In Response – Safe Use Of Money

In Safe Use Of Money – I said;

“My personal thoughts about being approached for additional money in support of AA, accompanied by a statement that AA itself is not being self-supporting, are – please tell me where AA is falling down in regards to money. Please provide me with specific, concrete examples of bills not being paid, facilities suffering, programs lacking due to not enough dollars. Tell me exactly how the message of recovery is not being carried because of not enough money. Without such “evidence” I will most likely remember that we are all here because we’re not all there and possibly question your motives for promoting additional contributions as being necessary.”

Well, I now have an answer and I am very much appreciative to the person who provided it. No, I can’t/won’t tell you who… but I’ll say this – the answer came from someone who has the real info. And here is part of it;

“We were $2,993,017 short of paying for our bills in at GSO in 2005. When we are short, we rely on the reserve fund; which the Trustees did to pay the bills.”

So, here’s the deal folks. When we’re short and have to rely on our reserves to pay our bills, we have to “re-stock” the reserves because, as a group, AA decided long ago to maintain a 12 month prudent reserve and this situation left us almost three months short. I won’t get into the “business” aspects of this practice, if you don’t understand, please seek guidance.

The solution to “re-stocking” our reserves to the desired level are twofold. One is increased contributions from the AA membership, the other is to increase profits on literature sales to agencies outside of AA. Simple. Unfortunately, if we come to rely on profits from outside agencies purchasing our literature, we are not self-supporting. Also simple.

And now I have a question for you – Are you familiar with this pie chart?