Considering giving up the market. Input please.

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Considering giving up the market. Input please.
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Downsizer Forum Index -> Small Business Questions, Ideas and Advice

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chez

Joined: 13 Aug 2006
Posts: 35935
Location: The Hive of the Uberbee, Quantock Hills, Somerset

Posted: Wed Mar 09, 16 7:32 pm Post subject:
Those chickens are plotting you know .

sean
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 42219
Location: North Devon

Posted: Wed Mar 09, 16 7:35 pm Post subject:
You and Arvo?

Lorrainelovesplants

Joined: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 6521
Location: Dordogne

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 16 1:29 pm Post subject:

I hope you dont mind me being really blunt here Chez - I think I can be as I think we have known each other for a while (even if it is on here).

I gave up doing egg sales as for the work involved in it - its not worth the effort. Think on it - 6 eggs sell for what £1.20 - £1.50 ish. For all the hassle of getting the hens, feeding the hens, protecting the hens, letting them out, putting them away, collecting eggs, making eggs clean, boxing, labelling. transporting, cost of stall - REALLY NOT WORTH IT.
I got rid and keep only my Orps and I sell their eggs on ebay as hatching eggs - Im currently getting £20 for 6, and they pay the postage. Now for me - with hens - this is worth it. I sell from Feb till July and it pays for the hens all year.

You really dont need the hassle right now as you have enough on your plate and need to use your time for you, your kids and your hubby.
Id even suggest getting someone else to help your mum out.

As re tax credits - I completely understand. We have worked the working tax credits because we would have gone under. Ive just been investigated (thank God I can provide paperwork to justify), and am still able to get payments. Help with working the system is what you need I think. You can work and work and work and not show a profit to be able to keep claiming.

Lorrainelovesplants

Joined: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 6521
Location: Dordogne

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 16 1:31 pm Post subject:
PS Love you and its so hard, but for ALL of your sakes, ditch the eggs and the market.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28232
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 16 5:41 pm Post subject:
I'm the first one usually to ask Downsizers to consider their business model in terms of hours and margins and how it compares to say the minimum wage, and I'd encourage Chez to at least try and work that out. But this is more than about money, there is both a social and a benefits entitlement element going on here.

Lorrainelovesplants

Joined: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 6521
Location: Dordogne

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 7:17 am Post subject:
Yes, agree, but cut out the dying wood would take a lot of stress away...

Lorrainelovesplants

Joined: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 6521
Location: Dordogne

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 10:58 am Post subject:
Im apologising here if Im being a bit blunt. Ive reread my posts, and hope they dont offend. Im feeling a bit short and unwell and this may come over. Sorry folks. I think Chez is doing a wonderful job. I just wish I could wave a magic wand and make all the crap go away.

chez

Joined: 13 Aug 2006
Posts: 35935
Location: The Hive of the Uberbee, Quantock Hills, Somerset

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 4:05 pm Post subject:

Don't be daft, Lorraine, you've not offended me. The reason I posted was to get lots of input from different viewpoints.

It was a better week this week - we were more organised, the ducks are back in lay, all the quail eggs sold and Arv banked just over £200. This was despite NMG having a minging cold yesterday getting everything prepped, Arv having a governers meeting yesterday evening and me being bedridden in my tinfoil bedbonnet* all afternoon. Nen is still at home - back to school next week hopefully; Leo is throwing regular wobblers about leaving me on my own and going to school; and I spent two hours this morning flopping round like a kipper on the sofa. So not an ideal week, but it still went much more smoothly.

I have given up doing eggs by post - the getting them packed and to the post office was just too much stress, despite the more lucrative unit cost. I have various local sales lined up for birds over the season, table top ones, not auctions; and I am selling hatching eggs if people come and collect them. I've got my second course of the season tomorrow, with a puppy-walker shadowing me in case I collapse; and I'm bashing my course notes in to a format that I can market to a publisher as a beginners chicken keeping book.

I think you're right - getting rid of the dead wood is the way forward. But I guess everyone's dead wood is different. There is a definite advantage to Arvo getting out of the house - he does go a bit bonkers if he's constantly confined to barracks with a million chickens.

I'm sorry you're having a rubbish time. Keep on keeping on. x

* I hate you, Sean

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46196
Location: yes

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 6:53 pm Post subject:

some good stuff and some bad stuff is better than all bad stuff .

apart from cyber hugs to all of you i cant think of much potentially useful except :

regarding the egg market finance aspect does it need to be all year round ?
i.e would "gone out of lay ,back in the spring" be an option for next year?
from what you just said it seems " home made " eggs are worth doing but the winter mostly bought in ones are perhaps less so.

i do understand the get out of the house thing and it is very important .

i recon get some good professional advice (cab probably but other advice might be available) re benefits and seasonal work. i half suspect it might be more complex than pt or now and again.

hope the course goes well and folk book/take for cash hatching eggs or chicks or pol

RichardW

Joined: 24 Aug 2006
Posts: 8443
Location: Llyn Peninsular North Wales

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 10:05 pm Post subject:
What ever you decide remember to check out the new regs re the new single benefit payments & the self employed. They are draconian.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46196
Location: yes

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 10:23 pm Post subject:

hip hip hooray for draco , maybe ids and chums will have such support

"During the 39th Olympiad, in 622 or 621 BC, Draco established the legal code with which he is identified.

Little is known about his life. He may have belonged to the Greek nobility of Attica, with which the 10th-century Suda text records him as contemporaneous, prior to the period of the Seven Sages of Greece. It also relates a folkloric story of his death in the Aeginetan theatre.[1] In a traditional ancient Greek show of approval, his supporters 'threw so many hats and shirts and cloaks on his head that he suffocated, and was buried in that same theatre'.[2]" wiki quote

chez

Joined: 13 Aug 2006
Posts: 35935
Location: The Hive of the Uberbee, Quantock Hills, Somerset

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 16 10:33 pm Post subject:

Yes, that's one of the things we are taking in to consideration. We are already having to justify why we don't work full time to the housing benefit people. Waiting to hear whether they consider having a terminally ill child enough reason to not be working 35 hours a week and earning £7.20 an hour. We've also just had a letter from the working rax credits people warning that they will want business plans, accounts, evidence of advertising etc. Which we have. But it all feels so much of a fight all the time along with everything else. I'm sick of explaining our situation to officialdom. They are appalled on a person level, but are constrained by the system. I've had two hours of seizures this morning, still so knackered by Monday's meeting with ATOS, I think; finished the day having one in Nenna's room as I was kissing her goodnight. I fell on the floor, she held my hand while Leo went and got Arvo. It's all rubbish and the system is intentionally cruel.

Seasonal market attendance no good for the market - they wouldn't keep our place. Which is fair enough - customers need consistency.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 15952

Posted: Sat Mar 12, 16 7:45 am Post subject:
The system is intentionally cruel, and lots of people are suffering from it. Hope you can get advice from CAB or others to help you through it. Can't do anything but as others have cyber hugs, and hope those pushing the system get their comeuppance very soon.

Hairyloon

Joined: 20 Nov 2008
Posts: 15425
Location: Today I are mostly being in Yorkshire.

Posted: Sat Mar 12, 16 11:14 am Post subject:

Chez wrote:

Waiting to hear whether they consider having a terminally ill child enough reason to not be working 35 hours a week and earning £7.20 an hour.
We've also just had a letter from the working rax credits people warning that they will want business plans, accounts, evidence of advertising etc. Which we have. But it all feels so much of a fight all the time along with everything else...

I am sorry, I have got lost: what is it that you want from them here?
Do you want them to say it is a good business and you should keep at it, or do you want them to tell you to give it up and claim benefits?

What they should say is:

Cloud Cuckoo Council wrote:

It is nearly a good business, that it clearly has enormous potential benefits to both yourself and your customers, if only it had that little bit of help, and how about we do <this>, <this>, and <this> to try and make it work?

My apologies if I have misunderstood the situation.

Quote:

It's all rubbish and the system is intentionally cruel.

If the system is intentionally cruel, then we should count our blessings that it is rubbish: imagine if they were intentionally cruel with any sense of efficiency.

The alternative is that it is cruel because it is rubbish at being not cruel.
I can sympathise with that: I have been guilty of it myself often enough.
That is what I would much rather believe... unfortunately, I think the evidence has gone beyond the tipping point.

Lorrainelovesplants

Joined: 13 Oct 2006
Posts: 6521
Location: Dordogne

Posted: Sat Mar 12, 16 11:25 am Post subject:

I think the point Chez is trying to make is that she needs to be working to claim tax credits.
She is finding working and trying to maintain her own health and that of her family situation increasingly hard.
If she can continue to claim tax credits then this opens the door to other credits/benefits.

Although the whole system will change soon, she needs to justify what she is doing, the fact that she cant devote more time to it etc to the deciding authorities.

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