So, according to the redtop papers (that I shouldn’t be reading, but Oh! The Temptation!) gas prices are about to shoot up 66% this winter, forcing some people to choose between heat and food.

Ow.

It seems increasingly apparent that the time when you could switch on your heating in October and leave it on until May is over.  Everyone is going to need to get a lot more thoughtful and careful about how they heat and live in their homes.  This is something that I was forced to do a couple of years back - my husband and I are in the fortunate position of being able to build our own home.  When we started designing the kind of home that we wanted, one of the first decisions that we had to make was about heating.  The method of heating your home affects everything about the structure of your building.  Want underfloor heating?  You’ll need thicker floors to absorb the height of the pipes.  Want a gas boiler?  You’ll need to site your services near to the cheapest connection point.  Want a Ground Source Heat Pump?  You’ll need to dig up your land at the same time as your foundations to site it.

What my husband and I wanted, above almost everything, was an environmentally friendly house which would cost very little money to run.  I’m a great believer in Personal Space Heating (ie. put on a sweater!) and have an ongoing hate/hate relationship with central heating boilers (I suspect that it’s something about me - they just stop working in my presence).  We ended up choosing to build a super-insulated house and choosing not to put in any central heating.  People whom we have spoken to about our choice have suggested that we may have lost our marbles and that *they’d* never be found in a freezing cold polystyrene and concrete box…

What we *are* doing, however,  is using the money that would have bought a boiler/radiator system to install some other technologies.  We will be putting solar water heating on part of our roof, and a wood-fired stove in the kitchen for heating, cooking and topping up the hot water in winter when the solar is less useful.  In the living room, we will be installing another wood burner.  Our bathrooms are reasonably small (on purpose) and will end up with electric towel rails in them for heating - these can be turned on and off as we decide to bathe.

This is all a direct result of sitting down and thinking about how we live in our home as a family.  I spend most time in the kitchen - in fact, when everyone is out during the day, I spend ALL my time here.  My computer is here too, so that’s where we tend to congregate.  When we aren’t in the kitchen, we’re in the living room.  Common sense tells me that concentrating our heating efforts on the kitchen and living room is the sensible thing to do.  We usually only sleep in our bedrooms, and a hot water bottle or electric blanket is all that is required to make sleeping a toastie experience.  We have sited the office and music room right behind the kitchen stove as there will be a great deal of spillover heat which will make that room (which I *intend* to spend a lot of time in) comfortable to work in.

Thinking about how you spend time in your home and your required warmth levels isn’t only useful in the case of a new build.  Just because you’ve got a gas central heating system with whole house heating doesn’t mean that you have to use it all. Think about where you spend your time and how you are dressed.  If you rarely use the kitchen, don’t heat it, and shut the door.  If you have two showers a week (both lasting 15 minutes) why on earth bother to heat the bathroom for an entire week?  If you turn down your thermostat, can you perhaps put on a jumper instead?  Also think about alternative ways of heating - have you got a chimney?  Could you install a woodburner?  Have you got somewhere to store wood or coal?   A live fire isn’t practical for everybody, of course, but if you *can* do it, then I would suggest pursuing it.  Wood is still very much a scrap resource on a lot of building sites, and you can get a lot of heat from a broken up pallet or branches that fall down in October storms…

Whilst I’m still in rented accommodation (the new house isn’t finished yet!) I’ll be thinking very hard about whether to turn on the central heating at all this year.  There’s a lot that I can do with an electric shower (cheaper to heat just the water I need than a whole tankful, plus cheaper water useage costs), extra jumpers and lighting a fire in the El-Cheapo woodburner here…  I also forsee some extra insulation in our immediate future (along with draught excluders and a new, draught-free catflap!).

I’ve been thinking about chickens lately.  No *great* surprise for those who know me, but it does tie into money and small business quite nicely.

I’ve recently hatched some chicks - they hatched yesterday in fact and my kitchen is now a mass of cutely cheeping fluffballs.  Aww…  I did this because I’m a self-sufficientish kind of a person, and I fancy having a small meat flock which I can bump off and fill my freezer with, whilst still allowing me to have a breeding stock left to do it again.  To buy 24 eggs (14 of which hatched) for hatching cost me just over £8 at the local livestock market.  The incubator took a tiny trickle of electricity which didn’t even show up on my “how much power are you using?” green eco-meter gadget.  I imagine that feed at the current price will cost me something like £6 to get them to slaughter age.  I reckon it’s likely to cost me something like a pound a bird, going down to something like 20p - 50p a bird as I breed my own.  The incubator was on loan from a friend.

The same bird, from a supermarket would cost something like £7.00ish.  Buying a live, just-about-to-start-laying, chicken from the livestock market will cost about £2-4ish, and will reliably give you 400 - 600 eggs in two years depending on the breed.

So why so expensive to buy the finished product when it can be done so cheaply? (Or should that be “cheep-ly” going by the noises in my kitchen…?)

We’re paying for the convenience of not having to find somewhere to raise chickens ourselves, not having to feed and clean them, not having to deal with the day-to-day health and upkeep issues and the general hassle of having livestock.  It’s OK for me because I actively enjoy keeping poultry and the by-products are a really good excuse to support my hobby.  As money is tight, I really appreciate the difference it makes to our bank balance, too.

But basically, people pay - in all sorts of situations - for the convenience of Not Having To Do It Themselves.  This is a great, and very different way to look at income generation.  Instead of thinking what you like to do, why not try thinking about what you don’t mind doing, but other people hate.  I gladly pay an Accountant to do my taxes every year because I detest them so much - to me it is money well spent.  My neighbour takes in ironing because she quite enjoys it, but finds increasing numbers of people who can’t abide it.  Gardening, car washing, cleaning, tidying - these are all things that people hate and would gladly pay someone else to do.  A perfect example of finding a niche and filling it brilliantly are those people who come round and clean your oven and hob.  Who likes cleaning ovens?  Not me, that’s for sure.

So, the key to a great little business is finding something that everyone dislikes doing, but you don’t mind.  Don’t be afraid to fill a tiny niche - you don’t have to offer a full housecleaning service if all you want to do is set up video/hard drive recorders for the elderly…

What niches can you think of today?

Positive thinking - it’s the key to making a success of things.  People who start off thinking about a new project with the words, “I can’t…” almost invariably fail.  Those who see no possibility of failure usually succeed.  Obviously it’s not an absolute, but it’s a pretty good way to lead your life.  Other people are drawn to happy, positive people and success or failure is often defined and navigated through other people (life partners, employers, friends, customers etc.).  So keeping a positive outlook is, in my opinion, the biggest single thing that you can do to guarantee success in your endeavours.

So please, someone, explain to me why I keep reading red-top newspapers?  My particular vice is the Daily Mail Online, and I find myself clicking through to it whilst waiting for another page to load, an email to unpack or chicks to hatch (I have hatching chicks!  They’re so cute!!!).  Is it full to the brim with positive, cheerful and uplifting stories to cheer my heart and get my day off to a flying start?  No.  It’s full of depression, doom and gloom.  With a side helping of rubbish celebrities.  Why do I do it???

Today was a classic example.  Lead headline? “Government warns of recession.  Up to 550 jobs per day to be lost up until 2010″.  Argh!  I’m going to lose my job!  I’m insecure!  My children!  My home!  My CHICKENS!!!

Yeah, right.  Now consider the fact that I am not employed.   Nobody can make me unemployed because nobody employed me in the first place.  All my income is self-generated and has the capacity to improve as any kind of recession hits.  My husband has enough work to last him for a year.  Why on earth is this headline stressing me out?  And, dear reader, it really did stress me out - I went from extremely happy (new chicks!!!) to depressed in the time it took me to read the story.

No more.  I am now going to try and give it up.  I can’t avoid tv news quite as effectively, but I may start to buy a tv listings magazine so that I can just turn the tv on to the programs I want, and miss the irritating and depressing stuff (I count most reality tv in this category as well).  I’m striking a blow for the independence of my happiness!

It’s been a tough year, what with illness, bereavement and over-commitment.  I’ll hold my hands up to having fallen off the horse thoroughly back in May, when suddenly money didn’t seem very important at all.

In explanation, I lost my father in May to an incredibly aggressive combination of illnesses, of which cancer was the strongest.  I’ve spent the time between then and now grieving, resting and regrouping my resources, ready to carry on forwards in the way that he would have wanted.

My father taught me some important lessons, and I think this is a good time and place to reflect on those:

• It is perfectly possible to be happy with very little in the way of material things.  Dad didn’t collect *stuff*.  He liked books, but only kept the ones that he wanted to re-read a LOT.  My memories of Dad aren’t tied up with things, but with feelings and events.  I don’t have to think hard to remember the way his hugs felt or the sound of his singing, but I’d really struggle to tell you about his *stuff* because there just wasn’t any.
• Doing what you love is more rewarding than chasing money.  Dad worked for the same company for his entire life - apprenticeship until retirement.  He could undoubtedly made much more money if he had swapped jobs or allowed himself to be headhunted.  But he loved what he did, where he did it and the stress of swapping that around and moving his family would probably have far outweighed any benefit.
• If you are bad with money, admit it and learn to trust a partner who is good with it.  My Mum is a financial whizz.  She can make a meal for a family of five for a pound (forget Jamie Oliver’s recent Sainsbury-sponsored exhortations to feed “four for a fiver”!).  She managed to buy a house, get a good retirement plan, have solid savings and STILL have enough for a few foreign holidays in their retirement.  Dad always admitted that if money was left up to him, the family would have been far more hard-up.  But he learned to trust Mum’s judgement and she was (and still is) brilliant.
• Figure out what’s important to you and build the rest of your life around it.  Dad had a difficult childhood during the Depression and then the Second World War.  His family was fractured and never really rebuilt.  As a consequence of this, he decided that all he really wanted was a stable family of his own in a house that he wouldn’t have to move from.  This was what he pursued with all his heart, and when he attained and kept it - this was what made him happy every day of his life.  He had the serenity of someone who has seen his dreams come true.
• Dreams don’t have to be unattainable.  Dad wanted a family and a home.  He didn’t see the need to aspire to someone else’s ideals of what he should want, and consequently, he found it quite easy to be happy with what he had.
• Debt is BAD.  Well, say no more.  If you’re reading this blog then you want out as well - you’re with my Dad on this one, eh?  He had a credit card, but only used it for things that he knew he could pay off at the end of the month when the bill came.

My father was a simple, honest man who blessed those who came into contact with him.  The lessons that he left me with are worth studying, and I plan to make them fit into my life from here on out.

Thanks, Dad.

The way I see things, there are two really good reasons for not wasting food:

1. Uneaten food has been grown, transported, stored, displayed and sold for the purchaser, many things have really high carbon footprints.  If you’re going to buy imported french beans from Kenya, the least you can do is *eat* the darned things!
2. It wastes your money.

My feelings about which of these things are the most important vary hugely with how fat my bank balance is.  At the moment things are very lean, so I’m firmly on the side of number 2 up there.  Why should I spend my money to fill up landfill?  I could be spending it on something I’d like instead - a bag full of slimy salad really isn’t a whole bunch of fun for £1.26 (unless you happen to be one of my children’s fledgling tadpoles at the moment - I’m having to let lettuce go slimy *on purpose* for them.  Augh!).  I could buy a bottle of cider instead.  Or some new felt-tip pens for my daughter.  Or three newspapers.  Almost *anything* is more interesting to buy than a bag of rotten food.

I think that what has lead to this is a lack of joined up thinking.  If you’ve got something left in your fridge that needs eating up, think about what kind of meal you could build around that leftover.  It requires a little more thought than, “I fancy pizza.  I shall buy pizza.” (Although the good Lord knows that I crave pizza on a fairly regular basis in THIS house - in fact, we used to refer to it as ‘the blessed food that comes in boxes’…)

I had a dear friend come to visit at the weekend, one who is cut from the same “waste not, want not” cloth as me.  I showed her my allotment.  She spotted chard.  She picked and cooked the chard, cutting out the stem part.  We had the chard with the chicken I’d roasted.  Yum!  We then sweated the chopped chard stalks and boiled the chicken carcass the next day.  I added some potatoes and a single leek that had been sitting in my fridge looking unloved for a while.  We had chicken and vegetable soup.  One chicken and an armful of stuff out of my allotment formed the basis for 2 full meals for seven people.

It’s all about altering how you think.

But, whatever you do, don’t think like this woman (I have an overpowering urge to shut her head in the fridge door and slam it repeatedly…) :

What a waste… my family is throwing away £1,800 worth of food a year | the Daily Mail

You may be aware that my posting frequency has dropped recently.  This isn’t due to a lack of things to say on my part or lack of interest in this blog, or blogging in general.

Unfortunately, a member of my immediate family has recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and whilst I am still determined to pay off my debt as quickly as possible, I simply cannot put money before spending time with someone that I love who might not be with me for much longer.

The automatic systems that I have in place will still be ticking away, but other committments will have to be scaled back in the short term, and one of those is likely to be this blog.  I will still be posting - I suspect I will have a lot of thinking time in the next few weeks - but it will probably be less often in the short term.

Just to pique your curiousity, I do have some whiffs of some interesting money-making ideas, and I shall be looking into E-book writing and delivery in the next few months - stay tuned for more detail!

Without a doubt, the part of being self-employed that I find most difficult is motivating myself and recognising that my businesses are just as legitimate as if I was working in an office for the Civil Service.  Remember that old saying, “On the Internet, no one knows if you’re really a dog”?  Well, in my case, no-one knows if I’ve actually bothered to change out of my pyjamas or not.  Which can be a bit of a problem, frankly. 

You see, it’s quite difficult to sound professional and in control of a large scale business when you’re dressed in a fluffy robe and a pair of pyjamas featuring the adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

I used to do the “FlyLady” housecleaning schedule fairly rigorously, and one of their tenets is that you should always get dressed to professional levels, including putting on proper shoes – not slippers!

When I did this, I always felt just a little bit more in control of things at home – housework, business and parenting.  The same thing seems to hold true with a work space for me, as well.  My current  house is not particularly well laid out for working – it’s one of the reasons that we’re building our own house as our needs are simply not met by the average house – but I have a small desk/bureau area set aside in my kitchen area which is where I work most days.  It makes a big difference to how I approach my day if my papers are in order and I have a clear workspace.  I don’t think that it’s any co-incidence that the days I seem to achieve the most are those where I’m dressed professionally and have a clear work space.  Those are the days when I find it easiest to believe that these little hobby businesses are growing into something more significant every day and that they are the key to achieving the things that I dream of…

If you are having some problems coping or developing the right attitude, then consider looking at your work area and how you present yourself to others (but most importantly, to yourself).  If you want to make a success of your arts-based mini-business, then maybe power-dressing is the wrong choice for you.  Try to think of someone making a go of a business in the area that you want to work in, and study their look.  What makes them… them?  Something that years of working in the Tribute Act scene has taught me is that it’s the small details which make a huge difference.  Anyone can put on a flouncy black dress and boots, but I *know* that what distinguishes my Stevie Nicks from any others are the things that the audience might not even notice – the moon necklace, the turquoise cuff, the hat that is *exactly* one size too big…  Because when I get those details right, I *feel* right, and everyone can see that I feel right.  It’s almost indefinable, but very definitely there.

Why not think about your surroundings this weekend and have a think about whether you can change anything to make a difference in your attitude and the attitudes of others?

I’m a sucker for a bargain.  Particularly when I’m already in the market for something.

Picture the scene: after careful discussion, my dearest husband and I decide that we really need a Widgetiser, as it will make our lives easier and save us money in the long run.  Our accounts are looking reasonably healthy, we go to look in the shops to see which Widgetisers are available and what the features are.  We’re going Widgetiser shopping!  Whee!

We head for the first shop, and go straight to the Widgetiser shelf.  There’s maybe 2 dozen different brands, ranging from £10 t0 £150, all with differing features.  My husband picks up the £150 model, and when he turns around, there’s me, clutching the £10 one.  We argue a little, pointing out different features of our chosen models, carefully skirting around the fact that we both made our instant decisions based on price.  There’s usually some kind of argument (in carefully modulated tones if the kids are with us), which ends with me pulling out my trump card of “we can’t afford anything better!”.  If he’s lucky, there might be a more expensive model marked down to the cheapest price, and I’ll agree to that instead.  He’ll put down his shiny new toy, heave the “she won, but I’ll cope *somehow*” sigh and fetch out his wallet to pay for the one I chose.

Fast forward 6 months.  We were right - the Widgetiser is great and it *has* saved us money, but it’s just never been quite… right… somehow.  It feels flimsy and I have to glue the stoptap closed after the first week of regular use.  I realise that if it had the extra functions that my husband liked, it probably *would* have been more useful and I would be able to save even more time and money with it.  Then it breaks.  Yup, I fell victim to the terrible marketing ploy of “buying cheap cr*p”.

Same thing just happened with our cordless phones at home.  Our telephone point is in a very inaccessible corner and well away from any of our work desks.  The only chair in which one can sit to use it  is usually filled by our elderly and very arthritic cat who makes you feel guilty if you try to move him.  He sits there looking confused and wondering why you’re sat in his chair, shouting on the phone.  So, being the soft saps that we are, we don’t move him and just twist at stupid angles to use the corded phone.  However, we are currently attempting to run 4 businesses over the phone whilst not disturbing an arthritic cat.  It’s not exactly good business practice, really - “Argh!  Sorry, I put my back out - the cat’s asleep again, was dates were you interested in again?”  Nope.  Something had to change!

I remembered that I bought cordless phones when my daughter was at the “permanently attached to Mummy’s left leg” stage, so I could sprint out to the bottom of the garden and complete my telephone business before she could toddle out to catch me and request more Teletubbies.  Brilliant!  Why didn’t I just get them back out and use them again???  Well, Einstein, the reason you put them away in the first place was because they were so unreliable.  One of them switches off at random and the other one has the charging ability of an IVA debtor.  After two consecutive phone calls from my mother about my father’s medical treatment which faded away to nothing (Did she say “chemotherapy” or “renal unit”?), I’ve decided I need to buy new phones.

However, I thought I’d buy them online.  So here I am again, looking at cheap cr*p and wondering how many functions I can get for how little money.  *sigh*

Somebody beat me over the head with a 2 x 4 which has the words “quality costs a bit more”, please.  Maybe I’ll tempt fate and let my husband buy them without me - whilst we’ll get nicer phones which last much longer, I may need adrenalin shots by the time he gets back from the shops.

But in the meantime… well, the cat looks so comfortable.  He is 17, after all, and my back isn’t *that* bad…

So, the government would have us believe that inflation currently stands at 2.5%, huh?  Well, if like me, you have filled a car with fuel or bought a loaf of bread recently, you’ll possibly share my opinion that they’re not *exactly* giving us the whole story.

The problem is that prices are creeping up in some places, whilst loss leaders are still being touted by the big supermarkets.  What’s the best way around this?  Well, what I’m planning on doing is starting to keep a price book.

I’m almost subconsciously aware of the prices of various things – I know that milk is £1.00 for four pints at Iceland.  Teabags are 99p for 100 at Lidl.  Cheese is … cheaper … at my local butcher.  But how much?  I’m not sure, because I haven’t made a note of it.  The key is to buy a small book, possibly an address book with handy-dandy alphabetical tabs.  The first time you go round a supermarket, write down the prices of things that you buy regularly in the appropriate tabs, along with which shops set which prices.  It’s a pain in the rear end the first time you go shopping, but from thereon afterwards, you have a point of reference for how much things cost.  If you know that milk is 75p cheaper in Iceland than in the corner shop (which it is for me), then you can plan to visit that supermarket and buy several pints and freeze it (I drink semi-skimmed milk, and freezing it doesn’t affect the taste at all, and means that I never find myself without milk for breakfast the next day after the corner shop is shut at 9pm.).

I’m going to try it next time I go shopping, anyway.  Anything that promises to save some money in today’s volatile economy has got to be good!

I’ve spoken a lot in this blog about the fact that you should diversify your income streams and set up self-employed businesses, but I’ve never actually  spoken much about the different businesses that my husband and I run, and the decision process that lead to them:

1.       My husband runs a building company with his father, specialising in joinery and electrics.  This was set up when he was learning the trade as the Oldest Apprentice in town (31!).  It has slowly grown over the years to the point where they have had to register for VAT.  Unless they take on anyone else, this business can’t grow anymore as it is limited by how much work two men can do.

2.       He is also self-employed as an electrician.  This is a vaguely complicated set-up which is to do with the scale of jobs and how they process tax payments.  I’m convinced that the taxman won’t be happy until every self-employed person in the UK has been driven insane by self-assessment forms and quarterly declarations…

3.       I run our cottage as holiday accommodation.  This one was really just a creative way of dealing with a house which we couldn’t sell.  The choice was fairly stark – either leave it empty and go bankrupt or let it out on some kind of basis.  Due to a bad experience with a previous long-term let, we decided to do it short-term for holiday accommodation.  It’s worked out well as holiday accommodation pays more than long-term let, too.  I also employ a friend to help with the cleaning, putting a little local employment into the economy as well.

4.       Both my husband and I run a music business called “Weyrd Media” which is an easy way to trace our musical earnings for the tax man.  If we did this without an umbrella company, it would get very confusing with bank accounts and his status as a self-employed electrician.  It used to be called “Weyrd Music”, but  I changed the name with the tax office at the last self-assessment submission to encompass the fact that I was also doing a certain amount of musical administration and website design for clients.  So really, “Weyrd Media” is a melange of different businesses – music performance, music promotion, music administration and web-authoring – all under a single business heading for the purposes of simplicity.

At least three of these businesses were created in response to outside stimulus, rather than the desire to “be self-employed”.  We took things that we could do, expanded the ideas and resources behind them and floated them as businesses. 

I’m happy to report that all three businesses are relatively healthy at the moment, as well.

If we can do it, so can you!  Why not get thinking about what you can do and see where you can best apply some energy?