"Mini" muni bonds — double your money, help your city
Municipal bonds are the sort-of boring financial tool that big institutional investors use to hedge their bets. But this week, the city of Denver is hoping to attract a totally different class of buyers for its bond sale.
The city is selling $500 “mini-bonds” to state residents, as a way to get locals literally invested in the community.
It’s a simple pitch for investors: buy a few of these mini-bonds, and in 14 years you’re guaranteed to double your money. In the meantime, the city gets funds to renovate two cultural attractions and build a new recreation center.
The yield is higher than what the city offers on traditional bonds, but Denver’s Chief Financial Officer Cary Kennedy believes the extra expense is worth it to keep the money in the state.
“We’re willing to offer this to the citizens of Colorado because we want to give them that investment opportunity,” Kennedy says. “And we also want them to feel like they can support these critical infrastructure projects.”
The concept of mini-bonds has been around for a while, but they’re rarely issued by governments. That’s in part because they can be a real headache to administer.
Lynnette Kelly, executive director of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, says the back-office costs can be significant for the issuer. The customer service needs of thousands of individual small investors can add up to quite a headache.
“My mother, for example, had a lot of mini-bonds from a public power district,” Kelly says. “She had questions all the time. You know, ‘Where’s my interest check?’ And, ‘I think I lost my mini-bond, what do I do now?’ All of those basic everyday questions have to be handled and they have to be handled really well.”
Investors can now find the answers to a lot of those questions online, making mini-bonds easier to manage.
And Denver is certainly betting on their popularity. It hopes to sell $12 million in mini-bonds in just five days.
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