Cohousing-L Mailing List: A letter to share

[Shari Hirst (sharihirst13]

I am writing to the co-housing community to express my personal experience.  
This letter is not coming from the Sand River Board.

We were talked into trying a professional financial management company because 
it was explained to our community that they were less expensive and much more 
efficient and knowledgeable than we were.  That the most important 
responsibility of the Financial Committee’s was to keep accurate records and a 
new member was convinced that we weren’t.  She researched and recommended that 
we hire a particular business.  We were told that they had many services that 
we should use, but never did.

It turned out that they were more expensive because they nickel and dimed us 
for everything.  A charge for putting a stamp on an envelope, the envelope, and 
such.  When we had questions about work they did, as we saw it, postings to 
wrong accounts, we never got a response.  In fact, once the resident who had 
recommended this business left Sand River, we couldn’t get a telephone number 
to contact them.  We would send emails, that were sent on and maybe months 
later we would get some kind of a response.  We had been assured that our price 
would only increase a certain percentage annually but that didn’t happen.

It took two years to separate Sand River from this business because of their 
criteria that they had to be notified of severance before the contract renewed. 
 It took a year working with a bookkeeper to have our books back to the way 
they should be.  We are now a little over one year past our severance from the 
business we hired.  

I am writing to try to save other communities from the troubles we had.  A 
simple bookkeeper is proving to be the best for us, and less expensive.  Feel 
free to contact me for further information

Shari Hirst
Sand River Co-housing
Santa Fe, NM