My homeowners association had an informal meeting last night.  Just a group of homeowners and the a member of the management company to discuss “the issues”.  Whatever that means.

I didn’t attend but one of my friends went and she was talking about it to me this morning.  They said that one third of the people aren’t paying their dues.  A THIRD!!  Wow.  How is the association managing?  Apparently we have some pretty frugal members on our board.  I’m so proud of them!  I guess they have been running under budget for the past 4 years so they have some savings that they are dipping into to cover the fact that so many people have stopped paying. They said that it takes about 10 months to evict someone due to not paying their association dues.  If your house is going to get foreclosed on anyways there really isn’t a reason to pay the association.  Which I suppose is true… but a third?  That’s a lot of homes!

We have a pool in the neighborhood.  I guess there is a guy who lives in the neighborhood who has been doing the maintenance on it for two years for free.  Which is very nice of him.  Right now the heater is broken and it costs $5,000 to replace it.  I’m of the mind to let it go for now.

I’ve also mentioned the tree problem in our neighborhood.  There are a lot of trees that need to be replaced.  One of the ideas they had was to not maintain the grass during the winter and use… get this… the $15,000 they would save to replace the trees.  $15,000 to maintain grass for 6 months!  Holy Cow.  I don’t know what the options are but I’m of the mind to go ahead and let the grass go for a bit and replace the trees.  Next year we can have grass again and we will still have the trees.  I will miss the grass though.  My son and I had a picnic pretty much every day last winter.  But I can deal.  It will probably mean two new trees for my front yard.  I know they also talked about replacing some of the grass with gravel and other low/ non maintenance landscaping.  I’m certainly for that.  There are some huge water retention areas that in the front that no one uses and that is grass that doesn’t need to be watered, mowed, seeded, ect.

Speaking of trees.  The pic is of a new tree they put in the front entrace of our community.  That is the tiniest palm tree I’ve ever seen in my entire life!  Look how little it is!  You can see in the background how big the other palms are out front.  lol.  It’s going to take like 20 years for that little guy to fit in.  That little tree probably only cost like $20.  Now that’s frugal!

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