Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Taxe Exempt Expenses & the Idea of Cohousing Expenses

[Rosemary McNaughton (astromezzo]

I'm late in catching up on this thread, but I see cohousing as the superset
that includes property maintenance, meals, meetings, childcare, guest room
occupancy, parties... and things that have no financial implications at all
like me inviting cohousing friends over for dinner at my house.

The financially-related pieces do get treated differently for tax purposes,
and it has me wondering whether we need a legal entity for our community
that is established to be the all-encompassing "cohousing" rather than just
"property maintenance" - right now I feel like we are legally "property
maintenance" with all the other aspects of cohousing either shoehorned in
with that or dealt with informally outside of that.  Maybe the best course
of action is to separate the aspects financially but control them socially
all together as a community, just as we have separate operating and reserve
budgets right now - or maybe there is some legal framework for stitching all
the parts together.  I'd be happy to go with whatever gives us the most
flexibility to do what we as a community want to do.

And, yes, we could do what we want and pay someone to make all the paperwork
work, but that takes money from a tight budget.  It's been quite affordable
to basically act for tax purposes as "property maintenance" - and I'm trying
to get a sense of how much value we would get and how much money we would
spend to make the rest of our "cohousing" more legitimate.

-Rosemary
Rocky Hill Cohousing
Florence, MA

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Sharon Villines
<sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>wrote:

>
> A drift in conceptualizing cohousing finances is emerging that I
> believe is not good for cohousing.
>
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