Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

cazmanian_minx

Mortgage payment day and £561.87 has come off the capital I'm now less than £1000 off my starting figure, so by the time Chart 3 comes out in September I might just be back to where I started at the beginning of the year It's grinding away slowly though, the amount paid off has ticked into the 11s and the amount outstanding is tantalisingly close to starting 133 instead of 134!

Business cash flow is bearing up quite nicely and should ease up now I'm heading into the busy part of the year. I have £2815 available and I know I've got an overseas order due to dock this week, which will be about £1k in freight, VAT and duty. There's £1876 falling due to a UK supplier on 15th August and I've got another two orders due to land in the UK in September which will be about £1k each again. On top of that, I have £4,548 outstanding on one business credit card and £2,337 on the other, but those will probably be paid off by the end of October at the latest. And after that I can think about awarding myself a pay rise (I'm going to need it - I've just seen how much a good thick winter turnout rug costs!!)

Edit: forgot to say, the pigs went to The Great Sausagemaker In The Sky last week. No tears from either of us, surprisingly, and they were good as gold - loaded into the trailer without a problem, had to be woken up at the other end and followed us into the lairage calmly. OH is collecting them from the butcher this afternoon.

cazmanian_minx

Cheque sent to the UK supplier for the £1876 and £1000 paid off the business card with the higher interest rate. I've banked £1k in takings in three days and will bank at least £600 tomorrow morning (card receipts since 8.30am standing at £615 so far, which may be a new daily record!!). Bring on Christmas!!

teapot2

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

Bring on Christmas!!

Oi none of that filthy talk on here

cazmanian_minx

Typical. You place your three big stock orders at intervals of a month to give you a fighting chance of dealing with it in an orderly manner and they all turn up within 10 days of each other!

2,760 reels of leather and suede cord turned up on Friday, of which 1,500 are now listed for sale with 1,260 to go. I've got fifteen boxes of jewellery making tools turning up on Tuesday and eight boxes of findings are docking at Felixstowe on Monday night. One good thing about all this hitting Customs in one go is that my VAT return for June to September is going to be a lot less expensive than normal!! I don't think I'll be getting a refund, but I can't be sad about that, it means business has been booming

I need to recalculate the offset account because it's closer to £4,500 now and that's going to reduce again when the balance of Merlin's field shelter becomes due for payment in about 3 weeks, though with a bit of juggling I can put that through the Tesco card and get a) Clubcard points towards the honeymoon and b) an extra 30 days to pay it.

One thing I need to do this year (which I think I've mentioned earlier) is build up a war chest for ordering Christmas stock next summer. I'm going to stash it in the savings account section of the offset. Then the offset current account can be for temporary storage, e.g. money for credit card bills, car insurance etc., the offset savings account for business savings and the offset cash ISA for long-term mustn't touch savings. I'm also starting to think about saving up towards proper business premises, as I'm rapidly outgrowing the annexe and, nice as it would be to continue working from home, I don't think the village is going to look fondly on a 3000sq ft warehouse going up on our land...

cazmanian_minx

IF has updated the mortgage interest so I've been able to update my signature and the MFi3-T2 chart. I'm now £600 away from my original starting point, so by the time the December update comes around I might just be re-starting on the challenge

Business cashflow is easing off now, I have one final overseas shipment to pay tax and duty on (about £1600), then Royal Mail will be taking £750 on the 8th for last month's postage and I owe one of my UK suppliers £1400 on the 13th. I've got £3,500 available at the moment, so I'm only a couple of hundred pounds off meeting those commitments and then most of the money from the next couple of weeks can be thrown at the business credit cards. It's been a worryingly quiet weekend though, I'm used to seeing £7-800 in the Paypal account on a Monday morning and it's currently standing at £350 :eek: I'm listing lots of stock at the moment though, so it'll pick up soon.

Oh, and exciting business news - I've been approved to sell in the restricted Jewellery category on Amazon (which is where they file beads) Going to give it a try with 50 different lines, gemstone beads only to start with, and see how it goes.

groatie_queen

Congratulations re Amazon, that is terrific news and I hope it works really well for you. Reading the figures you need to keep in mind for postage, tax etc, it clearly must take quite a bit of monitoring and planning to keep it all in balance. Much credit to you!

cazmanian_minx

Good news: the final import bill was only £1200, not £1600 as I was expecting :j Royal Mail's been paid, the supplier's been paid, so since I still had £1750 available, I knocked another £1000 off the higher rate business credit card. Annoyingly, the eBay fees have just been charged to it, so that was £616 of it gone straight away, but at least it's moving in the right direction. I've been working pretty hard over the past few days - all the suede's listed, all the leather bar 100 reels and all the toolkits. The findings arrive on Monday, along with a MAHOOOSIVE order from my UK supplier! They rang me yesterday to say 'Look, we know you buy a lot of X type of stuff from us, X is selling out rapidly and we don't know whether we're going to get another delivery before Christmas. Do you want to do a big order now and we'll put it on 90 day terms for you?' Yes please! I did add up all my business debt this morning and it's quite a scary number (five figures :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:) but it's more than offset by the amount of stock I have here, so as long as sales stay perky, everything will be fine

Today's job is listing those last 100 reels and working out which products are going to go on Amazon.

cazmanian_minx

For the past few weeks I've been tracking all my debt - personal, business and mortgage - rather than just the mortgage. I've really been knuckling down and am pleased to see that I'm making decent progress. Since 17th September, it's gone like this:

PERSONAL

Egg card (0%)
17/9: £1,877.83
1/10: £1,836.14
£41.69 paid off

Tesco card (paid in full each month)
17/9: £1,224.40
1/10: £1,491.53
£267.13 added

Field shelter balance due
17/9: £1,239.50
1/10: £0
£1,293.50 paid off

Vet account
17/9: £105.01
1/10: £0
£105.01 paid off

BUSINESS

UK supplier account
17/9: £3,920.08
1/10: £2,689.13
£1,230.95 paid off

Royal Mail account
17/9: £745.35
1/10: £745.35
£0 paid off (collected via direct debit on 13th October)

Business overdraft (6%)
17/9: £3,804.30
1/10: £2,728.83
£1,075.47 paid off

Barclaycard (20.9% :eek::eek:)
17/9: £4,179.16
1/10: £4,179.16
£0 paid off

Post Office card (19.9% :eek:)
17/9: £2,426.97
1/10: £2,102.77
£324.20 paid off

plus mortgage £133,531.45

GRAND TOTAL
17/9: £153,054.05
1/10: £149,304.36

£3,749.69 paid off in two weeks

If (and it's a big if!) I can keep going at this rate, the business debt I was so worried about will be gone in 10 weeks. I did a rough calculation of my VAT bill a couple of weeks back (last day of the quarter was yesterday) and with two weeks to run I owed them £5.26 thanks to all the importing, so that's not going to be a worry. I need to get cracking on those two big credit cards - there's £1000 of available overdraft tagged for the Barclaycard, but I had an answerphone message from the UK supplier yesterday to say they were sending me out a load of chain which had just come in, but could I call my account manager urgently on Monday morning. I suspect they're going to want me to pay a big chunk of my account off ahead of schedule because that'll put me so far over my credit limit with them that it's almost funny. They know I'm good for the money, but I suspect their computer system is throwing a hissy fit at them, so they may need to have that £1000 instead.

I'm trying desperately not to touch the £4,200 in my offset savings account - am hoping that I can somehow juggle money around to pay the Tesco card without having to resort to using it!

cazmanian_minx

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

I need to get cracking on those two big credit cards - there's £1000 of available overdraft tagged for the Barclaycard, but I had an answerphone message from the UK supplier yesterday to say they were sending me out a load of chain which had just come in, but could I call my account manager urgently on Monday morning. I suspect they're going to want me to pay a big chunk of my account off ahead of schedule because that'll put me so far over my credit limit with them that it's almost funny. They know I'm good for the money, but I suspect their computer system is throwing a hissy fit at them, so they may need to have that £1000 instead.

Nope, they just wanted to tell me that some of my backordered stock had come in and would be on its way to me in the next day or so Have paid £1500 off that Barclaycard this morning :D

cazmanian_minx

Mortgage payment day. £567.81 paid off the outstanding capital :j which, when combined with the amounts in the offset accounts takes me to £127,882.37 interest-bearing which is below my original starting point of £128,114 finally Only another £39,768 to go for the challenge...