Comingle is an interesting idea that would act as a pseudo emergency fund to provide a stable week to week income for their users. It could act to stabilize your income if you have an irregular income or as an backup plan or insurance for when you lose a job or income source. It works by distributing the average of all their members contributions weekly to each user. Once the service starts, the end result will be a net gain for those with low income and a payment to provide a guaranteed monthly income for higher earners.
- For those with low income, any amount of extra money can aid in the pursuit of opportunity and keep things from turning desperate.
- For freelancers and gig-workers, reliable weekly income can ease the complications of sporadic cash-flow.
- For those with more income, Comingle lets you help others, sends you a little extra cash on slow weeks, and provides a safety-net if things take a turn for the worse.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them. I just got this in an email newsletter and was intrigued.
Seems to be unemployment insurance with extra steps and not backed by the government. Or a ponzi scheme.
Not really either, its a crowdfunded income equalizer. It is not based upon infinite growth so its not a ponzi scheme.
Edit:On second thought, it can act as unemployment insurance not backed by the government, but I would contend that is a good thing since the government programs often have an excessive amount of strings attached.
Not sure why people are downvoting me. I guess I offended someone. Not sure how. ** shrugs **
Your correct, technically it is a guaranteed basic income. The newsletter I heard about it from was one that promotes UBI so I got mixed up.
This post looks like an advertisement, and I would have removed it, but there are some discussions about the product itself (and its possible issues/pitfalls) in the comments, which might prove useful to some people, so I'm leaving it up.
While, I am not affiliated with them, I can see how this could be interpreted an ad. My intention was to highlight a potential way to use this service as a way to help with budgeting or income. It is certainly a type of service based around your personal finance that is novel and imo relevant to this community.
I understand. I think it could have helped if you had posted this with your own thoughts as a discussion of this and other similar services instead of the content from the newsletter (don't know if you did that, but the post reads like marketing material) and the link to a commercial product.
The only thing I got from the newsletter was a link to the website. I posted my thoughts in the title and post contents.
Every day I appreciate how lucky I am that my country knows the concept of social security.
I'm curious what the social security system is like in your country(France?). The US theoretically has a safety net for people but it is sabotaged by 1/3 of the population and businesses to make it ineffective.
It's very, very hard to get laid off / fired in France if you haven't done a major fuckup. It's possible, but the notice period is 3 months during which you're legally entitled to spend one or two working hours per day actually job hunting.
Unless you voluntarily quit, you get ~50% of your old salary for up to 18 months (unemployment benefits last for the same duration as your latest work contract, with an 18 month cap) as long as you can prove you're job searching. If you exceed the duration you get an insufficient, but non-zero, financial help of ~500€/month (which would cover a 2 bedroom rental in any small city and one bedroom in a mid-sized city, but not housing for a major city like Paris or Marseille).
Families get extra subsidies based on the number of children, and for long-term issues you can apply for subsidized housing, etc.
Also, healthcare is very cheap (and many emergency care things are free, as well as all prescription medicine), which means that if you can cover room and board you'll survive. You may have bad surprises but not "lifetime debt" bad surprises - that's why whereas the US financial planning advice is to have 3-6 months of living costs saved, the French advice is 1-3 months.
I see so basically strong worker and family protections, and healthcare not being treated as a extortion scheme. If only the US government wasn't filled with bad actors who are basically unaccountable to the people.
It's been done in the crypto space over defi before, and in some regards, you could consider this a fiat version of PoolTogether, but everyone wins.
The thing with Defi liquidity pools vs this is, you know what a place like PoolTogether or Curve is doing to generate revenue, by offering your liquidity for fees and generating a profit from transactions.
You sell, I dunno, MATIC for ETH, someone has to supply the ETH, someone being the pool members, and they collect the fees for the transaction. It's just how defi works.
Banks work similarly, with firms using deposited money in the stock market, generating revenue for the bank.
You know what they're doing. You deposit for the security and insurance a bank provides. For crypto, the yield and gains the pools provide.
For this... ?
Unless they're more open, unless they're really a charity and this isn't a front, I have my doubts on the longevity of this project. Someone will always want theirs, and if it isn't at the beginning, it will just corrupt later.
It is very simple what they claim to do with your money: Average out the contributions and pay it back to its members. I would agree that when implemented you would need some transparency to show that the company isn't taking more the agreed upon amount. As far as their ownership they claim to be organizing to prevent exploitative capital.
From the about page.
A New Kind of Company for a New Kind of Economy As we solidify our corporate structure, we'll be adopting a steward-ownership model in which profits serve the mission of the company and protect it from extractive-capital. With legal safeguards built into the company's DNA, investors are fairly compensated with capped returns while decisions remain in the hands of a core, purpose-driven team along with all Comingle members.
Well yeah, it's extremely probable what they claim. It's right there. I'm not discussing claims, I'm discussing the reality. They will need to prove themselves regardless of claims.
