Economic crunch, banks closing, property prices falling, unemployment rising, cashflow being squeezed. Watching your savings and portfolio shrink daily is a nerve-racking experience. These are the days for tighter budgets, innovation, new tools and a new mindset. Now is the time for considering using low cost, new technology and to stop wasting time and money on applications that do not deliver value. Planned action for survival is now so very important. Start leveraging the skills of experts to help you. What is your strategy for 2009? Don’t know where to start? (more…)

So the VAT rate has been reduced from 17.5% to 15% for 13 months. This means an item selling for £9.99 will be reduced by 21p. That does not get me excited enough to go running out to the shops to buy anything.Fortunately, most property investors are not registered for VAT but the sudden change in tax rate has been interesting. Over the past two years, I have bought many different programmes to manage our property portfolio. Some have been online and some offline. Now the messages are coming in telling me how to implement this tax change. I have to do nothing, or maybe a click or two, to the online software as it is all done for me. The offline ones are so different. One set of instructions is two pages long and another is pushing its support package! Crickey! (more…)