Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

StuartGMC

Caz well done, the spreadsheet will really help to gauge progress and add further incentive (as if you needed one!) to clear the mortgage.

cazmanian_minx

Christmas seems to have arrived for my shop - usually I take £100-£120 a day; since Sunday takings have been £247, £384 and £319 :beer:

Some other pieces of good news to report:

1) I've had letter from my divorce solicitor containing my final bill, which turned out to be a refund of money held on account - £211.

2) I queried Royal Mail's decision not to refund me postage on an Airsure item the French postal service failed to deliver and got a cheque back by return of post - £13.31

3) One of my transcription clients paid up - £72.11 - and has sent me some more work (£6-worth so far, but he says there's more coming).

I've also discovered that Intelligent Finance has something called a Sole Trader Business Savings Account which can be included in the Plan (i.e. offset against the mortgage) and allows you to pay cheques made out to the business name into it free of charge. I shall ring them up later today and see if I can open one, because that would be extremely useful - I only get a couple of cheques a month and won't miss them if they're stashed there rather than in the business current account.

Oh, and I've bought my second lot of shares (or at least I will have come tomorrow, which is the buying date for the cheap trading fee) - I went for BT in the end and will buy M&S in January.

Caz

setmefree2

on all that :T:T

evab_2

brilliant Caz, glad your shop is doing well x

gallygirl

Nice one :j

cazmanian_minx

OH has been away at a conference for the past couple of days so rather than veg out in front of the telly in the evenings I thought I'd do something useful and tidied up my stockroom.

Oh. My. Gods.

It took NINE hours over two days I knew it was getting a bit out of hand, but that's just ridiculous! (And I haven't quite finished yet either...) I've been so busy with stock coming in and going straight out again that nothing had been filed away and I'd got to the point where I had about 6 boxes from 2 different suppliers in 2 rooms and was packing straight out of them, which is OK when you can remember what's where...

Anyway, I've invested in 10 Raaco DIY cabinets and now nearly everything is filed away in its own drawer and properly labelled. I've used up nearly 500 drawers now :eek: and need to buy another 5 cabinets! Makes packing orders MUCH quicker

I also took a deep breath and tackled my 'soddit I'll deal with it later' tin. Well, it used to be a tin, by the time we moved in June it was a cardboard box and yesterday it was an overflowing cardboard box with a number of subsidiary piles around it It's now sorted into three boxes: one for stock that already has a listing and just needs counting into selling pack sizes and adding on, one for stock that has been photographed but doesn't have a listing and one for stock that needs photographing and listing. They're all full :rolleyes:, but at least I know what's where and it should fetch about £700-£1,000 when it's all sorted out and sold (which is a lesson to me about having a 'soddit I'll deal with it later' tin really...)

Remember last year I ended up selling a bit of cabochon jewellery and was pleasantly surprised that I did so? Well, I've been invited by my neighbour to share a table with her and another neighbour at a nearby Christmas fair a week on Saturday, so I need to dig out the superglue again! Other neighbour is a proper professional jewellery maker (she's re-setting some sapphires for me that were my mother's and have been broken for years) and I suspect my stuff is going to look very cheap and cheerful next to hers, but I've got some gemstone hearts I'm going to thread onto chains and sell at pocket-money prices, so hopefully we'll be catering for different markets.

I've also decided to put a Ready To Wear section into my website and eBay shop for those customers who like the components I sell but don't have time to make their own and will start listing a bit of cabochon jewellery there - hopefully that'll keep sales going right up until Christmas

Caz

StuartGMC

Is that £700-1000 the value just of the "soddit" tin?
Hope that all this hard effort now allows you to remain efficient; reminds me I must work through all the paper here in the study and that filed, and shred older stuff (scan to PDF first if necessary). I can then sort the other filing which is all waiting to be dealt with, and try to get it scanned then held in hardcopy for a short while before shredding.

cazmanian_minx

Stuart - yes

Craft fair is the day after tomorrow. So far I have 50 pendants and 7 bangles ready. Going to do some cufflinks, earrings and more bangles tomorrow.

Today has been a good day. I reached 10,000 feedback on my eBay account and got a nice yellow shooting star, which I'm ridiculously pleased about. And I've put the new mortgage rate into the spreadsheet and if we make absolutely no further deposits into the offset, we pay our mortgage off 2 years and 9 months earlier. Of course, we're going to carry on saving - my tax savings go in there and OH is going to be putting £500 a month in once he's finished paying off his one credit card, so with a £400 overpayment created by not changing the regular payment as well, we should start flying through it

Caz

StuartGMC

Caz
Looks like good news all round and plenty of stock to see you into next year?
Major benefit to you the interest rate cuts!

setmefree2

Well Done on the shooting star Caz