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.
This company isn’t even listed on crunchbase. No idea who founders are, investors, banks involved.
There needs to be a fuckload more transparency here.
The website shows who their founders and partners are if you look. https://www.comingle.us/about-us As I stated it is not yet launched so there is nothing that needs transparency at the moment. Eventually transparency would be nice once they get started so you know they aren’t misusing their funds.
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.
soo… not UBI
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.
Technically it’s not. If they go bankrupt somehow or defraud their customer base, there’s very little recourse from the users.
Interesting. Tithing 7%, and then getting the average of all the tiths back -3%. Is interesting.
The maximum you can get every year is $16,000. No limit on the maximum you can put in. All deposits into the bank account are tithed. Not sure how they’re going to handle people of multiple bank accounts.
If somebody leaves they can’t come back for 2 years, unless they pay up like they never left.
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.
Since so much of our social safety net is run by states, and since so much is based on poverty numbers, it’s interesting to learn how that poverty threshold was originally calculated
Spoiler alert, it was just made up by some bureaucrat’s personal beliefs about “expected costs” for a “normal family.”
It hasn’t been adjusted for the insanity of today’s expenses, not even counting inflation. In the 60s, they didn’t have the same medical, educational, or transportation costs we do, let alone other stuff like rent and daycare.
It’s literally a meaningless figure that is kept artificially low to limit who is eligible for assistance.
Your link says its based on the cost of food for 3 people in a family at the 1960s . Surely there is nothing else you need in life besides food. /s It didn’t account for anything besides food cost. Not housing, vehicle, or gas cost.
Here’s a good read by about how ineffective the US’s safety net is https://www.scottsantens.com/the-progressive-case-for-replacing-the-welfare-state-with-universal-basic-income/ . TLDR Only 25% of those eligible actually use it.
Side note: this site was unfindable on google even when searching “scott santens welfare progressive” in google. Interesting.
