Buying our kitchen in bits and pieces from our local Ikea store has been a mixed blessing. It's dragged the total project time out beyond anything remotely sensible. Not that we were really in any great hurry, which was probably part of the problem. Nothing to spur us along. However, it's meant that we've been able to carry along with our normal lives without suddenly having a huge bill to pay. All up, this is likely to cost us somewhere around 70 000 SEK. Not the kind of money that we had just lying around. So buying as we had the spare money has been of benefit to us.
If we play our cards right, we should be able to halve the cost to us when we are finished. Well, sort of. When we bought our apartment, it came with a sum of money attached to the apartment which could be used to pay for renovations or redecorating. It's called various names, but the most common are renoveringsfond or reparationsfond (repfond). Not all body corporate apartment associations operate a repfond but, if they do, then it's a compulsary addition to your monthly body coprorate fee (avgift) of a few hundred kronor. Although it sits in a central body corporate fund, it's your money to be used only by you. The aim behind the fund is to ensure that all apartments are able to be maintained to a good standard, thus helping all the other apartments to maintain or increase their resale value.
I've seen body corporates show the combined repfond for all apartments as cash on their balance sheets, without detailing exactly what it is. I'm not sure that I like that. Ok, as that cash can only be used on the apartment building, it's a potential asset for the building. I get that. But, at the same time, it's not cash that the body corporate can use as an organisation. Our body corporate holds somewhere in the region of one million kronor in the combined repfond, without saying that it is the repfond account. But it can't use that one million kronor to fix, say, a leaky roof. So I think it gives a distorted view of the true financial power of the association. I understand it, but I'm not sure that many of our pensioner neighbours do. It should be clearer, I feel.
As I said, the money is your's, but it must be used specifically for work on your apartment. Usually it's given as a reimbursement after you've had work completed. In other words, it's difficult to get given the cash up front. Which is fair enough. Unused repfond contributions can help increase the sale price of an apartment although, if you think about it, it's kind of self balancing. The sale price is lower because work is needed, and then raised because the sale includes money to complete the work. So I'd argue with the salesperson who tried to justify a selling price of a low standard apartment on the basis of a large repfond. When we first bought our apartment there was, from memory, about 40 000 SEK sitting in the repfond. And that money would become our's to use. That is a pretty large amount, and told us that we were probably going to be looking at an apartment which hadn't had any renovating done for quite a few years. So there was going to be work needed. Which turned out to be correct. The upside to that was that we knew there would be money there for us to use for the necessary redecorating work. In the end I think that we paid a fair price for our apartment, given it's size, location and condition. Knowing how much is in a repfond will give you a bit of an indication about the previous owners. A large fund will likely mean that the owners weren't terribly concerned about keeping the apartment fresh and modern. A low fund usually means that recent renovation work has been completed. So it's a good guide.
Whether we draw done the remainder of our repfond for our new kitchen remains to be seen. In some ways it would be silly not to, given that the money is there. On the other side of things it's kind of nice to know that the money is there should we want to do something else inside. We still have another bathroom that we probably will freshen up a bit, and we might want to treat oursleves later by glassing in our balcony. Dunno yet, we might take part from the fund and spring for the rest ourselves.
We might end up doing that, Youma. We have to build or buy something first, which we've done. All we have to do is to show the receipt to get reimbursed. So we're entitled to take the money and and spend it on a good boozy holiday if we like. Which doesn't sound too bad.
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