Ham Radio Clubs – About Life Memberships

In an online chat that was really about VPN/ISP companies, discussion of the investment portion vs the discount of Life Time Subscriptions/Memberships ensued.

Is it really good for the organization AND for the life member to starve the organization of funds by a discounted Life offering?

Iffy in the short term, and resoundingly not so much in the long term.

I posted:

Organization of any type that offer highly concessionary lifetime memberships/subscriptions eventually have to cover costs.

Usually they reduce services, add an annual service fee, or go out of operations, unless they can dilute the lifetime services costs with enough money from annual/short-term users.

For service organizations if they are disciplined enough to actually invest the lifetime funds, a six-times full annual fee makes financial modeling sense.

Running Montecarlo simulations on the models that is still risky, and some say a no-risk fee could be as high as eleven-times.

There are so many decent organizations and companies that crash because they get lifetime estimates wrong.

Avoid getting involved if you can, as all potential fixes break something badly – usually first it is trust. Been there, fixed it, and still people are mad at the team members who forced some adulting.

Initially both sides are happy – the club gets some extra $$, retains fickle membership and the Life Member gets a discount while avoiding the chore of having to pay yearly dues.

Then there is a crossover where the club continues to incur costs, but the money collected is all spent.

That is when the sad times start as I described. What I didn’t say is there often is also a Ponzi Scheme where the club encourages even more members to pay a lump sum because they need cash fast to meet costs.

My personal strategy is to take out Life Memberships, but then plan to restart annual funding when the club starts to need money.

As some of the organizations move to payment systems that can be set up to pay your due yearly with little intervention, I am rethinking this into using auto-pay so I always pay my costs, but that presumes that annual members are not being the sole source to cover the predictable shortfall for the life memberships that are sold.

So it may be better to take out that Life Membership if the math works out personally for you AND you can predict that you will receive services valuable enough to make it worthwhile.

73

Steve
K9ZW