The mind boggles!…

[The Byre]

Apologies op for hijacking thread with my woes. Unless anyone has a million pound idea to give me. Why wouldn't you as you are all clearly very successful or unemployed being able to post on here all day.

It relieves the tedium of writing long economic reports and going through deliberately obscure P&L accounts! Now I have to edit some audio that is even more boring!

 

[IanSuth]

Then you are wasting money somewhere. My bet is that you have debts and you don't know how to clear them. The answer is simple - you clear them a penny at a time. You don't need a million pounds - you need to get rid of all those debts.

I cannot even begin to imagine how I would burn through over £8,000 each and every month! That's crazy! That means that your household is leaking money like a sieve!

Most people in debt only look at the mortgage and then give all kinds of magic reasons why they must have all those other debts - leased cars, furniture on the never-never, stupid phone contracts, credit card debts, Sky, Netflix - and on and on and on and . . .

Step one - only shop at Lidl. If Lidl doesn't have it - don't eat it. If you want a new tool such as a cordless drill or whatever, wait until it is available at 'Middle of Lidl'. We only shop at Lidl and not because we are poor but because the food is BETTER! It also means that we can shop faster and save time and we all know what time is! (If you price up the time spent/wasted schlepping around Sainbury and Morison's at, say, £20 an hour, you begin to realise just how wasteful most shopping journies really are!) And definitely no home deliveries!

Step two - impulse buys - we are still with food here - no snacking and no boozing by anyone. Musli for breakfast (no more Jumbo Minty MacNugget-Pops!) and an evening meal. No crisps, no chocky bars, no comfort food. If you must have alcohol, brew it yourself, it's dead easy to do. If you or the wife smoke - stop. The same applies to pets - dry stuff from Lidl only. No magic gunk out of tins.

Step three - cars! Any new leased cars in the driveway can go back to the dealership. As you will be doing all the shopping after work and the kids can take the bus to school, the wife does not need a car. And she'll be far too busy baking bread, brewing beer, looking after the autistic child and running an online business to be wasting time shopping. Buy a good, used Diesel estate for cash. Servicing and repairs are best done by your local 'Stig-with-a-Spanner'. No more visits to dealerships!

Step four - all the rest! No more subscriptions for anything! No Netflix, no Sky, no iPhone contracts, no online contracts for newspapers. All that has to go! No club memberships - or indeed anything else that costs money every month. If someone wants a mobile phone, a £20 burner phone and a £10 pay-as-you-go card work better than some fancy smartphone. Holidays are camping holidays in the Highlands - much more fun for the kids than some ghastly hotel in Spain, or worse still, some Egyptian concentration camp with complimentary beer, wine and diarrhea.

Step five - the mortgage! Now that we have stripped out about £25,000 of useless nonsense, getting rid of the mortgage is the family's number one priority! Yes, the whole family! It's no longer only on your shoulders, the whole family must now take responsibility for actually getting the old finances into shape. That means paying off that mortgage so that you retire without the Sisyphean task of meeting monthly payments for anything other than basic utilities. My 30 cents worth would be to release equity by moving to some remote part of Scotland so that the kids can enjoy a tertiary education without running up £50,000 in student debts. Just make sure that they study proper subjects with which they can actually earn a living, so no Music Technology, Philosophy, Media Studies, Film and TV, or any pseudo-vocational rubbish like that!

Can it be done?

I know a guy who worked for an investment fund. He too had a six-figure income and he too was struggling to make ends meet. In 2008 the fund collapsed and there were no more jobs in investment banking. He moved his family to a cottage outside of Inverness and started an appliance repair business. He is now debt-free and happy, grows much of his own food and has time for hobbies and for life in general.

So yes, it can be done!

This is almost how we live (except we don't just go to lidl, there is an Aldi as close and I alternate plus end of day shopping in M&S / Waitrose if passing as they discount more). I don't plan food in advance and buy for that, i look at what is cheap and we cook from that.

Old 1.9l Skoda Octavia Estate, paid off mortgage (twice) by paying double min each month (double drops 25 yrs to 10 yrs). Wife has gone back to full time work now youngest is 16 as she enjoys it (she works in a technical role), just checked jnt account and if you ignore money going into savings accounts we spend c £1400 pcm (averaged over last 12 months) and we live in a 5 bed house in Berkshire and run 2 (3 if you count eldest daughters) motorbikes between us !

 

[Gyumri]

Absolute rubbish.

I completely agree.

 

[DontAsk]

paid off mortgage (twice) by paying double min each month (double drops 25 yrs to 10 yrs).

Even better was the Virgin One Account. Every single penny left over at the end of each month was paying off the mortgage. Unlike other flexible mortgages you could borrow it all back any time if you really needed to.

 

[AlanJ1]

I completely agree.

I was talking about your post, so I am glad you agree your post was rubbish.

 

[Washington]

Apologies op for hijacking thread with my woes. Unless anyone has a million pound idea to give me. Why wouldn't you as you are all clearly very successful or unemployed being able to post on here all day.

Maybe you should pay a visit to Andys Man Club www.andysmanclub.co.uk
I heard quite a lot about it this week as some people I know were fundraising for the charity, there are 70 groups around the country where people meet. It may be good to sit with a few guys and get stuff off your chest
Try to look after your mental health if you can

 

[RandomQ's]

Focus on the process not the goal - meaning do what you love everyday and see where it leads. It will inevitably lead somewhere.

Hard to let go of certainty, but trust in deliberate practice and automatic focus is what will ultimately lead to success.

 

[SillyBill]

Surprising to me at least but no-one has mentioned (albeit skim read) developing skills and or job shopping to get a higher paid job. A mid £20k job to a mid £30k job (or higher) is not exactly shooting for the moon and should be achievable with the right mindset. Perhaps even in the same company if a chat is had with the bosses on progression. I'd rather that than go painting and decorating in the evenings or trying to set up an ecommerce site to try to make £5k a year of profit that will likely actually lose money. One of the useful pieces of advice business owners can actually give is to tell people when not to bother and to get more money through employment. IMO, this is one of those.

 

[Casually made]

Lot of useless waffle in this thread not sure why some people bother posting

Baseline .....you either need a niche product / service with a nice audience or a very high demand product / service

Contrary to popular believe you can't just flip a passion into a profit unless you have 100K in the bank forget about it

Online is crowded with crap and we are about to enter one of the worst recessions in living memory i think the rampant hyper consumerism we have seen in the last 15- 20 years is about to take a massive blow to the knees and it will decimate that effervescent drop-shipping model.

I have been lucky in sourcing high ticket niche products i can make anything from a 100% to a 2000% margin and pay little to no tax on.

The catch unit volumes are restricted i can't really scale or train anyone .... it quite literally is a one man band

Even this model i am concerned with what is about to come

Pivoting is going to be key in the next 2-3 years ..... helping people / businesses save or make money is going to be the most in demand service / product you will be able to offer

 

[Socio South West]

I see so many of these threads living in the dreamland of self employment/business being a guaranteed route to additional income. WRONG WRONG AND WRONG again..... And thats without the stress and grief that getting a business off the ground and keeping any momentum you manage to gain going.

The route to additional income with least stress is an additional part time employment - go stack shelves in Morrisons a few evenings a week... get some evening cleaning work... There's loads of it out there.

Yes, its mindless, but its also comparatively stress and risk free. And when you get the magic promotion or you realise that you no longer have any free time... you hand in your notice and walk away without any worry of winding the business up, getting shot of stock etc etc.

Keep it simple!

 

[Casually made]

The route to additional income with least stress is an additional part time employment - go stack shelves in Morrisons a few evenings a week... get some evening cleaning work... There's loads of it out there.

Do not do this for christ sake by the time them criminals in Westminster have had your trousers down in additional PAYE and NI you will be virtually back to square one

On top of that this kind of work is remedial and soul destroying they will work your nose to the grindstone for a pittance

You will end up depressed and demoralised for probably an extra 70 quid a week

Understand the system is highly rigged against the working man

Circumvent it by any means necessary.