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There have been countless occasions that you are out shopping and as you are checking out, the cashier will ask the above question. You are in the middle of that shopping euphoric state of mind. We know it happens especially when you have paid all of your bills, and you are paying yourself. It is a standard practice in retail to ask the question when you buy anything that totals up to around $100 or more (stores have different price points). In fact if you have worked retail or are currently working retail, you already know that you must ask it.

We thought you would be interested to know that store credit cards (aka private label credit cards) are a $100 billion industry which includes retail cards, third party cards, travel cards, gas cards, and a few others. Interestingly, very few of the retailers run their own programs anymore. Most are run by third party banks and processors and interest rates are typically much higher than credit cards (averaging in the 20-25% range).

Hey, we like a good deal as well as anyone else, but one of the reasons we started Lending Club was to make it easy to repay your debt. That is why we automatically debit each monthly payment from your bank account. The challenge with retail cards is that it is another bill that you have to remember to pay. You might not even recognize the envelope when it is received so it might go into junk mail.

Lending Club believes that if you went in there shopping to reward yourself with something new, and you have the money, you should spend that money on your purchases. The mind will play tricks on you when you are on that shopping “high”, so just remember – 22.9% to 24.9% interest – that should alleviate any urge to save “10%”.

If you are interested in a more complete understanding of what factors into your FICO score, you might want to look at this page that explains it all. We will go over them.

Payment History – 35% of your score depends on this. This means, have you paid on time consistently. It is very important to have a solid track record of on-time payments. Late payments and bankruptcies will hurt your score.

Amounts owed – 30% of your score depends on how much you owe. The more you owe, in relation to your credit limit, the lower your score will be.

Length of credit history – 15% of your score depends on this. Note that even if you don’t have a long credit history, if you are responsible with your credit you can have a decent score.

New credit – This makes up 10% of your score, but if you don’t need the additional credit, it is probably a wise choice to save your money and your credit score.

Types of credit used – Again, this only makes up 10% of your score, but it is a component of the overall FICO score. It is good to balance the types of credit that you have between credit cards, installment loans, auto loans, and others.

One thing that you didn’t see above is anything about race, color, religion, national origin, sex, and marital status, and whether you receive public assistance or exercise any right under the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act or the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Interestingly, income is not factored into your FICO either.

Note that Lending Club has a minimum FICO requirement of 640. The average FICO score in America is 723 and about 75% of Americans will meet our minimum.

Several of you are wondering, besides the “how it works” page that you can read on this site, “How does it really work?” We continue getting more attention from an increasing variety of places: read this article that came up yesterday - if you can. We are also getting more questions about our matching technology LendingMatch™.

We believe Lending Club very much resembles a marketplace. The closest analogy would probably be a “stock exchange”, except that members trade loans rather than stocks. As in a stock exchange, we believe that technology is critical in making the exchange run more efficiently and help match supply and demand.

The main difference we see, however, is that person-to-person lending is not only about numbers, about supply and demand. It is about people helping other people achieve their financial objectives. On both sides (lenders and borrowers), real people benefit from the exchange by obtaining better rates than they would from a bank.

Recognizing this specificity, we have built a technology called LendingMatch™ that not only matches supply with demand but also takes into account personal attributes such as the connections that exist among all of us. As a lender requests a loan portfolio recommendation, LendingMatch™ generates a portfolio of 20-30 portions of loans that matches the lender’s risk tolerance and desired return (based on a borrower’s credit score, debt-to-income ratio, etc.). The algorithm also favors borrowers who are connected to that lender through Facebook groups and networks. Lenders can decide to invest in their own geographical network, school network or other community they feel connected to.

Very soon we will be having some more technical postings here. Watch out for a few posts from our CTO Joaquin Delgado coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Clearly, we're not the only ones talking about Americans' excessive credit card debt. See this report from CNN Money, which offers a list of money management tips. One troubling factoid grabbed our attention.

The average American household with at least one credit card has nearly $9,200 in credit card debt, according to CardWeb.com, and the average interest rate runs in the mid- to high teens at any given time.

More alarming is the fact that many people only make the minimum payments each month, which means they could be paying off their credit cards over a period of decades. We addressed this issue in a previous post when we discussed a recent GAO study.

A key benefit we offer borrowers is consistency. All payments are the same amount each month because Lending Club loans are installment loans. There are no variable finance charges each month.

When you have equal payments throughout the loan period, you can be more financially responsible. And when you manage your finances more efficiently, you will be improving your credit rating with every on-time payment you make!

We introduced the fantastic report – Social Personal Finance – back on this blog post. As many of you have found out, this report is quite in depth. We see a lot of you visiting the site, and for those that have read it cover to cover, we know this may be old news.

Starting from just a few hundred thousand today, we expect two million U.S. households will be using social personal finance sites by the end of next year.

The above is a forecast or prediction by Jim Bruene. We agree that the main catalyst behind this forecast is social networking. Nine years ago no individual could have forecasted the growth of social networking.

We are riding the tidal wave branded as Facebook Platform. It is bigger than anyone expected it to be. Lending Club was the first collaborative financial service to launch on a social network on May 24. We are taking this opportunity to help promote financial responsibility among our members.

Our constant reference back to our favorite study is done to help pass on information that is not always common knowledge. We are getting tremendous feedback and good will from the Facebook community, as well as increasing support and engagement. We will be releasing later this morning our latest numbers, two and a half week after the launch. They are quite surprising.