Marimbas Pay For College
Have you ever had the feeling that maybe we are stuck in doing things the old way? That possibly a new perspective or a new way of looking at things might lead to a major change in your life. The thought that there is another way to do things.
I have an acquaintance that shocked me a few weeks back when he told me he was in the marimba rental business. The only reason that I even knew what a marimba is was that I had recently seen a CBS Sunday Morning segment (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-marimbas-sing/) on the problem of rosewood trees becoming endangered and therefore not having enough rosewood to build marimbas. For those of you who are not orchestra aficionados, a marimba is somewhat like a giant xylophone.
Here in Texas, when kids enter middle school, they have to choose a fine art course of the orchestra, choir, or band. This leads many parents scrambling to find a marimba for their student to do the required practice at home. This is the situation that Cassidy found himself in when his son entered middle school and chose orchestra. He quickly found that there was only one company in the Dallas, Fort Worth Metroplex that rented or sold marimbas. Unlike most parents that would have just thrown up their hands and complained about the situation Cassidy thought about the same problem but through a different lens.
He saw this as a business opportunity to fix a problem in the market. He started to buy marimbas off of Craigs List or wherever he could find them. Rather than set up a payment plan to own the marimba which most kids may never touch after their orchestra class is over, Cassidy rents them on a monthly basis. This monthly payment is a lower monthly payment than it would cost the parent to make monthly payments to own something they did not want to buy in the first place. Cassidy has turned renting marimbas into a nice little business that creates a great passive income stream that he is now using to help put his son through college.
The marimba business started because he looked at the same problem that middle school parents had been dealing with for years in a different way. Why I am I taking the time to tell you about a local marimba business? The answer is we need to look at how we invest our money differently.
Investing should be fun and exciting. You should be excited about the companies that you own and what impact your investment dollars are having. However, what we currently have is an investing public who is disinterested and disconnected from the companies they own. The direct link of stock ownership has been lost because investments are packaged in mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF) that few take the time to learn what is inside the fund.
What if there was a different way to look at the same problem but form a different perspective? That is part of what I believe to be exciting about Faith-Based investing. We can look at the same old mundane world of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and inject life into the conversation. When was last time you were with friends at a back-yard BBQ or the office water cooler and heard about this great fund or stock investment they had?
Not just from an investment return perspective but for some of the innovative things that the company was involved in creating. Where you have a portfolio that aligns with your values, and you don’t have to worry that you are unknowingly supporting causes that do not align with your values.
To me, this is an exciting opportunity, and all it takes is looking at something familiar and mundane from a different point of view. Rather than being upset that you have to buy a marimba for your 12-year-old, you could instead, turn it into a business that funds that same 12-year old’s college education. Rather than throwing your hands up and saying its too hard or what does it matter what I own in my investment accounts. You could turn into an opportunity to engage and get excited about what you own and the impact those dollars can have. I will leave you with the idea of investing for impact and the question of what’s in your portfolio?