Invest with the Crowd


“We Rise by helping others.”

Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective efforts of friends, family, customers, and individual investors.

It is nothing new, we have done it even before the rise of the internet, but because of the internet and social media, it has become much more easy and accessible not just for others to raise funds, but also to share it.

Community investing can be a great way to get involved in helping others while growing your funds by investing your money or by lending it.

Crowd-Helping
If you want to only help without thinking about returns then non-profits like kiva.org may be for you! You can lend for as little as USD25.00 to entrepreneurs across the world!

Lending money is nothing new, and we all know that it can be very profitable. I’ve done a lot of micro-crowd lending in the past with my friends and lent to our combined circle of friends aggressively and got an average simple interest return of about 54% within the year. The risk for this is high and there are times when someone didn’t pay and it got really stressful and some burnt-bridges.

Crowd-Lending
Another is through legitimate community investing via community banks, community credit unions, community loan funds, and micro-enterprise lenders (or also cooperatives); an online alternative can be the P2P (Peer-to-peer) lending. The average return ranges from 5-9% depending on the platform. In the U.S., the well-known ones are Lending Club, Funding and Prosper. The whole market is still new.

Crowd-Investing
As mentioned earlier, there’s a Real Estate version for this too. However, the real estate crowdfunding space is still fairly new & unfolding but it could be a massive market in the future. Some of these focus on direct investments in real estate, others buy mortgages, R.E. Loans, single properties, commercial and Private R.E. ETFs. No lazy investments here.

Investment Clubs is also another way to crowd-invest. These groups pool their funds and use it to engage in equity or stock investments. It’s a great way to not only learn from co-investors but also earn!

Crowd-Farming
Instead of approaching banks, small-local farmers can now raise funds while getting loyal fans online!

You remember those farming games you used to play? It’s similar to that but you are putting in some capital and you don’t have to do the farming yourself. You sit back, get updates and collect.

This can be done by having stake on a particular farm produce like an orange tree or livestock like cattle/cow/pigs.

You put in money to meet a farmer’s goal, let’s say raising pigs or piglets. After 90 days, the farmer can sell those livestock and you will also get a cut of the profits plus your original invested amount. Now the period may vary as pigs, cows, fruits and trees have different growth rates, so you have to decide how long you will be invested – short term? Midterm? Long-term?

One of my teen-hood dreams is to one day have a farm of my own. I am aware that farms require land and a lot of capital and maintenance, but through this crowd-farming, I get to partial achieve that teen dream of mine.

In the Philippines, we have Cropital. The Spark Project and other micro-crowd-funding locally. You can also find farm-based campaigns in Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Barnraiser, GoFundMe and Kiva.

“Alone we can do a little, but together we can do so much more!”

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Invest with the Crowd Invest with the Crowd Reviewed by Vernon Joseph Go on Saturday, March 31, 2018 Rating: 5

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