Starting to think about financial questions

Questions for a Financial Plan

Our financial arrangement will determine how our resources are acquired, distributed and compensatedIt doesn't necessarily tell us who or how decisions get made (that's the Authority plan), although there may be some relationship there.

There are lots of ways to do it, and through my work in the community I know about many of them. But we do need to know more about what we want, both personally and together. Here are some questions that might get us started.

I have some random illustrative examples at the end which you might choose to read at the beginning if you don't have much experience thinking about financial arrangements.

I. Purposes

            1. How do you feel about financial plans? Do they excite you, irritate you, intimidate you, or something else? Do you want to be deeply involved in thinking about it, or hope not to be?

            2. How, if at all, might you imagine the purpose(s) or mission for our legal financial arrangement? Is it, for example, just a quick and dirty way to make legal the fact that we are doing business? Is it a highly detailed structure which clarifies, enables, and constrains? Is it mostly a way to anticipate and provide remedies for conflict? Is it a spiritual container that should closely mirror our deepest purposes and values?

II. Personal Resources

            1. What sort of resources are you prepared to contribute? Financial resources, labor resources, consulting resources, other resources?

            2. What sort of risks are you willing to take? Do you want to be an owner, a paid worker, do want to make low-interest loans, do you want to donate without compensation?

            3. How "collective" do you want to be? Do you want to pool together assets with other people, or do you want a clear share, etc.?

III. The Collective

1.     Do we want to be a relatively closed ownership group or do we want to include others over time? Would those others include only investors, or would they include workers, residents, etc.

2.     similar to above, how much do we want to "pool" and how much do we want to specify individual shares? How much do we want the shares to be equal and how much do we want them to be based on financial contribution?

IV. Forms of Financial Arrangement

            1. What forms of financial arrangement best do what we want them to do based on above?

            2. What are the various advantages of different arrangements that allow resource sharing, such as LLC's, co-ops, etc.?

            3. How do most collectives organized themselves?

Some Examples:

1. Simple – We form a simple company called Transitions Retreat Center, LLC. We each contribute money, and own the company in proportion to the money we contributed to it. The company buys the land and carries on the business, and as any of us contribute more money to the company our percentage share increases.

2. Complex – We form a company called Transitions Realty. The company buys property which is owned in proportion to what we contribute. Over time, workers other than us receive shares of Transitions Realty so that they become part owners. What happens to a worker's shares if they stop working in the company is clearly spelled out in a legal agreement. We form a nonprofit called Transitions Retreat Center, which carries on the business of the retreat center and pays rent to the owners of the property. Some of us work in the business and receive a yearly salary. We also form a company to house the online computer project John described called Computer Transitions – only a few of us own and manage this business together (including John's son?), but we make a yearly taxable donation to the Center depending on our profits (and pays a sublease to the center for programs that are run there). Occasionally one of us who is not an owner of the business might do extra work for this business and receive compensation from the business for doing so.

3. Mystical – We each identify a set of personal resources (financial, labor, services, rusty old car, etc.) that we are willing to commit to the project for a year. The sets are not "equal” in value, but they represent equal levels of pushing each person to the boundary of their comfort zone. We operate through consensus to determine what happens with these resources. We chant a lot and do more drawing exercises. When the year is over, who knows? We leave that to the universe.