Administration - here we go!

[Wayne]

The money crunch is hitting me now as well. We've lost 2 long standing regular gigs that we've been doing every month for years, because the managers of both venues have had orders from their head office to stop music nights.
That's about £140 a month gone for me. It may not seem much, but over a year that pays for a few household bills. It could all change because there are few constants in my sort of work, but the diary is looking quite bleak at the moment.
I'm still doing a bit of teaching which is helping, but i may have to submit my books to the council in the hope of being able to claim a bit of housing & council tax benefit if this trend keeps up, & i've not had to do that for years.
The main thing keeping me afloat at the moment is that we did have a good year last year, particularly the last 6 months, & also i'm good at money management & have always allowed myself a good safety net, even when things have been going well. So i'm not struggling yet, but here's hoping things change for the better for everyone.

[Rob McCow]

Oh no! Even Wayne is suffering!

because the managers of both venues have had orders from their head office to stop music nights.

That's a really, really weird decision. Surely music nights are there to pull in the punters and get them buying drinks? They should consider other ways of raising revenue (pay for entry, re-negotiating band rates etc) first.

[Wayne]

Oh no! Even Wayne is suffering!


That's a really, really weird decision. Surely music nights are there to pull in the punters and get them buying drinks? They should consider other ways of raising revenue (pay for entry, re-negotiating band rates etc) first.

Tell that to Tragus Holdings who own the Café Rouge franchise, & Castle Rock Breweries Ltd!
The crazy thing is that the manager of Café Rouge Nottingham did not want to let us go because our monthly jazz night does well.
Up until last year they has jazz every Friday, but they sacked all the other bands & just kept us on once a month because we pulled in more punters & got the best response. (apparently)
But now we've had to go as well because it seems that head office are only looking at the outgoings. (ie paying us £280 a month)
The only silver lining there is that the manager is on our side, & is hoping tp review the situation come Easter, providing things pick up.
The situation is similar at the Lincolnshire Poacher (the Goldwasser pub) where all the bands were cancelled as of 2009. Karen's hands are tied because she's only the manageress, & what the directors of Castle Rock say, goes.

[Dirk Gently]

That's crap news, Wayne. It was a very good decision to take that £500 job back in November.

[Ralph]

The money crunch is hitting me now as well. We've lost 2 long standing regular gigs that we've been doing every month for years, because the managers of both venues have had orders from their head office to stop music nights.
That's about £140 a month gone for me. It may not seem much, but over a year that pays for a few household bills. It could all change because there are few constants in my sort of work, but the diary is looking quite bleak at the moment.
I'm still doing a bit of teaching which is helping, but i may have to submit my books to the council in the hope of being able to claim a bit of housing & council tax benefit if this trend keeps up, & i've not had to do that for years.
The main thing keeping me afloat at the moment is that we did have a good year last year, particularly the last 6 months, & also i'm good at money management & have always allowed myself a good safety net, even when things have been going well. So i'm not struggling yet, but here's hoping things change for the better for everyone.

Being self employed as well Wayne with no guaranteed earnings I understand how valuable bread and butter business like the ones you've lost can make things feel considerably bleaker. I think given the gloom over the country, we need more entertainment not less but I suppose if people are socialising indoors rather than venturing out then it's going to hit the likes of yourself. Perhaps teaching work is the best way to go for now. Hope things pick up for you as we get into the longer nights and people head out.

[Wayne]

Thanks guys, & i hope things will be ok for you Tim.
(And Ralph for that matter)

[Ralph]

Thanks Wayne - a good finish to 2008 has given me a bit of a cushion to 2009 but I never rest back - the end of the world may be nigh by all media reports but I refuse to believe it just yet anyway!

[Wayne]

Good man! That's the attitude!

[Ralph]

When the going gets tough... some old tunes from the 80s...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35YivWEs3zw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxlHiyBewSA

I find music one of the biggest motivators in these times!

Maybe there should be a music thread for getting a lift out of the credit crunch?....

Now I understand why so much 1930s music was like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL0Qt7IF8Q4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCN9K...eature=related

[Wayne]

[Ralph]

Which reminds me self sufficiency might be a good idea!

[Wayne]

Especially if you had Felicity Kendall to 'encourage' you.

[MacNimon]

Fingers crossed that I'm not tempting fate, but I seem to have bucked the trend at the moment when I recently got myself back into stores/warehouse/forklift work which also gave me an extra £35 a week. Too bad it's with the same crowd I've worked with since August, but it's a job and after already having been made redundant last year I'm reasonably happy with my lot, given the current worldwide financial situation.

Plus the rise is allowing me to put money away each week towards this years big November meet...


I hope everything works out well for you, though, Wayne. And Tim as well, of course.

[SiHart]

It could be worse, inflation in Zimbabwee is running at 1,000000000000000000000000%

Si xx

[Captain Tancredi]

It's looking very much as if the contractors who were brought in to upgrade our PCs at work have gone belly up with half the job done.

[Rob McCow]

Redundancies all round at our company! Fortunately there won't be many in our office. Senior management are all re-applying for their jobs (new roles) and there's a general restructure.

HOWEVER. They've deferred pay reviews until October. This has seriously annoyed me!

[SiHart]

That's not good at all. Looks like going on secondment was the right move. At least, too, it's not your office that's been affected. Get them working on your schemes ASAP- don't give the other company that work!

Si xx

[Dirk Gently]

HOWEVER. They've deferred pay reviews until October. This has seriously annoyed me!

On the upside, they could have reviewed your pay downwards if they did it now.

[Rob McCow]

That's not an upside, surely!??!?

In a way it's bad to think about this kind of thing when people are losing their jobs. But in the position I'm in, it's still disappointing.

[Si Hunt]

Sorry to hear that Steve. I know what you mean about pay reviews; it's almost like you're expected to be grateful you've even got a job, yet it's not your fault the company is in trouble so why should you suffer? Then again, I must admit I do always fall into that bracket and tend to feel grateful rather than annoyed when pay reviews/bonuses are deferred during periods when others are losing their jobs. What do you mean by "in my position" though. Were you relying on the pay rise for something?

Si.

[Rob McCow]

Were you relying on the pay rise for something?

Nah, I've got more responsibilities now, without a substantial increase in salary.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Sounds like the greed is back on Wall Street ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8149762.stm

US bank Goldman Sachs reported a net profit of $3.44bn (£2.1bn) for April to June, beating analysts' forecasts.

The bank said it had set aside $6.65bn for pay and bonuses in the quarter - an average of $226,000 per employee.

Hey remember when you're looking at all the chaos, facing unemployment and uncertainty. Greed works!

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Actually there have been a number of articles in the news lately - several banks have started making profits again.

So is lending back up? A little.

Are bonuses back on the menu? Oh you bet!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8180826.stm

So they were without a bonus for about what - 7 months, whilst a lot of people are out of work, or on less this year than last. Ah what it is to have a Government bailout.

It's kind of frustrating how little the Government does/says about this, so it leaves the opposition to seem proactive about this with ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8202738.stm

I know it shouldn't really bother me, I'm not in the UK anymore, and it's not really my problem. But it has perhaps galvanised me to make sure I keep my postal vote come the inevitable election. Because the UK Government is still really "my" Government, and it's frankly shambolic how the country has been led to ruin, and how little intervetion there has been by this Government for the common man.

It really reinforces how New Labour have been very good at taking care of big business, but absolutely wretched at looking after the populace. "You have put your faith in me ... you FOOLS" should have been Blair's acceptance speech!

[FlyingBeastie]

New York's unemployment's raised up to something like 9.6%. I've been noticing that the neighborhood where I went to High School (it's quite posh, lot of Jews around there) I've been seeing more and more homeless just sat on the street which is something you'd never see around there

I hear ya about the deferred bonuses- my brother works at Avon and they freezed his last year. Hopefully this year he'll get it though, apparently the company is doing better- they hired a couple of people this past month

The credit crunch hasn't affected my folks much cos' we've always been Middle to Lower Middle class (bobbingly) so we've always been "just getting by". We plan to move soon though, hopefully that works out cos' our neighborhood's drastically changed these past few years.

Another thing that helps is that my college is free (I'm part of the honors program) so as long as I'm "smart" and keep my grades on the up and up we won't be screwed with tuition especially cos' I wanna' save up and study abroad to the U.K. sometime in the next 3 years

[Si Hunt]

Tax on phone lines to come in before the next general election.

Hap-py days are heeere agaaain!

Si.