Lafayette County’s Baptist fund now worth $22M

By Alyssa Schnugg
Staff writer
alyssa.schnugg@hottytoddy.com

Lafayette County’s $20 million trust fund created following the sale of the old Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi is now worth $22,086,787, according to Green Square Capital, the investment firm in charge of managing the fund.

Since the first of the year, the fund has earned $361,832. Since its inception in 2012, the fund has earned $3,839,040.

Green Square’s Steve Sansom told the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors Monday that the fund is expected to earn $621,913 by the end of the year, slightly down from the $641,655 earned in 2017.

So far this year, the fund has seen a 1.7 percent return.

Over the last three years, the county has received a total of $1.7 million in distributions from the fund that has been used for paving roads in the county.

The economic value of the trust with distributions is $23,839,251. 

The fund’s current allocation is 50.3 percent in fixed income, 47.6 percent in equities and 2.1 percent in cash equivalents.

Sansom said that he’d like the board to consider increasing the fixed income allocation to closer to 60 percent and reducing the amount in equities, or stocks, to 40 percent, due to a possible rise in inflation.

Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, is expected to accelerate from lower levels now to +2.4 percent by year’s end. Headline inflation — a measure of total inflation, including food and energy prices, which tend to be much more volatile – is forecast to also pick up this year.