Nate and I feel we have been extremely lucky that we are able to do always love to do and make enough to do this as our primary jobs. Because of this good fortune, we also want to give back and giving to good causes is one of those things that we should all do as part of our personal finances.

We realize that a lot of people are struggling with their own finances and don’t necessarily have a lot of money to give. That is why we encourage people to find ways to donate that don’t cost money if this is the case. if you do have a bit of money that you can lend to a good cause (you will likely get it all back), we have a proposition for you.

We have decided to make an effort to support Kiva.org We like this organization for a number of reasons. First, unlike most charities where you give your money and are never sure exactly how it is used, you know exactly where 100% of your money is going with this organization. Secondly, the money that you use can be used again and again to help people. You can see some of the loans we have made and follow the progress that we have made in our new blog.

There have been a number of personal finance bloggers who have mentioned this organization and also support it. I believe that I first saw it on Frugal For Life, but know that My Money Blog and others have also mentioned it.

Basically, what you do is agree to give microloans to people who would otherwise not qualify for a bank loan. The loan your give can be as small as $25 and they are added with other people’s loans until the loan is fully funded. These loans are given to small businesses all across the world to people who pay them off anywhere from 6 months to 18 months time. When the loan is paid back the money goes back into your Kiva account where you can have it sent back to you or reloan it again to another person.

So what is the catch? The only catch is that you don’t earn any interest from these loans. While the individuals who get the microloans do get charged interest, this interest goes to help support the organizations in each of the countries where the loans were given out. So basically you loan your money out for free to help individuals who would not be able to get loans otherwise.

There is some risk involved. There is always the possibility that the person who you loan the money to will default. Up to this point, however, Kiva has a 100% payback rate. Microloans on average have a default rate of three to 5%. You should keep this in mind if you decide to loan the money, but the risk is far less than many other types of loans out there.

In addition to setting up a website which we are currently creating, we have decided that we would like to get other people involved with this project. We therefore are setting up a blogging project to help spread the word. To encourage you to lend Kiva $100 ($25 to four individuals), we have decided to reimburse the approximate interest that you would lose ($5) had you kept the money in a bank account.

This is how the system will work:

1. Make four loans on Kiva.org
of $25 each dated after today (previous loans don’t count).
2. Write a post on your blog about your donations (to help spread the word of Kiva.org)
3. For this project, you are limited to receive $5 in interest. Even if you decide to lend more than $100 (which we encourage if you have the means), we will only provide $5 in interest per individual.
3. Send us an e-mail with a link to your blog post and your email address where you want the money sent through paypal.

Once this is done, we will send you $5 by PayPal to reimburse you for the interest that you have lost through your kindness. We have set aside $1000 to make these payments so we are hoping for 200 bloggers to help spread the word by the end of the year. That will place an extra $20,000 into the Kiva.org system.

While we would greatly appreciate a link back to this post so others know about this project and to help spread the word, it is not a requirement of this project to do so. The main focus of the project is to spread the word about Kiva.org.

In addition to the $5 payment you will also receive a minimum of two links to your site (and likely more) for those of you who are into SEO. We will make a post each month of the blogs that have participated in the program and then a round-up when we reach 200 blogs. So not only will you get interest that you might have missed, but you’ll also get some good links to your blog in the process. Hopefully this will bring some traffic to your site and you will find some new readers of your blog for your help.

If you have any further questions, feel free to post in the comments and we hope that you will join us in this small effort to make the world a little better place.

Those Who Are Participating

• Living Planet posted the following: Kiva’s one-time loans with interest (also mirrored here)