Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

chirpchirp

Caz, I love this diary! It's so lovely to read how your business is going so well. When you first went for your bank loan and you were looking at importing beads it looked so risky but I'm so pleased for you that you went ahead and did this.

The water treatment plant sounds really exciting too.

cazmanian_minx

I think I'm on my own for the mortgage challenge - OH bought a new car yesterday and is taking the balance after trading in his old one on finance over 3 years. Still, he's got the car of his dreams and in best MSE fashion has bought the demonstrator which is loaded up with extras rather than going for the new model which arrives next month and would be about £8k more for the basic version.

I went to have a look at the water treatment works yesterday and it's even better than the one in the village because there are no big holes in the floor where equipment was, it's solid concrete. It's about the size of a small house and needs very little doing to it to make a decent lock-up, other than re-bricking the bottom of the front wall (they had to take the whole front off to get the equipment out and they've put the upper steel panels back on, but just blocked off the bottom with plywood rather than put in new cement blocks). I just need to find out who owns the access track now and what rights the new owner will have over it - it's in a bad enough state that I wouldn't be able to get my Polo down there (OH's new car will find it a doddle however!).

Caz

cazmanian_minx

Gosh, nearly a month since I updated last Let's see, where were we...?

I didn't buy the water treatment works. I got the legal pack through and found there was a covenant with National Trust for Scotland - if they caught you using the building for anything other than crofting, forestry or water treatment purposes, they had the right to bulldoze it, plus the access given over the track down to it had only been granted temporarily for the purposes of construction, and although Scottish Water had been using it subsequently, there was no guarantee the estate owner wouldn't block it at some point in the future. It sold for £5,900, so somebody's got a very cheap storage facility! I was discussing the issue with my neighbour and he advised waiting until we buy the croft in 3 years' time, then apply for a diversification grant and build a big shed that's part pig sty (we're going to need a farrowing pen eventually if we're going to be breeding pigs) and part bead storage. Apparently the crofting commission is very keen on anything that allows a crofter to stay on the land full time rather than going out to work and crofting at evenings and weekends, so it shouldn't be a problem.

You may have noticed a big drop in the offset amount in the signature - I am now worse off than when I started the new MFi3-T2 challenge. This is entirely OH's fault - his 83-y-o mother in law is never in a million years going to get up into the cab of a Nissan Navara, nor were we going to fit the three of us and 20 bags of Tesco shopping into a VW Polo. So I started looking for a slightly used Toyota Avensis on the grounds that OH used to have one as a company car, we both liked it and with all the bad publicity it was probably a good time to buy one. Earlier this week I picked up a 3-y-o ex-fleet car with 50k miles on the clock and paid £7,900 for it. It's a diesel, so the fuel economy should be better than the Polo, the tax is only a tenner more a year and I've just managed to insure it for £10 a month, fully comp, for both of us to drive with business use

So I'm now on a challenge-within-a-challenge - can I repay the £7k I took out of the offset as well as putting in the £1.5k extra to top up the regular overpayment so that I'm back on track by the time chart 2 is published in June? It's almost but not quite impossible! OH will be paying me back for the car (he says it's his fault I'm having to change, so he's paying for it) but over three years. It was mortgage payment day today - only £155 interest this month - and we're getting hearteningly close to £10k paid off :j Other sig news - diet going well, novel writing going less well :rotfl::rotfl:

This month is going to be a belt-tightening exercise The cashflow situation is still squeaking a bit, but the crisis has mostly passed. I think I'm going to have to leave £1000 on my business credit card for a couple of weeks, which is annoying, but compared to what could have happened, I think I'm just going to pay the £20-odd they'll charge me in interest and thank my lucky stars! I'm holding off placing any more big overseas orders until the pound picks up a bit against the dollar - it's plummeted into the 1.40s and I've been buying around 1.55-1.60 - so it's a good time to stash some cash. Royal Mail prices go up at the beginning of next month, plus I never increased my prices when I went VAT registered or when VAT went back up to 17.5% so I think it's time I reviewed my pricing - though I suspect it'll all have to be done again after the election when VAT is almost bound to go up to 20%...

And on that cheery note, I have to go and appease the two pleading spaniel faces resting on my knee, begging for a walk

Caz

cazmanian_minx

I'm an idiot Got a letter from the Inland Revenue on Wednesday, telling me I'd underpaid my tax by £245.01. 'No I flipping well haven't,' I thought, and charged upstairs to the computer, full of righteous indignation, because I remembered copying and pasting the figure from the self-assessment part of the HMRC website into their bill payment system, so there's no way I could have got it wrong.

It does help if you copy and paste the CORRECT figure - I'd missed off the additional correction for the previous tax year

All paid now, but that's another hit to the offset I could have done without. :mad:

On the plus side, my 12,000 charm bracelets finally turned up and I sold 800 in 20 minutes :eek::eek: I've got 1,300 to post out today - Royal Mail are going to hate me - and I'm hoping this is just a one-day surge caused by the people who've been wanting them over the past couple of months, because I wasn't planning to order from that company again until June and they take 3 months to deliver.

OH has gone off to Edinburgh today to meet up with his brothers and watch Scotland get beaten at Murrayfield tomorrow, so I'm going to spend the weekend listing more old stock and see how much I can get cleared before my year end on 31st March.

setmefree2

Great news about the charm bracelets :T:T

Kaz2904

That's a fair bit of packaging you'll need to do! Let's hope you've obliterated that £250ish very soon. It's very annoying finding that your figures are wrong though isn't it!

cazmanian_minx

Not doing brilliantly at the moment on the overpayment front - Senior Dog came down with pneumonia, we almost lost her and the vet bills are racking up like you wouldn't believe. But she's bounced back brilliantly and is pretty much her old perky self again, albeit still with lungs full of grot and on four antibiotic tablets a day for about the next 2 months.

So at the moment I'm concentrating on being able to pay the credit card bill in full when it comes due, but I'm making a bit of progress in other areas too - my business overdraft got right down to £500 this morning (and then I paid myself :rotfl:) and I've finally bitten the bullet and bought some proper financial accounting software (Sage Instant Accounts Plus) along with a plug-in which will automatically do all the accounting entries for my eBay and website sales. Not cheap, but will probably pay for itself in less than a year in terms of time saved doing accounts and giving me proper management information to make better buying decisions. Getting Sage set up is proving to be a hair-tearing exercise though! Fortunately it comes with 45 days of telephone support and I think I may be spending a lot of tomorrow on the phone to them...

Caz

setmefree2

Glad to hear your Doggy's on the mend

cazmanian_minx

Still battling with Sage - it's going to be fantastic once I've set it up, I've got a plug-in from Tradebox which automates all the eBay and website sales into Sage for me. The problem I'm having at the moment is that it doesn't seem to like items with a per item price of less than a penny - so the person who's bought 3 bags of 100 headpins at 99p each and 1 bag of 1000 headpins for £4.99 has an invoice that gives net prices of £1.00, £1.00, £1.00 and £0.00 and VAT amounts of £-0.01, £-0.01, £-0.01 and £4.99 :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:which is going to mess the VAT return up a little bit I'll get there in the end, Tradebox have been utterly brilliant in helping me out so far and I'm sure they can tell me how to get round this - if it turns out I can't use the stock control system it won't be the end of the world, just mildly annoying.

Anyway, my year end has passed and a quick look at the figures shows an annual turnover of £76,030 :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek: compared to £48k last year. Profit before accountant's fee and tax is a smidge under £18k, so I'm nearly making what I used to working for HMV - in fact, if you strip out the London allowance from my old salary and add in the transcription work, I've just about surpassed it

Senior Dog is still being expensive, so no progress on the mortgage front but she's bouncing round the place and showering all the vet staff with kisses every time she goes in for another x-ray which is worth more than money

Caz

sarahmacuk

Just read your diary. What a lovely read!