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Writer's pictureDan Marich

There's A Budget?


If you needed another reason to wonder why you need to get plenty of sleep each night, here is an example. Because I don't already have enough to do in my retirement, especially with Linda being on the DL still, I saw a note from the management team for our HOA asking if anyone would like to volunteer to be on the budget work group for the 2022/23 fiscal year.


I had heard, thru the rumor mill, that the board was considering raising our monthly dues and I wanted a front row seat to try to stop that from happening. I figured, how hard can this be? You have a budget for this year, just add in cost of business increases, and badda bing, you're all done.


Guess what? It seems to be a bit more complex than that. What the hell do salespeople know about budgets? I had one every year when I was in management, and I figured that if I could get our regional managers to stay out of strip clubs, at least one month a year, we were going to be fine.


Anyway, I not only get asked to be on the committee, I somehow get myself elected co-chair. Talk about the blind leading the blind. So now I'm not only going to have to spend one day, every other week leading the troops to come up with a new budget for the next fiscal year, but I am actually going to have to do some work on this. What's really fun is that everyone else on this committee is retired too, and they're busy playing golf, and pickleball, and whatever else they have going on in their world. Think they're going to kill themselves doing this?


I sent my co-chair a copy of the proposed agenda for the first meeting and things have started off swimmingly. After three days of waiting for her feedback I called yesterday to see what she thought. She thought she hadn't looked at her email in three days and she doesn't see mine. I resent it and asked her to get back by Saturday. Last night I get an email from her. She can't open a word document could I send it as a PDF. This should be fun.


We basically have two months to come up with a plan and present our initial budget to the finance committee. If half the group can't open Word how will they ever open Excel? Can you imagine putting together a budget using crayons and construction paper? OK, carry the two and put the total in Burnt Sienna.


So now I have the last free four minutes of my day accounted for and I can get on with my retirement.

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