Joining Fees

Originally posted by RS400atC Frankly that's not always reasonable. One club I used to be a member of had about 100 members and about £500k in freehold property, which affectively belongs to the membership. This dates back to members in the 1920's putting their hands in their pockets to buy the building. Over the years, when investment has been needed, it has come from the existing membership in the form of a levy or higher subs for a year or two. In the absence of a joining fee, it would make sense to dip out for a year when spending was needed. If you don't want to join such a club, that's fine, go start your own or find one which is not so reliant on the investment of previous generations. Unless a club is paying dividends to  shareholders like some golf clubs, joining fees are just part of the income/expenditure balance and no joining fee means either less spending on facilities, or higher annual subs, particularly in some clubs where capacity is limited.

No, the argument just doesn't hold water. It's exactly the same as has been said in the past many many times to try and justify the joining fee, that it's to compensate for the efforts and investment of previous owners.
In you real life example; if somebody leaves or dies from the 100 membership of your club, do you then pay them back their 1/100th share of the assets?

The next generation of members come in and make their contribution to the club, both in the running of and the fabric of the club in whatever way is required at the time.

Over the years I have been a member of 8 sailing clubs, including at least one Royal Yacht Club with valuable freehold, they were one of the few not to charge a joining fee. I have contributed to varying degrees at each club, mainly due to the changing circumstances of growing family, sailing clubs should be seriously thinking about increasing membership not putting barriers in the way, financial or not.

Two and a half grand seems the bottom end for a 400 on Apollo Duck.

Joining fees discourage people just joining when they feel like it-miss a year or just for the summer. We offer a sliding scale of membership fee depending on when in the year they join. Some penalty is needed to discourage just joining every year in August when the kids are on holiday and then not having duties to do March-August. And probably not paying boat berth fees either...

Could be that all members should be put on the list for duties, some clubs even rotor new members in for a couple more than the norm in the first couple of years. This will then give them a broad understanding of the running the clubs duties and gives extra skills in return which will then be useful to the club in general. My feeling is that with all else that is on offer to people in their off time we need to include rather than exclude them into our sport.  

I looked into joining a sailing club in Spain- kinda of assuming that's what you did when starting out in a new area... the €11,000 joining fee was a bit too dear, and raised questions about what the club was actually about. Admittedly they didn't then require you to sign up for the bog washing rota on dutyman, but still....
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