'How close to the brink are you?' 2009 poll results/discussion

A little unfair of me but to answer the question from my point of view I'm grateful for the first time ever that I'm now a senior citizen. I have a (hopefully) guaranteed pension and my home is secure. I've been through recessons wihout the advantage of MSE so I think/hope it will be just a little easier for todays working people if they follow the guidelines here. I'm not saying it will be easy because it won't but sites like MSE are a Godsend at the best of times, even more so now. it's an 'I can't, we can' situation.

My good wishes to everyone who is or will be suffering the effects of this time.

In the United States, President Obama is proposing a multi-billion tax reduction package to kick start the economy.
Under this plan, each family will get a tax rebate in the post for $1000.00 and each individual taxpayer
will get $500.00.

President Bush did the same thing in 2001 after 9/11 and the economy took off!

IS GORDON BROWN LISTENING? If you want to jump-start the economy, give people back their taxes to spend
on food, savings, whatever!

"0" for me, no problem whatsoever. No debts at all, no mortgage etc. Made more than adequate provision for the rainy days while the sun was shining.

Last time I went for 5.

Today I have gone for 7.

We have run a fully liable business for 22 years.

We have personal guarantees on a 20 yr lease and have traded in that prtemises for nearly 11 years. It is a well known area and boutiques like ours got it back on it's feet after the 90's slowdown...then the Costa's and Starbucks arrived plus the chains.....and up went the rents.....and many interesting Indies left to be replaced with chains....which kept pushing up the rents......

Consequently, we are under rent review and our Big Glass Tower LL wants to increase our rent buy 40%......except, the past 14 months has seen our T/O drop by 40%. They don't care about the local area, they are just using us to push up the rents for my chain store neighbours.
We operate on far smaller margins than chains....so cannot pay as high overheads


Our shop now uses up 90 man hours per week (me and OH) and earns zero profit and zero salary for our labour and time. It's soul destroyong.
Worse, our regular customers (and visitors) love it...afterall, we still have 60% T/O coming in.....but the other 40% thats been crunched renders us unviable.

Last summer, we started supplying a big E-Tailer with my own label clothing (I drone on about it on Economics board)...sales are sky high....so we currently earn our living expenses from that....but it could go tomorrow; fashion is fickle.


I want to throw the shop keys in the sea and concentrate on developing the other venture (I have had to turn down 2 new really fab opps due to a lack of time...I can only do so much in 7 days) but, our LL would bankrupt us and we own a house.

Going bankrupt isn't in my Life Plan...esp as we don't have mountains of debts anymore

We are trying to re-assign the lease....supposedly in the St paved with Landlord gold....the St that is immune from the downturn according to their surveyor......so far? Zero interest.
Loads of other shops have just, this week, come onto the market too.

The last rent review was a nightmare and put us into debt...and we nearly paid it all off too over the past 3 years....what a shame, we could go down due to the greed of a fatcat , in denial property unit trust based in Mayfair, London who view us as insignificant, numbers on a chart

Rant Over.