Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

cazmanian_minx

Right, here we go, goals for the next three years!

I've just spent 15 minutes putting together FinancialBliss's fabulous mortgage overpayment spreadsheet again. I had one before but accidentally deleted it. :rolleyes: According to the spreadsheet, the mortgage balance on 12/12 is due to be about £118,000 (assuming no interest rate rises, which is unlikely) - so if we do nothing at all, the outstanding balance minus offset is going to reduce by about £21,000. I think my original goal was to reduce it by £30,000 altogether, so I'm going to up that to £40,000 :eek: I'll update the official challenge spreadsheet (I've been organised and bookmarked the link) after the next mortgage payment on 5th December.

So where am I going to find £19,000 of savings over the next 3 years? Well, I could go mad selling beads. It's got to the point where I'm bursting out of my annexe and I've been looking at commercial property to rent this week so I could expand further and get someone in to help. But then I sat down and thought about it and bounced things off my Mum and my partner and reached the following conclusions:

1. I am essentially an anti-social person who prefers to be on their own a lot of the time. Having a work colleague or colleagues would drive me up the wall.

2. I'm getting stressed just *thinking* about expanding and now my blood pressure is down to 112/75 I'd like to keep it there.

3. I don't want to sell beads for the rest of my life.

So instead of scaling up, I'm going to scale back. I'm going to cut back my range, sticking to only those with high stock turn, good profits and minimum processing required. I'm even considering closing down my separate website and just selling on eBay again. This should leave me with enough volume to keep my Royal Mail discounts, enough money to carry on paying myself the same amount, more space in the annexe and more time to do other things

What other things? I hear you ask. Well, I want to see if I can make the stuff I enjoy doing pay me a little bit more. So writing, photography and investing. I want to get to the stage of having enough work out there and money invested that I can sit back and live off royalties and dividends if I want to. No idea how long it'll take - this is a decades-long plan - but this challenge is a good jumping off point.

Caz

SmlSave

:beer: Here's to great goals and achieving them over the next three years :beer:

evab_2

Fantastic plans Caz, I hope everything works out for you and animals health improves x

earthgirl

Sounds like a real life plan, good luck!

cazmanian_minx

Just popping in to say that I'm having a REALLY good month for bead selling! With one week of November still to go, I've taken £1,162 on the website and £7,449 through eBay, so unless something goes disastrously wrong over the next 7 days, I'm on course for my first ever five-figure month :j:j:j:j This is despite not having had any 18" silver plated trace chain for the last 6 weeks and selling out of 16" SP trace, 16" and 18" SP fine curb and 16" and 18" medium curb - if the supplier had been able to send them to me, I could have taken another £2000+ easily :mad: Lesson learned: order 10,000 of each in advance next summer! Also nearly sold out of charm bracelets as well, just 191 left out of the 6000 that arrived at the beginning of October :eek:

I'm getting slightly worried about a new supplier though - I sent them a telegraphic transfer on 4th November and was told that I'd get the stock 14-21 days later. On the 8th they emailed and asked for a copy of the paperwork because their bank wanted to make sure I was genuine, so I scanned the T/T paperwork (without my signature on) and the letter from the bank confirming that payment had been made. They emailed back to say thank you, they'd passed it on to their bank and since then I've heard zip. If they don't contact me by Friday I'm going to give them a polite nudge and see what happens, because the whole reason for buying this stock before Christmas was that it's an item that makes a great gift and I close for Christmas in less than 4 weeks!

Caz

cazmanian_minx

Another Monday, another £62.19 for the tax bill into the offset account...

It doesn't look like I'm going to make my £10k Sales dropped off a cliff over the weekend - I thought something had gone wrong with eBay again, but checking my spreadsheets showed that the same thing happened last year; people get their last pay cheque before Christmas and hit the high street. Unless I take about £450 today (unlikely but not impossible - if I had chain in stock I'd be more optimistic!) then I'm just going to miss it.

On the plus side, I emailed the new supplier and my stock is due to be shipped around about 5th December. Might shift a few before Christmas

I've also realised that with my tax bill of c. £1500 due on January 31st, I'm going to be starting the MFiT-2 challenge with a bit of a deficit! Still, at least we've got one dog sorted out now (Smokey's joint tap results were clear, so it's 'just' osteo-arthritis in both hocks - at 6 ). Red has another week on her antibiotics and then I find out whether they're going to do another x-ray or just put her straight onto heart meds. (She's standing by my chair at the moment, wagging so hard she's wiggling! But it's still dark and it's also hailing, so her chances of getting a walk in the next 20 minutes are zilch...)

I've been slowly working through my photos and submitting more to the one microstock library I'm currently signed up with. Another six accepted and about twelve rejected, but those were taken 2 years ago and looking through I'm surprised at how much better I've got since then. I'm deleting a lot of old stuff that's not up to scratch and reclaiming hard drive space - RAW files are great, but they don't half take up a lot of room.

Caz

Queen-Bee_2

Caz - you are an inspiration, so many different types of business activity! Certainly makes me think about how I could diversify by selling some of my writing or finding a niche to do something on e-bay...
QB

evab_2

Well done with your sales so far, I agree that this close to Christmas my spending is in the high street rather than online to ensure I've actually got the product (every year I say I'll be more organised!).

Hope your stock comes through in time.

setmefree2

evab wrote: »

I agree that this close to Christmas my spending is in the high street rather than online to ensure I've actually got the product.

Me too. I stop buying on line for christmas around about now...

cazmanian_minx

Missed out on £10k by £240 :mad::mad: Never mind - next year

I've been spending money like water this week. The bill arrived for the drive - £2,566.80 - and the credit card bill with all the Christmas shopping and the vet bills on it pinged into my inbox - £1,045.41. Now, the money for all of this has been sitting safely in the offset account. That's what savings are for, right? But it's taken me two days to actually make myself pay the bills; for some reason I desperately wanted to go into my current account overdraft rather than touch the savings. Utterly ridiculous, because the savings are earning me the equivalent of 1.6% and the overdraft gets charged at 15.9%.

Even worse, those two bills arriving at the same time leaves me under the amount of the tax bill due at the end of January. Looking at the weekly payments due to go into the account over the next two months, I think it'll just be enough - I'll check 10 days before it's due and transfer some extra dosh if needed.

On the bright side, at least the bulk of the hit to the offset has come before the official start date of MFi3-2 so I don't have to make it up!

Mortgage payment day tomorrow - hopefully IF will update over the weekend so I can re-do my figures...

Caz