foodstuff

Seppo and I had another car discussion *shock* about the hurricane and emergency supplies. We were trying to figure out (without looking anything up, as we were in the car at the time) what types of food you’d try to acquire if you wanted to do only the most mininal stocking (or looting, as circumstances may call for), aside from water.

I said I’d go for beef jerky, nuts, canned tuna, and shelf-stable boxed tofu, maybe a couple of Power Bars or other food bars.

What would you get? *scurries off to google for emergency food supplies*

ETA: Looks like beef jerky is a bad idea because it is very salty and would require you to drink a lot more water than usual.

money clubs? credit unions?

I am not sure how to refer to the concept of “gae”. It’s a money club that Korean (and Korean immigrant) communities join. They serve as fast personal loans and/or high interest savings, depending on where you are on the chain.

I was thinking about this on the drive in to work this morning, because I was trying to remember how it was that my parents were able to start up various businesses in the US. They certainly didn’t have the kind of credit that would get them a good loan from a bank. I will give a really simplified example of how a gae works. In real life, it is more complicated.

Let’s say you have 12 families. Usually, the gae are run by the women heads of the families. The 12 families will agree to go in for — let’s say something like — $500 as the base cost per month, with something like $25 as the “interest”. They will meet every month and, depending on the size of the group going into the pool, they might have a small dinner or a large banquet, sponsored by the person who is getting the pool that month.

The 12 families are culled from extended family, friends, business partners, church contacts, etc. of the women organizing the pool. They organize a lottery/voting system to determine the order in which the families will get the pool of money. If a family needs money right away to pay for a down payment on a car or pay up a child’s tuition or whatever, they might want to be near the beginning of the pool distribution. If they don’t need the money right away but want to earn a high interest off their investment, they will opt to be in the later end of the pool.

All the people who have not yet received money from the pool on any given month will pay the base amount. The people who have already received money will throw in $500 + $25 each month after they’ve received. So the first person receiving the money will get $500 x 11 = $5,500. The second person will receive $5525. The last person will receive $5,775 on their $5,500 investment for the year, which is comes out to 5% overall interest rate for the year, and more, if you calculate by using a daily (or any other periodic) average balance which is more accurate since they did not throw in the whole chunk one full year ago. The interest rate that the first receiver pays for the “loan” is fairly low too (a similar calculation that I am too lazy to do), compared to what they would pay on a bank loan, if they were able to get one at all.

I am not sure actually if the interest is on a sliding scale or if it’s a fixed amount. My mom used to go in on a few at a time, some that met only every other month, some that met every month for very small amounts (but had lots of families, so it would go on for like 2 years or more). The best is to go on a low cost one that has a lot of people so that you get a lot of cash in a bundle, but you don’t have to put up a lot at a time. The problem with big groups is that you start to have more and more people that you don’t have a first degree relationship with, so there is greater risk of someone crapping out and leaving with the money when they get it. That is why it is important who you go into this with.

Being immigrants, we didn’t end up in any random city; we moved to where we had family (our sponsor was our uncle, my dad’s brother) and friends. So we already had a built-in network, albeit a very small one, of trusted people who would get us into a gae or introduce us to people for jobs.

As every thought I have now turns to the hurricane, I think about the displaced people and the fact that so many of them have no network of the kind that my family had. We had only $75 as our entire family assets when we moved here, but we had a lot going for us, which is why I am able to be what I am today. I can’t imagine the kinds of obstacles we would have had had we not had a family and community to rely on to vouch for us. How will they get jobs or apartments? It’s hard to get an apartment without proof of current and established income and an employment history. It’s hard to get a job without a permanent address. It’s a sad Catch-22 situation.