In today’s economy, living without dipping into your savings or taking out a loan is hard. Many businesses, still reeling from the pandemic, rely on loans to stay afloat. Of course, with loans come high interest rates, and if you can’t repay the loan on time your credit could take a hit that’s difficult to recover from. However, there’s one Italian bank that came up with a cheesy idea that seems to be working for them. Since 1953, the Credito Emiliano has accepted giant wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese as collateral. That might sound absurd, but it makes more sense than you might imagine. The cheese wheels are known to cure for long periods of time — priced according to their curing time — and only get more valuable as time goes by. Besides holding the cheese as insurance, the bank stores and ages the wheels in climate-controlled vaults for the duration of the loan. The farmers save on operating costs, and the bank doesn’t have to worry about getting their money back. The value of an 80-pound cheese wheel is roughly between $900 and $1,500, so it makes sense for the banks and dairy farmers to work together.
