Dear Heritage Members and Friends,
Happy New Year and happy halfway point through our church fiscal year. We are holding steady with our income right where it should be, and our expenses overall are running slightly ahead of the 50% mark.
The big outlier in our expenses in the first half of the year has been our energy bill. Duke adjusted our even billing sharply upward on top of sending us a very large bill late last year to catch up on a deficit that had accumulated based on an artificially low prior billing rate. The Finance Committee is working closely with our Church Administrator to stay on top of Duke to make sure that our even billing rate is being calculated properly and to evaluate our energy provider vendor options to bring down costs for both natural gas and electricity. In addition to energy costs, we’ve also seen some high maintenance costs hit our budget early this year putting us over budget for that line item, not a huge surprise for an aging building.
On the income side of the ledger, while we have finished the first half of our fiscal year on track, the second half is going to be more challenging. As many of you probably know, late last summer we lost our long-term Taekwondo renters. The owner of the Taekwondo business that has rented from us for many years made the decision to retire and wind down his business. We received $2,000 of our budgeted Taekwondo rental income of $6,000 before losing this stream of income. We have other opportunities to rent our space in the second half of the year, so we may well make up for some or all of this difference.
The other challenge, and opportunity, that faces us in the next six months is meeting our aggressive fund-raising goal. We set a target of $16,000 in fund-raising income this year, and we’re currently almost 15% of the way there with $2,171 in fund-raising income through the end of December. The good news is that last year we were able to achieve almost $12,000 in fund-raising income on a goal of $8,000. Our church auction was the star of the show with total earnings of $8,500. Of course we’ll need an even more successful auction this spring along with all of the creative fundraising efforts we can muster, like our upcoming Mardi Gras party on Saturday, February 18. Any members or friends who have fundraising ideas and willingness to volunteer for the remainder of this fiscal year are encouraged to contact our Board of Trustees via:
And finally, as we have turned the page to a New Year, it will soon be time to plan our 2023-2024 fiscal year budget and set a pledge target for our spring pledge drive. Our pledge campaign will start in earnest on Stewardship Sunday, March 26. Learn about our most recent 22-23 stewardship campaign on our past year’s stewardship website at https://huuc.net/category/stewardship-campaign/. If you are interested in volunteering to help with our upcoming 23-24 pledge campaign, please email:
Here’s wishing all of our members and friends a productive and positive start to 2023. As always, please let me know if you have any questions. You can email me anytime at:
All the best,
Reid Hester
HUUC Finance Committee and Stewardship Chair
1/23/2023