I am trying to help a friend to get some body art and offered to pay for it. However, I want to ensure that the funds go directly to the artists (or, at least, reimburse payments on proof that the work was done). But I also want to deposit the funds with a third party, who will validate this, rather than doing so myself.
I did some Googling and found something called a “Kiss Fund” and emailed the company who manages them. But I suspect that they will not be able to perform the validation properly, since they are not local. So I am wondering if anyone has any other ideas (without the costs being exorbitant)? While the fund would be in the thousands, that’s probably not worth the legal expenses for a true trust fund to be set up. I’m hoping that something might be MacGyvered.
You want to pay someone to get thousands of dollars of tattoos, and they are not enthusiastic about it, so you want a scheme to force them to use the money in only one certain way, but you are unwilling to involve yourself enough to write a check to the tattoo artist?
How bizarre.
A professional won’t do this without going through all the legal hoops that might be necessary. What those hoops are, I dunno, but you’ll need to talk to a local lawyer about that.
But either you jump through hoops, or you trust somebody enough to do the job without any legal safeguards in place, or you do it yourself. There aren’t any other choices.
I have an idea that would likely work. It’s pretty simple and not too costly. But I’m not going to share it unless you explain why (1) you offered to pay for someone’s tattoo, (2) you don’t trust the person to get this tattoo on his or her own, and (3) how you propose that a third person validate the tattoo if you can’t or won’t validate it.
I suspect “body art” is a euphemism. I’ll not speculate on what for.
What you really want is an escrow service, not a trust. You deposit money with the escrow service and they hold it until a specifically defined outcome occurs. Your counterparty is responsible for proving to the escrow service to their (really your) satisfaction that the terms of your deal have been fulfilled. At which point the escrow service releases the funds to your counterparty.
I have no idea how common are escrow companies that will handle oddball transactions other than real estate conveyances. But a few phone calls in your local area would be informative.
You might also call a local general business attorney, particularly a one-person shop. They may be willing to play the man-in-the-middle role for a suitable fee.
The fact you seem to want to pay for a service, but only after it’s provably been rendered is another obstacle. Your counterparty would need to either get the service performed on credit from the vendor, or would need to pay up front with their own funds and expect reimbursement from your escrow service. Only you can assess how plausible those two scenarios are. If they’re both “not very”, then your plan falls apart.
It’s a technical term for things like tattooing, piercings, etc.
I checked for anything like an escrow service that might be suitable, but didn’t see anyplace that did anything other than real estate or other dyed-in-the-wool arrangements. Thanks for the idea though, it gave me something more to Google and maybe if some other things I have sent out queries on don’t pan out, I’ll dig into it further.
And yes, I was thinking that it would be a reimbursement setup.
I haven’t used them but I know someone who did and it worked out okay.
According to their website, you can do escrow for “contracted services.” To me, that would include giving someone a tattoo. You can also do “milestone” escrow where you put the money in escrow up front and release the funds in stages as the work gets done. I’m guessing that each artist would require a separate escrow for the work that they would do. If one person were doing a lot of work that you wanted to pay for in stages, you could set up a milestone escrow for that vendor.
You’d still have to figure out how to verify that the work was done. You have to authorize the release of the funds to the vendor, which I presume you’d do only after you verified the work was finished to your satisfaction. I don’t think there’s a good answer for that part of your issue.
I wonder about that website. At least as explained by Tired and Cranky.
The key thing about a real escrow service is that the two parties agree in advance in writing about the money terms are about the conditions to be fulfilled. Then the payer irrevocably puts up the money. After that the payee does the whatever, then convinces the escrow service, not the payer, that the conditions have been completed. Once that the payee does that to the escrows service’s satisfaction, the money is released and there’s nothing the payer can do to stop the release.
If the payer (our OP) is the one deciding whether or when the conditions have been fulfilled & telling some website to release funds, then that’s not a true escrow. The payer could always refuse to authorize release of funds even though the payee has fulfilled the conditions.
And the payee will know this possibility is out there. And so behave accordingly.
Yes, the parties should agree on the conditions to be fulfilled but that’s true in any contract.
It’s a true escrow service even though this particular company’s escrow accounts present some of the issues you raise. I think you believe that it is always the escrow agent’s responsibility to determine whether the contract terms have been fulfilled. That’s true only if the escrow agent agrees to take on that responsibility. Escrow.com doesn’t seem to do so. For enough money, you can pay an escrow agent to take on that job. In that case, the escrow agent would owe a fiduciary duty to administer the contract fairly to both parties and it could be sued by either if it failed to do so. There is real risk in taking on that responsibility and the escrow agent will charge more for it. For the cost of some tattoos, I think it’s probably overkill.
Escrow would convince Sage Rat’s artists that he has the money to pay them and they can go to the escrow agent to get their money once their work is done. Sage Rat would have to pay escrow.com up front – not irrevocably but that’s basically never true in escrow agreements. Part of the point of escrow is that the promisor can get his money back if his counterparty fails to satisfy the agreement. That’s what Sage Rat seems worried about.
If the parties disagree about whether the escrow terms were fulfilled, escrow.com punts the parties to arbitration where they can work it out. I assume that arbitration is likely to be cheaper than a lawsuit for the amounts likely to be at issue. Since the funds will remain in escrow, arbitration saves the risk that the party will be judgment proof.
The tattoo artists would likely rather have an escrow agent hold the funds subject to the agreement than just trust Sage Rat to pay them once they’ve done all the work. Escrow isn’t a perfect solution to trust problems but it’s probably the best reasonable cost solution for Sage Rat.
That is what I am looking for. There would be no value (for my case) in putting the money with a 3rd party but still being the one to make the determination on when to release the funds. My goal would be to give the full funds to the 3rd party, and the basic rules for reimbursement, but beyond that it would be on them to validate and reimburse based on the agreed upon conditions.
I just ask, due to having had dozens of friends who’ve had “excellent plans” that they eventually rethought. Wow, come to think of it, I can think of five friends who’ve rethought their body art (two scaling-way-downs, one re-locating, and two not-really-ready-for-irreversable-changes).
Nice of you to help out financially, but aren’t you pressuring them to not change their mind?