We’ve been caught in the property trap for a while now.

My husband and I bought some land to build our own house on quite a while back.  We mortgaged against our current house to raise the funds, and made our plans.  We planned to sell our current house when things got a little further along so that we could clear the mortgage and raise enough funds to finish the self-build.

This was a great plan, but the execution of it happened to fall right in the middle of the current downturn.  We made the classic mistake of asking too much for our current house when the market was falling, and consequently didn’t get a sale.  We ran the very real risk of owning two houses, and then having to pay Capital Gains Tax when we finally sold the one that was no longer our main residence.  It was, quite frankly, a bit of a worry.

During this stressful period (which included 2.5 house moves, setting up and then closing down a business and a redundancy) my husband told me that all we needed was for the RIGHT PEOPLE to see our house.  The problem was that the same kind of people kept coming to look at it - I knew from the moment that they pulled up in their immaculate Audis and asked about ripping out the solid fuel Rayburn that they were never going to be the Right People for this house.  It needed someone more… organic.  Someone else who thinks that chickens in the back garden and neighbours who get in your washing for you are great things.  My husband kept telling me that it would sell when the right people came to look.

Lo and behold, a couple ofweeks ago, the estate agent asked us to do a viewing for some people one weekend.  I wasn’t overly hopeful as I’d been here before.  I tried to think positively, though and was beyond excited when I watched the VW camper van pull up.  A VW camper van!  The kind of car that *I’d* like to drive!!!  The people from the great car came in, and whilst they were making “ooh!” and “ahhh!” noises at the Rayburn, their son checked out the garden.

“MUM!!!!  THEY’VE GOT CHICKENS!!!  COOL!!!” was the word from the back garden.

I started to get excited.

Over the course of the next 45 minutes I became more and more convinced that these people were the kind of people that I could pass my beloved house on to.  They were not only nice people, but they were nice people who I really hoped might become friends as well as neighbours.  By the time we’d finished giving them a guided tour of the allotment site, I was aware that if they didn’t want my house, I would be gutted.

My gut instincts were right.  They felt the same way about my house as I did.  They made an offer, and whilst it was far lower than we really needed, it would enable us to move on with our lives and the new house, and ensured that the right kind of people moved into the community.  We’d gladly take the financial hit for that opportunity.

So, here I am, the proud owner of a house with a “sold” sign on the front of it.  Solicitors and estate agents are phoning at regular intervals and we’ve made progress with the new house, too.  Things feel fresh and shiny.

It would also appear that we are not the only ones.  Over the last month, every house in my village which has stood with a “For Sale” sign for over two years has sold.  Five houses in one tiny village, in one month.  I really believe that the housing market is starting to pick up.  I am still unconvinced that we are going to go back to the bad old Boom Days, but if the housing market is moving, people have the option to move forward with their lives, which can only be a good thing.

I’m feeling good today.  How about you?

It’s been a while since my last entry, and I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been avoiding it.

It’s a bit of a difficult time at the moment - my main family income comes from my husband’s construction work.  We are very lucky that because of good word-of-mouth and excellent standards of work, we do still have work coming in, but people’s ability to pay is getting more and more… variable.

There’s a nasty trend doing the rounds at the moment, which is for individuals and companies to request and commission work which they have no intention of paying for.  I have heard of companies requesting complete overhauls on heavy plant machinery, only to sell the plant immediately after the work is completed and then file for bankruptcy as soon as the money is liquidated.  By the time that the 28 day terms on the invoices for the plant overhaul come due - there is no company left to pursue  for the money.

It sucks, quite frankly.

We are having to be quite careful about the jobs that we take on - sometimes we can see that a potential client’s ability to pay is somewhat … compromised.  Other times we don’t know until we have to write off a debt.

The real problem is that in the current financial situation, it really is very easy to panic and take any job that might be offered.  Lower pay might seem more acceptable than no pay, but don’t forget that in most cases, your bills will not have gone down, and the only way of making the figure that you need to break even is to work more hours.  Continuing this downward spiral eventually means that there won’t be enough hours left in the day.

So what’s the answer?

I wish I knew - we wouldn’t be having such a difficult time at the moment if I did.  The things that are helping us at the moment are:

• Pre-qualifying clients.  Can they pay?  Is the job one that we can do the best possible work on?
• Valuing our own skills as highly as we hope our clients will.  If we don’t think we can do a job, why would someone employ us?  Doing an excellent job is a surefire way to get repeat bookings.
• Not being afraid to identify loss-making ventures.  We know what our bottom line is - the amount of money we need to clear every month to maintain our current lifestyle.  We keep an eye on this and adjust expenses/incomes accordingly.   Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

2008 has been a mixed year all round for me, so I thought I’d stop and have a look at where I thought my successes and failures have been over the last 12 months, and what that says about me and how I’m doing on this journey to financial freedom…

I lost a lot of momentum in the first half of the year, due to a bereavement.  Would I change this?  Well, I’d certainly change the fact that I lost someone I loved dearly, but I don’t think I can bring myself to care too much about the money and momentum that I lost.  I spent precious hours with people central to my wellbeing, and didn’t give money a second thought - I did what needed doing, and that was that.  As my new year’s resolution was to be nicer to myself, I also refrained from beating myself up about it, as well.

I found, surprisingly, that the biggest obstacle to moving forwards was myself.  Time after time I found myself throwing up roadblocks to my progress.  Because I no longer answer to a “boss”, I am in charge of my own journey, and whilst I don’t find that scary, I do find it challenging.  If I could ask for anything in the world, I think I would ask for the ability to stay focussed on the task in hand and not to go wandering off at a tangent every two minutes.

This year I finally admitted to myself that I might be scared of success, and that’s the reason that I’m sabotaging myself with my lack of attention.  Next up - ways to deal with that, and stay on target.  That’s going to be the hard thing.  I’m currently reading Tim Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Work Week”, and his comments about setting yourself artificially short deadlines is really reverberating with me.

Next week is going to be a week of accomplishment, I’ve decided, so watch this space to see if I really can achieve that!  I’ve set myself two deadlines for projects that have been chugging away very slowly in the background, and if I can get my head around those then I think I can consider myself back on track.

In terms of cutting costs, I think I’ve done extremely well.  Our grocery budget is much lower than other families of my acquaintance, and putting the heat on is a bit of a red-letter day.  We’re burning free wood (my husband works in the construction industry amongst other things, so wood offcuts are easy to come by), and planning for making better use of our vegetable plot (”allotment” in Britain)  this year.  We’re eating a lot of home-produced food at the moment - particularly meat, which is much better for us, the environment and our budget.  We are consolidating bills by moving out of our current house and into our smaller holiday cottage next door.  It’ll be difficult in terms of space, but will make space heating and bill payments much easier.  We’re only running one vehicle and have sourced some free vegetable oil for the purposes of bringing the fuel bill down once the weather heats up a little (50/50 veg oil and diesel only works well in spring, summer and autumn - winter temperatures make the oil thicken and has a tendency to clog up the fuel pump on the car).  Once we move next door to the holiday cottage we will have access to free digital tv, so we will also be cancelling our satellite subscription.  If I could figure out a free way of pumping our well water to toilet cisterns and the washing machine I would be even happier, but I don’t do practical stuff like that.

On the whole, I’m feeling pretty good about the advances we’ve made towards coping in a more difficult economic situation.

My husband is slowly but steadily transitioning away from the construction job which he currently works at, and towards the music job which he loves.  We’ve been complimented on how brave we are at making this transition, but I fail to see any bravery involved - he’s effectively working two jobs at the moment (construction during the day, music during the evenings and weekends), and not dropping construction work until he’s got other things to fill the time and wage-gap.  It’s not a brave leap into the abyss, but rather a measured move towards sanity…

On the failure front, after a successful period of bringing our credit cards down to a really sensible level, we ran them up again with two visits to the US last year.  I really took my eye off the ball on this one, and pushed the boat out as it was a bit of a “once in a lifetime trip” for both my son (one trip) and my husband and I (second trip).  Whilst we *can* afford the payments on the new balance, it doesn’t leave us enough to overpay in the way that we were doing before, and I’m unhappy with that.

My lack of ability to stay on target is the biggest failing of the year, and the one that I feel most unhappy about.  It’s time to address that - any suggestions as to tools and tactics for addressing this problem would be greatly appreciated.  I have toyed with the possibility of taking my laptop and working elsewhere - a coffee shop in town perhaps.  However, fuel money, parking and refreshments mean that this is going to work out to be a very expensive option.  What I need to do is to find a way to do all my household chores and then switch speed to working without getting distracted by social networking or general browsing (damn online papers!).

Things that I feel positive about for the upcoming year:

• Ramping up several musical projects into better paying options
• Working on our new house and hopefully moving in sometime late summer
• Putting together a new project with a friend, which has the possibility to make money in otherwise dead time
• A couple of writing projects which require research that will be fun to do, and hopefully marketable in the long run

So, the next thing is to set myself a couple of tight deadlines, pull myself up by the bootstraps and just get on with the business of moving forwards.

I’m a big fan of free stuff, and I’ve read several of Suze Orman’s works and really like her writing style.  So I was fairly jazzed when I saw that she’s giving away downloads of her latest finance book here:

http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahshow/20081119_tows_bookdownload

It’s only available until midday today (US time - which gives you Brits a headstart!) and it’s part of a tie-in with the Oprah Winfrey show.  However, you don’t have to sign up for emails or updates, you can just grab the book and run if you like.

I’ve only just downloaded it and am having a quick scan through, but I really like the fact that Ms. Orman addresses the economy as it is at the moment - she’s obviously written this book *very* recently and it addresses the financial issues of recession and ‘credit crunch’, which is really great.  So many PF books are aimed at where the market was a couple of years ago, and things have changed so much that they aren’t really all that relevant.

And hey! How often do you get offered a free book?

I recently read with interest an article about a company specialising in out-of-date food.  The company, “Approved Food”, started out as a market trader selling close-to-date packaged foods.  I know the sort of thing - there’s a stall on a couple of my local markets that does the same sort of thing.    Chocolate bars, biscuits, tinned goods and packets of crisps are the usual sort of thing that they sell, and sell very cheaply.  I can often be soft-soaped by the children into buying them a packet of sweets from these kinds of stall.  Who cares if it only has a week of date left on the packet when you know perfectly well that the kids will wolf the sweets in a nanosecond?

However, the realisation that one of these small-fry market traders had gone national and were now offering to ship out-of-date foodstuffs around the country was interesting.

On one hand, I am very glad to see that more people are realising that food-packaging dates and rules are nowhere near as accurate as a bit of common-sense.  I vividly remember buying some fresh honeycomb from my local farmshop.  “Best before 12.08.07″ it said.  Hrrmmmm.  I wonder if the chap who invented the rules for dating food realised that honeycomb lasts indefinitely?  That there was honey found in Tutankhamun’s tomb that was still perfectly edible?  Obviously not.  I’m a great believer that if a tomato looks OK and smells OK, then the chances are good that it’s good to eat.  I try to grow a certain percentage of my own food - time allowing - and nature has yet to stamp a vegetable with a best before date.   I haven’t given my family food poisoning yet because commonsense tells me when something is just a bit nasty.  If I don’t fancy eating something that’s gone a bit soft or squishy or hard and lumpy, then into the compost bin it goes.

Don’t get me started on the meat labelling rules, either.  Most people in this country don’t realise that beef needs to be hung for several days to make it tender and tasty.  This takes time and space, both of which cost the supermarkets money, so the odds are good that your supermarket beef will have been packaged straight from slaughter - I know this because I have bought meat straight from the abbatoir before  - they recommend storing it for SIX WEEKS before eating.  Still worried about eating the steak 2 days after the best-before date?  I’m not.  If it smells a bit funky, then it’s almost certainly because it’s been packaged in an air-excluding pack and pumped with CO2 to make it look redder.  Yuck!  Take it out of the plastic, stick it in a bit of tupperware and it will last for lots longer.

However, I am more than a little cautious with chicken and fish in this regard.  I’ve never had real food poisoning, but my dear Pa-in-Law has, and he lost 2 stone in a week.  He’s a very active builder, and not at all overweight, either.  I’m in no hurry to experience the same sort of illness, so I treat chicken and fish with respect.  The freezer is my friend in this respect - I freeze all my fresh chicken or fish that won’t be eaten within 24 hours and just defrost it as I need.

However, Approved Food isn’t selling this kind of food - it’s selling tins and jars and packets of stuff that really isn’t much affected by dates.  A week here or there doesn’t make much difference to a teabag, really.

On the other hand (I bet you’d forgotten about those hands, hadn’t you?) I’m a little concerned that this company is building up expectations of cheap food which may lead customers to ignore a couple of issues - (a) you still have to pay £5.75 for shipping 28Kg of shopping and (b) the odds are really good that a market near you will have a stall doing the same sort of thing, but without the excess shipping costs and carbon footprints.

By all means, investigate short-dated food, but give your local market a try first.  Many of them are open on Saturdays (if you work, this makes the difference between getting to a market and being reduced to shopping in T*sco) and have a huge range of other interesting stuff, too.  The vegetables are cheaper, the meat is fresher and the Mars Bars might just be 25p!  Give it a try!

I love the feeling of new possibilities that a new year brings.  It’s a time for planning and reflecting on last year.  So how did last year go for me?

Well, not great, to be honest.   I had a devastating bereavement in May,  which was the result of a sudden and vicious illness which started in January/February.  Most of the beginning of my year was eaten by sadness, caring, bereavement and recovery.  I couldn’t cope with much before about August, and had so much fallout from things that had gone undone that it pretty much ate the rest of the year.  However, for all the bad stuff, there were small, jewel-bright moments - my family has grown much closer, and I realised that money, stuff and tasks are all very unimportant in the light of health and love.  There really wasn’t much which couldn’t wait for 8 months, and my children remained well-fed and loved, and my marriage is stronger than ever.  It confirmed my feeling that this journey isn’t about money for me - it’s about getting time and experiences.

The new year has given us the opportunity to look at lots of smaller things and make changes.  Whilst in the middle of his tax return, my husband broke the monotony and decided to make a couple of phone calls.  With perhaps 15 minutes on the phone, he saved £300 per month on our mortgage and about £35 per month on his mobile phone contract.  He decided that you don’t get anything if you don’t ask for it, so asked.

I was very impressed!

For those who might want to repeat this experience with their own mortgage lenders, the salient points that my husband made in the phone conversation were:

• Interest rates have come down a LOT, but our mortgage rate only gets adjusted once per year, and is currently not reflecting this.
• We want to get a better rate as  loyal customers who are feeling the pinch in these difficult times.

We have also decided to simplify our living arrangements, and will be moving back into our small cottage, rather than the larger rented house that we’re currently in.  This will hopefully save us in the region of £600 per month.  It will, however, necessitate a radical decluttering exercise as we’ve got far too much stuff, and the cottage is considerably smaller than our current house.  This also frees me somewhat from the rigours of running the holiday cottage business (which is what we *were* doing with the spare house!) and allows me to put more of my time into other projects.  This currently looks like being labouring on our new house, which is partly built.  My husband has promised to buy me a hi-visibility jacket, a pair of workgloves and some “toe-tector” boots so that I can get stuck in!  I’m quite excited by the prospect of this as it will also get me a bit fitter at the same time.

My challenge to you today is this:

Look through a recent bank statement and try to find at least one bill that you can negotiate down or cancel - an unused membership, subscription or service perhaps.  Or try to negotiate a better rate on your mortgage or rent ( a friend of mine recently got an £830 per month rent reduced to £650 with one sentence…).

Just a quick word to let you all know that I probably won’t be posting much (if at all) until the New Year, as I will be away from home and catching up on some serious sleeping and family time when I am back at Casa InDebtNet.

For those following the home game, I can let you know that the best place to busk Christmas Carols is at a high-class Farmer’s Market.  If you can work the names of the locally produced products into your carols (Wassails are particularly good for this…) then you may even get some free stuff if the vendor is suitably amused :-)  We made about twice what we would normally make on an average shopping night for about two and a quarter hours of music.

I shall be applying my quarter of the month’s takings to my credit card bill, which will make quite a bit of a difference

So now I am off to prepare my holiday cottage for my Christmas guests and then start baking this afternoon!

Blimey.  I am looking forwards to some serious sleep between Christmas Eve and New Year - this December has been the busiest *ever*.

I had one of those epiphanaic moments recently, when I realised that I’m really great at talking about how to make more money, but whilst I can talk the talk, I’m falling down on “walking the walk” far more often than I need to be in order to build some success.

I have a product to sell (music) and I know that there is a market out there for it (past bookings and public reception).  What I need to do is stop procrastinating and just Get On With It.  I’ve been talking with a friend about doing more public and paid bookings, but we haven’t gotten any further than talking about it.  We have a terrible tendency to get together, talk a bit and then lapse into a salad-eating and ‘Robin-of-Sherwood’-watching frenzy.

Now, 2008 has, in common parlance, been a complete bastard of a year.  Many people that I love and respect have passed away this year, and I’ve spent a lot of it feeling a bit punch-drunk.  Just as I recover from one hit, BLAM! Another one comes in.  At this point in the year (having lost a dearly loved friend and neighbour under a week ago) I know that there is nothing I can do to salvage the year.  What I am intending to do, though, is to get utterly bladdered on New Year’s Eve and kick 2008 out of the door with all the venom and savagery that it deserves.  And I shall be welcoming in 2009 with open arms and the intention that it will be a Good Year.

In other words, 2009 will be the year that I actually get my arse into gear and start developing the music career that I both want and need.  I highly recommend that if you are procrastinating about starting a small business or developing your current career in a positive fashion, then you earmark next year as the year to do it.  In order to do this, I have made a list of the steps that I need to take in order to make this happen:

1. Set a regular practise and repertoire time with partner
2. Sort out new costumes
3. New promotional pictures in new costumes with instruments
4. Expand website to encompass new work
5. Record a three track demo
6. Pull together a press pack
7. Compile mailing list and references for potential venues
8. Do a Mailshot
9. Follow up phone calls

I publish this list here as a public mark in the sand, and to let it be known that I intend to create my own luck next year, and to have a good year at that.

Stuff you, 2008.  2009 is going to be MY year!

I’ve not posted for a couple of days as I’ve been running around doing all the Christmas preparations and tasks that everyone is doing at this time of year.

I spent a very pleasant afternoon at my daughter’s school nativity, watching my five year old sing her first ever solo (dressed as an angel) and reduce a roomful of parents to tears - we do seem to be raising a houseful of musicians, one way or the other!   We’ve also spent almost every evening (and several of the days) in December out singing carols.  It’s a pleasant way to earn some Christmas money, but I must say that it isn’t easy.  Both my husband and I are also struggling through coughs and colds, so it’s a little trying to say the least.

My husband’s family are very arts-orientated, and all are amateur musicians, whilst my sister-in-law is also a professional actress and stage fight director.  Talking to her always makes me think about how arts professions are perceived by other people in more mundane jobs.

“Easy money”.  “Nice life if you can get it”. “Ought to get a REAL job”.  These are all perjorative terms I’ve heard in relation to working in the arts.  Without exception, they are all phrases used by people who have never *worked* in the arts.  On the surface, it seems like an easy life - getting paid to do something that other people do for fun.  Not having to get up in the morning.  Playing all the time.

The simple fact is that it isn’t like that AT ALL.  My sister-in-law often gets up at 4 or 5am to drive for miles to the next theatre engagement on a tour, where she has to put up a set, re-choreograph parts of the show for the new theatre, liaise with theatre management and check all the props and costumes - replacing or repairing anything missing or damaged.  By the time she’s finished all of this and run the cast through any changes, it’s evening.  Round about the time that most of us are sitting down to ‘Eastenders’ and a nice cup of tea, she is gearing up to put on a performance, which will likely run until 10pm or so.  Then she has to take the set down, pack it into a van and drive to wherever her accommodation is (often on someone’s mother’s floor, or a looooong drive back home), whereupon she can finally sleep, before getting up and doing this again the next day.  Because it is such a “glamorous” profession, and there is a lot of competition, the pay isn’t very good, so she does all this for minimum wage or less.  She doesn’t get weekends or holidays.  The tour keeps on rolling.  She can be booked into Devon one day and Northumbria the day after.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers.

My husband is in the middle of transitioning from full-time construction and electrical work into being a full-time musician.  This means that for a few years here, he is effectively working two full-time jobs as he builds up a music work portfolio to enable him to scale back his construction work.   His timetable is equally as mad as that of his sister, if not worse, because he has to somehow fit being a father and husband in there somewhere as well.

So why are they working these mad hours?  Because they both have a dream of where they want to be, and what they want to be doing in a few years’ time.  They both realise that sitting back and waiting for someone to hand-deliver the perfect career is not going to work.  There is no such thing as a ‘perfect time’ to start a business, or make a life-changing decision.  Careers and lives are built out of the bricks of determination and hard work.

If you are sitting there, worried about the possibility of losing your sole source of income, or despairing at the fact that you may still be doing a job you hate in another 10 years’ time, then I challenge you to push yourself.  Start something today.  Do something scary and challenging which will move you closer towards your dreams.  Then post about it, and let us all know what direction you are travelling in

0% interest loans aren’t something that one tends to see on every shop window these days.  Which is why I was particularly interested when a musician friend of mine told me about the “Take It Away” scheme.  This appealed *hugely* to me as both a musician and someone interested in personal finance.

“Take It Away” is a scheme run by the Arts Council of England, and it aims to offer 0% interest loans to people in order to buy a musical instrument.  It is not available to school children (over 18s only) and it requires a deposit and then 9 monthly payments to pay off the instrument.  The loan is for up to £2000, and can include instrument, accessories and tuition.

Pretty cool, eh?

It’s a great way to get started with a musical instrument if you’ve always fancied it, but can’t find the money to buy an instrument straight up.  It’s also a fantastic way for experienced musicians to expand their instrumental repertoire.  A classical violinist of my acquaintance used it to buy himself a saxophone - he’d never be able to justify it otherwise - and my daughter’s rock guitarist godfather used it to buy himself a folksy mandocello/bouzouki.  The loans are not limited to beginners and there is no set list of instruments to choose from.

If you are interested, then I recommend cruising past:

http://takeitaway.org.uk

http://myspace.com/takeitawayscheme

or calling on 0845 300 6200

Of course, the important thing to remember is that this is STILL debt, and that you should make sure you have enough monthly income to pay for the installments for 9 months.  The *really* clever way to do it would be to buy something and get good enough in 9 months’ time that you could start getting gigs or busking with it.  Buy it and *apply* yourself to getting really good.  Then you can start replacing what you paid for it with gig/busk money!  Yay!!!  It’s pretty much how I’ve funded most instruments in the past five years, and I now have a policy of “no instrument in without one going out”.  Otherwise we’d be drowning in harps, frankly!