b'How to Legally Raise Private MoneyRecall that under current securities laws, a person who wishes to raise money from private investors must register the offering, which involves a long and expensive pre-approval process, or qualify for an exemption from registration. Exemptions usually impose limits on investor qualifications and adver-tising; they can be cost-prohibitive for smaller offerings. Unlike typical private offering exemptions, the Regulation CF rules allow issuers to ad-vertise to the general public and impose no financial requirements for investors as long as they dont invest more than $2,000 in the offering. The primary objective of Regulation CF is to create a securities exemp-tion that will allow entrepreneurs to use the internet to legally and inex-pensively raise small amounts of money from large numbers of investors in a for-profit venture. The rationale behind Regulation CF is that the wisdom of the crowd will organically determine whether a specific project is worthy of investment. If crowd wisdom functions as expected, offerings with solid issuer cre-dentials and well-crafted business plans will be successful, while risky projects or those lacking in substance will remain largely unfunded. Regulation CF also has an open communications provision allowing in-vestors to comment publicly on an issuers performance. This provision is aimed at quickly exposing fraud or ineptitude before there can be signifi-cant loss to any single individual. The rules for a Regulation CF offering include: Limit of $1 million can be raised in 12 monthsThe offering must be for a specific projectno blind poolsThere is no limit on the number of investorsNo pre-qualification is required for investments of up to $2KFinancial qualification and limits on investments of more than $2KDisclosures and annual audits for raises above $500K (could be costly)Securities must be offered only through a funding portal; issuers cant solicit independently62'