Association Reserves questions
From: Pat Little (redtailcablespeed.com)
Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 18:08:14 -0700 (PDT)
At Jackson Place Cohousing in Seattle we are doing our first reserves study
since we moved in. Our friends at Puget Ridge provided a lot of information
from their reserves study, which is helping us greatly.  And it turns out,
surprise, surprise, we have not been saving enough. 

So, we are facing the prospect of persuading our community of the need for a
large increase in dues by maybe 30% to correct this. And I'm wondering if
there are some of you out there who can help us with your experience or
advice. Here are the questions we are pondering: 

 - How do we prepare the members for the big increase? We know many of the
"logical" reasons for it, but I'm sure it's going to be an emotional
discussion. It would help us to be able to show what percentage of the
annual budget other Cohousing communities pay for reserves. If you're
willing to provide this information, please also include number of units,
age of project, whether urban or rural, and if you too are catching up with
previously under-funded reserves.

 - We have a long list of potential reserves components, around 60. Should
we itemize the smaller things in our reserves study, which requires effort
to estimate life and replacement costs for each of them, or should we
instead lump them in a 'general' reserves category to cover the
(unspecified) small stuff (and gradually increase the funding over time to
match inflation)? Or should we just handle this via 'general maintenance' in
our annual operating budget?


And a more technical bookkeeping question - we are wondering how to track
the reserves funds in our bookkeeping system. Most of the accumulated
reserves will be in a separate savings account, requiring 2 signatures for
withdrawals, but collections from the current year will be in the checking
account for some time before they get transferred to savings. We'd like to
have a way to show, in the books, the total accumulated reserves regardless
of which account they are in. We use QuickBooks. Does anyone have experience
with this, and could tell us what you did?

Many thanks,
Pat Little
Jackson Place Cohousing


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