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Imagine this offer for a rabid Buffalo Bills fan:
For a nominal amount – maybe as low as $100 – you get a certificate that you can frame, similar to a stock certificate.
No, you don’t get any stock in the Bills. And you get repaid only if your investment isn’t used and the team leaves Buffalo.
Here’s how the plan could work, using hypothetical numbers.
Let’s say the Bills were to be sold for $870 million. The new buyers could put up $470 million, borrow another $300 million at market interest rates and use the remaining $100 million, at no interest, through the fans’ fund. That $100 million might be repaid over 20 years, but to the fund, not to the individual donors.
The fund organizers have research suggesting they can raise more than that. Raising somewhere between $100 million and $170 million through the fund could, according to the fan alliance, save a new owner anywhere from about $7.5 million to $12.8 million in interest payments per year.
In return, the ownership group would have to guarantee keeping the Bills in Buffalo for a certain, specified amount of time.
To those who scoff at roughly a $10 million annual saving for multimillionaires, the fund creators say it’s the equivalent of an entire season of some teams’ luxury-suite revenues. And in the Bills case, it would buy the equivalent of 173,000 additional tickets for a season.
That’s no chump change, in any financial circle.
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/erie-county/can-fans-help-keep-bills-here-20140201
For a nominal amount – maybe as low as $100 – you get a certificate that you can frame, similar to a stock certificate.
No, you don’t get any stock in the Bills. And you get repaid only if your investment isn’t used and the team leaves Buffalo.
Here’s how the plan could work, using hypothetical numbers.
Let’s say the Bills were to be sold for $870 million. The new buyers could put up $470 million, borrow another $300 million at market interest rates and use the remaining $100 million, at no interest, through the fans’ fund. That $100 million might be repaid over 20 years, but to the fund, not to the individual donors.
The fund organizers have research suggesting they can raise more than that. Raising somewhere between $100 million and $170 million through the fund could, according to the fan alliance, save a new owner anywhere from about $7.5 million to $12.8 million in interest payments per year.
In return, the ownership group would have to guarantee keeping the Bills in Buffalo for a certain, specified amount of time.
To those who scoff at roughly a $10 million annual saving for multimillionaires, the fund creators say it’s the equivalent of an entire season of some teams’ luxury-suite revenues. And in the Bills case, it would buy the equivalent of 173,000 additional tickets for a season.
That’s no chump change, in any financial circle.
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/erie-county/can-fans-help-keep-bills-here-20140201
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