Journeys End

I was asked to come to one of the Directors office on Friday to be given the statutory 2 weeks notice. It’s more surprising to me that I lasted this long to be honest; how can a small company afford to keep paying someone that they don’t give any work to. I guess that I have been busy for an average of 50% of my time there and most of that work I have found myself by asking people if they need a hand; not a particularly good strategy for a contractor as it highlights that you have nothing to do. However it beats the endless boredom of spending hour after hour pretending to work when you have none. I could just sit there and play on my new i-phone toy but that would be a little too obvious. In fact that’s exactly what I was doing when the Director collected me. The other guy, Steve who started the same day as me is also finishing the same day and he’s been very busy all along so I feel a bit sorry for him. However, I will not miss that rotten journey especially now it’s starting to get foggy in the early mornings and it won’t be long before the ice gets here. It’s been a good contract and largely I have enjoyed finding out about Lasers; in fact this year they have been around for 50 years. Strange, because they still feel like a new technology. Anyway, good luck to OpTek but I feel that they need to stop working so hard and start to plan and manage a little more, especially when you employ such a high percentage of contractors.

I have been quite grumpy of late but I guess that most of that is because of the rotten journey that I have to look forward to each day and I never seem to have time at home to do anything. Also, since I have been working again I haven’t had chance to do much exercise either so my weight has hardly reduced at all since I have been diagnosed as diabetic. I will make a great effort once I have finished there to get into a regular routine every day and make a big effort to slash some pounds.

I think Claire has told you that we bought a new bungalow on Great Holm from Derek an old acquaintance. We know him because he owns the property below one of ours in Oldbrook and I started negotiations about 3 years ago to buy it from him. However, we never managed to agree a price because his advice of its value seemed much higher than our judgement so he marketed it in the normal way. This coincided with the property crash starting at the end of 2007 and he never managed to sell it even though he kept reducing the price. Twelve months later he re-let it and those tenants are still there. Derek is getting older and his wife and himself have just planned a journey around the world starting at Fiji and finishing at Hong Kong with New Zealand and Australia in the middle; a real adventure lasting around 2 months. He expects that they will do a blog so we will put a link for anyone wishing to follow them. He expects that his wife will retire at that point and intends to start winding down himself so is slowly selling off his properties. If you sell one a year you reduce your capital gains liability as each person is allowed around £10,000 a year before tax so if a property is owned jointly the first £20,000 of profit is tax free. Anyway, we bought his bungalow last year and we had agreed a price for the Oldbrook one this year. Everything was going through nicely and we were a few weeks away from completion when my valuation survey came back suggesting that the price was rather high. The price we had agreed seemed about right at the time but was set by a previous agent that had been pestering him to sell it again. Claire and I thought about it and talked about it coming to the conclusion that we were not prepared to go ahead with it at this inflated price so reluctantly we dropped out. At our age we are not in it for the long term gain but we are in it for investment purposes and we didn’t think we could make a profit on it in the next 5 years so it wasn’t worth perusing. Of course Derek was disappointed, especially as he has already booked his trip through the same agent that we used when we went but he asked his pestering agent to put his money where his mouth was.

We had already spent the best part of £1000 in the purchase of this property so it wasn’t ideal for us either. However, because we were re-mortgaging another property to finance this one and were in the final stages of its completion we decided to carry on and get the money while we look for another investment property that we could make some money on. I spent the last two weeks looking on RightMove and scouring the papers and also between 9am and 11.30am Saturday phoning agents to arrange viewings over the weekend. I had just finished and was only waiting for one more confirmation phone call when Derek phoned. He had also had it valued and it had come out at the same price as our valuation so he was offering it to us again at the reduced price. If he had only rang a little earlier we wouldn’t have wasted the whole weekend driving around MK viewing properties. To be honest, I enjoy this task but when you are working it takes so much away from your precious spare time we could have done without it. Anyway, we viewed about 10 places and have found 2 that we really like and want to buy, trouble is neither of them are mortgageable and we don’t have enough cash. Anyone have a spare quid or two?