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 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 **
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
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.
So, is this non-profit or for profit entity ?
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.)
