As you hopefully know by now, a portion of our entire fund is set aside for our readers. We inventively call this the ‘reader’s fund’.
At the beginning of this project, we promised that we were going to set aside 10% of our fund for the readers. And since we made £3,435.26 in our first year, that obviously gave us £343.53 to use for that purpose.
We’d already donated £50 to a very worthy charity earlier in the year (frankly, when a friend feels the effects of cancer, that’s a pretty good cause that we think the readers should back) so this still left us with £293.53 remaining in the kitty.
And if you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that we devised a plan to offer our readers some cold hard cash. Originally, we weren’t sure we’d go down that route, but frankly we didn’t have that many readers (email subscribers) and we thought ‘what the hell, let’s just give it away’.
So we contacted them and then waited for responses. And waited some more.
Of all the people we emailed, we only got one person to actually reply. We did everything we could to get to our non-responders. We gave them ample time to reply, we sent chasing emails, but still there was stony silence. Perhaps they’re bots? Perhaps they don’t check emails? I still can’t figure it out.
Who actually did reply?
We said we’d keep respondees anonymous, and in any case we actually don’t really know anything much about them anyway.
But our mystery reader decided to take the guaranteed £25 PayPal transfer, rather than be swayed by our offer to gamble £50 on red/black at the roulette table. We were interested to see whether people preferred the certainty of a reasonable amount of cash, or the possibility of a much larger amount. Turns out, in our sample of 1, it’s the former.
Was it rational of them to go for the £25? What would you have done and why – let us know in the comments below?
Intrigued to know more about where our money was going we asked (without any obligations) if they would pen us a few words on their financial strategy and what they would do with the cash. Here’s the response we got:
I am at the building foundations stage of my finances. I am currently looking to save up an emergency fund, to cover unexpected costs that might arise. I think six months of wages in an easy access account would be sufficient. I then intend to buy my first home, which will another key stage in my financial journey.
I then intend to invest in different real assets such as funds, shares, gold as well as rental properties and not hold too much cash.
I am interested in FIRE but a lot of online content is not UK- specific. I think I will always work but I would like my everyday costs covered by passive income. This would allow me to reduce my work hours or take up another job that would free up time so I could gain qualifications for a career change. I would really like to work in a front line healthcare role in the NHS.
A side hustle I am looking forward to doing is day trading stocks. I have read the books so it is a question of getting a starter fund in place and then finding the time.
Although the money we’ve given the above person is fairly trivial in the scheme of what they need to save up to accomplish many of the goals they’ve set, we’re super happy to see this cash having gone to use in these plans.
The spirit of what they’re up to and want to achieve is totally compatible with what we’re trying to do ourselves on this site. It would be lovely to get an update somewhere down the line about how they’re getting on. Best of luck to you!
What did we decide to do with the rest of the cash?
We debated this one for a while. What do you do when you’ve tried to give away money but found nobody who wants it?
Do you just go out and start giving it to random strangers. No, that wasn’t the point of our idea. We want to use it for people who actually engage with us.
Do we donate more to charity, as we have already done? This was one we really thought hard about. We considered splitting the remaining pot three ways and then each donating our third to a charity that was close to us. But we had concerns that this approach didn’t involve the readers enough.
So we also considered getting the readers (or our twitter followers) to vote on a charity. But to be honest, the level of engagement didn’t seem to be there to make this really something that felt like it would captivate people.
So we took the radical move to not spend it altogether!
That might seem like a cop-out. And if you’re cynical – and we recognize you’re fully entitled to that view – you might claim we never intended to spend it in the first place. But if that was the case, we wouldn’t have gone to quite so much trouble with this whole thing. It shouldn’t be this hard for us to give away money!
Eventually we thought: if we can’t find enough readers to give money to, then let’s hang onto it. We’ll re-invest it in our plans and hopefully multiply it further so that in future we have even more to give away (fingers crossed that next year it’s easier for us!)
What are the plans for next year?
Since we gave away the cash, our email subscriber list has doubled. This might be a coincidence, but perhaps word has spread.
So there will be people wanting to know what we’re going to do with the reader fund in another year.
Let’s start with one certainty. There will be a reader fund again. It will be 10% of the increase in the value of the fund over the next year.
How we use it is going to be down to our discretion again – exactly as we said from the very start in this post. We might choose to give out cash again, but we might not (especially if we have loads of readers and this becomes administratively difficult). Charity donations and other ideas are absolutely on the table.
All we can say is we’re going to try to use it for you in a way that we think works well for the collective readership. We’ll know more by the time we get to the point of giving it away in 2020. We’re also open to sensible suggestions from you – feel free to chip in with comments below. The more you let us know your thoughts, the more we’ll know the best way to use it.
Re-branding the Reader’s Fund?
As we said above, it shouldn’t be so staggeringly difficult to give away cash. Maybe people thought we were joking this year, but hopefully we’ve proved we’re deadly serious.
One thought that ran through my head is to call this a ‘shareholder fund’. That might make it sound a bit more financially appealing to the savvy readership we’ve got.
‘Shareholders’ would still be those people who are email subscribers, but we could definitely look at making the email list a bit more interactive (at the moment you just get new post notifications through WordPress’s automated system). Perhaps we’ll do quarterly email bulletins that are a bit more tailored instead.
It’s one that we’ll have to discuss between the three of us. Again though, it’s one that we’d love to know your thoughts on in the comments below.