Green Pastures

Pobby

We are moving shortly to a shared home with a relative and will be selling ours or renting. I am quite keen to rent to the council for the extra security they give however my wife is not so sure as we will be 200 miles away .

By chance I stumbled on this. http://greenpastures.net/. Clearly a great cause and is offering up to a 5% return.

colsten

Another unregulated investment 'opportunity'. Thanks, I'll pass on that.

G_M

Naive? Or spam?

doe808

Unregulated. Pass.

jimjames

Pobby wrote: »

We are moving shortly to a shared home with a relative and will be selling ours or renting. I am quite keen to rent to the council for the extra security they give however my wife is not so sure as we will be 200 miles away .

By chance I stumbled on this. http://greenpastures.net/. Clearly a great cause and is offering up to a 5% return.

As above it's unregulated.
More importantly how does it tie in to you renting your house out? They appear to be offering the opportunity for you to invest not actually rent your house for you?

Why would you accept an unregulated investment for 5% when you can get a guaranteed amount for that or even use a regulated investment where your capital may vary but at least you know the money is protected.

Malthusian

If you want a return of 5% and to help the homeless, then invest in a diversified portfolio of equities and other long-term investments and give any surplus returns over 5%pa to charity. Both you and the charity will be a lot better off and with a hell of a lot less risk.

grey_gym_sock

Malthusian wrote: »

If you want a return of 5% and to help the homeless, then invest in a diversified portfolio of equities and other long-term investments and give any surplus returns over 5%pa to charity. Both you and the charity will be a lot better off and with a hell of a lot less risk.

will equities even give a return higher than 5%? they might, but we really don't know. so that approach may or may not work out. and putting everything in equities doesn't make sense for most ppl, anyway.

making investments which will have positive social effects is a difficult area. it all depends what is positive in your opinion. but there is a danger of ending up very restricted in what you can invest in; and a poorly diversified portfolio is riskier.

just in case the OP was considering selling their house and putting all the proceeds in this investment - then definitely don't do that - that would be far too much concentrated risk in 1 very lightly-regulated investment. for a very small part of the proceeds of selling the house (if you do decide to sell it), it's not totally out of the question, but there are significant risks in putting money in such a small organization, and 5% return is not very high given the level of risk.

as a comparison: there are a few tradable bonds, listed on the london stock exchange, issued by somewhat larger social housing providers. they typically pay about 4.x%, so a bit less. but then there is a bit more regulation of them, so a bit less risk.

if you're planning to invest a large sum of money (e.g. from a house sale), then diversity is vital. that means not risking more than a small % with any 1 organization, or even to any 1 sector (e.g. social housing providers). the only exceptions to that are for FSCS-protected deposits with banks and building societies (i.e. the first £75k per institution, or in some cases more), or putting money with NS&I (since that's government-backed).