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flexagonDoes anyone remember back when I was talking about microloans (friends-only link)? Well, I did do some research and found a few funds that are fronts for microloan-based investments, but I never found anything that let me be more personally involved, and I never bothered to invest.
Enter a post on sowhatcanido at blogspot that told me about Kiva.org. Unbelievable... it's EXACTLY what I was looking for. It lets you, as an individual person, choose the micro-businesses you would like to micro-support (and these are masons, shoe sellers, fishmongers, haircutters) even if you only have $25. You can see pictures of the people. When a loan is fully funded the entrepreneur gets the money, and over the next few months the lenders get emails on how the businesses are doing. After the loan is paid off in full (and while this is not guaranteed, repayment rates are extremely high), the money is returned to the lenders, who may withdraw the money or re-invest. Loans are mostly for less than a thousand dollars total.
I'll mention the one downside now: these are no-interest loans as far as the lender is concerned. However, in my opinion the power of choosing who you're supporting, and actually hearing about how they're doing as time goes on, makes up for that. I am looking right now at a woman in Honduras who wants to buy more stock for her tiny grocery store and still needs $200. Yeah! Why not?
A CNNMoney article on Kiva
I've been interested in this sort of thing for what feels like ages now. It may come as a surprise to hear me say this since you all know how much I hate being in debt, but I think loans are wonderful. Money (like water) is most powerful when it's swishing around, and loans are a way to swish money between those who'd rather have it now and those who would rather have it later because, like me, their imaginations are failing them for now. Without loans I'd never have gotten the education I did. And being on the other side of loans like this is a pretty cheap way to potentially do a lot of good. Assuming you get your money back, all it costs is the interest you would have gotten... and, although interest matters when it comes to retirement savings, it's not that much if you think of it as a charitable contribution. And your bank is giving you crap for interest rates anyway. :)
I want to keep the focus on Kiva, but this has made me think again about some things I've thought about before. Namely, what if I do overcome my selfish and clingy nature and give away some excess money -- what the hell should I do with it? There are so many organizations that would like it -- they scare me with all the mail they send me, and if I give them anything they only send more mail asking for more. More, more! It's like a bottomless pit.
Then I have to ask who I would like to support. In general I'm in favor of those who, overall, support themselves or want to. I have a friend who tutors prisoners, and he likes it because it's a self-selecting group of ambitious people who really want to make it in the regular world. Similarly with the microloan thing -- these are people who are very ambitious and have business plans, cute and little though they might be. But then there are children, who can't support themselves in any case. And animals. And MIT, who I did just give some money to (and got a 100% match from Colubrid, yay). And I recently found out about Jump$tart, which aims at educating kids about finance and thus is doing something very dear to my heart.
In Orbital Resonance by John Barnes, the kids sometimes do things in school like pyramid math. In pyramid math your class is broken up into pairs, the pairs are joined into groups of four, and those are joined into groups of eight, etc, until the last group is the whole class. Your final score on the math test is determined 1/2 by your own score, 1/4 by your partner's score, 1/8 by your group-of-four's score, and so on, with the class's score counting for as much as the half-the-room score to make the math work out. Well, I think about this rather often because life is a pyramid game. Most of all, in life, I want myself to to well, be happy, and be prosperous. Second to that, I want my husband to be that way too, and after that my friends and extended family, and after that my neighborhood (prosperous streets are safe streets), and my city and finally my nation (much much better if not ravaged and war-torn). Because of this thinking, I'd probably be even more interested in small-scale local investments than I am in ones halfway around the globe. Sadly, the opportunities just don't seem to be there; even if I wanted to, there's not really a way for me to invest $1000 or whatever in the local bookstore. It seems easier to work harder on just supporting local businesses with my everyday transactions. And so although swishing my money out to Uganda and Bulgaria doesn't feel like the right pyramidlike balance, someone has at least made the chance exist, and I'm leaping at it.
Sheesh... you may have just witnessed the birth of wicked concrete luxury #2. :)
Discuss!!
Enter a post on sowhatcanido at blogspot that told me about Kiva.org. Unbelievable... it's EXACTLY what I was looking for. It lets you, as an individual person, choose the micro-businesses you would like to micro-support (and these are masons, shoe sellers, fishmongers, haircutters) even if you only have $25. You can see pictures of the people. When a loan is fully funded the entrepreneur gets the money, and over the next few months the lenders get emails on how the businesses are doing. After the loan is paid off in full (and while this is not guaranteed, repayment rates are extremely high), the money is returned to the lenders, who may withdraw the money or re-invest. Loans are mostly for less than a thousand dollars total.
I'll mention the one downside now: these are no-interest loans as far as the lender is concerned. However, in my opinion the power of choosing who you're supporting, and actually hearing about how they're doing as time goes on, makes up for that. I am looking right now at a woman in Honduras who wants to buy more stock for her tiny grocery store and still needs $200. Yeah! Why not?
A CNNMoney article on Kiva
I've been interested in this sort of thing for what feels like ages now. It may come as a surprise to hear me say this since you all know how much I hate being in debt, but I think loans are wonderful. Money (like water) is most powerful when it's swishing around, and loans are a way to swish money between those who'd rather have it now and those who would rather have it later because, like me, their imaginations are failing them for now. Without loans I'd never have gotten the education I did. And being on the other side of loans like this is a pretty cheap way to potentially do a lot of good. Assuming you get your money back, all it costs is the interest you would have gotten... and, although interest matters when it comes to retirement savings, it's not that much if you think of it as a charitable contribution. And your bank is giving you crap for interest rates anyway. :)
I want to keep the focus on Kiva, but this has made me think again about some things I've thought about before. Namely, what if I do overcome my selfish and clingy nature and give away some excess money -- what the hell should I do with it? There are so many organizations that would like it -- they scare me with all the mail they send me, and if I give them anything they only send more mail asking for more. More, more! It's like a bottomless pit.
Then I have to ask who I would like to support. In general I'm in favor of those who, overall, support themselves or want to. I have a friend who tutors prisoners, and he likes it because it's a self-selecting group of ambitious people who really want to make it in the regular world. Similarly with the microloan thing -- these are people who are very ambitious and have business plans, cute and little though they might be. But then there are children, who can't support themselves in any case. And animals. And MIT, who I did just give some money to (and got a 100% match from Colubrid, yay). And I recently found out about Jump$tart, which aims at educating kids about finance and thus is doing something very dear to my heart.
In Orbital Resonance by John Barnes, the kids sometimes do things in school like pyramid math. In pyramid math your class is broken up into pairs, the pairs are joined into groups of four, and those are joined into groups of eight, etc, until the last group is the whole class. Your final score on the math test is determined 1/2 by your own score, 1/4 by your partner's score, 1/8 by your group-of-four's score, and so on, with the class's score counting for as much as the half-the-room score to make the math work out. Well, I think about this rather often because life is a pyramid game. Most of all, in life, I want myself to to well, be happy, and be prosperous. Second to that, I want my husband to be that way too, and after that my friends and extended family, and after that my neighborhood (prosperous streets are safe streets), and my city and finally my nation (much much better if not ravaged and war-torn). Because of this thinking, I'd probably be even more interested in small-scale local investments than I am in ones halfway around the globe. Sadly, the opportunities just don't seem to be there; even if I wanted to, there's not really a way for me to invest $1000 or whatever in the local bookstore. It seems easier to work harder on just supporting local businesses with my everyday transactions. And so although swishing my money out to Uganda and Bulgaria doesn't feel like the right pyramidlike balance, someone has at least made the chance exist, and I'm leaping at it.
Sheesh... you may have just witnessed the birth of wicked concrete luxury #2. :)
Discuss!!
no subject
Date: 2006-07-03 11:42 am (UTC)