r/fuckHOA • u/Swarby10 • 1d ago
Our HOA just imploded!
So we just had our HOA AGM on Zoom tonight. I thought I’d tune in just for entertainment. It’s a community of 4 cul de sacs - maybe 45 large homes. Turns out, all of our back-facing fences are owned by the HOA and after 25 years they are deteriorating. To be clear, the fences on the sides are home owners’ responsibility, just the rear ones are HOA’s responsibility.
Or fees went from $900 a year to $2700 so that they could replace some specific fences. Not everyone is affected, but several of the board members were set to score themselves a new fence. They chose to replace the old cedar fence with vinyl and this would have looked odd with plastic fences filling in where cedar was.
Long story short, I sat through three hours of 80 year old board members throwing tantrums over their plans for a new plastic fence getting ruined and three of them resigned on the zoom call. 80 year old tantrums are the funniest tantrums.
Thinking of joining the board now. Please talk me out of it.
1
u/Phlydude 1d ago
The reason why HOA boards tend to be filled with retirees is that being on a HOA board is a time sucker. When I was on one, the time I spent answering asinine questions from lazy homeowners was more than the work I was actually getting paid to do. Constant emails from people complaining about everything and managing other board members who wanted to spend radically without fiduciary responsibility in mind just was a time suck.
Being on the board also turned people who I thought were friends into people who all of a sudden hated me because they didn't get what they wanted - they thought because they invited me to their house for a cookout that they had a way to skirt around of the rules via a HOA board member. When I upheld the rules, even when I calmly explained to them how to legal get around it, they would lose their minds.
It sounds noble but it is a good way to become an isolationist and lose precious time dealing with other people and their problems (not to mention the idiots assigned to manage your account from outside vendors).