Lending Club is excited to announce that we have partnered with 5 of the best "DebtBuster” bloggers to offer advice and encourage those with credit card and personal debt to commit to getting rid of it during this holiday season.

If you’re like most Americans, you probably have more than $5,000 in credit card debt, according to Experian, a credit reporting agency.  The Federal Reserve also confirms American’s infatuation with debt: the size of the total consumer debt grew nearly five times in size from 1980 ($355 billion) to 2001 ($1.7 trillion). Consumer debt in 2009 now stands at $2.5 trillion.

Lending Club offers a way out of debt: a no-hassle fixed rate personal loan at interest rates that are typically lower than those of a personal loan from a bank or credit cards.

Take the DebtBuster Challenge
Take your credit cards or outstanding loans and find out their balances and rates.  Check your rate for free at Lending Club and compare the rate you got.  Chances are it would be lower.  If you can commit to the monthly payment, you can pay off your debt in 3 years or less!   It's that simple.

So take the Lending Club DebtBuster Challenge.  Get a better rate at Lending Club. Commit to getting out of debt.

As a little extra incentive, we’ll send you a nifty Lending Club t-shirt or back pack when you list your loan at Lending Club from one of our blogging partners below.

Read up on How to manage your debt
Starting today until January 15th, our amazing DebtBuster blogging partners will be writing about how to consolidate, manage and reduce your current debt.  Don’t miss out on this useful series or articles from the following folks:

Flexo @ Consumerism Commentary

Matt @ Debt Free Adventure

DK @ DebtKid

Steve the GetOutOfDebtGuy

Silicon Valley Blogger @ TheDigeratiLife

Nearly 100 Lending Club investors did indeed get smarter about P2P investing and may have found a better place to stash their cash. Patrick Gannon, SVP Investor Services, and me, Sam Kasle shared tips on how to maximize your return, properly diversify, and how streamline your investment process. Lending Club notes are offer by prospectus filed with the SEC.

Smart about investing, but want to Get Smarter? Check out the replay of the forum here.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Sam Kasle

Continuing with our look at financial systems, the next step, after you have clarified and identified where your money is going, is to find the area that needs the most work. This does not have to be an area where you are losing money or getting in debt, but an area that you can see will improve if you work on it. You want to choose an area that you can change pretty quickly, so that you can build momentum and then work on your bigger goals in your financial life.

For example, once I started keeping track of my expenses, I saw that in my financial system I was spending over $200 per month on coffee and pastries. I always thought that I might be spending a little bit too much in this area, but keeping track of the exact amount put a number to this hunch. It was now a fact. And I had to do something.

Then I analyzed the entire process that I went through in the morning that led to me spending this kind of money. I realized that the main driver for me going to Starbucks, or one of the alternatives, was that I was running short on time. By starting my day earlier, I would not have the same time pressure and could make my coffee at home or at the office.

Although I didn’t fully eliminate the coffee expense, I freed up about $100 per month, which is now going towards investing for my future.

You should do the same. Look at any area of your financial system and see where you can make small changes that can end up making a big difference. Don’t put ten or twenty things on your list and try to change them all at once, as it will be too big of a change to handle at once. Take one item from your list and analyze the entire process that you go through before and after making this purchase. Then consider putting part of this newfound money you’ve generated into some P2P loans on Lending Club.

Changing one item at a time will build up your confidence and the momentum to keep on changing other things. Eventually, you will have your personal financial system optimized and capable of carrying you towards your financial goals.

You do have written financial goals, right?

In an earlier post in this series, I made the point that personal finance can be viewed as a system, with money flowing into our system and money flowing out. Many times, the money leaving our system exceeds the money coming into our system. That’s called living on credit. Usually a financial system cannot sustain a prolonged period of living on credit. So the point of this post is for you to determine and clarify your financial system.

Now that the holidays have passed, spending usually goes back to “normal,” so keeping track of how your financial system works for one month will give you a pretty good picture of everything that’s involved. Get yourself a notebook or some other tool that you will use to keep track of your spending. I use my BlackBerry, which has a “Memo” program where I can quickly type in a transaction and its dollar amount. The BlackBerry is handy for me because it’s usually always with me. Find what works for you.

In tracking our transactions, we want to answer the following questions:<

1. Where is the money coming from? And how much? Here you can list of any sources that you have had money come from in the past and expect to receive money from in the future. For most, our jobs will the number one contributor. You may also include part-time gigs, interest income, bonuses, child support, proceeds from P2P loans on Lending Club, or any other source that puts money into your life. Checks, direct deposits and cash all count. Don’t forget the small cash amounts!

2. Where is the money going? And in what amounts? First, I want you to write down five to ten categories that you can assign to your expenses. Examples of categories include: living expenses, food, transportation, entertainment, fees and miscellaneous. If you know you’re spending a lot of money on one product or activity, make a category for it. For me it was coffee, so I had a “coffee” category.

Once you have your categories, use the same process that you followed with your income, and write down every time any money leaves your life. If you are spending 50 cents on a bus ride, write it down. If you spend $75 on gasoline, write it down. You want every single transaction written down; nothing should be missed, especially those small transactions that add up to big bucks.

Many people, myself included, are at some level emotional about money. It’s not just green paper. Because money is so emotional, most of us misjudge how much we make, how much we spend and where that money is spent. When committing to one month of keeping track of your income and expenses, you will have hard facts about your money. You will be able to separate the emotions from it and then proceed to make decisions based on real facts that you gather, write down and analyze.

One of the big benefits of thinking of your financial life as a system is that you will respond instead of reacting to everything that happens to you financially. What is the difference? It can mean a lot to you financially.

A reaction is an action based on some kind of external action. A reaction has no plan and no thinking built into it. It can be called a “knee-jerk” action or a reflex. When the doctor taps you on the knee, you have no control over the reaction and your leg moves. Same thing happens when you are reacting to your financial life.

Some examples of reactions:

• There’s a sale going on at the mall and although you don’t need new clothes, you decide to go shopping

• Your car breaks down and it costs $500 to fix, so you put it on a credit card

When you don’t have a response or a system prepared to deal with everything that might come to you financially, you are forced to react. And many times this reaction will cost you a lot financially.

A response is a prepared action you have for anything that comes your way. A systemized financial life helps you by making sure you have a response for mostly everything. It helps you by allowing you to foresee anything that might go wrong and prepare for it ahead of time, so that the unplanned and unwelcome event does not ruin you financially.

Some examples of being ready with a response:

• Not spending all your money during the holiday season, knowing that the after-holiday sales will have a lot of bargains

• Putting away two to six months worth of life expenses in case you lose your job or get injured

• Planning ahead for major purchases so you’re not forced to use credit when buying them on a whim

Action: Look over your financial system to see where things might go wrong and prepare a response. This will keep you from breaking the bank when financial emergencies come up. It will also reduce the amount of stress you experience in your life, knowing that you have that cushion in case anything goes wrong on your way to achieving your goal to become wealthy.