Vocabulary
A glossary of pooled money
The same words carry different meanings in different traditions. These are the senses used across this site.
- Advance
- In a building society, the sum paid to a member to buy or build a house, repaid alongside the continuing subscription.
- Arrears
- Subscriptions due and unpaid. Rule books define how long arrears may run before benefit is suspended and before membership lapses.
- Benefit scale
- A written schedule setting how much is paid, for how long, and at what reducing rates, so that individual claims need not be argued case by case.
- Box club
- A small local fund keeping its money in a locked chest, usually paying sickness and funeral benefit to a membership drawn from one trade or one neighbourhood.
- Call
- A demand on members for a contribution after a loss has occurred, as distinct from a premium collected before it.
- Common bond
- The defined connection — place, trade, employer, congregation — that determines who may join a cooperative credit society, and which supplies the information the society lends on.
- Dividend on purchases
- A cooperative store's surplus returned to members in proportion to what each spent, rather than to capital held.
- Indivisible reserve
- A fund's accumulated surplus that members cannot distribute among themselves, held permanently as the society's own capital.
- Mutual
- An organisation owned by the people who use it, so that surplus returns to members rather than to separate shareholders.
- Permanent society
- A building society with no fixed end date, accepting savings from members who are not borrowers, and therefore requiring reserves.
- Rotating savings circle
- A fixed group contributing a fixed amount each round, the whole pot going to one member per round until every member has received once.
- Rule book
- The society's constitution: purpose, subscription, benefits, officers, penalties and the procedure for winding up.
- Share-out
- The distribution of a club's entire fund among its members at an agreed date, after which the club begins again from nothing.
- Subscription
- The fixed periodic payment that maintains membership and entitlement. Not a deposit and, in most societies, not refundable.
- Surety
- A member who undertakes to pay if another member does not, and who therefore has a direct reason to watch how that member is faring.
- Terminating society
- A building society formed to house a fixed group of members and to dissolve once the last of them has been advanced.
- Valuation
- A periodic comparison of the present value of a fund's promises with the present value of its expected income, which is how a fund discovers whether its subscription is enough.