Canterbury - 9th November, 2005

Julie and I are both on a weeks conference with St. Mary's Bredin (www.smb.org.uk) called Face Down. It is great to be able to spend time with God whilst we are looking at the possibilities for our future. The speakers we have here for this week include Bruce Collins and Guy Chevreau, who happens to come from Oakville in Canada, where we spent 3 months last year.

We have got to the stage where we are waiting on a couple a things to fall into place before we make the property purchasing decision. So we have decided, in the interim, that we have both should get Christmas jobs.

Julie tried with M & S after she saw an advert in the store but the on-line application system rejected her. We are thinking of sueing them for discrimination! Don't they know who they are dealing with? The questionaire asks you to select what you are most like, except the list they give you from which you have to choose, includes nothing that relates to you at all. I guess if it did then you would be acceptable. They must have some weird people working for them if they answered the questions correctly. Perhaps they didn't.

I am applying for van driving jobs and Julie is looking at hamper packing. We shall see what happens.

It was very strange and quite amusing to be walking through Canterbury going into Strutt and Parker and looking at £550,000 properties and then to go round the corner and applying for £5.05 per hour jobs. They ask you for your CV too and we try to tell them that it would be of no benefit for them to see what we have done previously. It most probably would put them off. Can I do multi-drop white van driving? Of course. Being the MD of a £2M t/o company is excellent training to be a bad driver who always parks on double yellows. It's the only way you can make it work.

The boys are getting on with it and it keeps us sane knowing that this part of moving to Canterbury is working. It is after all the only reason we came. Neither of us had been here before 6 weeks ago.

We have rented out the flat at Helena Court for 6 months but we may get to the point where, what we want to do down here, would dictate selling a London property. We have to get our heads around that first. You can't have you cake . . . . . . etc.

They have some great investment properties down here if you are thinking of putting a little something aside for your old age or you need some additional income. A property priced at around £195,000 could be bought for a £40K deposit. The mortgage will cost about £700 per month and the already rented cash flow produces £1,600 per month. This gives you a surplus of nearly £900 per month for a downpayment of £40K. Put half of that away for repairs and so on and it still leaves you with £5K per year. Quite a nice little earner. There are investors down here with 10 to 15 of these investments and I suspect that they are doing quite nicely. The properties do not tend to grow in capital value (as they do in London) but then income yields of over 8% are unheard of in the capital.