Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

cazmanian_minx

A nice surprise when I checked my business bank account this morning - HMRC had processed my VAT reclaim in double quick time and paid me £1317.22 :j:j:j This means that I can, should I wish, pay my tax bill out of my business account and leave the savings untouched in the offset. It's tempting...

10% of the VAT reclaim and the £1200 in takings I'd transferred in from Paypal is now on its way to the offset. I'm going to be transferring 10% of turnover regularly again now I've switched back to transferring funds weekly (end of free banking period and my Autofree tariff caps the number of free transactions I get!) rather than splitting my tax bill into 26 and transferring from my current account. I've also finally got round to setting up that standing order for the annual bills , so that'll be about £800-£1000 a month going into the offset plus whatever else I can sling into it. I've only got £2000 saved up for next year's ISA so far, so that needs to be topped up.

The first draft of the novel is trotting along steadily. I'm trying to get into the habit of writing 500 words a night and have managed it for the last 3 nights in a row. It's a mess, but, as so many writers have said, you can edit a mess, but there's not a lot you can do with a blank page

Caz

gallygirl

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

It's a mess, but, as so many writers have said, you can edit a mess, but there's not a lot you can do with a blank page

Caz

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Good luck!

cazmanian_minx

Today is an absolutely excellent day - I've passed the initial quality control tests for Alamy!

If that's absolute double dutch to you, here's an explanation Alamy is a stock photography agency with very, very high standards and, unlike the microstock agencies (Shutterstock, Fotolia etc.), they pay a decent cut to their photographers. They request four shots for your first submission to them and when I tried back in May last year it was a flat no. Yesterday I uploaded some pictures of the robin in my back garden in the snow and got a YES this morning :j:j:j:j:j:j:j

So I can now upload as many photos as I want per batch, with the proviso that if they get pulled for a quality check (which, as a new contributor, is likely) one failure will result in all photos in that batch being failed as well as any photos still queued.

I don't actually care right now if they ever sell anything of mine or not, they think I'm good enough to be on their books and that's enough for me

Caz

setmefree2

:T:T:T:T:T

cazmanian_minx

I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by how much we've still got to pay off this evening, so I thought I'd cheer myself up by looking at how far the interest payments have fallen since we took the mortgage out. Most of it's due to the base rate falling (we're on a tracker), but it's still cheered me up all the same!

05 Jan 2010 INTEREST 172.41
05 Dec 2009 INTEREST 164.74
05 Nov 2009 INTEREST 171.53
05 Oct 2009 INTEREST 168.10
05 Sep 2009 INTEREST 174.92
05 Aug 2009 INTEREST 175.52
05 Jul 2009 INTEREST 169.85
05 Jun 2009 INTEREST 177.02
05 May 2009 INTEREST 172.65
05 Apr 2009 INTEREST 230.75
05 Mar 2009 INTEREST 260.48
05 Feb 2009 INTEREST 332.57
05 Jan 2009 INTEREST 431.43
05 Dec 2008 INTEREST 572.18
05 Nov 2008 INTEREST 722.66
05 Oct 2008 INTEREST 724.11
05 Sep 2008 INTEREST 748.18
05 Aug 2008 INTEREST 748.19
05 Jul 2008 INTEREST 725.32

It went up slightly because of the large cheque going out for the driveway and it'll go up again when I pay my tax bill, but the offset is building back up quickly (£700 paid in over the last 30 days).

I've moved forwards with my plans to take the bead shop on the road as well - my first table top sale has been booked for 28th February. If I can do 2 a month and take £150 at each, that'll be an extra bit of dosh and hopefully some new customers for the website (I'm going to have business cards made up to put in with each purchase). If I can get a few lined up then I can put a page on the website saying where I'll be on what date and people can email me and ask me to take specific items for them to look at.

Caz

setmefree2

Makes a big difference doesn't it:T Here's to low interst rates and OPs :beer:

cazmanian_minx

Harrumph. Paid my tax bill this morning, so a big dip in the offset account :mad:

Cashflow is still very tight. I have £3,200 of my business overdraft available and over the next 30 days my expected takings are £5,600, giving me a total of £8,800 to play with. £560 goes into the VAT/tax savings pot. There's £1,300 due to go out on the business credit card, £1,700 owed to the tools manufacturer (who have told me I don't have to pay it until the four missing boxes turn up), £2,000-worth of chain is about to turn up from one of my UK suppliers, which is due in 30 days and my big Hong Kong order is about to ship, which means approximately £1,300 in freight, VAT and import duty. Oh, and I need to pay myself as well - that's another £1,200.

So I'm not going to make much of a dent in the overdraft this month, but at least it should move a little bit in the right direction :T

I had a nice surprise yesterday - I read a review on Amazon of the most recent erotic short story anthology I was published in, and the reviewer said that my story was one of three that stuck in her mind :beer: Must write more pron, obviously

Caz

cazmanian_minx

Mortgage payment day - another £564 off the outstanding amount :T:T:T

That puts us from the £138ks into the £137ks and we'll hit the £136ks next month, all being well. This month's mini-milestone is getting to 5% of the mortgage paid off - it's taken us 20 months to get that far and we only have 18 and a half years left to run on the mortgage, so we're going to have to speed up a bit :eek:

Cashflow has eased up a bit, thanks to a few bumper days of sales. No sign of those missing four boxes yet; I suspect they've been yanked by Customs for attempted evasion of import duty - the manufacturer gave me a price in pounds sterling that they said included VAT, duty and freight (in essence I'd be buying them from their London office and they'd be the importer of record), however the boxes have been turning up marked 'Commercial samples, total value US$15'! Customs, quite naturally, take a dim view of this sort of thing...

The rest of my outstanding stock orders are all under control - I have three boxes in a depot in Inverness, waiting for the next delivery up our way (can't wait to get those, they've got dragon's vein agate beads in, which I'm hoping are as nice as the pictures!) and my enormous findings order (12,000 charm bracelets and about 500,000 jump rings and headpins) is somewhere at sea on a cargo ship called the Ever Charming, which is due to dock at Felixstowe on 24th Feb.

I'm back to thinking about expansion plans again. The one thing I desperately need is more space and there's a disused water treatment works coming up for auction at the end of this month. It's 5 miles away and is a 96sqm concrete and steel building on a nearly 400sqm plot of land. The guide price is within my budget and after speaking to my business manager yesterday, she's happy to lend me the cash to buy it (we actually went through the loan application on the spot so that it was sitting there ready to process if needed - the decision's been referred to Edinburgh, but I've sent her a profit & loss through for April 09 to January 10 and she thinks it won't be a problem. As she said, any business that can grow its turnover by 40% in a recession is doing something right!). The only problem is that there's no way to see inside it before the auction, however, I had a good look round the one in our village which is identical (unfortunately not for sale - it sold about 10 years ago to someone who thought he was getting all the outbuildings further down the road as well and was bitterly disappointed to find out they belonged to someone else!) and I suspect that all the equipment will still be inside it. Since all I want to do initially is use it as lock-up storage, that's not going to be a problem, the boxes will fit round the outside and I can remove the stuff over time Am going to go down there and have a poke around later and then contact the local Scottish Water to see if he remembers what's there (or even better if he's got a key!!)

Caz

abouttimetoo

Hi Caz

You're doing so well! Might seem a daft question but is the water treatment plant near you that sold 10 years ago still a possibility? Does the owner use it if what he bought did not turn out to be what he expected. I was just thinking you could have made him a cheeky direct approach to see if he would consider selling or even renting storage space with an option to buy at a later date?

Regards
ATT

cazmanian_minx

abouttimetoo wrote: »

Hi Caz

You're doing so well! Might seem a daft question but is the water treatment plant near you that sold 10 years ago still a possibility? Does the owner use it if what he bought did not turn out to be what he expected. I was just thinking you could have made him a cheeky direct approach to see if he would consider selling or even renting storage space with an option to buy at a later date?

Regards
ATT

I think he's started doing something with it - it's got new steel doors on it and he's been seen taking some of the old equipment out of it. Plus he paid £14k and it's got (lapsed) planning permission to be demolished and a 4-bed house built in its place, which is going to put it out of reach. The guide price for the one I'm looking at is £5-10k - it doesn't have the spectacular views that the one in our village does and isn't in a residential area, so planning permission for a house would be fairly unlikely - hopefully that'll keep the price down!

Posting here obviously has some kind of magical effect - my missing four boxes turned up yesterday as did the three that I thought were still in Inverness

Caz