If you haven’t been going to the HOA meetings, I think you’d be hard-pressed to make the assumption that it was arbitrary and made up. How often are your HOA meetings and have you been attending? Go back to the minutes and see when and why the vote occurred.
I’m in a small complex and it turns out that our HOAs have not been keeping up with the budget for the past 8 years before I moved in. We voted out the old board and voted in folks with a finance background to try to get the budget back in line. Without raising monthly HOAs, our reserve is 25k in the hole per unit (and that’s without considering emergency/unexpected repairs).
Unless the HOA is building a spa with that money (which has happened at a friend’s complex), usually the assessments deal with practical issues that are not fully funded at the time.
