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.
The only thing I got from the newsletter was a link to the website. I posted my thoughts in the title and post contents.
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 **
I downvoted you because it’s disingenuous to present “as guaranteed as a company can be” with “guaranteed”
There’s no outside mechanism to protect the customers from this company. That’s not guaranteed.
Of course there is an outside mechanism, it is
- a. the government: if they lie about what they provide you can sue them like you can any other business that defrauds you.
- b. you can always just stop letting them access your account if you don’t trust them.
Nothing is fully guaranteed. Society as we know it could easily collapse in our lifetime. Ultimately it will likely be a less conditional income than a job where you can be fired at any time for literally no reason. I see a guarantee as a promise essentially. It is only as trustworthy as the party guarantying it.
So you individually sue them after they fail to make good on their claims.
You should be able to see why this puts their customers in a compromising position
So you individually sue them after they fail to make good on their claims.
Yes or as I stated earlier and is far more common, you can stop letting them have access to your financial account.
No, I really can’t see why that is a comprising position. This is how every business in the US operates. If a company defrauds you have to take it up with the company, (not likely to work if they are acting in bad faith), your financial instution or in a court individually or via a class action. How does this put you in any more of a compromising position than if you your internet stops working and continues to bill you for it?
The worst that could happen is you have to get your bank or credit card to stop paying them because they don’t live up to their end of the deal. While there is risk involved with giving companies access to withdraw from your bank account, there are also safeguards built into the system that can be used. All banks and credit card companies have ways to mitigate fraudulent billing. That is in addition to the option you always have of taking them to court.
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.
It is as guaranteed as a company can provide. IF they operate honestly, I see no reason they would go bankrupt. I would assume the users would have recourse via small claims court or possibly other courts if they fail to provide what they agree to provide.
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.
Just to clarify, the 3% is for the business expenses.
One of the FAQs say that this will decrease if the pool grows larger and 3% becomes too much for operational cost.
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.
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.
Nice try tech bro. “Oh, we got hacked, whoopsie.”
Well excuse me for thinking the world can be anything outside the mainstream. No need for personal attacks.
I don’t think you were the tech bro in his comment, the person behind Comingle was.
Are you involved in this company? If not, wasn’t aimed at you.
Nice try tech bro. “Oh, we got hacked, whoopsie.”
That isn’t the meaning your post conveys. When you reply to my post name calling, someone unnamed, it is only natural to assume you are referring to me.
I already said I am not involved with it.
I like the concept. I’m highly concerned by the fact that they only seem to have gotten to the “we can move around monopoly money” stage and are asking $75,000 via Indiegogo to do all the “user verification and fraud detection” stuff. Do I trust this startup to have all my bank and credit report info? (And sure, they say they “may” need a soft credit pull, but let’s be realistic - to prevent people from connecting just one dummy checking account and pretending they have no income, Comingle’s gonna have to pull everyone’s credit and link all the bank accounts.)
They are going to have to gatekeep who can join, to balance out the givers and takers. Otherwise if a flood of takers join first, the givers are never going to join up.
Probably some form of waiting list, with their back account monitoring in place.
11.6% of US is below the poverty line. They said anyone up to 200% above poverty line should never give, and only get a net benefit from this program.
That’s ball park 60 million people who have absolutely 100% positive incentives to join, no down side. So any “givers” would get totally drowned out if they ever needed to take a slice of the pie, so they are going to have to come up with some average income goal, segment groups, or give preference to givers, or something.
Not saying it wont work, but the population rush for free money may be hard to manage
I’ll have to research this. Interesting idea.
There’s an FAQ on the website you can checkout.
There is not a big incentive for people to join if they earn above average.
What I would like to see is an internal job market. Let everybody help everybody else to increase their income.
With job suggestions, it pays off to pay 7% when you for example improve your income by 30%.
The ultra wealthy have an enormous incentive to combat runaway gini coefficients (see capital South African capital flight) as at a certain point one less Scrooge McDuck money pile is well worth the price of 20 fewer homeless people on your commute and various tech b/millionaires have gone so far as finding various UBI programs via a Y Combinator pilot program
https://www.inc.com/kaitlyn-wang/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musk-universal-basic-income.html
Investing some money in UBI experiments just makes them look good. What’s their enormous incentive to fully introduce it? It’s cheaper to commute by helicopter or relocate the headquarter. Homelessness is a problem for the middle class.
I beleave that the middle class has to finance UBI on their own. This company already provides the basic infrastructure. If that’s not a good deal then the deal has to be improved.
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.
So, is this non-profit or for profit entity ?
Is this Scott Santens’ new thing?
He is an advisor to it according to their website.
