Signing it all away...

In an hour or so today I and my good lady are to visit our solicitor in Leeds to sign the contract to sell our house for an unfeasible amount of money to a young couple with a baby family who think that our house is the ideal place to raise their kinder and invest for their future.

It is, its true that it is, its a fairly big house, big garden, big rooms inside and plenty of them.
Its also a money pit.

But its not as big a money pit as the even bigger house that we moved from six years ago to live in this money pit - that even bigger house simply sucked the very blood from our veins and spat us out four years later almost penniless and still only halfway through our restoration plans - the people who bought that house from us also currently have it up for sale, I think its drawn every last drop of blood from them too.

And in a remarkable coincidence the house that we lived in before the very big money pit disaster is also up for sale, I think the current incumbents must have discovered the natural spring running underneath the ground floor which would fill up the three foot underfloor space after a long period of rain, to within two inches of the ground floor itself.

Yes, we've moved house several times, seven times in fact and for the last three house moves our equity in the house has doubled in value each time, we have sold this particular house for exactly twice what we paid for it in 2001.

We're moving down again, down to a regular three bed semi-detached with a regular sized garden in a regular stylee neighbourhood and in doing so are regaining some of our built up equity to pay off various credit cards and loans and make ourselves totally debt free - I can't explain what it feels like to actually state that, fucking relieved is one phrase that fits.

For the last two years our business has not been doing too well, we made a loss for the first time ever two years ago and when the accounts are done for last year they will also show a small loss, we are existing to simply pay the bills and its not been much fun for the past two years.

So we're selling the business too.

We've sold a third of the shareholding (Suzannes share) outright and we've sold a big chunk of my share and Ned,s share, me and him are staying on to run the place for the new owners with a small personal shareholding left behind, and I can't wait for it to happen.

Ned and I are the third generation in our family to run this business and the question has been asked whether or not we have failed in managing the family asset, to my mind we haven't, we are just embarking on the next phase of the company development, we can't do it all ourselves and we need outside help and investment, investment that we cannot provide for ourselves and so inviting a much bigger company in the same trade to come along and invest, but mroe importantly to take away the tiresome administration that is all consuming in every UK business nowadays is our perfect solution - for the first time in at least two years I look forward to coming to the office each morning now.

But more importantly we will be receiving a regular wage again, a monthly salary, sales bonuses and a shareholders dividend at the end of the year, all of which will be a novelty because for far too long, and all other business owners will know what I am talking about here, for far too long we have relied on customers paying their bills before we can pay ourselves, its a big pain in the arse that I simply will not have any more.

The negotiating is done, the numbers agreed and we are close to signing control over - it can't come soon enough.

March 2007 is going to be a very big month for us, a huge lifestyle change, a month when I can finally shake off most of my responsibilities and start a ten year plan to get some serious saving done, pay off the last of the mortgage, retire and paint.

I can't wait.