Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Accounting

[David Hungerford (dghungerford]

> Seeing how various groups have set up their accounting would be very
> valuable to us ... we're wrestling over how to assess homeowners fees 
> right now, and haven't even begun to think about how we're going to 
> track them when we start living at Highline.  I suppose a lot of the
> variations will be in how the fees are assessed, and thence the divying
> up of the funds into whatever reserve funds are deemed necessary. 
> 
> What have various groups done about accounting in general?
> How are people 'counted' for various parts of the homeowners fee ...
> What's on a per person basis ... per unit ... per square foot ... etc ...
> and how are children, their needs/costs accounted for in the homeowners fees?

At Muir Commons we have fixed homeowners fees originally set by the 
State, since we are technically a condo with an HOA.  This fee was set 
using a standard formula, it includes (in theory) operating costs, 
insurance, reserves (for future repairs.)  We have the power to change 
those fees at any time we wish, and have.

We've lowered our fees from $100 to $95/month/hh, but added a $30 
capital improvements fee.  We're currently reviewing our reserve plans, 
since the state estimates are rather vague.  Each house pays equally on 
all of these things.  Everything is done on a per person basis, but 
everything is paid equally on a per household basis ('cept meals.)  Children 
are not counted at all (except for meals.)  Committee membership, work 
contributions, common house cleaning, landscape work is done per adult 
while the rest of our budget/bills are divided equally by household. 
This has been a topic  of ongoing discussion. The one exception to this 
has been laundry use,  where we charge ourselves, at estimated marginal 
cost per load for  wash/dry/soap.  This came up early on for two 
reasons:  1) the desire to  encourage energy conservation and 2) because 
of the wide diversity in laundry use (some people have laundry machines 
in their houses, so rarely use common house; singles do a heckuva lot 
less laundry than families w/children.)

We have had a number of discussions about "user fees" vs "group 
ownership" over the past 3 years and I can't do justice to the discussion 
in this forum (even the definitions of these terms remain ambiguous).  
However, we have agreed that nothing in our accounting/paying-for-things 
structure should ever make people feel excluded, and that we shouldn't 
expect to add an accounting system for anything that requires as much 
effort as the meals, or even the laundry, because we don't want to create 
any more tasks than we already have (i.e. none of us want to micromanage 
or *feel* micromanaged.)  I've been amazed at some of the 
posts from other groups over the last few months which talk about "work 
chits," "per sqft fees" and so on. How do you guys find time to do that 
kind of detailed accounting?? I guess what's important is that 
everyone in the group feels that the system in place is fair (which may 
be a very different thing than "equal," "equitable," or "evenly divided.")

David Hungerford
Muir Commons