Seems someone is applying the crowd funding model to paying off the arrears of home owners in negative equity. The website is all very unclear at the moment but the jist seems to be that homeowners will have to offer some sort of reward to those people who are willing to donate to their ‘project’ , i.e. paying off their mortgage arrears.
It all seems a bit bizarre to me, on their website here they list an example where a yoga teacher will offer yoga lessons online in return for someone paying off his mortgage. restartireland.com/projects
Anyway for those of us who don’t have bubble time mortgages around our necks and feel as if we are missing out I suppose it is a good way to feel part of that.
The rest of us can just stand back and scratch our heads. Like I can understand the crowd funding model for getting prototypes of useful devices built or interesting arts projects launched. But all those things engage people, employ them and produce an end product everyone can share and talk about. In this effort all that will happen is the arrears will be paid off a bubble time mortgage to help into keeping a banks balance sheet look better, the same banks we have already bailed out.
Yes, you go on barely scraping together the repayments from the money I give you whilst I sit here renting for the rest of my natural life…actually I think the yoga will be good for my blood pressure which seems to be inexplicably high…
It is not entirely clear from the website how it works. They use fluffy words like ‘rewards’ rather than get straight to the point and outlining the details of a concrete example. Regardless it seems to me that the people donating get nothing of much tangible benefit from it (except maybe an online yoga class that they didn’t want to begin with). I suppose they do get the feeling that they’ve helped someone in need but they could have done that by donating to the SVDeP or some other housing and poverty related charity
It is all a bit bizarre and I’d love to know who is behind it. Social Enterprenoooorship I believe it is called. Sounds like a cack handed way of begging to me but there you go
I’ll look these guys up on monday, but I’m sure there’s going to be some sort of fee that they charge for it. Oh and they “hold” the pledges. This has scam written all over it.
Assuming those who had the good sense to leave the country and those who have already been shaken down for an expensive holiday don’t partake, that leaves the 170,000 to help themselves at the rate of six per month. The lucky people at the end of the list would have their mortgages paid for them after 2,361 years, assuming the far future descendants of the first to be helped continue to pay their tenner a month instead of saying “I’m alright Jack”. In the interests of fairness, should they not all just pay a tenner a month toward their own mortgage, so that everyone is paid off over the next two and a bit millennia?
I’m not sure if this thing qualifies as tax evasion, a lottery, or a Ponzi scheme, but I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of sh1t that it’ll either end badly or, more likely, be totally ignored. (Although you never can tell, such is the level of financial literacy in Ireland).
So good in fact, I think the government should take it over. They should take money off the wages of all workers earning over a threshold, directly from their pay. Then some of the money could be given to the banks who can use it to write-off the debt of some deserving cases. To root out the shams from the deserving cases the bank credit control departments should assess every case individually. Then with the excess money collected the government could provide schools, hospitals etc
So, restart Ireland now limited has two directors, one Volkan Koc, an engineer from Turkey and David Dennis, a builder from Inchicore. It was registered in February 2013 so has no accounts or anything up yet.
