TSR Money Savings Club

Some friendly advise from your favourite Uncle Scrooge .............

Teach me.

Some friendly advise from your favourite Uncle Scrooge I am just somewhat value conscious which unfortunately often comes off as being stingy and selfish... I blame it on genes

Anyway have always been somewhat of a good saver.... my family often tell me even when I was 5 I knew how to squeeze money for better deals LOL... I don't particularly remember that era........but I'll take their word for it.

I went to uni a few months after turning 17, that was in 1995 and I had already saved up US$4000 of my own money to go, remember now it won't seem like a lot of money but that was a lot of money back then... how I earned it? I used to build databases.... was rather good at it back then... first customer was my mum and I think she purposely overpaid me LOL.

Anyway, an important thing to always remember about finance........ evaluate and plan... failure to plan is planning to fail... very simple.

My finances are quite simple in reality, for every £1000 I earn after all deductions and taxes I do the following :-

i) 10% I remove it and give it to church, though now I only do 7% as in Switzerland you have to pay 3% church tax

ii) 10% I save it in something fairly liquid, usually short term saving accounts that you could withdraw money at any time. I never let this build up to more than 2 months salary of my main job.

iii) 5% I take it out for short term investments, usually buy stocks, commodities or stuff such as oil or gold. Any profits are reinvested the same way.

iv) 15% I take it out and dump it into a long term tax-free savings account, the one that can give the best ever returns. Then each year in November I will evaluate what I will do with the money..... usually end up buying real estate to let out for a profit, investing it into a business or buying stocks to keep for long term. Returns or any profits from this I also do the same thing.

Now am left with £600 of the original £1000..... I just go on the basis that I've made £600 and not £1000, so as most experts believe your rent shouldn't be more than 20% of your monthly income, so I just look for a place that is £120 rather than £200 even if it means living in an area not befitting someone who does my kind of work

Bonuses are different of course.... 10% still goes to church, 30% I keep for fun stuff, 50% into iv and the rest into iii.

Haven't done too badly I think, at my height I owned 8 properties, 7 of them rented out for profit of 18% average. Also invested in the following businesses an organic farm, 2 country-inns, a bakery and I am the owner of a small company that does property development, usually by means of refurbishing old buildings into very nice ones. Earlier this year sold off everything that had debts on it.. as I wanted to move away from real estate.

Money gained from the sale, some of it went into buying up that alpine lodge in Switzerland, the owner wanted to retire and I was keen on expanding my hospitality businesses. The other part of the money I bought one very derelict mansion from the Canton for CHF100 on the promise that I would convert that mansion into 6 townhouses without significantly affecting the exterior of the house and after it was completed the Canton gets the rights to 2 units of the townhouses. Thankfully I also received a green-home grant to retro-fit various energy generation and saving devices into the building.... am trying to win an award for this project. Was originally going to sell off the 4 units, but only sold 2, 1 I kept for my own stay and another I rent it out to one policewoman.

Last 3 months also begun selling off everything I owned, cars (I'm a classic car collector), antiques, the bakery, all remaining real estate in Britain and anything that had value to it needed to go.... went were the 2 country-inns. Even our old family home sold together with the organic farm... needed to raise funds for a new business venture... found a distressed company and one that had some rather valuable patents and tooling in Switzerland. Was originally going to bring all the tooling and locate it somewhere in Wales, but that proved to be quite a disastrous plan... I asked the Welsh Government for a place and a small grant... they gave some ludicrous conditions for the award of a grant which was only 3% of the final amount required....which would have been fine as I could have found a way to raise more money, except I asked for a place in either north or south Wales, they came up with the idea of why not have one site in North Wales to manufacture all the components and truck everything to a site in South Wales to assemble it. I told them they can keep their grant and was about to give up... in the end I told the company I was going to pull out from the sale as I didn't have enough money to save it, had 50% of it in cash, 43% in loans and needed the last 7% for it... the head of that company asked me to ask the Canton in which the tooling were located in and also to speak to someone at the Federal government, a few calls, emails and meetings and it turned out I had enough money after all... 3 grants, 2 tax-holidays, 1 year free rent at one industrial park and turns out I don't even need 43% in loans, in the end the shortfall I had to make up in loans was only 8% saved a good part of it on the relocation cost and another good part of it was saved from the need to pay out redundancies and goodwill. On top of that, I also got offered 4 big contracts and 3 smaller ones from the 3 governments that took faith in this whole project... which essentially gives me lots of breathing space...... moral of the story : After the final contract was signed by the representatives of the governments involved, I told them if they had come earlier it would have spared me and all the staff that were about to lose their jobs much of the agony... the person who was representing the Canton where the main plant will be located at simply looked at me with her steely blue eyes and said "But you never asked either." (Imagine that being said in very sterile and formal German) LOL.

Which brings me to the next point when it comes to saving money or doing anything else....... always do it with both eyes and ears open. Just because something appears to be cheap does not mean it is value... think long term. Also your bank isn't in the business of helping you save money

Imo you've been very very lucky with your real estate deals, the property market was heading for an almightly crash at the tail end of 2007 yet it was propped up all over the west with bank bailouts and ludicrous zero interest rate policies. Despite the subsidies many "billionaire" real estate moguls have been caught out and gone into liquidiation because of their unrealistic business model (just buy real estate and hope that it continues to inflate)

tbh it sounds like you're a bit of a subsidy chaser yourself, especially with your latest gov't back business venture. I'm a bit jealous as I'd quite like to get my hands of some of that free money too!

How old are you and whats your net worth in GBP?

Am 33... networth........ heh I'm sure HMRC would love to know as well

Wow 33! are you still a student?

Yes I'm doing my MBA now.

What about yourself?

My property investments has always somewhat followed a rather unusual model. I always buy on location and with a very good view... not unusual, but what I normally do is I always find the worst structure I could find usually something in very bad shape preferably listed... after that I have it fixed up and I rent them out short term, usually either as corporate rentals or to overseas visitors who are visiting Britain for a slightly longer term say 2-3 months or so. Every now and then I've let it out for an academic year to wealthier overseas students. In fact I never openly advertise any of my properties in Britain unless it's being sold.

As for subsidy chaser.... I'm not going to say no to "free money" But I can tell you it is far from free. They usually come with a long list of conditions, to get the grant from the Swiss Federal government one of the guarantees I had to give is all the products sold in Switzerland must cost less in Switzerland than it does anywhere else in the EU. Essentially it means instead of earning 18% margin as I would if I sell it to Austria or Germany, I only make 8% for local sales and if I provide it to any Federal Government project then it is only at 3% profit margin. Also they requested that at least 40% of all raw material must be sourced from Switzerland unless those from elsewhere are at least 30% less. Then comes the biggest condition, they want most if not all logistics to be by rail and river rather than by road.

From the Cantons, 1 said they wanted the administrative office and HQ to be in their Canton so they can get a slice of the tax from it.

The Canton and village where it will be made doesn't mind it that they won't get tax from it but they want guarantees that none of the initial 250 employees will lose their jobs for 3 years and for each of the next 5 years they want to see at least 50 new jobs being created of which 30 must be apprentices and I need to give preference to people who are from the village or from that Canton first. Oh yeah, it will be made in a village that has population of 2000, a train station with 4 trains per day, a row of 9 shops, of which 1 is empty and 1 school.

Wage subsidies, they actually have that program similar to that announced by George Osborne in the Autumn Statement here.... they pay for 6 months half of the wages. But to apply for it you must first promise that the jobs they will be doing is a real job and will be a permanent one, then you must show proof that after that 6 months you can afford to keep them and finally that you aren't getting rid of any existing workers to benefit from the subsidy...... very much different from that in Britain where after 6 months you can tell them to bugger off and nothing will happen.

Trust me, even though it is free money... it is actually nothing of that sort, they usually come with conditions that requires a lawyer to analyse what it is saying and usually for every bit they franc they say they are giving, they expect at least 3 back from the venture.... just not necessarily by me paying it back but somehow it must be to their benefit such as employment of people within the area so they could gain some taxes or save them on their benefit bills or more often than not during the time of election you will have those politicians in government coming by to claim that they created the jobs.

If you are after government subsidy monies, try the Welsh Assembly Government, they have some fairly good grants available and many of which are fairly easy to get if you are doing something small, but the moment it touches on a medium scale then they start being a bit funny as they will start asking you to hire more people... which isn't really wrong per say... but for my case they came up with crazy ideas that end of the day I would have struggled to remain in business.

if you're at university and have very few hours of teaching, consider a part-time job.

Also consider trying to get an interest free overdraft from a bank, take that money and bung it into an ISA account and at least make some interest out of that money...

I regret not having a part-time job at uni. I find that the busier you are, the more productive you are and there is then less time for procrastination. It also instills a work ethic into you and this isn't a bad thing at all. Providing your studies don't suffer as a result of also working in paid employment....

Also, review your different bank accounts, their interest rates, terms and conditions and see if you can do better elsewhere, e.g. compare the market.

Thanks that was an interesting response, it sounds like they drive quite a hard bargain over in Switzerland. Much better than our useless UK governments!

Nice one. How did you save up, just through working, yea?