This weekend will mark the 25th anniversary of the television show Friends. Fans are recounting their favorite episodes and reminiscing about the ups and downs of the interactions that defined friendship in the early 2000’s. They were great friends but would they make great business partners?
Like most friendships, the show centered around celebrations of individual milestones - marriages, children, career accomplishments. But what would happen if the friends pooled their collective resources together to invest in their dreams?
The One With the Vacation Rental Property
A few of these iconic episodes see the characters stray from their rent-controlled Greenwich Village apartments and head to Phoebe’s friend’s beach house. While this time they were able to stay rent-free, making this a regular occurrence while sustaining their city-dwelling lifestyle would leave the group having another rental cost without anything but memories to show for it.
Instead, what if the group came together to purchase the beach front hideaway together? Not only would they have a place to escape from the city together without fears of the property being filled with sand, but this investment could provide secondary income as a rental investment of their own.
According to an article on Wealthfront, “The goal is to enjoy all the upsides of owning property in a place where their money can go further while continuing to live in ever-pricier urban hubs.”
Think for a second if Monica, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe collectively saved $400 per month over a four-year period of the show.
$400 x 6 friends X 12 months = $28,800 per year
$28,800 X 4 years = $115,200
“Today, the average vacation rental in the U.S. costs $319,000, has four bedrooms, and earns its owner $36,000,” according to a Curbed report on the shift to vacation rental investments.
Even by New York standards a $115,000 down payment on a vacation home is very significant.
Needless to say, generating this capital as an individual would be near impossible - especially with the chosen career paths of some of the characters (a chef, a struggling actor, a massage therapist, a retail buyer, a paleontologist, and a transponder.) It is the power of the collaborative savings that opens the possibility to transition from friends going their separate ways to friends with a lasting income-generating vacation homer investment together.
The One with the LLC
Protecting these relationships is one reason that many friend groups never move past the talking and dreaming stage. To overcome this, the group investment process must protect the individual finances during the savings time period while mitigating the risk and liability during the investment stage.
TribeVest is the only group investment platform that automates the monthly deposits into individual FDIC savings accounts to avoid Joey having to choose between his sandwich money and his promised investment. And… Monica’s obsessive compulsiveness is put at ease with a cumulative dashboard to monitor the Tribe’s growth.
When it is time to make the investment of your dreams, forming an LLC and opening a business banking account - also part of the TribeVest platform - creates an entity with shared equity that will withstand even Ross’s irrational behavior because “we were on a break.”
The One with the Happy Ending
We celebrate the anniversary of Friends because it reminds us of a shared experience and why friendship is so powerful. It is the ability to harness this combined power of group investing with those we know and trust that allows us to create new shared experiences while securing the future we dream about.
