Saving and Investing for Self Sufficiency

So we’ve talked about how debt is bad and it needs to be killed off. We’ve highlighted the need to minimise your Tax footprint, and we’ve provoked a bit of thought about where we spend our hard earned cash.

So let’s say for the sake of argument that we’ve cleared all our debt (or at least [...]

Finance for Self Sufficiency

We’re back after a short break, but what on earth happened to the weather? When it starts to rain, after a week of scorching hot sun you know British summertime has arrived!

Our three part series on “Ten practical steps to becoming more self sufficient” generated a lot of interest, but still no comments! So far, [...]

Getting Started - Ten Practical Steps to becoming more Self Sufficient

I thought it was time for a series of articles that give you some practical things you can do to increase your level of self sufficiency. Remember, when we talk about Self Sufficiency we are talking about a change of mindset, taking responsibility for our own, and our family’s needs. To that end here are [...]

Brew your own

Making your own beer and/or wine has never been more cost effective.  It’s relatively straightforward to do and is another area where you can exercise some self sufficiency. Frankly the amount of tax levied on alcohol is scandalous, as it is for many other areas of taxation. Whilst abuse of alcohol is a widespread problem, [...]

NEEDS versus WANTS

We’ve covered a variety of subjects with the posts so far and I wanted to begin to put some context around them for you so you can see where everything fits in. Let’s start with a “back to basics” question:

What do you really need to be self sufficient?

Shelter
Food
Water

That’s it! Self Sufficiency boils down to those [...]

UK Budget 2010

Whilst being more self sufficient means that you are, to an extent, slightly insulated from some of the bad events, no one can fail to be concerned about the economic situation and the “wheezing” recovery the UK is currently making. With that, I thought it would be good to have a [...]

What a tangled web we weave...

It’s that time of year again when banks and financial institutions bombard you with advertising about ISAs – protect your money from the taxman! The ISA allowances change this year so you can protect a little more.

I wrote recently about taxation. Lets take a look at it from another viewpoint. I want you to imagine:

You [...]

Tax doesn't have to be taxing...

Yes it does. That’s the whole point of it.

The problem is things seem to have got more than a little out of hand on the taxation front! What does this have to do with Self Sufficiency I hear you ask? Well, as we said before there are many reasons people aim to be self sufficient, [...]