The reserve study arrives, all 60 pages of it, and the board's real question isn't answered on any of them: what do we do now? That's not a flaw in the study. Pricing components is the preparer's job; choosing how to fund them is the board's. This is the path from one to the other.
What the study decides — and what it doesn't
The study establishes three things: the component list, each component's remaining useful life and replacement cost, and one or more funding schedules — commonly a recommended schedule and sometimes a baseline. It does not decide which schedule the budget adopts, how to close an accumulated shortfall, or what any of it costs each unit. Those are funding decisions, and they interact with rules the study never mentions: the conventional-mortgage reserve tests read the budget's contribution against the study's highest recommended schedule, and the state statute reads it differently again.
Finding the gap
The starting arithmetic is short: add the study's replacement costs and any deferred maintenance, subtract reserve cash on hand. That difference — the funding gap — is the number a funding plan has to close, and it reads most honestly in two units: dollars, and months of regular assessments. A gap equal to 17 months of assessments tells a director more than a seven-figure number does.
Four ways to fund it
Every plan is some mix of four routes: status quo (keep the current budget and accept what the tests say), a special assessment that closes the gap in year one, a loan or line of credit that spreads it over a term at a rate, or a hybrid that splits the two. None of them is the right answer in general — the special assessment is cheapest in total but hits owners at once; the loan smooths the cash and costs more nominally over the term. The useful exhibit shows all four side by side, each with the same rows: the vote required, cost this year, cost per month after, ten-year owner cash, and what each does to the state rule and the mortgage tests.
Per unit means by the declaration
Common expenses are shared in the proportions stated in the declaration. The board cannot adopt a friendlier split for a special assessment or loan repayment — not headcount, not square footage, not equal shares.
A 0.85% unit pays 0.85% of the assessment and 0.85% of the debt service, because the declaration says so. Any per-unit table built another way is wrong before the math starts. One sensitivity worth seeing alongside it: if some units go delinquent, the remaining owners carry their shares in the meantime — association lenders commonly stress-test at 10% of units 60+ days late, a banking convention, not a regulation.
Start with the five numbers
Before the component table and the unit mix, five numbers say where the building stands on the two mortgage tests: budgeted assessment income, the reserve contribution, the study's highest recommended contribution, reserve cash, and the state. The check runs in your browser and stores nothing; the full report adds the funding routes, the per-unit table, and the ten-year cash on both tracks.