Traditional finance is uninspiring: it’s possible to buy a bond or CD (“certificate of deposit”) that pays out a certain amount of interest every year. But there is no investment that will literally buy you a sandwich or coffee every day—until now, that is!

Background:

A large class of investments work as follows: you, the investor, lend a chunk of money to a borrower, who then pays it back (hopefully) over time with a bit of extra interest.

Example: a city issues a $1200 bond that pays $350/year for four years (total: $1400, unless the city goes bankrupt: https://www.google.com/search?q=cities+that+went+bankrupt.)

The Issue:

Strangely, nearly all investments pay the lender back in a currency. But this is boring: it’s usually more exciting to receive a tangible object than to see some highly abstract bank account number be incremented.

Proposal:

Let’s use the $1200 city bond example from above: if a person bought it, they’d get paid about 7 dollars per week. Not very exciting!

But what if, instead, the bond was paid back as follows (Fig. 1):

Monday: free donut
Wednesday: free coffee
Friday: free AA battery or AAA battery, of the investor’s choosing.

This would be a much more exciting investment!

Fig. 1: The “normal” investment pays out as shown in the “A” (black) flowchart (top). Very uninspiring. The new “tangible” investment pays out in random goods (here, a sandwich, coffee, paper clip, AA battery, and mint candy).

Conclusion:

Look for this new type of investment to catch on!

PROS: Makes investment fun and interesting!

CONS: It’s possible that this type of investment would not be suitable for institutions; would a city’s pension fund be capable of handling an investment that paid out 8500 kebabs per day? Unlikely.