Background:

Imagine the following situation: Person A has a high-paying job, but their cousin, Cousin B, has a badly-paying university lecturer job. Cousin B’s home’s roof starts leaking, and as a result of having to pay for repairs, Cousin B will no longer be able to afford to visit family for the holidays.

The roof repair cost is trivial to Person A, but is a major expenditure for Cousin B.

The Issue:

One might say that the “correct” solution would be for Person A to pay the repair bill, but the actual logistics of this can get complicated. In particular, people don’t usually like to feel indebted to their friends / family.

Loans are even more complicated: one might say “ah, Person A can loan money without any expectation of it being paid back,” but now Cousin B is going to feel extremely awkward about the situation (even if Person A completely forgets about it).

This situation is even more complicated for non-relatives: imagine paying a major bill for a friend or coworker. It could work, but it could also add layer of awkwardness and/or indebtedness to future social interactions. Even if all concerned parties are extremely chill about it, there’s a change in the implicit power dynamic between the two individuals if one of them is funding the other.

Without remaking society entirely, how can we solve this issue?

Proposal:

Consider: if Cousin B got some sort of unexpected financial windfall—like a small lottery winning, a tax refund, or proceeds from a class action settlement—this would solve the car-repair problem in a manner totally free of any guilt or social-interaction weirdness!

So the proposal is simple: a company that sends real amounts of money for fake (but plausible-sounding) reasons. So Person A could use this “Fake Funding” company as an intermediary to send money to their cousin, without the cousin ever knowing.

Some possible reasons for funding that might pass scrutiny:

• A check from a class action settlement. No one ever reads these in detail, so it could be something like “you have received $892.45 as a result of The People of Nevada vs. Amalgamated Carburetor Inc.” (Example in Figure 1.)
• A “tax” refund, with minimal details: “2022 Tax Year Adjustment: General Account Refund: $1,140.25.” What does that mean? Who knows! And if the check clears, who cares!
• Any other bureaucratic-sounding thing that a person wouldn’t look into too much: car insurance refunds, medical insurance price adjustment, compensation for a recalled product, etc. Something that sounds so boring that a person would instantly forget about it as soon as they had deposited the check.
• It would probably not be a good idea to have the reason be some sort of fake inheritance, as that will instantly set off alarm bells, since that’s such a common avenue for scams (e.g. “Your distant relative, the ‘South American Ambassador to Africa,’ has has died and left you $45,000,442. We’ll just need a $1000.00 processing fee”).

Conclusion:

This sounds like a service that could probably be accomplished without the existence of a specialized company. Maybe this is even already a service offered somewhere? Or it might be a situation where the first step is ”hire a lawyer and spend $10,000 dollars on legal fees” in order to anonymously send $200.

PROS: Could allow people to help each other out without causing social weirdness!

CONS: Might be hard to make this system legal according to current tax law, since there are a bunch of highly mysterious rules and regulations about transferring money, gifts, gift tax, etc. etc.