Not trying to be a pessimist and I’m not saying this is a bad idea but without making a change to the bylaws, couldn’t a future vote override this one?
Haven’t seen a vote override another one yet and it seems unlike to occur. However a bylaw to prevent vote/counter vote is probably a good idea. There seems to be some murkiness as to whether or not it’s possible to override or go around things once they’ve been voted on. It would avoid a lot of confusion and churn by making that not possible.
As for the finances, we could do a simple vote now, make a formal addition to the bylaws during the special annual meeting.
Is anything really really being accomplished besides having it be known that a majority of membership today thinks it’s a good idea to have reserves?
It’s a lot more binding that than. Further it seems that a lot of things have been done either via tradition or simple votes.
@Chris - That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought about that. If you think we can do things better with an endowment, and not pay a lot of fees that seems sensible. OTOH, I have to wonder where the line is. Right now we’ve probably got some money in a savings account, which is probably earning some interest. Is the line when we go to a money market account, a CD, or buy stocks? Obviously there is a line, seems like a good thing to discuss with an expert.
All this discussion about how to invest reserves is a little bit of cart before the horse situation to me. The first question is how much reserves should we have. For an individual who could lose a job or get sick at any time it makes sense to have 6 months reserve in savings. For a group like ours what are the odds of everyone stopping paying for a year? If that happens then I would say the group is over. What scenario would cause that to happen? An invasion from Cuba and Russia ala the movie Red Dawn?
In my opinion we should either be saving for our own building, lower the monthly fees or start spending more on community outreach events and tools for Hive13. We should keep enough capital for a couple of months reserve plus whatever we plan to spend on goals. We are supposed to be a non-profit service organization not some kind of corporation.
I have great respect for the current group and I don’t want to see things get really complicated with worries about large sums of money sitting around in accounts. You can’t turn on the news without hearing about someone getting caught embezzling from some kids football team or borrowing from a church group or pension fund for a sure thing investment. Having that lying around could attract the wrong crowd to our group in the future. We are makers and need to focus on making.
I’m open to other suggestions. Having spoken with Jon Neil and Jim Dhalam the 1 year reserve was a informal standard that’s been used over the years. Sticking to 15K would leave us another 13K to spend on improvements. From what I can tell from the open finance site we’ve been hoving at ~25-30K for several years now, so it doesn’t seem like it will have much impact on our current spending.
I think the biggest potential worry is having to move. I’ve heard estimations in the 10K range for that. Most of the other possible problems should be partially covered by insurance.