Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Melanie Mindlin (sassetta![]() |
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Date: Sat, 4 May 2024 09:47:55 -0700 (PDT) |
I can’t even imagine how your community has survived without raising dues. While having dues go up is not popular, we have expenses and they must be paid. Our community has two homes that are part of our City’s affordable housing program. We chose at the beginning to get more money up front for them and excuse them from our HOA dues. We calculate our necessary expenses, which are our HOA dues separately from our “community expenses” which the affordable homes also pay. Our HOA dues include our reserves (about 50% of the budget), utilities and maintenance. Our community expenses include childcare for meetings, parties, trainings, and other support for social activities. The community expenses only come to about $20-30 per household. Since our reserves, utilities and maintenance are not optional, and the rest of it doesn’t add up to much, there is very little quibbling about the budget and the dues in our community. Each of our teams submits a request yearly for what is needed to keep their activities going and it is rarely questioned. Basically, we have found that after dividing everything between all our homes, the price for anything optional is hardly worth fussing over. We had a controversial request last year over helping our neighbor pay to remove a tree that was threatening to fall on our property. Since we were not required to pay for this, there were differences of opinion on whether this should be a community expense. In the end we agreed to pay a small amount from our budget and passed the hat to raise a more respectable amount. Finally, I want to say that in our state there is no mandatory way to calculate HOA dues. Since we are not a condominium, each house is responsible for it’s own upkeep, leaving only our common areas in group ownership. We decided to calculate our HOA dues on a per house basis rather than by square footage, based on the concept that all those costs are based on usage and the size of the house has no bearing on the amount of use of the common space. If anything, the smaller homes use the common space more because they have less space at home. We have seen little correlation between the size of the homes and the number of people occupying them. This original assumption has turned out to be correct as our smallest homes make greater use of the common laundry, guest room, and personal use of the kitchen. Nobody has raised any concerns about this early decision. There are a couple of important issues contained in your situation. If you are not collecting money for your reserves, you are reducing the value of all of your homes as you are creating the need for special assessments in the future when something is needed. Smart buyers will know this. Much has been said in this list serve about the importance of having adequate reserves, and they are required in many states. I believe that it is also important to be transparent about the subsidies you are providing to people with financial challenges. Paying the HOA dues for our two affordable homes amounts to a subsidy of about $200/month for each home and constitutes about 20% of our total budget. Hope this helps. Melanie Ashland Cohousing > On May 4, 2024, at 3:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote: > > In our 25+ year history, our community has discussed raising dues a number > of times. Far more often than not, we end up deciding not to increase > because there are 1-3 households for whom the increase would be too much of > a burden. > > Have any communities come up with a compassionate work-around to this? > I would love to find a way so that the ~20 households who are willing to > have their dues increased actually have an increase, but the ~1-3 > households that can not afford it do not have the increase.
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Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? Helen Svoboda-Barber, May 3 2024
- Re: Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? Elizabeth Magill, May 3 2024
- Re: Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? Buzz Harris, May 3 2024
- Re: Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? Muriel Kranowski, May 4 2024
- Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? Melanie Mindlin, May 4 2024
- Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues? Grace Kim, May 4 2024
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