[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge: Death and Taxes

miloh froggytoad at gmail.com
Tue Dec 21 20:58:24 UTC 2010


I take the blame for starting to throw out the $5k figure for
Noisebridge monthly expenses.  I tried to find every last thing that
was a necessary expense in previous years, which includes amortizing
some annual costs to monthly expenses.

> I... monthly expenses for January.
> AFAIK those consist of
>  - rent ($3600)
>  - trash ($120 or something?  I vaguely remember seeing a bill at some
>   point.)
>  - PG&E (variable, as high as $750)
>  - DSL ($100 IIRC)

Water, Insurance, Tax CPA, Possible legal,
I divided by 12 and rounded up to get high average estimates for the
following monthly costs (changes are minimal at current rates anyways)

Water is bimonthly amortized and currently averaging ~$100

Insurance is once a year, and cost an est. avg ~$200/month

Tax Accountant cost: I think it is about ~$500* + some filing fees
which I'm rounding up to ~$50/month to account for overages
*note, we had a discount given to us last year due to delays but as a
rule of thumb I believe $500 is what we could paying a CPA for annual
taxes

Legal costs: we currently don't have legal costs but I know they were
significant back when the 501c3 was being formed, circa 2009.  Is
there any reason to expect to incur legal costs?

Total:  3600+120+750+100+100+200+50=   $4920


Note that using these rough estimates as monthly costs, if the
Noisebridge community brings in an average $5k a month, it will 15
years to save up the $15k backup fund from scratch.   That's too long
to wait for the 3 month operating cost backup savings to get funded.

What we really need is a fund drive to get 15k in the bank ASAP, as
well as to develop practices that generate $5k monthly from the
Noisebridge user and member community for basic expenses.

-rma



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