The annual subscription helps us with administrative expenses of running our U3A; stationery, printer cartridges, purchase of printed materials, 'marketing' materials (to help grow our membership base), producing the newsletter, and help with subsidy with room hires.
Also, when we engage a guest speaker we usually have to pay them a fee…(more on this below, see 'Guest Speakers'

One of the continuing ongoing costs is the hire of rooms for meetings. Every month we have to pay for the hire of the CSP Community Centre Main Hall. In addition we now making a significant contribution towards the room hire costs for Interest Group meetings.

Lots of groups are helping keep our room hire costs down by having their meetings in their homes, or venues where there is no fee to be paid.

We are now using our 'saved-up' funds to make a sizeable contribution towards room hire. But we have to be careful and ensure that we don't run out of money. So, we are asking members who attend a meeting in a hired room to pay £1 for every meeting.

The contribution will help us to keep afloat. Depending on how much we receive from members it will determine our level of future funding for hiring rooms from our 'pot'.

We do have to monitor our finances closely; for this reason whilst we do not want to increase the levy for those attending meetings in a hired room, we may have to increase the current £1 levy in the future if necessary.

To enable our Interest Groups to have access to a computer and digital projector we have purchased two of them. These reside in the CSP Community Centre and are available to borrowing by any of the groups who would find them useful. 

Also, we have now also purchased a tie-clip microphone, and an extra hand held radio controlled mike for use at our Monthly Meetings. 

Although some of our guest speakers give their time freely, the majority of those we invite to address us at the Monthly Meetings make a charge. 

The charge is usually reasonable but it does vary from month to month. We budget in the region of £100 for each month, but it does vary.

Often the speakers we engage donate their fee to their own 'good cause'.

One of our main ways of communicating with members is through the website. 

So we can do this effectively we now own our own domain name (i.e. chalfontsu3a.org.uk) and this requires a renewal fee each year. Also we have to pay an annual fee to a 'hosting' company. The company we use charge us a monthly fee, so we budget for this every month.

The other expense we incur with the website is an annual fee for the software that allows us to build the website and keep it up to date.

Fortunately this software is easy to use, so our Interest Group Convenors can also go in and edit 'stuff' without having to go to college and earn themselves a degree in computer science!

Along the way we will incur other expenses for things like social events. An example would be the Christmas Social we held in December 2015 where we spent monies on the cake, and goodies on the tables. 

We want to make our U3A as inclusive as possible and holding social events is a good way of keeping as many of us involved as possible.