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Bestthingsinlifearefree

Hi TG,

Fair play for joining the forum :beer:

You say the business produced 21K in income last year but could produce 60K
- 90K but does not because of the work life / balance issue.

Could you get a au-pair to help with the children or rent a small office locally to work at mosat of the day but close enough to be at home to help out ?

If these measures cost say 5K per year but helped you earn 60K it could be worth it.

One question how long have you been self employed and what has been your best annual earnings to date ? (after costs)

Your OH made a very, very good point in one of her posts:

"Living in denial has got us into this mess. Facing reality will get us out of it."

If you sell the BTL you can clear your debt and reduce your current mortgage
(think of all the interest you will save). This will reduce your over head massively.

What's the point of paying high interest on 30K of debt when you have the option to clear that debt.

You need to rapidly increase your income or reduce your overhead or both.

Vickicb

Hi TG,

I think we were similar to you in some respects in that OH would get big contracts paid so we would spend the cash on something - ie holiday, home improvements, etc and yet not plan for the quieter months. The cash was coming in but we were not managing it very well, had we planned better I think he could have continued working for himself.

We converted the attic to create a quiet office out of the way from the kids, which may not be an option for you at the moment due to the expense. However, it was a godsend for him. How many bedrooms do you have? I guess you've got the kids sharing already but if there is any way to free up some office space upstairs away from the kids and teach them not to disturb you that would be one way to get the quiet space you need to work. You need somewhere that separates "home" from "work" to help to get you motivated again.

TechyGuy

That you all so much for some very constructive comments, and I apologise for being such a misery yesterday! I was having one of those "what is the point?!" days, and generally being very stroppy and unproductive!

I thought about it overnight before I had seen all your posts and came online to post my idea for moving forward which is along the lines of what Seaxwyn posted. I think that although finding quiet time to work is a problem, I could achieve what I need to in the time I have if I planned better.

I spoke a couple of times in the last 2 days to my friend who is in a similar situation, and was interested to find that we are both able to give clear cut advice on how to manage each others available time and resources, but not our own! As a result we are looking for some decent integrated software that will help us to plan and prioritise properly.

For example, I will get a big job, plough everything into it for 2 months, finish it, get paid, and feel really pleased. Then a month later the cashflow is dire, because during the 2 months of the big project, I didn't line anything else up! Elementary stuff, but I need to focus on it, and build in a minimum target for marketting and sales time each week. I think the key to this is good planning and scheduling.

The kids do make it very difficult to work, but the reason I need to do so much work is that I am doing the wrong work in the first place. Very much like complaining that you don't have enough time and money for the weekly grocery shopping, when really the problem is that you didn't write a list and plan a route around the supermarket...!

So, that is what I am going to do: Plan what profit I need to make each month and to achieve that, what to sell each month. Work out from that what I need to quote in order to make those sales, and then contact enough people to get the required opportunities to quote. Big jobs are great and the way to huge profits, but I have to fit them in among a reasonable level of week to week work.

I will back this up by using software to do cash projections and help me prioritise my time. You can lie to yourself and any one else who wants to listen about how good things are, but it is hard to remain convinced when you type in the numbers and see a graph disappearing into the red at the end of the month! :eek:

Anyway, I think this will work and is the way forward, and we are moving my desk at the weekend to a quieter area of the house :j

Feeling very fired fired up now and can actually see how to achieve this, which would mean that we could slightly increase our salary and in a few months we could start paying lump sums of a few thousand at a time out of the business to clear our debts.

Cheers,

TechyGuy