My story happened about 9 years ago. Life was sweet, then. I was a part of a social/business community based on personal development. I had started public speaking a couple of years before and found I had a talent for it. I took every opportunity to speak and, before long, the opportunities were lining up…

I had just finished a tour of the UK, speaking in most of the major cities. There was a big event lined up and I was billed as the top UK speaker, right before the international keynote speaker. My speech was a triumph, I got a standing ovation. This was the highest point of my life up till then. I had two partners lined up to begin a big project within the community and couldn’t wait to get started. Everything was finally going my way. I was in debt, had no cash but I could see that was all about to end. At last, I believed I could fly!

Around this time there had been a few new people join the community. Some of us were less than happy about the new element. It seemed they were all about money and less about growth, more profit and less service. Before we knew it, the Department of Trade and Industry had begun to take an interest in what we were up to. It all happened very fast. Suddenly there was a court case going on and the DTI was trying to shut us down. 70 of us headed of to the high court to watch the proceedings. They had to move the case to a bigger courtroom to accomodate us. Both sides laid out their case. The prosecution talked about the unscrupulous nature of the new element and one person in particular. Then the defence talked about the virtues of the more established members of the community and one person in particular – me! I had no idea this was going to happen. All the details of my business, personality and values were laid out in court for anyone to hear. It wasn’t that anything nasty was said, on the contrary, it was just mortifying.

After 3 days the case ended. The DTI had more money than us and based on the bad boys, a fairly strong case. They won and we were shut down immediately. My business, income, future plans, opportunity to speak and my social life all went in one short pronouncement. I went home devastated.

I crawled into a corner and, for six weeks, I pretty much stayed there. I wasn’t whimpering and singing a poor me song, I was thinking. OK, I did whimper and sing a poor me song for a couple of days, then I started thinking. I realised I could still speak, I still had the ability. I could still inspire people. I could still teach personal development and leadership, I just didn’t have the environment. The court case had embarrassed me but enhanced my reputation and, although I had lost my social life, I still had real friends. I realised they could take away my job, but never my work. I had lots left in me.

I spoke to the people I had agreed to partner up with for the big project. We couldn’t do what we had originally planned, but we could do something similar but bigger. One decided to come with me, the other moved on.

So, we started The Wow Factor. We had decided on the triangle and circle logo and it was with the designer. I was in the bath and had a sudden thought. I jumped out and rang the designer asking him to put fire on the top of the logo. It just had to be there. But, apart from some pretty design, we didn’t have a clue how to move forward.

Six weeks later we got a call from London Fire Brigade (as it was then, Fire and Rescue Services is what they are called now) asking if we could do leadership courses with a strong emotional intelligence leaning. YES, we most certainly could. Not much later I bought my partner out so that she could go and do her thing. Nine years later, Zandria and I are still teaching leadership in The British Fire Service amongst other things, and still loving it.

The company we have built was the lemonade squeezed from a nasty court case. Around the time it happened I found a card and carried it with me for a long time. It has a quote from Albert Camus on it,

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me, an invincible summer.

Pass it on

The Rules

Life gave me lemons, so I made lemonade – MEME
Rules:
* Copy and paste these rules to your blog post.
* Link back to person who tagged you.
* Write about an incident in your life you first thought was really bad, but ended up being a blessing.
* Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
* Let each person you tagged know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
(* And if you want to – link back to this original Lemonade Meme post too.)

I’m tagging;

G Blogmaster from CanIGetRichOnASalary?

Bill from Money-Hacks

Nina from Queer Cents

Shawna at Bumblefucked

This post appears in the carnival of money stories at Money Ning

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I went immediately to check it out – anything that could be useful to readers is worth a look. It made fascinating reading – in the way a venomous snake is fascinating… The article explained that of the 50 million new UK credit agreements made annually, 20 million are likely to be unenforceable! It sites (without references) a case of “a consumer in The Midlands” as seen “on the BBC” (reputable organisation to lend credibility, but with no links) who recently had £36,000 worth of loans and credit cards written off. It doesn’t mention that this case has anything to do with this company or anything more about it at all. Then it says – You get to keep 100% of any final settlement, plus interest! Then, in bold, “and any goods or services already purchased”.

Is your greed awakened yet, that shameful place inside you that feels the weight of your debt lifting with the extra triumph of free stuff? It’s meant to be. And if not your greed, then your desperation, the part that longs to be free, to have someone else make it all better. In fact, it’s essential to their plan that one of these parts of you is awoken before you read the 5 steps.

The first step involves you parting with between £200 and £300 ($400-$600). This is purely speculative money. It’s non returnable. It’s the fee required by this company to investigate the fairness of your credit agreement. If it is found to be unfair, there is no further fee to continue. If it is fair, like more than half of the agreements made, the money is no longer available to you and your debt goes on for longer still.

I decided to look a bit further into the issue of unfair credit agreements. This company makes it sound as though the courts will easily grant an effective annulment of as many as half of the credit agreements in the UK (The numbers go up to 50% on their site). There are some simple sums to be done here. UK total consumer debt stands at £1409bn currently. If half of all consumer credit is based on unfair agreements that means approximately £700 billion has been extended unfairly. If all this is claimed back through the courts, who pays? At what point will the courts stop ordering the credit companies to pay out? There is no sense to it, at all.

I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau website. There, I found some very useful and impartial advice. If you feel you have been treated unfairly, it’s really important you get it sorted out – there are unscrupulous credit agencies out there. If you really haven’t, don’t bother yourself with these companies that make unreasonable promises. The key sentence I found on the CAB site was – “A court can rule that there is an unfair relationship between you and the creditor. They can change the terms and conditions of your agreement, or they can rule that the creditor can’t force you to stick to the agreement.” With £700 billion at stake, which do you think the court is most likely to do?

The CAB gives the most likely reasons that your agreement might be considered unfair;

• you have been charged interest at an exceptionally high rate
• the creditor gave you wrong or misleading information, or didn’t give you enough information when you were deciding whether to take out the loan
• the creditor failed to make a proper assessment of whether the loan was suitable for you
• the creditor didn’t fully take into account how your age, experience, physical or mental health would affect your ability to enter into a credit agreement or to keep up with payments.

You can get a free consultation at the CAB and they will tell you whether your claim will be likely to work. You can also complain directly to the Financial Ombudsman Service. If they agree that the agreement was unreasonable, they have the power to order the creditor to pay you compensation and to put the matter right. Total cost to you? Nothing.

Beware the wonderful offer, the promise of immediate gratification, the snake-oil salesman with the panacea. Ask yourself these important questions;

1. Do I feel my greed awakening?
2. Does this feel like it could solve my desperation quickly?
3. What would happen if everyone took this offer at the same time?

If you are happy with your answers, proceed with caution. If not, use the money to get one step closer to being debt free.

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The mini-app web page is very simply laid out. You fill out the details of the email address to send it to and the date you would like to be it to be sent. When that date arrives, it sends the email out. It doesn’t ask for too many details, like even who it’s from, so… How could it possibly be useful?

It’s advertised as something that could be used to remind you of an event in the future (I already use a schedule for that) or to send someone else a Happy Birthday message that you may forget later, that could be of some use, I guess.

So I gave it a few minutes of my time and thought about how it could really be useful. I came up with a few ideas, but here’s one that specifically relates to debt…

I’m really in favour of finding a buddy when you are changing anything in your life. Someone who will support you when it gets tough, yet challenge you if you start to goof off or slow down. It could be someone going through the same thing, or it could be someone who’s already done it. For myself, I prefer champions, that keeps me on track best and I don’t like to fall short in front of them.

So here’s how to use the time machine emails.

1. Set activity goals for the week or month and send emails to yourself and your buddy/champion. Use them to check yourself against.
2. Set your accomplishment goals for the year and send the emails to come out once a month to see if you are on track.
3. Set the final date that you intend to be debt free. Get reminder emails set up along the way, with benchmarks, if possible.
4. Send your future Self a congratulations email on the final date! If you don’t feel ready to do that, ask if you truly believe in your ability to reach your goal by that date.

What date can you comfortably put on that final date? This will tell you a lot. Go on, climb inside the tardis in your mind, visit that date beyond debt, enjoy the view and see the possibilities – then look at a calendar. Come back and send yourself that email!

This post appears in The 13th Money Hacks Carnival.

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Six months ago, if someone had asked you what credit crunch meant, what would you have said? I thought a lot about this. I’m sure I would have thought it was an exotic breakfast cereal, perhaps including some freeze dried strawberries that counted as one of my 5 a day…

Now we all know exactly what it means. It means people have spent more money than they had. The money was lent to them by banks who had already lent money to US banks so they could give out “sub-prime” mortgages (sub-prime means people who can’t afford mortgages in the first place but, hey, it was worth a punt). Now those poor “sub-prime” people are living in tent camps outside LA and can’t pay, so the banks can’t pay the other banks, they borrowed from, some in other countries. This means that banks overextended themselves and the odd one has had to be rescued by the government on behalf of… well the people who borrowed the money they couldn’t afford in the first place, but we can’t blame them because the bank said they could.

Now, no-one has any money to spend and none to lend (where on Earth did it all go?) so we’re all getting crunched in the credits. When we go to the supermarket, apparently, we don’t want two for the price of one any more – oh no. We don’t want more stuff, we want to spend less money. So, the supermarkets tell us, we want discounts instead of Buy One Get One Free. So now, they give us a third off instead (??!). No, this is nothing to do with their profit margins, they are just giving us what we want.

Back to language then, the net result of all this means sub-prime and credit crunch are in, while a dear friend suddenly finds itself out in the cold. Bogof, must sadly, bog off.

This article appears in The Carnival of Personal Finance No. 152 at Money Under Thirty.

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The specific term “Bling” was first popularised in the hip hop community, and has since spread beyond hip hop, into mass culture. “Bling-bling” means expensive, ostentatious jewellery or clothing, or the wearing of them. Bling, however, has a broader definition. It is a set of values that includes playing hard, looking good and lapping up the finest, the sassy/gaudy style – the Bentley, the Jacuzzi, the Cristal, the fur coat, the first class ticket, Gucci, Prada and the Rolex. Not surprisingly, Bling is often dismissed as a crass and shallow celebration of material wealth.

Young people today, are the first generation to be born to those who have had credit freely available. Easy credit has fueled expectations that, as adults, we now have to manage. On a number of occasions, when out shopping, I’ve heard small children respond to their parents pleas of “I can’t afford it”. with “get the money from the machine on the wall” – with little or no understanding as to how that money came to be there.

With the Bling lifestyle I wonder how much thought role models give to the plight of the young people who aspire to be like them. I see kids wanting to emulate their favourite celebrity. They buy fake diamonds to be like their idols, and designer clothes they cannot truly afford, all to live a lifestyle that is nothing more than a fantasy. I am not one to step on people’s dreams, every one needs dreams. They help us steer our path in life, provide escape, encourage us to do better, fuel our passions and dreams are a source of fun and joy.

However, in today’s society, where the world of entertainment takes pride of place in the lives of our youth, the need to separate dreams from reality is critical. For many, the bling lifestyle is something to aspire to. But the ordinary young person will never attain it without racking up debts in the pursuit of that dream. Young people have embraced credit as a way of life. Debt counselling services tell us that they are seeing a rise in the number of young people who come to them for help. The under 25’s are building up debt through credit cards and personal loans to live the Bling lifestyle they aspire to.

Talk to your children about Bling and what they are prepared to do in pursuit of it. Explain the downside and help them to separate fact from fiction. But most of all remind them that they are the biggest diamond in their world and no amount of bling will ever shine they way they do.

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