[stuckinpgh]

What other forms of hard money lending are there that are secured by collateral? The Trust Deeds I do generally involve land development, commercial land improvements, or personal mortgage swing loans.

I've also dabbled in stuff like prosper.com, but from my short experience there lending money unsecured over the internet is a bad idea no matter what the interest rate is. I've actually only had one loan out of nearly 100 default so far but I'm counting on there to be more before the loans are paid off.

The idea of lending money and "being the bank" seems to interest me more than throwing money in the stock market and watching the dice roll on a daily basis though. I have a friend that has almost 3mil invested in trust deeds and is earning an extremely healthy salary at 13%, but even he wonders if he should be involved in other things to diversify.