The Ultimate Incentive muddles along

kavics177

Mini Kavics turned 8 in November. I really hope it's the hormones and she will adjust soon.

wendz86

Great news about the vaccine Kavics.
My big girl is nearly 10 and is sometimes nice as pie and other times can be very moody. She was a nightmare this morning.
Dinah - well done for trying to get on with work , it's so hard with kids etc around. 

Dinah93

So, NIM has just had a phone call to say he is now permanently work from home. The whole office is closing. On the one hand this is good as we won't need to buy a second car again, we will save about £500 a month on petrol, he no longer has a commute for 2 hours a day. On the other it means we are now both home, working, in each others space, ALL THE TIME FOR ALL OF TIME. 

It's already prompted us to think about what changes we are going to need so we don't crack up. When he started working from home I moved out of the study so he had a quiet place to work and do video calls etc, but long term I can't always work from the sofa. 

We keep talking about moving and realistically that plan is probably going to have to be moved up a year or two, but we need to really make the decision on which secondary the kids are going to as it impacts where we buy the house. We were planning to wait 2 years until biggest mini was in secondary, so little mini would get a sibling place even if we moved 5 miles out and were a bit more rural, as it's a very, very oversubscribed secondary so we need to stay within about 2 miles to have a chance of a place.

Received a really annoying letter this morning from the council saying we have a summons for unpaid council tax... which is a scary letter when you've had it on direct debit for a decade. So I need to call up and find out what on earth is going on there. 

So I need to get more focussed with my time I guess, knuckle down to finding alternate ways to make some money. If we are thinking about moving this year possibly or even next year we need our debt cleared to make that possible as I don't mind having a mortgage again if we don't have a few grand a month going out to the debt as well.  None of this would be scary or daunting if I could just damn well work! 

clearmydebts

Dinah93 said:

So, NIM has just had a phone call to say he is now permanently work from home. The whole office is closing. On the one hand this is good as we won't need to buy a second car again, we will save about £500 a month on petrol, he no longer has a commute for 2 hours a day. On the other it means we are now both home, working, in each others space, ALL THE TIME FOR ALL OF TIME. 

It's already prompted us to think about what changes we are going to need so we don't crack up. When he started working from home I moved out of the study so he had a quiet place to work and do video calls etc, but long term I can't always work from the sofa. 

We keep talking about moving and realistically that plan is probably going to have to be moved up a year or two, but we need to really make the decision on which secondary the kids are going to as it impacts where we buy the house. We were planning to wait 2 years until biggest mini was in secondary, so little mini would get a sibling place even if we moved 5 miles out and were a bit more rural, as it's a very, very oversubscribed secondary so we need to stay within about 2 miles to have a chance of a place.

Received a really annoying letter this morning from the council saying we have a summons for unpaid council tax... which is a scary letter when you've had it on direct debit for a decade. So I need to call up and find out what on earth is going on there. 

So I need to get more focussed with my time I guess, knuckle down to finding alternate ways to make some money. If we are thinking about moving this year possibly or even next year we need our debt cleared to make that possible as I don't mind having a mortgage again if we don't have a few grand a month going out to the debt as well.  None of this would be scary or daunting if I could just damn well work! 

Could you stay put for the next few years so you can pay off the debt, get back on your feet and so the kids could go to your preferred school? What about a home office in the garden (when you are in the position to buy it) or a desk in your bedroom?

Have you a mentor from your training that you could chat to about putting a short term business (pandemic) plan together? Can you not run classes online? Or record yourself and see if people will subscribe to unlimited classes per month?

Great news on the vaccine Kavics. My nearly 11 year has an awful attitude at the moment. My 9 year old is a breeze in comparison!

Dinah93

I am running classes online, but it's netting about £300 a month which is less than 10% of what I normally make even on our slowest months. We have a subscription service too for unlimited recordings, which actually is what makes most of that £300, the timed live ones make absolute pennies as the attitude is very much 'but Adrienne does them for free'. So mostly I run the online classes just to try to keep our students engaged with us, it took me 3 years to build up to where we were, and when we can rebuild I reckon 50% won't return as there has been such a seismic shift to free online platforms for classes. Whatever you want is on youtube for free so why pay someone? I do kind of understand that mindset, I'll go to youtube, if I want to learn a new skill in photoshop rather than pay for a course for example. 

My mentor and I, and indeed the whole business support group I'm in speak most days, and I have changed what we're offering, but 95% of our business is in a specific skill which just can't be done from home without asking people to fork out around £900 to be able to do it and even then for safety reasons we are limited in what we can do. I have started hiring the equipment out to do it, but the home based kit was a big investment for the company, so we could only get enough for 6 people, so it's a very very limited offering at present. 

I've made a conscious decision in some ways that I like my business doing what it does and I have a lot of plans to grow it when we can, but for me personally I'm not happy with only having one income source, so I'm trying to adjust that, I just miss doing what I love. 

£26.47 withdrawn from quidco this morning, that'll arrive on the 29th apparently, so I'l pay it off the debt then. Payday as well today so I'm going to try to make a small overpayment just so I feel better, but I do need to speak to the council about why they've demanded the full council tax as it'll all be going to that if it needs. We had no overpayments really last month and it sucked, but I saw a metaphor that resonated with me the other week, and I'm going to do a podcast on it this week, as personally it massively has helped me frame my thinking on if I'm doing 'enough'. But basically instead of looking at everyone else (especially those I am in the business support group with) racing ahead with their plans, I'm trying to think of it as the difference between a ball and a slingshot. The ball gets thrown and it moves forward quite a long way (the people I'm currently looking at and thinking how far they've come) whereas the slingshot has to go backwards before being propelled forwards at a greater pace (which is what I hope I'm doing my solidifying the foundations of my own income and the business rather than going in a new direction without firming up what is already happening behind the scenes to give me that stable foundation to build on). 

Dinah93

I keep reading that you need at least 7 steams of income for financial security. So this morning I decided to write down any and all steams of income I have, no matter how small, and see where I'm at. I don't know whether to group all similar steams together (so for example I do print on demand, but I sell across 6 sites) but if I have each separate source I have 31 sources I can think of off the top of my head, some don't make me money yet but are in development and should start making money soon but most are making me an income even if it's only £10 a month. If I group them into similar themes. If I group some of them like the print on demand I have 13, some are entirely passive but even I question if I'm stretched far too thin at a time when my only real working time is after the kids go to sleep (not once this week have they both been asleep before 10.30pm) or the 3 hours I get each Saturday when NIM takes them to the park so I can film. Which I'm currently all dressed and made up ready to do, I'm just killing time now waiting for them to have the right number of socks, leads, coats and car keys to get out the door. Unfortunately the number of videos and scripts I have planned to record that I'd ideally like to release this week I'd need them to clear off for 8 hours - which isn't really doable during lockdown in January, but is much more realistic during the average school week. I am hoping for a golden window between the kids going back to school, and my normal business fully starting again so I can get into a rhythm again. I start a fairly intensive period of work in July to franchise the business so I really want to be back on my feet before then. 

Despite doing a lot of yoga I've struggled a lot with my back lately, it's only in the last few days it's clicked. Up until NIM was set to homeworking I worked at a desk in the study. Now I work cross legged on the bed with the laptop on an upturned Tesco crate, or just on my knee on the sofa. The Tesco crate is actually the better desk as the laptop is about the right height, but neither of these are ideal for a good posture! 

kavics177

Happy Belated Birthday, I haven't realized that you share the day with toddler Kavics who turned 2. Time flies. She is so cute though, talks all the time. The newest phrase is that 'it hurts, poor me'. Mini Kavics's behaviour is still questionable, hasn't improved at all.
I have 8 steams of income coming in regularly so not doing too bad. We went to have a look at houses last week and it's such a disappointment. Despite Covid the prices shot up and we just can't afford to move right now. Went to a financial adviser too who made a plan of our monthly mortgage repayment if we do decide to move and it came out as nearly half of our combined salary. Just can't justify that as right now we are mortgage free. So thinking about buying a rental property but we are in no rush.
Back at work now, home office this month so still nice and easy. 

Dinah93

Happy Birthday to toddler Kavics too! 

Wow, that is a lot. I don't think I would feel comfortable taking on half my salary for a mortgage either. 

The last few days have flown by somewhat. I've set myself a really ambitious content generation schedule for the online channel with a new video 6 days a week and audio daily (twice daily on Wednesdays) but it's a lot of editing etc to keep it up and income doesn't actually scale the more I do. 

I am struggling a bit at the moment with motivation and focus, every day just drags into the next and I can never get even 30 minutes to think without someone asking a question unless it's the 3 hours on a weekend they're at the park so I can film, but in that time I just film, I don't have a chance to catch up on anything else. As a result the coffee table is overloaded with projects part done, books to send to amazon, clothes to mend, letters to be dealt with, things to be returned and so on. 

Had a chirpy call with the council after receiving a court summons for non payment of council tax. Turns out our payment on 1st January 2020 didn't go through, they never wrote and told us, never tried taking another payment ever again, and this is the first we knew we hadn't been paying council tax. So now we either need to pay £2k by the 8th, or go to court to arrange a repayment plan. We obviously have no issue in paying it, it just seems amazing not one single letter has been sent to let us know there was an issue. 

Dinah93

But we did get a cancellation on our anniversary trip to Venice due next month, so that's another £400 or so back in the account in the next few days, I've requested a flight refund too. 

Dinah93

Been a wek or so, oops! But I know you like a good freebie as much as me, one of my friends shared this on facebook this morning: https://triyit.co.uk/ with a big box of free goodies. I pay for degustabox already as I love trying new products, but free is obviously even better, so might be worth checking out.