Slow month for blogging

I seem to have my focus elsewhere this month - there has been little blogging needing to be done, but thankfully, some other revenue streams have been a bit more active. This is just as well as I went a bit mad and bought myself my first ever laptop this month off eBay. I got a bargain at just under £50 plus delivery. The battery was duff, but I bought a broken laptop for £5, and that had a good battery - also a good DVD drive and hopefully other components that I may be able to re-sell. I may try my hand at laptop salvage for a while in case it may be a worthwhile income stream - bit of a gamble though buying broken stuff in the hope that something is salvageable...

Naturally, I will 'charge' the laptop to my online earnings as it is definitely a tool of the trade... mostly I intend to use it for doing website building. I also bought my first wireless router (not exactly a first-adopter) so the two are working well as a team.

Fortunately, I have had a few tapes to convert this month so I think the cost of the laptop will be covered - would really like to have another bumper crop of paid blog posts so I can invest in more broken laptops!

I recently bought a new domain for my cassette to CD conversions and have a spanking new web design up and running - for the time being I will run two sites promoting the same business. I am also linking the sites into facebook and twitter too - I am going to have to spend a little time encouraging people to 'like' my page - but I also want to revamp the old site to bring it up to a similar design standard. I will need to work out a long-term plan that makes use of the traffic that the old site gets and also encourages visitors to the newer site.

Still juggling too many ideas at once, but feel a bit more determined to see some plans through at the moment, so am going to make the most of this mood...

Garden Trimmers...

I managed to find a break in the weather last week so I could finally mow the lawn - it was getting very like a rain forest! Sadly, I did 90% of the grass before my hover mower lost one of it's blades. Having searched in vain for the missing blade I finally gave up and got the trimmer out instead. Now my trimmer is OK, but it's not exactly a redmax... I hardly thought that I would take such an interest in garden implements, but I could really make short work of that pesky grass with one of these...

Anyway, I am now waiting for another break in this awful Summer weather so I can finish the job properly.

Sale of Goods Act

I spent a little time studying consumer law when my career path was looking uncertain, having previously studied it as part of a Business qualification, and the studies have stood me in good stead when it comes to knowing my rights as a consumer.
However many consumers are ignorant of the rights that the Sale of Goods Act offers. I find knowledge of the actual legislation gives particular weight to your argument when making a complaint (should you be forced to do so). In particular if you use the full and correct name of the act: Sale of Goods Act 1979 - (my tutor was always keen that we should use the date to show that we knew the full details of the legislation) generally whoever you are addressing will probably assume you know what you are talking about.
Of course, there are always those traders who don't care how they treat their clients, but the majority will want to ensure they stay on the right side of their clients whilst staying on the right side of the law.
It is worth noting that this legislation comes under the heading 'civil law' rather than 'criminal law', so calling the police to resolve a consumer dispute is not appropriate. That said, you will still hear irate consumers threatening to call the police because they want a refund for a hat that doesn't fit!
Knowing a little about the Sale of Goods Act 1979 and the sale of goods and services act 1982 will not protect you from rogue traders, but it will give you the confidence of knowing when the law is protecting you, and when it is protecting the tradesman.
It is also worth noting that the law protects you when you are buying online, but has limited powers if you buy used goods from individuals rather than new goods from business traders.

eBay trading

On the whole eBay is a great place to get a bargain (and to spend your hard-won internet earnings) but sometimes eBay throws up an anomoly. I have noticed that when looking for computers on eBay, unlike with desktops (which you can hardly give away), laptops fetch silly prices.
Even the lowest spec broken rubbish laptops seem to go for a minimum of £100. My advice is to be careful about bidding for laptops on eBay, to get anything half-decent will cost you as there seems to be a lot of people prepared to bid way over the odds. Bear in mind that with a laptop, you will need all the drivers if you are going to re-install the operating system - the drivers for laptops seem to be a lot less 'standard' than for desktops particularly drivers for wi-fi etc.. Also bear in mind that changing a motherboard or processor in a laptop is not a job for the faint-hearted. If you are bidding on a laptop that is not working, you have to bear in mind that if the processor has burnt out, you are probably wasting your money. At least with a desktop you can simply fit a new one.
Laptops are limited in every respect apart from portability, for instance your laptop will be slower, have less memory capacity and a smaller hard-drive than the equivalent costing desktop. It is far more likely to have significant damage after the first year or so, frequently laptops are sold with broken keypads, broken screens - often they are sold as seen as the owner can't even get them to boot up, but yet there are apparently plenty of bidders who are willing to take a massive risk.
That said, I still want one, and I will probably use eBay to get it unless I get lucky and can find someone who has a laptop to get rid of.

Father's Day (UK)

Father's Day is just around the corner, and although I have come to think of it as a day when I can take it easy and be pampered by family, I also need to remember that I should be sending a card to my Dad too..!

I don't ususally get presents for such ocassions as I live a fair way from my parents and posting presents would be too costly. However I did see some hunting binoculars on a website and that reminded me of the sort of gift my Dad would love. Dads are typically hard to buy presents for, and my Dad (like me) is one of those who, if they want something will go and get it rather than wait for someone to buy it for him.

Frugality tip...

A 'first adopter' is one of those people who must have the latest gadget - amongst your friends they will have been the first to buy an enormous flat-screen TV and a Blu-Ray player, and then a Blu-Ray recorder. If, amongst your friends, the first adopter is you, then you are going to struggle with 'frugal living'...!
Being at the cutting edge of technology is a very expensive place to be, and although I am interested in all the latest gadgets, I definitely do NOT qualify as a first adopter... The frugal choice is to wait...and wait until the first adopters or even second adopters have moved on to newer toys, then buy their old ones from eBay.
Today's example is a bit extreme even for me... I have just (yes only just) installed a wireless network in my home (I am using it right now!). I have used the excuse previously that a wired network is faster and more secure - facts which cannot be argued. However in an unguarded moment the other day I bid £5 on a wireless router and won it for £2.70! The daft thing is I don't even own a laptop of my own (I use my works one at home sometimes). Anyway the point is that if you are prepared to wait, you can get some real bargains. Hard-drives are another example, today I bought a 1TB hard-drive from eBay for £25 including delivery - something that might have cost me twice as much six months ago.

'All things come to those that wait'

is my frugal tip for the day - that also applies to eBay auctions, sometimes you search for something for months before you find the bargain you were looking for (although to be fair sometimes it takes that long to learn that you are going to have to extend your budget to get what you want).

SLR cameras

If I had to choose gadgets that I desired, but have not yet managed to find at the right price, slr cameras would be amongst the first to come to mind. The last time I bought a new (non-SLR) digital camera, it cost me several hundred pounds, and yet I have recently replaced it with an equivalent but slightly better camera from eBay for less than £5...
I was never able to afford an SLR camera even before they were available in digital format, so the chances of being in a position to make that kind of 'investment' are slim. However, like all things technical, prices are likely to fall at least for the camera bodies if not for the lenses. The massive drop in prices we have come to expect for digital equipment will not apply to lenses for which there is a long established market.
I have recently been taking a lot of photo's for a website that I am building, and photo's of the goods offered are going to be crucial - so I am one step nearer to persuading myself that a digital SLR camera could be a vital work tool!

Earnings May 2001

A definite improvement this month, largely helped by an Adsense payment dropping in on the last day of the month... Without this boost, turnover would have been around £85, profit around £70. Some improvement in passive income signalling a return of the payments for fixed adverts that I thought had ceased, and a couple of small but welcome affiliate payments.
Major expense this month was a domain renewal, I thought I might sell a domain, but the offer I got was so low I may as well hold onto the domain and get some earnings from it.
I am looking a buying another domain or two for new projects and am still trying to find time to get 'into' Wordpress. I have another project using a different CMS at the moment, so I am hoping that this experience will inform my journey into Wordpress when I finally embark on it!
I have just submitted my figures for last year to the taxman, I don't think he will get overly excited about my earnings, but I am pleased with the improvements over the last 12 months and hope to be even more profitable this coming tax year...

US Business Lawyers

Usually you associate the term 'LLP' with US Business Lawyers, but I noticed recently that UK lawyers are using the same term for themselves. I firstly assumed that this was because US businesses were setting up UK offices, but I guess the term is common to either side of the Atlantic.

LLP actually stands for Limited Liability Partnership - It is because law businesses are not allowed to be public limited companies (Plc), that they must remain as a partnership, each partner having a limited personal libility for the business. Of course, this means that any partnership with limited liability may call itself 'LLP', but mostly the term is associated with lawyers and attourneys.