Student Loan Lender MyRichUncle - Its Name is the Greatest Asset

MRU Holdings, Inc's MyRichUncle (NASDAQ - UNCL) has it's name as It's greatest assets. Founded in 1999, MyRichUncle has taken many routes towards innovation. It first started out with Iempower, Inc which created an investment vehicle for students where students were treated like stocks. For instance, Bill needed $10,000 for Law School, he would go to Iempower and request funds by agreeing to pay a certain percentage of his income for a time period of 10-15 years. Iempower created their determining factors carefully, they only lent money to students with good grades, GPA, and other factors such as internships, work experience and future career expectations.

Unfortunately, Iempower couldn't secure greater financing for their education investment model and narrowed down their business by looking at traditional student loans. It then launched MyRichUncle and began lending to students using similar determining factors that it had used for its Iempower product and attracted a lot of students because of its fairness. MyRichUncle's greatest year was in 2005 when it launched and was further successful when it launched its media campaign in 2006. It's media campaign highlighted the unethical lending practices that financial aid administrators and other lending companies were committing and gained the enmity of several people, but it did the right thing. MRU is also very successful because of its technology innovation. It processes all of its loans online and gets loans to student in the shortest time possible.

MRU was founded when it's founders were only 21 years old. Raza Khan and Vishal Garg founded the company when they realized how hard it was for them to finance their education. Both founders attended New York's prestigious Stuyvesant High School and NYU. They are now 29-30 years old respectively and their company has originated about $400 million dollars in student loans. They appointed Edwin McGuinn Jr. as Chairman and CEO when they went public in 2004. Mr. McGuinn is a well experienced businessman and has made the company very strong.

MRU, in my opinion is the most "student-centric" student lending company because it has so much information available on its website that can help a student understand the dynamics of student lending. Here are a few links:

MyRichUncle Financial Aid 101 presentation

How loans work

The Financial Aid Office

EFC Calculator

Monthly Payment Calculator