in fact, that we have submitted our privacy and security practices to rigorous scrutiny by TRUSTe, the Internet's leading protectors of consumer privacy.

Chief among our privacy practices is the fact that while your identity is verified as a borrower or lender, all loan listings are anonymous. Our privacy policy includes a detailed accounting of all personal information we collect, how the information is used, and with whom it may be shared. Some information we collect is shown to other members, while other information is kept private. We always tell you which is which, and there are no guessing games.

This policy also covers our security practices, including the fact that your sensitive financial data is securely stored in an off-site facility. We encourage you to read our privacy policy and contact us with any questions at privacy@lendingclub.com.