Balancing Things Out

And as with everything in life, once you start looking you always find the yin to the yang of what you’ve just read… “Being Responsible is the Key”.

And what is interesting about this is that it basically says the same as the the gurus of wealth creation, Rich Dad, Poor Dad about poor struggling young first time buyers, ie sort out your financial independence FIRST and then buy property – don’t expect everything to be handed to you on plate and stop whinging if you are daft and it all goes South.

We couldn’t afford it either, and neither could your grandparents, but we managed – either badly or well, but we managed, and during tougher financial times as well. You can too if you give up the drink, the toys and the gadgets and simply concentrate on finding solutions (like starting a second job from home… lol!).

Wouldn’t go so far as to say send your children to work in a Primark factory, but when needs must and all that

I mean, no one seriously thinks those children are working in those factories RATHER than going to school or working elsewhere for more money do they? If they are it’s because that’s the best option for them and their families, which then leads to the uncomfortable question of what happens when the contracts dry up from Primark et al…? Where do those children turn to then to earn money for the family pot…? Prostitution? Crippling themselves to beg?

OK, 60p a day isn’t much, and no kids should have to go to work, and yes we have to care, and do care, that the environment they are working in is less than good, BUT presumable the other options for their families are worse, and that’s where we will have pitched them by getting all self righteous and holier-than-thou to poor old Primark.

And what about Mrs UK Average and her kids, the ones she’s raising on a shoe string? If Primark can’t supply what she needs on a budget, is she just to shrug and feel all green and smug and go spend her last pennies at M&S like these short-sighted middle class do-gooder protesters who can’t follow an action through the end consequences or seeing that their world view isn’t necessarily the right or only one?

And on that note, I have been seriously discussing first time businesses with my girls, ages 12 and 10. They have to earn their pocket money, it doesn’t come as a given, because that’s how it is in the real world, and I want them to be financially free by the time they are in their 20s.

Felice (age 10) is determined to do something about animals, perhaps write a guide or ebook about dog care or having a puppy (since she is pretty experienced now!), and has put a postcard advertising her services as dog walker locally, and started her very first blog “The Latest Sniff“, which we will incorporate in the new revamped Funky Angel if she sticks with it

Cecily wants to do something “random” online for her peers, details yet to be confirmed, and is interested in doing a mayhem radio show or perhaps interviewing people she admires, such as J K Rowling. I can’t see where the money is in that, but knowing Cecily she’ll already have a biz plan and niche market already mapped out in her beautiful head, so we wait with interest…

But what I do know is that I will be getting ‘Cashflow for Kids‘ for them for their birthdays next month. No middle classs daftness about buying doodahs on debt for my kids, thank you very much! The ubiquitous Jones’ can go their own sweet way as far as I am concerned – a healthy credit balance on the bank statement and no debt to trip you over is much more desirable than any amount of race horse shares, fast cars, and kids at private schools, and I don’t care if that means a kitchen garden, canal or road kill, frugal gourmet in the kitchen, and shopping at Lidl and Primark!

They are privileged, we all are in this country, and the best way to give thanks for that is to make the most of what you have and not abuse it.

Here endeth the lesson. Amen

Media Spinmongering…

I am working on a big project on the state of the housing market for the agency where I work part time. Some of the research has got me feeling a tad depressed, mainly as a result of the media spin and the panic people are experiencing. I haven’t really felt the squeeze myself, mainly I think because we live very frugally, using different outlets from locally grown and the markets through to Lidl for our food, cook from scratch, don’t smoke or have any other expensive habits, socialise locally, have had years of practice holidaying wonderfully on a budget, and generally hardly use the car since I mainly work from home and the children walk to school…

I had been avoiding the papers and the news because I couldn’t deal with the general gloom and doom, and was of the opinion that if anything was going to trigger a Second Depression it was the spinmongering of the media preying on people’s fears… And it really seems to be working on most people as I have seen a 50% rise in queries through Funky Angel in the last month alone! That’s a lot of people looking for other options!

I personally think (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) that working from home is the best and most cost effective option for families, and the work/life balance coaching that I have done for years has gradually shifted recently to take in to account people wanting assistance setting up their home businesses, not just the support to do make that change.

Have to say it’s hugely satisfying, and something I look forward to doing much more of in the future ie on Thursday!! Why Thursday, particularly? Well, it Thursday is one of my usual days for mentoring, so obviously it’s a day I look forward to, but this one is slightly different as I am mentoring a home working design team in how to set up an internet profile on a shoestring. They have a nice little business but no website presence, which is different from my usual client, and so I was delighted when they agreed to let me showcase them!

Watch this space!

Hurrah! New Tax Breaks for WAH Businesses!

Great news from the good ship Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs, who seem to have had a change of heart this week with regard to the type of expenses that can be claimed by the self-employed and business owners who work from home WITHOUT their home becoming liable to Capital Gains Tax when you sell it (…if you decide to sale, obviously… we’ll be discussing the sense, or otherwise, or this in our forthcoming Funky Finance on the soon-to-be-live New and Expanded Funky…)

New guidance in HMRC manuals, published on their website contain examples of the level and nature of home expenses that can be claimed. There are two areas of particular interest:

Specific expenses and mixed use of premises, and they’ve even given some useful examples!

A new element is term ‘fixed costs’ and includes mortgage interest, council tax and home insurance, and for the first time HMRC are content to allow a proportion of these costs to be claimed against the income of your business if certain criteria are met, such as:

• The area of your home is used exclusively for business purposes for a prescribed amount of time – say, 9am to 3pm, which basically means that if you sit at the kitchen table working you won’t qualify for the additional deductions. Personally I think that is all to the good anyway, as you’ll know if you have already read my discussion of your home office, since perching at the kitchen table or on the sofa with your laptop will play havoc with your back! And psychologically it is much better, anyway, to have a separate office space, and it seems that the lovely taxman has recognised that and is looking for is an area that has the appearance of a home office ie it contains a desk, computer, chair, and storage etc etc.
• The amount you claim has to be reasonable in relation to your business – so you can’t claim that you work 20 hours a day in the office (however much it might feel that way sometimes when you’re in the middle of a rush!. Additionally, the area used is the main proportion of the living area of your home – we’re talking 5-15% of the total living space, on average, here.

Apart from these two provisos, you will now be able to claim a percentage of the total cost of running the home. Which is news to celebrate over, perhaps mostly because it is a firm indication that the powers that be are getting behind the WAH trend in the UK and beginning to try and help!

So get the champagne out (you know me, any excuse!) and let’s raise a toast to the new era of working from home within our communities around our families!

NOTE: For further information see HMRC’s manual at BIM47825

It’s been a bit of a week!

Happily my attention to the SEO on Funky Angel has already paid dividends and we are climbing the ratings again and back on the second page for both working at home mums and business mums, which is great, and Nikki Pilkington will be giving us a hand with the new site.

Apparently Google has over 50 data centres and each searches individually, one after the other, hence why it takes up to 6 weeks for SEO to settle down after changes have been made or a new site or link established, so it’s a long game, like so much else in life! I cover SEO in detail in my forthcoming book for working at home business mums (and dads) and if you want to registered for a copy you will be able to next week!

Yesterday was the biggest house slump for a while, so mass panicking as people realised that they might be negative equity and that on top of the budget squeeze on petrol and utilities, well, people need extra cash, which is probably why we have seen such a huge rise in enquiries over the last few months! Because if you do need to make some extra cash, starting a home based business, either around the kids (and save on the childcare costs) or in addition to your regular job, is a great way to do it.

1,400 home businesses are started every week in the UK and mum businesses contribute £4.4billion to the economy according to surveys…and it’s easy to see why. It’s the most economical way of starting a business and the most family and lifestyle friendly as well, and it frees you up to become very creative and use your brain to make money for you, your family and your community, which is exactly what we need to combat a credit crunch.

However, concentrating on my own home business for a moment, seems my macs have picked up a trojan somehow and it’s been playing havoc, slowing them down and then freezing them up to the point where I haven’t been able to work and have had to spend huge amounts of time trying to sort it out. Macs are not as vulnerable to these kind of things as PCs, but when they do pick up a Trojan it can be difficult to clear. Anyhow, seems the spyware community got on to it really quickly so hopefully there won’t be any more problems…

Boosting the Constitution

Had a press release from Sourcewire today about the benefits of drinking water, and it got me thinking about our general health as we have all been in the wars or under the weather lately, Cecily is particular! In fact I had a phone call from her allergy homeopath yesterday just checking that the treatments that she prescribed last month to treat Cecily’s tree pollen allergy (constant sneezing poor love, for about a week before we managed to get on top of it). Obviously we had treated it with conventional hayfever treatments (first one didn’t work; second one did), but I wanted to make sure it was dealt with, rather than just suppressed.

Arlene Smith was great, and yes the homeopathic remedies had worked a treat, even her general stuffed up nose had gone, which was a bonus, but it got me thinking about Cecily’s general health as she seems to have had one thing after another since last year and she told me yesterday that she has verrucas, which are a sign of a slightly depressed immune system.

I think it is the overall stress of starting secondary school, and us having been practically homeless last year, plus adding a puppy to the family, fracturing her collarbone, and now she has SATS coming up after half term (although goodness knows how she’ll cope when she can’t use her right hand!), so with the nudge from the press release fresh in my mind, I am resolved to take her back to the homeopath and see if we can’t give her constitution a boost, plus start adding lots more garlic to my cooking and make her my special ‘medicine in a bowl’ chicken soup at least once a week.

That will help Felice and I too, we’ve both been very tired lately, and the stress and upheaval of Cecily’s collarbone and adding a new puppy to the family probably has been at the root of our fatigue, so early nights, lots of water, chicken soup and extra garlic is the prescription!

Mini IQ party

Had a gang of friends, other mums, round last night for a Mini IQ party with Di Leighton, one of their Senior Associates who is based in Mortimer.

Mini IQ sell a range of quirky educational books for children (and some for grown ups too) and employ part planners to do book parties, so ideal for mums working around their children. I like the company immensely.

The books went down a storm, especially with my girls, who immediately added a heap of them to their forthcoming birthday lists! I was quite surprised because I thought my two were out of the zone so to speak, but they particularly liked:

Encyclopedia Prehistorica – Mega Beasts, which I have to say was wonderful and may yet make it on to a birthday table, and…

Calm Down Boris… Which is a baby’s hand puppet toy in a book.. and the elder one’s favourite…!!

Ooookaay…

Di has also teamed up with some other party planning mums selling other things, such as Virgin Vie and bead jewellery and they are started to market themselves as a local team who can visit school fetes etc. I think it is an excellent idea and we immediately discussed them have an associate page in the marketplace in the new Funky. All good stuff, and definitely an idea for all you other work at home mums and business mums who are party planners to emulate.

On the Radio again

This time it was a discussion about whether children actually need fathers, which had been triggered by the hybrid embryo laws that are currently causing such a storm in parliament.

BBC Berkshire had extended the debate to whether fathers would now actually become redundant, which was quite a jump!

My points were that there were two separate issues:

Firstly where the cells for the hybrid embryos were going to be harvested from – and in the case of it being used to help a lesbian couple have their own child, obviously this means that a father isn’t essential to the process.

Secondly, however, this doesn’t actually affect any resulting child’s need for male role models, whether that’s in the guise of a father or other males around them as they growing up, which I actually think is essential for a child to grow up balanced and emotionally healthy. My children’s father lives at one end of the road and we live at the other and they see him pretty much every day – and that’s how it should be.

There is an African proverb that it takes a whole village to raise a child, and I think we would do well to remember that here sometimes – no one can be everything to someone else, and particularly not to a child who needs a wide range of people and experiences in order to develop and grow up to be well rounded.

I do think that a return to a more traditional “cottage industries” way of life, with people working from home or close to home, adapting their relationships, work and schedules to fit around their children and give them the best upbringing possible, while also maintaining their spirit of community, is the way forward in this country, and why Funky Angel exists – to help families find and maintain that work/life balance.

Snail-loving dog?

Just walked out to make a cup of tea and found the dog is happily crunching on a snail, surrounded by the broken shells of perhaps a dozen more.

Now I have no problem with this at all, since we are infested with them, being so very near the canal and the river, and they eat my plants, but it is pretty unpleasant crunching across them to the kettle!

Question: is it usual for dogs to eat snails? Or is he perhaps a French dog, rather than Irish as we were led to believe when we adopted him from the Lab rescue? Having done a quick search, apparently it’s completely normal… not to mention grasshoppers and other interesting mini bugs – no wonder he and Felice get on so well, her favourite creatures in the world are newts and she once spent a happy summer cultivating a snail farm, complete with playing midwife to one who gave birth to about 30 babies!

Perhaps I should stop him, though, since he could easily eat a neighbour’s snail that’s been in contact with slug pellets, and that would be a Bad Thing, but it’s so helpful to have a snail loving hound as a pet…perhaps I could train him to eat slugs as well, and then my poor decimated vegetable patch might have a chance to thrive…? No…?

Ok, sigh, then I’ll have to resort to the beer trap method and add yet another thing to the list of Bad Dog crimes…

Poor Albiedorable

Hiring in the experts

Having sought advice from everyone I knew who has half an idea about organic seo, it would appear that I’m doing everything right, just don’t have the time and fast track info to apply it quicker than a quick thing (not that seo is quiiiick. More slow slow quickish slow!), so I’ve decided to hire in the experts ie Nikki Pilkington. Spoke to her dad Bob, who was lovely and they are going to get on the case of the new Funky in a couple of week’s time once I have finished the content and the expanded areas (travel, finance, family).

He reckons six months to increase traffic to 1,000 a day plus get it organically searchable by business mums. I shall carry on doing the do my end and hopefully the two will meet somewhere in the middle, and in less than a year, if I’m lucky and persistent and have a fair wind behind me!

My lovely house is lovely and quiet today because they’ve gone to school and the cat and dog are both asleep in the their respective beds, completely tuckered out after the weekend. Quite fancy joining them to be honest, feel really tired myself, and I confess I’m starting the week FERVENTLY glad they are all back at school and I can actually get my head down … and of course they are off again next week for half term..! Crumbs. Terms just get shorter and shorter. Or maybe I just get older and older….lol..

I keep wishing it would all just calm down so I could just concentrate on one thing ie Funky Angel, but it never does, and I’ve come to the conclusion that working parents, especially business mums who run their own home-based businesses around their kids, ESPECIALLY single/divorced business mums who work from home and do more than one job… well, we have to be the most balanced and highly effective creatures in the universe, just because we have to do two or even three full day’s work in one short day!

In fact, I reckon we could RUN the universe on a part time basis just as soon as they all get out of our collective hair! Not that I would want to, you understand. If I had that kind of quality time just handed to me I’d be off traveling with my laptop and camera and a good friend.

Forget running the universe, it can quite happily get on with running itself as far as I’m concerned!!

More injuries…

If the striken Bambi wasn’t enough for one household, Felice and Jasper joined the walking wounded last night.

We were happily ensconced on the sofa with the Doritoes and Philly dip, watching Grumpy Old Men (still sweet) and then The Golden Compass (excellent, really really brilliant, and that’s from someone who is an avid fan of the books), dog at our feet, and enjoying the smell of the pheasant and redcurrant casserole. Felice was fiddling around, leaning off the sofa to talk to the dog (he’s not allowed on the sofa), when suddenly she slipped and fell off and landed SMACK on her back on the wooden floor missing the rug (and the dog) by a good meter. There was a silence, and then the wail.

Bless her, she could hardly move it was so sore and I was worried about moving her at first because I didn’t know if she’d done any damage, so got her to move her hands and fingers and turn her head, but all seemed fine, so gingerly lifted her (she weights 4 stone these days – who says I need to go to the gym?!) up on to the sofa, and Cecily fetched the Rescue Remedy, arnica cream and tablets, and the ibupropin, and Doctor Mum was once again IN.

It obviously hurt like the blazes, but have to confess that once she was over the initial shock she made a bit of a meal of it, and managed to use it to lever getting the dog up on the sofa to cuddle with her, which is what she was after all along. Personally I think trying to break your spine to achieve a cuddle with your dog on the sofa is a trifle extreme, but that’s Floozy for you. Never a girl to do things by halves.

I then went upstairs and found Jasper the fleur de purr scrunched up under the radiator feeling sorry for himself. When I bent to stroke him he hissed, which is most unlike the cat, he’s usually the soppiest most easy going feline on the planet. So I picked him up and examined him fully, an so Vet Mum was then IN as well! No blood, but sensitive on his left and side, and his ear looked a little worse for wear. Obviously had had an altercation with one of the neighborhood moggies, but from the lack of cuts and tears it looks like he won. Perhaps having a dog living here isn’t so bad after all, hey Jazzy? lol…

He then snuck downstairs and snuggled with Cecily for a bit (dog in rightful place on the floor by this point), and we continued watching the Golden Compass, Felice identifying strongly with Lyra, Cecily loving the plot and characterisation, me was just happy watching Mr Daniel!!!

One of my five beaus rang at this point to have a chat and arrange a date, but I put him off til tomorrow, with all the excitement it really wasn’t the time for an intimate chat. I poured myself a fat glass of red wine (cab sav/merlot mix, very nice, and a gift from Carolyn for having Bree before and after school because they are stacked out at the moment) at this point before rejoining the film- I so deserved it!

Cat then disappeared upstairs and I served the pheasant casserole in bowls with plain boiled potatoes in front of the film, it was real comfort food and the girls loved it – Felice cheered up immensely and the back was suddenly much improved when she found she had a tasty pheasant leg to gnaw!

Mum’s view: all too much excitement really… when can I escape all of them and go away on holiday…?