Givling, a great way to help alleviate the student debt crisis

I, like so many, am sitting under the crushing weight of student debt. For myself, I admit that much of this is due to my own foolishness, imprudence, and lack of foresight. Financial counselors cannot be entirely blamed; I’m sure they said something about the difficulty I would be facing in paying these loans back later with the probable salary of someone in ministry. However, I do wish someone would’ve said to me upon entering grad school: “You should choose a less expensive school. You’ve already got too much debt from your undergraduate years. You must not borrow more money.” But, no one did. Even if they did, I don’t know whether I would’ve listened.

So, now here I am: paying back those loans in pittance payments that barely scratch the surface. My wife and I just welcomed a beautiful daughter into the world; she’s 6 weeks old in the photo above, but now she’s 8 months old. I underwent very helpful financial counseling through Crown Financial Ministries and their Money4Life program. We are handling our finances much more wisely than ever before. Nevertheless, we are struggling to make ends meet and can’t move forward on buying a home, and we have little hope of seeing the end of this debt any time soon.

I stumbled onto Givling a couple of months ago. I started reading stories about a couple of people who had their student loans completely paid off by this organization through the method of crowdfunding. You can look up videos on YouTube to see what I mean. I’m familiar with crowdfunding through Kickstarter and like the process. So, I signed up. Simple enough, you play a little trivia game every day for free. It takes less than 5 minutes of your time (unless you’re excellent with trivia!), and then, at the conclusion of the game, the opportunity to interact with an ad appears. If you interact with the ad (which usually entails opening a link or watching a video), funds go toward the Live Funding Queue. So, in 5 minutes, I’ve helped provide funds for someone else to have their student debt paid off. I also have the option of paying to play. I can pay essentially $0.80 to play a single game, and those funds go toward the Live Funding Queue as well. (You don’t even have to have student debt to play Givling; it’s a nice way to help others that doesn’t really have to cost you much.)

The Live Funding Queue is where the excitement happens. The Queue is made up of 10 individuals at a time. The funds generated through the advertisements go towards paying the loans of the folks in the Queue. Once these 10 have their student loans paid off in full, as I understand it, the Queue will be re-populated. This is where things get very interesting. The Queue will be made up of: the next 3 individuals who signed up to play Givling; the 3 individuals who have contributed the most dollars by paying to play, the top funders; and 4 randomly chosen individuals. It’s the last group that is the draw for me. I have paid to play a few times, but I’ll never be a top funder. Every time I interact with an ad, I’m given additional entries into the drawing. I also gain extra entries just by playing the 2 free plays every day. And, I can gain even more entries when others use my invite code to join Givling. So, currently, I have more than 1000 entries.

Givling sends out e-mail updates pretty much every day. They’re super-short, usually a single paragraph long. They keep telling us: If 100,000 are signed up for Givling and actually played their 2 free plays every day and interacted with the ads every day, they would be able to pay off one student loan (of up to $50,000) every single day. They currently have well over 110,000 people registered, but obviously not everyone is actually playing their free plays every day. One other perk: there are daily cash prizes awarded to top scoring teams in the trivia games. I don’t care much about that, truly, but it happens.

So, sign up for Givling! Download the free app and play the free games every single day! Use my invite code: JL184692. Then, invite everyone you know to play. You’ll be helping a bunch of people. And, if you have student debt, you could receive the help of others through Givling. If you don’t have student debt, and you’re chosen to become part of the Live Funding Queue, you can give your spot away to someone else. Surely, you have friends or family who have student loans. If not, remember me. 🙂 Alternatively, if you don’t have student debt, and you’re chosen to become part of the Live Funding Queue, you can have the funds go toward your mortgage (up to $25,000).