Wanna Talk Money?

Kirst decided to post his confession about overpaying his credit card bill because he wanted to show that it's possible to get out of debt.

"It was kind of my way of saying if this is what I have to confess about, it's not all bad news," he said.

Others have opted for niche sites. Some, such as Covestor.com, allow investors to see how their portfolios compare with others. Social lending sites, such as Lending Club and Prosper, bypass banks to match lenders with borrowers. Buxfer.com and BillMonk.com help roommates, friends and relatives keep logs of shared expenses. NetworthIQ helps people figure out in a public forum what they are worth in dollars.

Owen Graham, 33, a systems administrator for a computer science corporation, wanted to figure out how well he was doing compared with others in his age and income bracket. So he joined NetworthIQ about a year ago. He learned that he and his wife, who is not a member of the site, are worth about $400,000 if you include their house in Olney, their 401(k)s and other retirement and savings accounts.

Each month, he updates his profile with information about how much he spent and saved. He said the site has made him less of a spender and more of a saver. "Now I'm really paying attention," he said. "It's one of those things that keeps me motivated in trying to head in the right direction. I would have no idea how much I had in retirement at any given time, and now I'm pretty cognizant of what's in there and how the markets are doing."

Brian Zacharias, 23, a senior economics major at the University of Virginia, was very aware of how he was doing and wanted others to know it. That's why he opted for Covestor, which launched last summer. His portfolio is up 40 percent since he joined.

"I like to let other people know how well I'm doing and put that information out to the public," he said. "I turned out to be a good trader, and I want people to know about it."

Zacharias said he likes that he can track other investors' moves, then ask why they bought or sold a particular stock. "They could have made a good decision, or they could have just been lucky," he said. "I like the concept of posting your rationale."

Some people, such as Phyllis Wright, 48, are just looking for a way out of debt. The customer-services representative who lives in Clinton borrowed $9,000 from the Lending Club to pay off some of her credit cards. "I knew that I had so much debt that I didn't even bother to try to get a loan from the bank because I knew I would have been turned down," she said.

She got a 12 percent interest rate, much lower than the rate she had on her credit cards. She had been paying her credit cards about $450 a month. Now she pays Lending Club $301. She still has credit card debt, but "that was a big help," she said.

Since September, when the Lending Club expanded from a Facebook group to a public Web site, it has issued about $9.5 million in loans, said Renaud Laplanche, founder and chief executive. Last month alone, it doled out about $3 million. Laplanche attributed the rapid growth to the credit crunch that has squeezed the mortgage market and seeped into other forms of lending.

Laplanche said borrowers must have a minimum 640 credit score, no more than a 30 percent debt-to-income ratio and no delinquencies. To minimize risk, lenders make small loans to each person. That way, if one recipient defaults, lenders are still likely to get a return from their investments in other people's loans. So far, Laplanche said, fewer than 1 percent of all loans have been in default.

"People tend to not default on other people in a community if they feel connected," he said.