The Board has approved the 2022 budget, which serves as an estimate of our income for the year and identifies our spending priorities.
If you are interested in seeing where we expect our money to come from and how we intend to spend it, you can see the budget here.
While we normally base each year’s budget to some extent on the previous year’s experience, that was not an easy process this year. That’s because 2021 was a most unusual year, with pandemic disruptions, major donations that allowed us to purchase new lathes for our class offerings, and, thanks to you, continued support through memberships despite the unusual times and meeting cancellations. So it was not an easy task to just look at what happened in 2021 and make assumptions about what will happen in 2022.
The Board takes it’s financial responsibilities very seriously. We intentionally under-estimate our income because we don’t want to base spending decisions on having money that might not come in. And, generally, we over estimate spending, as you can see by comparing our 2021 budget spending estimates versus what spending actually occurred.
The good news is that the club is in a stronger financial position now than it was when we entered the pandemic in March of 2020.
Still, we plan to watch our money flow carefully this year as we expect to spend more than we take in. We plan to use cash reserves to cover the spending that exceeds our income. This, of course, is not sustainable moving into the future.