DIGERIDOO'S DEBT, DONE

So it turns out you can pay back your college loans by just passing your virtual hat around.  "I'm now SL debt-free," Lordfly Digeridoo IMed me recently.  In mid-February, Digeridoo launched a novel scheme to cover the $4000 in debt accrued to get his Urban/Regional planning degree-- simply ask for unsecured loans from the thousands of Residents who'd never met him before.  Despite the strangeness of the plea, the loans came, and kept coming, and by the end of March, he'd raised nearly $800.00 in Linden Dollars, including a few Paypal donations.  "The spread was fairly random," he tells me.  "Had a few HUGE donations (like $L30,000 or more), and then tiny ones ($L500 or below.)"  He made about that much in a rush of custom building assignments in SL, and a college loan paid the rest off.  And having done that, he began paying back his Resident lenders, "even the folks that insisted that I not".  He's posted the full list of loaners on his blog, as a public show of thanks-- which also happens to be yet another list of people willing to take the trust and faith they'd invested into an avatar seriously.

Comments

[Haney Armstrong]

Congrats Lordfly and thanks for the coverage Hamlet.

This is a wild smashup for us over at Omidyar Network as investors in both Linden Lab and the new peer lending company Prosper as well as a large number of microfinance organizations. Here's a thread about peer lending at omidiyar.net in case anyone wants to jump in.

http://www.omidyar.net/group/community-general/news/1171/

[Relee Baysklef]

What I'm curious about is, did Lordfly pay them back with interest?

[Matthias Zander]

No, Relee, that was one of the premises of the whole thing. The loans were simply them investing in one student's future. They got no gain out of it, which was stated up front.