As consumers swiped discounted wafflemakers and flatscreen TVs onto their credit cards last Friday, Swapsity—an online bartering community—marked Buy Nothing Day, Black Friday’s alter-ego, with a primer on bartering.
In U of T’s Sidney Smith Hall, an enthusiastic group of about 100 people gathered for a talk by Shannon Lee Simmons, a financial adviser turned barterer who left her job at an investment firm in 2010 to launch the Barter Babes project. Simmons, 26, says she got the idea for Barter Babes while besieged by calls from rich clients panicked by the downturn. If they were freaking out, she thought, how was everyone else faring? “I started eavesdropping at the bar, the gym. Everyone, especially women, was talking about money. Women just out of school were freaking out about RESPs for children who didn’t even exist.”
Financial advice can be hard to come by when you’re young and don’t have much in the way of assets, so Simmons set a goal: to barter her financial expertise to 300 women in a year. Soon, she told the crowd, her calendar was packed and her freezer was overflowing with bartered lasagna, but her debt was growing. “That’s when Marta [Nowinska], owner of Swapsity, contacted me and offered to guide me through the collaborative consumption model,” said Simmons. “I started going to swap meets so I could actually live on no income.”
Most in the crowd had never swapped before, and pragmatic questions like “How do I ask?” and “How do I offer?” dominated the discussion. “As a financial planner, I think everyone should barter five per cent of their discretionary income,” Simmons advised. Once she’d learned the ropes, Simmons was swapping financial tips for massages and haircuts in no time.
