Confessions of a house hoarder

cazmanian_minx

The Highland Council released its form for self-catering business rates grants on Monday afternoon, I sent mine back Tuesday morning.  I've had an auto-responder email to say it's been received and I'll get an acknowledgement email when a human has had a look at it.  I know one or two people who got in on Monday late afternoon who've had that second email, so hoping I might get mine next week and then assuming I haven't missed anything it should be about 2 weeks to payment.  Fingers crossed as I'm currently tapping my way through my last bit of transcription.  It's going to feel very strange to have an empty queue, it doesn't happen often!

Nice bit of insurance saving this week though.  I got a call from the NFU asking if they could quote for my tractor insurance, as they had a note it was coming up for renewal.  After a bit of confusion (the tractor insurance is in the autumn and on a special vintage machinery policy that's under £100 a year, so no one ever gets close), we worked out it was the quad bike instead, so I dug out the renewal quote email, which I hadn't got round to looking at, and said, 'Do your worst,' not expecting much, because when they quoted for it when we bought it 2 years ago, they were about £100 more expensive.  Impressively they came in at £150 cheaper - the only difference was that our existing policy gave us a new-for-old replacement if it was written off or stolen, whereas the NFU's policy insured it for second-hand value.  So I sent their quote back to our current insurers and asked them to requote at the lower amount and they came in even lower, so we went from a renewal of just over £300 to £134. 

On the minus side, Tor's discounted rate ends on the 30th April and we're going from a monthly payment of £186 to £315.  Ouch.  Bank of Ireland's SVR now 4.59%.  I hope holiday let lending opens up again pronto.

brizzlegirl

Take care Caz, good to have you posting again x

EssexHebridean

Ouch to that rate - yes, fingers crossed to that area of the lending  market getting back to normal sooner rather than later! 

Good work on getting the grant application in so quickly as well - hopefully you will have that second email today at some stage. 

cazmanian_minx

Well done Highland Council, the grant was processed and in my bank account in 11 working days, which given the volume of applications they got once they opened it up to self-catering businesses was impressive.  It's a huge relief, as it's meant I could pay the other half of the electrician's bill and the rest is stashed to cover the mortgages and bills on the lets until tourism re-starts.  I was having a chat with my agency's area rep by email the other day (Tor was supposed to open first week of June, so I asked him to put it back to August as I'm not going to be top of the list for the two trades I need out there to finish off and I don't want to be scrambling to hide the missing section of kitchen floor) and they think there's going to be a massive surge in bookings once the Highlands opens up again.  I'm hoping that we'll get a few weeks where lockdown is eased but tourism hasn't re-started so I can go out there and finish it off.  Scotland's being pretty strict about unnecessary journeys, so even though it's only 17 miles from here and I start and end the journey on my own property, I'm only going out there as often as I need to check it for insurance purposes. 

Anyway, I've spent the last two-and-a-half weeks being a farm hand for my friend, who has a big farm a mile away from where I live and asked if I'd go and help with some chores during lambing.  So while she's been getting on with the sheep midwifery with help from her husband and two lambing assistants who also live locally, I've been feeding hens (about 100 of them), collecting eggs, cleaning dog kennels (10 dogs) and mucking out lambing pens (just under 800 ewes to lamb, but thankfully about 500 outside in the fields - just the twins and triplets inside).  The last week has been more or less full time, but they're getting to the end of the indoor ones now, so I'm down to just a couple of hours a day again and will probably finish towards the end of next week.  It did, however, give me a chunky invoice to put towards this month's scores on the doors, as transcription work as been very thin on the ground.

So, April's scores on the doors:

• East Coast journalist - £51.34 (lowest one for ages, newspapers are taking a lot of her work in-house or just not commissioning)
• Farm work - £576.00
• Business biography writer - £65.25
• Specialist market research agency - £424.34
• Art biography writer - £46.67

TOTAL - £1,163.60

I was NOT expecting to get over £1k for April, given the drop-off in typing work, so:

cazmanian_minx

May seems to have gone very quickly.  I spent the first 8 days still at the farm, though tapering down from a full day to about 2 hours, then had a couple of days off to recover.  Transcription work has picked up a little bit, but isn't back to normal yet.  In response to last month's snake of Tor's mortgage going onto SVR and increasing by a chunk, Ethel's gave us a ladder - we're still in the initial three-year cheap period, but it's a discounted variable rate and the lender put their SVR down, so we're saving about £50 a month on that one. 

In other news, my laptop has died and I've got a horrible feeling it's my own fault for trying to economise and buying a non-branded charger for it.  Ones from the manufacturer are £90, this was £30 and had good reviews on Amazon.  I used it for three days, the battery kept dropping to zero charge when I unplugged it, it interfered with the trackpad, making the cursor almost unusable when switched on, and then on Saturday evening it refused to boot up at all.  Left it unplugged overnight, tried with my husband's charger in the morning (he has the same laptop, but rarely uses it) and it came up to the security BitLocker screen.  Entered the code, restarted and it went totally dead again.  So I'll take it into the Microsoft store next time I'm in London, but given that probably won't be this year it's new laptop time.  I didn't want another Surface, (a) because I can't afford one (Mr RPC paid for half of that one four years ago) and (b) becuase of the stupid way the power cord is designed - that was my third one in four years.  So I toddled off to Tier One to look at what they had and found a ThinkPad T440, Grade A reconditioned, which when I'd tweaked it to upgrade to 8MB of RAM and a 240GB SSD, came in at £365.  As a transcriber, keyboards are really, really important to me and I loved the one on my last ThinkPad - hopefully this one will be just as nice. 

Also adding to the current spate of spending, Merlin got an abscess in his hoof, so had to have the vet out last week, the farrier has been today to give it a check-up, and then I have another vet coming out on Friday because all three need tetanus jabs and their teeth checking.  Plus they all need microchipping before it becomes illegal to own an unchipped horse, which I think is October this year. 

Anyway, scores on the doors:

• Newsletter journalist - £130.84
• East Coast journalist - £201.34
• NEL - £155.00
• Farm work - £303.00

TOTAL - £790.18

Not great and thank goodness for the farm work, because it would have been a disaster without it.  I'm glad that I did in the end apply for the self-employed grant.  I only got £525, thanks to it being calculated against three of the lowest-value tax returns I've ever submitted, but it will be a massive help for getting through next month, where I suspect I'll be lucky to break £500.

brizzlegirl

Hope it’s all picking up Caz, those vet bills sound ouchy! Fingers crossed for a busier month in July x