If you've survived with a $1,500 carryover for a number of years, $10k does sound excessive. Generally speaking, the thing to do is look at how much you need to cover expenses before you have some revenue coming in for the year. Most of our beginning of the year expenses are pretty low, then we do a big fall fundraiser. The high cost expenses come more towards the end of the year. So if the fall fundraiser falls short, we either scale back activities for the remainder of the year or decide to have another fundraiser.
If you're getting parents to raise or donate money during the year, I think they usually expect that it's going to benefit their kids. If it's just put aside for a rainy day, they're probably not going to be too happy.
The exception is some big long term project, like a new playground. It's hard to raise money for something like that in a year, so there is more of a long term investment involved. But most people wait to start saving for that until they identify a specific project.
- mum24kids
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