Financial Updates
Helpful Finance Resources
Our proposed 2023-2024 budget will be available in late May as we prepare to vote on it at our June 4 congregational meeting
You are welcome to send any questions or comments about our church finances either to our whole Leadership Team or directly to Stew Konzen (LT Financial Officer)
May 5, 2023 Financial Update
We’ve got some good news and some challenging news. First, the good news. In April we responded to our financial crunch by cutting expenses and increasing our Giving. If we stay focused, we can still meet our deficit target of $33,756 for the year. Below notice two things: our income has been $34,319 less than planned. In response, we’ve cut back expenses thus far by $36,333 compared to plan, both declines of just under 11%. Eight months into the fiscal year budget, we have accumulated a $13,094 deficit.
Now the challenging news. This next table shows where we are now, at the end of April, and how the deficit has accumulated each month. Notice lots of red.
Here’s the same table, with projections added in yellow for the last 4 months of the fiscal year. We project income (i.e. Giving) to grow about 11% less than we had planned. This table projects expenses as budgeted without any cuts and shows the deficit ballooning up to $47,115. Not good!
To remedy this situation, we need to make more cuts over the last four months of the year. If our Giving stays 11% lower than planned as projected, then we’ll need to make additional cuts of $13,359 in May, June, July and August as outlined below.
This plan is not quite worst case, but is fairly conservative. We’re hopeful that Giving will improve in these last few months so that we don’t have to cut programs to the bone and reduce our Global and Local Giving in major ways.
Please consider becoming a regular giver if you are not already. And if you give regularly, but have not adjusted your giving for inflation, then please consider upping that amount by 7.5%, which is how high the cost of living has risen this past year in the Seattle area. A $400,000 dollar budget this year has the buying power of only $372,000 in last year’s dollars.
Oh, and by the way, we continue to pay our mortgage. We have a balance of $628,126.65 and pay $5,263 each month. In March $3,385.77 went to principal and $1,877.23 to interest.
Be generous and prosper,
Stew
Financial Officer