Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

You can tell winter is starting when it's half past nine in the morning, you're in a south-facing room and there isn't enough daylight for your calculator to work

I squeezed in my extra £500 to make it £4,000 off that Barclaycard this month Probably shouldn't have, because at the moment I don't have enough money available in the business overdraft to pay myself and get that stock couriered (forgot about that ), but it's done, I know I've got £130 coming in from the website in card payments and I have a load of stock here to get listed, some of which is special orders, so if I can get that photographed and up for sale today, hopefully the people it's for will buy it tonight. And if it comes to it, if I have to pay myself £1000 on the 1st and the other £500 later, it's not a problem (I can do that right now and have enough for the courier).

No more Barclaycard payments this month though. For now it's cheering that I owe less on it at the high rate than I've paid off this month

Hiddenidenity

Your doing great Its good to read your so happy and positive x

cazmanian_minx

Email from the Hong Kong supplier this morning to say that they'd miscalculated the weight and it's actually 105kg. The cheapest price I can find is £454 via an aggregation service using TNT Economy, so I've emailed my freight agent to see if he can find a better deal through his contacts. He usually can Current available overdraft funds are £1935.92 with the £38.07 interest due out today, so I should be OK for £1500 for me and £450 for the courier by tomorrow - the cartons won't be ready to pick up until 4th October and if my agent handles it, he won't bill me until the goods arrive here so it'll be academic anyway.

I was going to have a day of doing outdoors stuff, because the forecast is for a rare dry day, but I really need to get these last few bits of stock listed as well and then start on the two boxes that have been sitting here since the end of August

cazmanian_minx

Ooooh, it's a happy scores on the doors today!

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£2974.26 / -£2832.97 +£141.29
Barclaycard: -£5000.00 / -£3500.00 +£1500.00

Business total: -£7974.26 / -£6332.97 +£1641.29

Personal
Overdraft: -£2665.07 / -£2745.00 -£79.93
Egg card: -£3333.33 / -£3333.33 no change
Dental loan: -£500.00 / -£500.00 no change
Barclaycard: -£2869.11 / -£2869.11 no change

Personal total: -£9367.51 / -£9447.44 -£79.93

Grand total: -£17,341.77 / -£15,780.41 +£1561.36 :D:D:D:j:j:j:j:j:beer::beer::beer::beer::T:T:T

Just a bit chuffed with that

Of course, it's all going to go downhill next week - I've got that courier to pay, plus my drawings will come out of the business account, so that's £2,000 straight off. Amazon will disburse, but because I'm nearly sold out of the toolkits now with no plans to restock (nightmare supplier) it'll only be about £600 instead of the usual £1100-£1200 - so just to stand still I need to take about £1400 through eBay and the shop. Mr Minx's share of the bills will be paid into the overdraft, but I've got to take out £150 over the weekend to pay for the first lot of hay. If I'm still under £16k in total this time next week, I shall consider it a success

cazmanian_minx

Late one today! The day's been all higgledy-piggledy because my cousin was passing through Scrabster this evening on her way home to Orkney, so I said I'd go and see her and do the weekly shop at the same time rather than in the morning as usual. Mr Minx and I spent the morning doing logs - he was chainsawing and I was attempting to split them with a large wood axe, but I don't have the upper body strength at the moment to really be able to get any weight behind the axe (it's about as much as I can do to raise it over my head!), so he took over while I stacked the split wood. There are about another 40 rings to do, which is my homework for the next couple of weeks!

We were supposed to be collecting hay tomorrow, but it's been so wet today that I don't think we're going to be able to get the quad and trailer down the field to take it from the driveway to the store. We'll see how it's looking in the morning, but I've got the £150 in my wallet just in case we go ahead.

One plus side of Mr Minx giving me a shopping list and not coming with me is that I only spent £58 instead of the usual £80-£100

cazmanian_minx

Hooray - we didn't get the really heavy rain forecast overnight, so I'm off with my neighbour's horsebox in a bit to collect my hay. The sheds are cleared and ready (though Mr Minx was quite surprised to find out how much of his stuff he'd left down there - we're going to have to use the trailer and quad to bring it all back up!) - in fact I don't think they've been that empty since they were built, so I must make an effort to keep them tidier in future.

Anyway, since it's the 30th September, it's time for month end scores on the doors. This month's PADs totalled a healthy £717.39 which was a pretty good result.

Debt 31st August 30th September

Overdraft £2980.00 £2871.00 -£109.00
Tesco card £1350.00 £0.00 -£1350.00
Egg card £3367.00 £3333.33 -£33.67
Teeth loan £7500.00 £500.00 -£250.00
Barclaycard £1471.47 £2869.11 +£1397.64

Only a £345.03 reduction in debt plus £153.92 in interest and balance transfers - that equals £498.95 in debt repayments, so I must have overspent this month Let's have a quick look at where it all went, courtesy of Microsoft Money....


All income for the month: £2347.50

Bank charges: £153.92
Bills £526.95
Diesel: £102.58
Cash: £20.00
Tesco: £467.69
Dental plan: £20.00
National Insurance: £13.25
Horses: £198.17
Croft savings: £500.00

Total: £2002.56

That explains it - a much higher than usual Tesco bill because of having family staying on top of a five Saturday month (August was £297.83) plus the first load of hay to be paid for (£150). The shopping should be back to normal next month, but I need to buy a couple of mats for the field shelter, then the dentist is here in November and then there'll be more hay to buy in December, so it looks like I need to get used to a lower rate of reduction for a while

On the plus side, I dumped £4000 plus interest from the highest rate card, so I'd still call it a successful month on the whole

cazmanian_minx

Hello October - wow, the months are going fast.

One thing I forgot to do at the end of last month is work out how my paying off rate is going. At the start of this diary I calculated that I'd have to pay off £18.90 a day excluding interest to get rid of all the debt by the time I was 40. That's now down to £14.96 a day

Not sure how much of the horrible rate card will get tackled this month, as it's looking like an expensive one for the business. Outgoings should be as follows:

Monthly account charge: £5.00
Quarterly internet bill: £112.69
Supplier account: £1861.01
Royal Mail account: £687.57
VAT direct debit: £960.00
VAT and duty on import: ~£380.00
eBay bill: ~£400.00
Website hosting: £23.99
Payments gateway: £24.00
Card processing: ~£10.00
Phone bill: ~£25.00
Next month's drawings: £1500.00

So that's £5989.26 needed, I've got £978.58 available in the overdraft and just under £700 waiting to disburse in the Amazon account, leaving £4310.68 to meet the bills. I also really need to place an order with my other UK supplier, that'll be about £1000.

On the upside, the Christmas rush is starting and my chains will be here at the end of next week, so you never know, I might make a little bit of headway. I'm going to aim for another £1000 off it.

cazmanian_minx

It was the first freeroll tournament of the October competition last night and I had a good and bad result - good because I finished 12th out of 355 which gives me a great start to being in the top 32 at the end of the month, bad because they only pay prizes to the top 10!

Amazon, bless them, had a clearout of backed up orders for my stock last night and dispatched everything that was waiting to go, meaning that they're transferring over £850 to me today Yesterday was manic for orders, I only just made the Royal Mail collection in time. Today I don't have as many but one of them is over £200 of stuff.

What else? Oh yes, we're trying an experiment to keep the heating bills down this winter, as in we haven't switched it on yet. The problem with night storage is that it takes about 48 hours after you switch it on to warm the house up and you don't get heat when you want it, you get heat when it chooses to put it out (there's a dial for early boost or late boost, but it doesn't seem to make much difference!) - so to keep the house warm, we basically have to leave it on the whole time. We've found that if we shut the living room door in the evening and make sure we shut it behind us again when we go to bed, the woodburner will heat up the living room and kitchen enough in the evening that they're still warm the next morning. Mr Minx likes sleeping in a cold bedroom and I have pyjamas, so we don't need to switch it on yet and when it gets colder we may get away with just having the kitchen night storage on and using the timer on the panel heater in the bedroom - the hall and landing night storage units can stay off.

cazmanian_minx

Not such a good game of poker last night, but I'm still in the top 32 (just!).

Hardly any orders to go today, obviously everyone ordered at the weekend! So I'm going to get started on these two boxes of cheap & cheerful stock that have been sitting by my desk for about two months

cazmanian_minx

We met our house's previous owner last night, he was up visiting friends in the village and decided to drop in and introduce himself. He still owns the croft (fields) around the house and we have an agreement to buy it from him once he no longer has to pay half the proceeds to the Crofters Commission (I think I've mentioned all this before). We thought this was going to be May next year, turns out he wants his money in March.

So it's going to be a bit of a scramble, especially since Mr Minx miscalculated his budget and I've had to pay the bill for the shelter groundworks he said he was paying for out of the money we already had saved. I think we're going to have to bite the bullet and apply for a loan at the beginning of February - there are some decent rates around and we can pay it back over 12 months. If we get turned down (fingers crossed we won't, as we'll do it in Mr Minx's name only so my self employment status won't be in the way) then I'm going to have to take up my mother's offer, but I'd really rather not.