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.
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.