As a part of its Changing Lives of Women series, Morning Edition is exploring women and their relationship with money: saving, purchasing, and investing for themselves and their families.
Cuban-American Barb Mayo describes a tanda like this: "It's like a no-interest loan with your friends." Mayo had never heard of tandas growing up and it wasn't until she started working in sales for a cable company in Southern California that she was introduced to the concept.
"I worked with a bunch of Mexican women and they were like, 'Hey Barb do you want to do a tanda?' And I was like, 'What is a tanda?' — and they explained it to me."
Here's an example of how a tanda works: Ten friends, family, or coworkers get together and each agrees to give $100 every two weeks to the group's organizer. One person ends up with the whole pot at the end of the month: $2,000. This goes on for 10 months until everyone gets the pot.
Everyone pays $2,000. Everyone gets $2,000. They're called tandas or cundinas depending in Mexico. Brazilians call them pandeiros, they're susus in West Africa and the Caribbean and hui in Asia)
If you get the $2,000 early on in the process, it's a no-interest loan. If you get it later on in the cycle, the tanda acts as a savings account. Mayo says she used her first pay-out for expensive dental work, and she liked that the peer pressure kept her paying on time.
If she missed a payment, the consequence was letting down friends — a harsher penalty, to her, than a default notice from a bank. But, Mayo says, for some reason, only the Latinas at her job were into the idea.
"It's funny because we work with white people and one girl was like, 'All you're doing is giving money to other people and not collecting interest on it and there's a risk!' " she says. "But all of us didn't see it that way."