What is LETS

             What is this LETS?

LETS is a many-to-many barter or trading system. Ever since people started developing an economic system by just swapping excess of some goods with somebody else - the first stage "a barter system" was born. This worked fine between friends and clans as even if the other person in the trade had no excess now, a simple IOU was easily remembered, and if not - the clan system would soon sort out any dishonours!

As trading widened and the clan system could not enforce IOUs, first regional and then national communities developed currencies to exchange for goods and services. Soon, some smart traders worked out that you could hoard the currency and make a business by lending it out and charging "an interest" on this currency, as a currency was required to enable many trades to occur. The net result in the "so called developed" areas of the world is that the wealth of the regions has been redistributed from the community, clan and sub-clan level into individual "currency rich" and "currency poor" people.

Of course the rich can trade how, whenever and for anything they desire - while the poor are restricted to either not trading or only trading for simple day to day necessities.  LETS is a system that reinvents the local IOU within a new clan structure - the community of LETS members.

In our Maleny LETS, members can trade goods and services with other members and the trades are recorded in our database in our local LETS unit called a Bunya. When a members sells something they are credited the Bunya amount and the buyer is debited the same Bunya amount. In this way the sum of all debits and credits come back to zero, thus the system is fair and balanced and we can see that each time we trade we are creating new energy within our community of LETS members, hence our LETS name.
No interest is charged on any LETS debit or paid to any LETS credit, so there is no point in hoarding. So the modern consumerism jingle "Shop till you drop!" - while inappropriate to our "over consuming" lifestyle, is very true for LETS. The more members trade within a LETS the better off they are and the stronger the LETS is.