Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

The Barclaycard that used to be an Egg card statement generated this morning. £40.09 in interest this month and a minimum payment of £72.69 which I made straight away. I'll do a rounding payment as a PAD later in the month, but I'm being quite stingey with the PADs this month, as I'll be needing to make my first payment off the 6.9% balance transfer now the higher rate balance on that card has all gone (:D)

It was a good Tesco run today - Mr Minx bought his whisky when he popped in after seeing his Mum last night, so the bill was only £57 and I got it down to £42 with coupons :T

I'm considering applying for a job, well, not a job exactly, more of an entrepreneurial opportunity. A property company in town has bought the Re/Max franchise for the area and is looking for estate agents, training provided. Property is something I've always been fascinated by, I love the whole house-buying experience and since I can't afford to buy any more of my own at the moment, I might as well help other people with it! They're advertising OTE of £40k which I think is extremely optimistic for up here, but if I'm reading the advert right and it's essentially a self-employed position with them supplying the leads, then it could fit around the bead selling quite nicely because busy season for the beads is a quiet time for house selling and vice versa. Definitely worth giving them a ring on Monday to find out a bit more I think.

cazmanian_minx

It's freezing here today and so windy that I had trouble standing up on a couple of occasions when I was doing the horses this morning! Nothing to report other than a £1.64 rounding payment to the overdraft.

cazmanian_minx

A quiet weekend for sales, only £407 in the PayPal account this morning Things aren't completely dire - I'm £800 short of meeting all the bills bar the supplier payment and my drawings and if it comes to it, the supplier payment can go on the card (argh) and I can pay myself late. I've spent the last two days talking to a lovely American lady who wanted some bangles and she placed her order this evening for £112-worth - though she hasn't sent me her address, so I can't put the card payment through until I get that.

brizzledfw

Estate agent thing sounds promising. Let us know how you get on

Hope you have a good week

cazmanian_minx

I haven't had a chance to ring them yet, but the more I read about Re/Max in the UK, the less I want to, to be honest

I took my camera down to the beach this morning and proved to myself that even in dull, flat light with a grey sky, I can still sometimes find a good image:


Armadale by Caro Jones, on Flickr

Still got lots more to go through, but I'm quite chuffed with that as landscape photography is not one of my strong points.

The lovely American lady sent me her address so I could put her card through - but didn't mention that she'd registered her card with the online security systems, so I needed the last four digits of her social security number as well. I've sent her a PayPal invoice, it's simpler!

brizzledfw

Like it. Pretty envious of your lifestyle really! :-)

cazmanian_minx

Ohhhhhhhh, trust me, when it's chucking it down and the wind's gusting to 90mph and you still have to stagger down sodden fields to muck out and feed the horses, you'd give ANYTHING not to be here!

Talking of which, I made my first horse manure bricks this morning Lesson one: if you've got manure and hay mixed together, make sure the hay goes in the middle otherwise they just crumble at the bottom. I've got three bricks sheltering under a bit of propped up profile roof - I can't find my cake drying rack, which is what I normally put the paper ones on, but hopefully if I flip them over this evening enough air will get to them to harden the outside over a couple of days. I reckon one wheelbarrow of muck will make about 20 bricks and I get 1.5 to 2 barrow loads a day :eek: so I may need to get a production line going come summer

I think I've nearly finished the Christmas shopping. My brother actually sent me suggestions for him and his partner this year, so they've been ordered and all I need to do now is nip into town this afternoon to get Mr Minx his last two stocking fillers (I have to go in, I only have 75 miles left in the fuel tank and I need 26 of those to get to the petrol station!).

The nice American lady has PayPal'd me the money overnight, which is brilliant, so those can go off today. I think I need to place another order with that supplier, as I've run out of a couple of things. And my Chinese wholesaler has sent me a US$100 coupon plus an offer of 20% off shipping if I spend over US$1000. Now, I've got about US$400 on account with them I think, so for about £500 I could get quite a bit of stuff - though I'll need to make sure it's all fairly lightweight. Just wish I had a bit more cash floating around - paying off that card felt good, but I may have shot myself in the foot slightly by doing it.

cazmanian_minx

Christmas shopping done AND I still have £70 in the 'gifts' pot part of the budget, thanks to some savvy shopping and a load of Amazon gift vouchers via Swagbucks :j

I've also got enough available in the business account to cover all the direct debits through to the first week of January. I still need another £2958.82 to cover the supplier payment and my drawings and I really don't think that's going to happen now (I have precisely zero orders waiting to ship at the moment ) unless there's a big rush next week. As long as I can take another £750 between now and 1st January to transfer to my current account for January's personal direct debits, the rest can be caught up with slowly.

cazmanian_minx

It's scores on the doors day:

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£3797.32 / -£3100.98 +£696.34

Business total: -£3797.32 / -£3100.98 +£696.34

Personal
Overdraft: -£2374.00 / -£2576.00 -£202.00
Egg card: -£3260.00 / -£3227.40 +£32.60
Barclaycard: -£2900.36 / -£2900.36 no change

Personal total: -£8534.36 / -£8703.76 -£169.40

Grand total: -£12,331.68 / -£11,804.74 +£526.94

That's last week's damage undone, almost to the penny.

For some reason, Barclaycard seems to love me at the moment. The old Egg card has a 6.9% life of balance offer on it, the original Barclaycard has popped up a 0% until July 2013 offer and Barclaycard Commercial are offering me a Barclaycard Business card. Unfortunately, there's still no current account transfer offer available, which is really annoying because there's £6k available on the original card and that would have meant I could have transferred the overdraft and the old Egg card to 0%. I'm hoping this means that my credit rating is starting to look a little less risky and when I have another go at applying for a 0% card in about March next year, I might stand a chance of being accepted.

brizzledfw

Well done. Some good news then.

Have a good weekend and hope you get some last minute orders