Scottish news - "menage mum". Why would you pay £17k into a menage?!

[AgentProvocateur]

Here is the story.

A menage is a scheme whereby everyone pays in an amount every week or month and takes turns at getting the whole amount - eg, 12 colleagues pay £50 a month, and each month one person gets £600.

This woman has been running a menage in one of the poorest parts of Glasgow, and she's done a runner with £100,000. (Allegedly). But some people were due thousands and thousands (which means they must have paid in thousands and thousands).

If you had that amount of money, why on earth would you not out it somewhere safer, where you would get interest, like a credit union or bank?

The amounts of money swishing around here are in this story are mindboggling.

Strange.

I have never heard of a menage. What on earth is the point of it? Why wouldn't one just put the money in a bank account and earn some interest?

How extraordinary.

I thought that was just like a pyramid scheme

And I thought a menage was a thing where two women and one men had sex

V confused now.

People where I used to work organised one. I couldn't see the point. Rather than seeing it as a (dodgey) saving scheme with no interest, they saw it as a loan with no interest iyswim.

menage can indicate husbandry or social group as well as menage a trois; perhaps the paper can't call it a pyramid scheme or scam, it prolly wasn't regisitered with the powers-that-be as a credit-uinion type of organisation

anyway, folk have been fleeced

another thought - perhaps the cash input may not always have been legit hence not in banks/CUs because of laundering-type checks?

how can they do a runner with more than that months pay in? and wouldn't the others who hadn't had a lump sum yet just continue (but be getting, say the total of 11 £50s instead of 12 £50s)

confused

Only clicked to see what 'menage' was - (apart from a trois).

I can see how it'd be good if you were person #2 on the list - an interest-free loan. Less giid if you are person #14 as it's just an interest-free savings account.

Sounds dopey anyway. Unsafe. I wouldn't do that even with friends - sounds like a way to make them not be your friends any more - let alone strangers.

It's pronounced menodge (to rhyme with lodge) and if someone is useless at organising, you'd often say "He couldn't run a menage" - it's the equivalent of "couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery".

Anyway, oneortwo that's what I can't understand. Unless she was running several, and had £100,000 passing through her hands every week/month.

Menages were the only way working class people could access a large sum of money in the early 20th century, banks wouldn't let you open an account with tuppence (literally)and they certainly wouldn't lend you it.

Social pressures meant people always paid up each week and stuck to it, especially as it used by done street by street, etc.

In some areas, people looked out for others by arranging a menage and ensuring that the neighbour facing a financial crisis was the one who got drawn the first or second time.

I suppose people for whom this was a part of their culture would still do it, I imagine there's probably some sort of paperwork that make people feel legally protected to an extent (even if they're probably not). Probably easier to save like this if you're not good at putting money away on payday or if you can't trust yourself not to touch it.

I've never heard of this phenomenon. You really do learn something new every day...

I've heard of pardners (sp?) which is the West Indian equivalent.

Credit used to be very difficult to obtain, so people found other ways of earning money.

It was very popular among the women in the village in Nigeria where I lived. A way of saving for people with no access to safe banking facilities and no chance of your hubbie nicking your savings cause if he did he'd face the wrath of 30 furious women, not 1.

I grew up in Glasgow and they were commonplace. I remember my mum paying into them. Like others have said, it gives people early access to a lump of money which they wouldn't be able to get otherwise (unless of course you're last on the list).