Amatheya's £4,000 in 2011 Diary

Amatheya81

Things are a bit mental at the moment and I don't know if I'll be able to post oftem but I'm still around. I've recently had some bad news which will keep me preoccupied but I'm still trying to be debt free.

I managed to break my £4k target last month so I'm thinking about a harder target next year. I've overspent a little over my birthday and I'm suffering for it now as I have to get my cam belt replaced which is just going to have to go on the credit card as I'm going to truggle to make ends meet this month as it is. On the bright side a friend is having a clear out and has asked me to ebay his stuff for him in return for 20% of the profit. I'm happy enough with this as even though it won't be much it will be better than nothing. I am worrying about Christmas and winter though as I need to do my shopping and get some winter cloathes and I'm not sure where the money is going to come from yet.

With any luck I should find out if I've got a pay rise in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed!

Wordsmith

Well done on making and breaking your £4K target. Something to be well proud of. Good luck with the pay rise.

Sorry to hear you've had bad news - but I hope it is not such a fearful time as you are at present anticipating.

All the best.

Amatheya81

New painting on my blog (Amatheyas Studio) please check it out

Amatheya81

Grrr! I'm really angry.

I accidently locked my debit card yesterday. So I went into Lloyds and asked them to unlock it. The teller said she had but offered to give me cash there and then anyway. I accepted and was rather concerned when she didn't ask me for any form of identification before giving me a large sum of money.
I had to get a bit more money out today but when I went to the ATM I discovered that my debit card was still locked. I went into the bank again to get it unlocked but instead of unlocking it the woman ordered a new pin. When I complained she said that I had asked for a new pin and that she couldn't undo it now that it was ordered! I was miffed to say the least and told her in no uncertain terms that I had now asked for a new pin but there was nothing that I could do so now I'm going to be without my card for 4 days

Add to that that me car was £170 instead of £150 and I'm having a great day!

Amatheya81

Well it seems to be one of those months... I now have flu!

I'm definately going to struggle for the rest of the month. My car repairs wiped me out and I've had a couple of other nice little surprises that have cost me money so all in all I'll be glad when it's November.

On the bright side I'm looking forward to a burlesque night on Thursday (I will be well dammit) and the first lot of my friends stuff has sold on eBay earning me about £25 for very little effort. He's getting me to list some of his old toy cars which is fun but I'm a little concerned that all the toy car research I'm doing may be taking up space in my brain that I need for something a little more sensible! lol

I do need to pull my finger out and get more proactive!

I need to make up some new card/poster designs,
I need to update my website and add a shop,
I need to do some advertising,
I need to put more of my friends stuff on ebay,
I need to get some of my own stuff on ebay,
I need to cur up in bed and sleep for about a week...

I'm sure I've said all of the above about a million times (appart from the sleeping) but one day I'll get around to doing them.

Amatheya81

Right, so I'm feeling quite positive today.

I got the letter for my anual pay review yesterday and it was at the higher end of what I expected. Still not much but better than nothing :T So I'm happy I've got a little more money coming in. I'm also starting to see some of my commission for selling my friends stuff on ebay. Again, not much but it's a little and I'm going to need every pennie as between car repairs, MOT, my birthday and preparing for XMas I am for want of a better word "screwed" this month
Never mind, I already knew that I was going to have to use my credit card this Christmas. The reason being that my mom is ill and this may be the last Christmas that she can enjoy properly so I want to make sure it's as nice as possible for her. I'm not talking about huge pressents as she's a bit dotty and if you buy her nice things she tends to squirrel them away but she loves decorations so I'm going to make my flat look like Christmas threw up in it :rotfl: and I'm going to make sure that when she comes to stay we have her favorite food and she loves parties so I've invited lots of people over. Things like that. It's going to put me behind with the debt payment but it's one of the few things that I conssider worth being in debt for.

Anyway, so this weekend I'm going to concentrate on the illustration business. I'm going to update my website with a card shop again and this time I'm going to put more thought into how I lay it out and what sort of message I'm putting across. I'm also going to put more thought into the pricing and postage structure. I'm thinking of doing a promotion something like "Spend £10 and receive free postage" What do you think? I'm hoping it would encourage people to buy a couple of pack of cards rather than just the odd one.
I also need to think about getting some more designs finished as at the moment I only have Ratz cards printed up and as I was infored by a couple of print companies "Rats are a hard sell" well outside of the fancy anyway. Hopefully I can make a few pennies with them but I really need to get some new non ratty designs finished and printed. I've found a new card printer that I'm very excited about so I'm hoping to use him for some of my new stuff and I need to look ito getting A4 prints done. Once I've got maybe 5 new illustrations done although I need to think about what work with next as while I love my rats (I leave little rats doodles everywhere I go) I need something more appealing to the wider public. Any ideas? I'm thinking about going down the medieval fantasy rout.

Anyway, appart from updating the website and re-opening a card shop I'm also going to have a good think about advertising my blog as I think that's where I get most of my hits from. I need to adviertise the card (and later print) shop and I also need to get more visitors as I only get a average of about 5 to 10 hits a day. I'm going to need this to be in the 100's before it starts generating income. I've also heard a lot about earning money from a bog and I want to look into how that works. But to be honest I don't want to end up with lots of commercial adds all over the place slowing the pages down.

Right, enough procrastinating and woffling. Time to nibble something and then get on with some work! :j

Amatheya81

The weekend was reasonably productive in the end. I've started a new illustration and I'm in the planning stages of updating my website. I'm also experementing with different printing methods for A4 prints.
Sunday I put a lot more toy cars on eBay than I usually manage so I've only got a few more and some toy trains to put on next week. Goot thing too because my friend has been clearing out his attic. I've made about £35 listing things for him and he's really happy with what I've been doing and eager for me to list more of his junk

I'm still worried about my finances next month but there's not much that I can do to improve them at the moment. Even if I cut right back I'll come no where near breaking even. When money is tight like this it makes me even more impatient for the day when I'll be loan free and and have a massive buffer in my pay. That day is only 15 payments away now and I'm still hopping to pull that date back into 2012. I'll need to pay off about £900 but that's only about £75 a month... Surely making that can't be impossible?! Ideally I'd like to pay off an additional £100 per month next year but I can't see how I'll manage that unless I get a really good bonus in April which isn't likely.

Anyway, onward and upward. Most important thing right now is working on my freelance stuff.

Amatheya81

Oh my goodness. I went to wor at 8am... I finished my day job at 6pm came home and started painting straight away... I've only just finished painting and updating my blog and I've realised that I'll I've eaten today is a packet of breakfast biscuits and a cookie. Time for dinner me thinks!!

Amatheya81

Whatever next. The housing association has once again messed up the service charge calculation and what's more they've taken 6 months to do it!
Every year in April the housing association who own the other half of my part buy appartment work out how much they charged us in service charge based on a estimate at the start of the year compared with how much they actually spent and bill or credit us the difference over the next 12 months. This is how it works in theory. In reality it usually takes them 3 months to provide us with the new figures. This year they didn't contact us until September with the new figures! We all grumbled but as it didn't make that much difference we ignored it. This month we have received another letter saying in effect Oops we got it wrong and split the bill over 8 months but there's only 5 left this year so now you're going to have to pay XYZ extra.

Honestly, if I was as incompetent as them in my job I'd have been fired years ago!!!

Amatheya81

Pay day today*Woohoo* shame I'm already on the back foot this month but never mind.
My ebay sales are going well and I'm looking forward to a few more pennies coming in next week. I also completed another survey for £1 yesterday. I'm up to about £6.50 in the survey pot again.
I feel a little as if nothing I do money saving wise at the moment will scratch the surface when I know I'm going to be accumulating more debt over Christmas but I also know that I need to keep it up even if it's a drop in the ocien.

Anyway, I don't have any money making schemes up my sleeves at the moment so I'm just going to have to keep on plugging. On the bright side there are a few good money saving months comming up soon. Feb and March will leave me with a extra £140 because I won't have to pay council tax and there is always bonus time April. Although last year the bonus was pathetic it was better than nothing. So there's plenty to look forward to.

On the business side, I spent all last night drawing again. I've moved my computer to the table instead of the sofa and it seems to be far more conducive to sitting down and getting on wih things. The illustration I'm working on at the moment is a semi self portrait which I'm going to use to create a new banner and business card. I'm getting the hang of my new Photoshop now and it has improved my art no end. Now all I need is a really powerfull computer so I can work on files that are larger than A4!
I've also decided that I'm going to try and post to my blog once a day. Even if it's just a short post or a YouTube link. I was really happy yesterday when I logged on and discovered that my page views had gone up from my average of 10 per day to about 100!!! I need to get some good peices up together, get a few small commissions (eBook covers and the like) and then start approaching publishers. I think if I try to complete a painting a week for the next couple of months I should start to have something resembling a consistent body of work

Hey ho! I'm spending the next 3 days in the pub so have a good weekend everyone