---
title: "A glossary of pooled money"
url: https://common-wealthfund.org/glossary/
description: "Definitions of the recurring vocabulary of mutual finance as used across this site."
published: 2026-08-10
updated: 2026-08-10
---

# A glossary of pooled money

Published 2026-08-10

Vocabulary

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.

Where a term is contested, the definition here states the sense used on this site.

A word that survives a change of institution rarely survives it intact.