I am going to begin tracking the pledges for the mutual fund by state; I will use this blog entry and simply keep updating this one entry as time passes. I'll post a link to this post on the right margin of the blog under "Track My Progress". The reason we need to keep track of investment pledged by state is (warning: boring technical mutual fund mumbo jumbo ahead) every state has its own rules/regulations and fees. So each state has it's own paperwork to deal with (this is how we keep a service economy going, as opposed to a nice national standard which would simplify life).
Long story short, to make it worthwhile to pay the annual fees (which vary in nature and amount in each state) for any 1 state, it will require about $40-$45K invested from that state to pay for the annual fee. For this reason many smaller funds, are only registered in a limited amount of states - obviously the end goal is to register in all 50 states as we scale up, launch and reach year 1 or 2. So while we are making incredible progress on raising pledges (Progress Towards Raising $7M) at nearly $1.8M as of this morning, we still will need a certain amount to make any 1 state eligible.
Since we will have new readers joining constantly, I'll keep this tally available on the blog and categorize the states under one of four categories as shown below. As more pledges come in, I'll move states to the appropriate category
Note: If "Jpassana", "Jimidean", or Ceferino are still around - I need to know your location; please contact me
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Category A: Enough funds to register States (12 states)
AR, CA, FL, GA, ID, IL, MI, NY, NJ, SC, TX, WA
[Note: Need to confirm ID, SC since 1 large investor in each is involved. FL is the only state that has no fee so although I have no investors there yet, I'm including it]
Category B: About halfway to $40K+ threshold States (6 states)
AZ, CT, KS, MD, NE, TN
Category C: $10K or less States (9 states)
LA, MA, MN, NC, NH, OR, OH, PA, WI
Category D: No investors yet (23 states)
Everyone else
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As always if you are interested you can post a comment direct on the blog, or email me (my email address is in the right margin of the blog) - at current run rate we can move our timetable up considerably and potentially could be live by spring 2009 when we are on pace to hit $4M pledged.
