Money & the Community Economy

What a community shares financially, what it does not, and the three numbers that decide whether you can afford it.

Money is where communities are least romantic and most revealing. A group can hold a values conversation for two years without discovering that its members disagree; it cannot get through one roof replacement.

What is actually shared

The spread is wider than the word “community” suggests, and it is worth being precise, because the same vocabulary covers very different arrangements.

Nothing but the common parts. The most common arrangement by a distance. Households earn, spend and save privately, and contribute to the costs of what the group owns together. Financially this is a well-run block of flats with better relationships.

Costs, deliberately pooled. Bulk food, shared vehicles, tools, sometimes childcare. Real money, real savings, no claim on anybody’s income.

A solidarity fund. Private finances, plus a pot the community can draw on when a member is ill, out of work, or in trouble. Small, and out of proportion to its effect on how safe people feel.

Income, fully pooled. A common purse . Earnings go in, needs come out, and nobody holds an individual wage. A minority arrangement, and the one that most changes daily life.

Nothing about the label on the gate tells you which of these you are looking at. Ask.

And ask about it thing by thing, not in general. Choosing one of those four arrangements settles far less than groups expect, because the arguments that actually happen are never about the policy — they are two people discovering they had assumed different answers about one specific item. The workshop. The van. The polytunnel a member built with their own money on shared land. What a departing household leaves behind.

The communities that have fewest of these arguments are not the ones with the most generous sharing arrangement. They are the ones with a list: what is held in common, what is somebody’s own, who looks after each thing, and who may sell it. Writing the list does not settle what the answers should be. It settles the far more common problem of nobody having noticed there was a question.

RCOS · Layer 3

The RCOS Standard is indifferent to which of those four arrangements a community picks, and specific about the list. Every resource inside the governed scope is classified as commons or private in a versioned register, with its steward, its access rules and any constraint on sale or transfer.

The clause worth knowing is what happens to the ones nobody got to. Anything unclassified stays unclassified — and the community may not allocate, encumber, monetise or transfer it until an authorised decision classifies it. Not a to-do item, a lock: the thing you forgot to write down is the thing you may not quietly sell.

A second door closes alongside it. Economic mechanisms must not let a member convert money into decision authority the governance layer never granted — whoever paid in most does not thereby acquire a louder vote, an informal veto, or a say outside the decision matrix.

RCOS Core v0.1 — §5.1 Commons vs Private Resources

The three numbers

The third column is where the money actually is. It is also the one nobody puts on a website.
Dimension	Entry	Monthly	Exit
What it is	What you pay to move in	Dues, service charge, association fee	What returns to you when you leave
Usually set by	The local property market	The community’s own budget	The legal structure, written in advance
Who asks about it	Almost everyone	Most people	Almost nobody
How much it varies	Enormously, by place	Enormously, by what is shared	Totally, by form
The question to ask	What exactly does this buy?	How much of it is saved?	What did the last leaver take?

Entry is usually an ordinary local property price, because in most forms you are buying a home and competing with everyone else in that town for it. The community premium people expect rarely exists; what exists is a discount in some legal structures, paid for at the other end.

The monthly figure is a service charge under another name. And the exit figure is decided entirely by which legal shell you are in — owning, leasing or renting — which is why the two topics are inseparable.

Where the monthly money goes

The best data we have found on ongoing costs is a study by the Cohousing Association of the United States with the Cohousing Research Network, which collected annual budgets from 20 communities comprising 611 units.

The finding worth staring at is not the total. It is that roughly a third of the average budget goes into savings — the reserve fund , held against the roof, the boiler and the resurfacing. Utilities and insurance take about another third. Self-performed admin and maintenance about 15%, and trade contracts about 12%.

So a third of what you pay each month is not for this year at all.

The costs nobody lists

The trial period. Six months to two years of contributing before you are a member, usually while paying to live there.

The move. Communities are often somewhere other than where your job is. Factor a possible change of work, a commute, or a year at lower earnings.

Unpaid labour. Two to six hours a week for the place. Not a hidden fee — it is a large part of why the dues are what they are — but it is time you cannot sell to anyone else.

The special levy . See the reserve fund. Ask when the community last raised one and what for.

The lawyer. Read the lease, the ground lease or the share agreement with someone who does this for a living. The cheapest line here, and the one most often skipped.

The question that reveals the most

Not “what does it cost?” but “what happens to someone who cannot pay?”

Every community has an answer, because every community eventually has the situation. Some have written it down: a hardship provision, a payment holiday, a defined process with a named decision-maker. Most have not, and improvise — which usually means the outcome depends on how popular the member is.

A community that can point at the paragraph has thought about its worst day. That is worth more than a low monthly figure.

Deep · the one form that publishes its arithmetic

Income-sharing communities are the exception to the general opacity here, and the reason is structural: when there is a single common purse, somebody has to write down what each member gets.

Twin Oaks in Virginia, founded in 1967 and the longest-running secular income-sharing community in the United States, states its terms openly. All income from the community’s businesses goes to the collective and nobody earns an individual wage. Members work 38.5 hours a week, counted in labour credits , split between the collective businesses and domestic work — cooking, childcare and maintenance count the same as making hammocks. Housing, food, clothing and healthcare are provided, and each member receives a personal spending allowance of roughly $100 a month.

Entry costs nothing. Exit returns nothing, with one important protection: members keep the assets they arrive with, frozen for the duration rather than absorbed.

Read that as a financial proposition rather than an eccentricity. It buys something no other arrangement on this page offers — care that nobody has to negotiate for. Illness, a new child, retraining and old age are simply covered. What it costs is the ability to accumulate anything.

There is a lesson in the contrast. A common purse forces a community to publish its arithmetic; private finances let everyone keep the question vague. That is a large part of why a field full of communities with private money has almost no usable cost data.

Sources & further reading

1 What joining costs — the three numbers in full, with a calculator for the third
2 Cohousing Costs After You Move In — Cohousing Now! (Coho/US) — the 20-community, 611-unit budget analysis quoted above
3 Twin Oaks Community — FAQs — the labour quota, the allowance and the asset rule, from the community itself
4 RCOS Core — Layer 3: Economic & Resource System — the commons register, contribution recognition, treasury transparency and limits on accumulation

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written

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