Things are so exciting right now in the Malcolm household. After a decade of fighting for it, we have finally been able to purchase our first home. And the weirdest thing: it's the shortest move in human history. Why? Because we have bought the very house that we've been renting for the last 2 years!
It all started years ago, when I was still a part-time s*#^kicker at a local caravan park earning a measly $24,000 a year. May sound like a lot to readers living in a third world country, (or maybe even the USA as I hear proportionately your wages are low compared to ours), but ask any Aussie and he/she will tell you that, "that sort of dough ain't buyin' ya squat in Austraya, mate. Bloody oath, bonza ripper. Bar-B. That ain't a knife... this is a knife." E-hem, sorry about that. However, my wife and I both grew up in poor families, so when it came to money we are both as tight as a badger's sweat pore. Anything that came in, we saved.
Then, when I got laid-off from that job and took up a night shift gig at the local fuel servo, things got a little hairier. (Is "hairier" a word?) I was only working 3 days a week, pulling approximately $340, while my lovely wife was about to quit work to give birth to, and look after, our first child. Things were about as tight as they could get. We'd not long been married, at 21 and 22, we were still running two cars, and were about to move from a tiny two-bedroom flat into a tiny three bedroom house half a block up the road. That was quite funny actually, the move. We had the best removal vehicle our money could buy... a baby pram. Don't worry, the baby, only a couple of months old, wasn't in the pram at the time. That'd be irresponsible. She made him crawl behind on a leash.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, things were tight. But somehow, we still managed to squirrel away a little money every fortnight. Then I got asked to come back to the caravan park full-time. Apparently the crazy-lady they had taken a punt on when they chose who to lay off 8 months earlier was more crazy—and less of a lady—than they'd anticipated. So there I was back s*#^-kicking with a small pay-rise (about $6000 a year more than my previous employment there). That was around about the time that child number two was coming along.
Wasn't long into that stint that my wife and I started investigating the option of buying a house. There came a couple of times that our position in the current rental looked perilous, due to house sales and such, and the idea of having a house ripped out from beneath my family was not what I'd call good. Back then, house prices in our town were pretty low, around 145K, and we thought we may have been able to crack it. Apparently not.
Fast forward almost ten years and two more kids, and things were looking a little more rosy, financially. (What? So we've had 4 kids under 5. It gets cold where we live and there's not a lot to do of a
night-time. And before you say, "get a TV", we had already tried that
and it didn't make a pinch of difference. Maybe it had something to do
with the way I sleep...[insert subtle throw-back to an earlier blog
post]) A few years before we'd had a neat little nest egg saved up, just a titch over 12K, but when the forth kiddie was about to come along, we realised that we weren't all going to fit in the car we had at the time. Down goes the bank balance. But we'd whacked the loan and rebuilt a bit of savings again. We started trying the banks to test the water and see if they'd give us anything. "Just can't get the servicing to work", they'd all say. I hate that word now. No, not work; I've always hated that word. Servicing is the one I dislike.
So we gave up trying, just focusing on saving every cent we didn't have to spend. Around the same time, I had started my little handyman business, which to my surprise had taken off like a seagull and defied all expectations. I made a turn over of $43,000 in my first year. First year! Blew me away. And I wasn't ripping anyone off to do it, either. Just working bloody hard. The second year went up a little bit, then again the next year. I past with flying colours the two year threshold where they say half of all small businesses fail.
A couple of years later we had a nicer little nest egg stowed away, and we decided it was again time to try for a home loan. We had just moved from a squishy three-bedroom brick thing on a block of land big enough to run around forty-three times in under a minute, into a five bedroom (one for each kid!!!) ex-queenslander on 1300 square metres. Heaven. By the way, for non-locals, a "queenslander" is a mid-late 20th century Australian home design. Ask Mr Google and his mates at the Interwebs. Anyway, I knew the owner; he was a customer through the business. To sweeten the deal for us, he took the house off the market, but said he was still dead keen on us buying it. Basically as an investment property, it was a bit crap. It had cost him a bit of money and was only likely to cost him more, so he wanted it gone. I said, "sure mate, we'd love it. I'll go down to the bank and see what they say."
It was a no go, still. Despite making more money running a business than I'd ever made working for someone else, ironically it was the running of the business that was stopping the numbers from checking out. I asked if he could just wait a little while until we saved some more and see what the banks said then. He said, "sure", waited six months then promptly put it back on the market. Thanks for the tiny bit of back-stabbing there, old mate. Real honourable. So we had to deal with weirdos wandering through our house, looking in our kids' cupboards and being asked to perform changes to make the house "more appealing" to prospective buyers. Blurgh. But luckily, the owner had far too much on it and it never actually looked like selling.
Until late last year.
A young couple came through, going on how they really liked it, planning where their dogs would sleep and which room she was going to do her hair in. They put it under contract, and it looked like my four kids, wife and I would be out on the street in less than two months. Wouldn't have been the first time for me, as I've been homeless before... twice. But with kids, that's a scary prospect. However, they asked too much of the owner in the contract, and he wasn't willing to come to the party. Then they wanted a lower price; he wouldn't come to that either. Like a miracle, the contract fell through and we were once again safe.
All while this had been going on, a mate of mine gave me a call out of the blue one day and suggested I waddle down to a particular local bank and have another go at a loan. He'd just got one, and by his calculations I was in a better state that him, so I was a shoe-in. So I did waddle down, and the young girl that was there filling in for the holidaying regular loans manager brought us in and went over our financials. She said she reckoned it'd go through at $150,000, with a weekly repayment of $208/week. I said to her as we were leaving the room, "if we don't get that at such a pathetic payment amount, I'm going to cry." At the time we were paying $280/week in rent.
We bloody got it, didn't we? I couldn't believe it. And the lady on the phone that gave me the pre-approval, said that the amount she had cleared was $170,000. I questioned the difference, and she explained that she thought 150 was too low, so she bumped it up to see what would happen! Amazing. Especially when only a few weeks before, we'd been in the loans office of another major Australian bank that have a name beginning with "Comm", and the woman on the tele-conferencing computer screen told us, "well, I'm not even going to bother telling you the number you qualify for with us. You can't do anything with that." Cold that was. Bloody cold.
So, after getting pre-approved for a purchase price of 200K, we spent a couple of weeks looking for anything with in our budget, thinking that pretty soon these peoples' contract was going to go through and we'd have to move. Do you reckon we could find anything that was going to fit our voracious brood? Not a chance. Small, small, tiny and cramped. Did I mention small? It was frustrating, to say the least. There we were with the first home-loan "possible yes" either of us had achieved in our lives, and there was nothing we could do with it. Our eldest son has Asperges, and there was just no way he (therefore us) was going to cope living in any of the houses that we looked through.
Christmas 2013 came and went, with us still floating in limbo an not knowing what to do. The contract for the other people had fallen through, but we were still lost. Should we buy a dump and try to make it work, or just let the pre-approval slide and keep renting? Until one day, I reported a small maintenance issue to the Real Estate and received a note that the girl was going to come around and have a look at it, and that the owner wanted to come too. We thought that was weird. Then the owner turned up ten minutes early, shook my hand and started the conversation with, "So, when are you going to buy my house?" "As soon as you drop the price to two hundred thousand, mate," I replied. He started stammering and mumbling something about two ten. I popped inside to get some photos of the house to show him, thinking I could bolster our case, and when I return my wife says, "We can do two five, can't we? Well, shake his hand then. We've just bought the house."
Bloody wow. The final approval on the loan came through, and now today six weeks later, I'm sitting on a couch writing this in the very first home I've ever owned. I've already been up and started painting the roof. It's fibro and needs a good covering to buy us time till we can rip it off. She's going to look sweet! We've got a few more changes to make, and the place is old, which means maintenance. But hey, guess what? I'm a handyman, so that bit's kinda sorted.
I still just can't believe it. I suppose it will feel more real when I hold our first rate bill, choking on bile through gritted teeth as I hand over a cheque for around $2500. Till then, I'm quite happy to be only half in reality. Nothing I have has been given to me by anyone, which is the way it should be. No value in a hand-out. I work for everything, both physically and mentally, and I'm ok with that. With that philosophy in mind, I look back to before I was married, when I was sleeping in the back of my car at a camping ground, and then peruse the journey between there and here... Well, it just makes me smile, really.
And the moral to this story: if you have a dream or goal that you've been fighting for, please don't give up on it, even when it looks like you'll never get there. Because just at that point when hope fades to fear and hopelessness, you too could be just six weeks away from holding the figurative key (spare key, in our case, obtained from the real estate because we already had the full sets) to your metaphorical first home. You'll get there. Just keep at it.
Thanks for reading. Till next time,
-Damien.
Thursday 27 February 2014
Sunday 23 February 2014
My take on the Social Media Circus
I've been using a couple of different social media platforms for a while now; long enough to have a reasonably good grasp on what's hot and what's not. If you're interested in my view, read on and feel free to leave a comment below.
Now first of all, allow me to clarify which minimal number of sites I use and have an opinion on. It may be obvious from the side bar to your right that I use the basics, Facebook and Twitter. (If you're not viewing this on the actual blog, then you can't see what I'm talking about. I took the liberty of placing a link to here below, as well as links to me on Facebook and Twitter. Bookmark them for endless streams of my brain-dribble.)
{ http://www.damienlmalcolm.blogspot.com }
{ http://www.facebook.com/damienlmalcolm }
{ http://www.facebook.com/WinchesterSeries }
{ http://www.twitter.com/damienlmalcolm or the handle @DamienLMalcolm }
Anywho, I mainly only use these two because, well quite frankly, nothing else measures up. And when I say "measures up", I mean exactly that. For me, Facebook ranks about a 9 on the usefulness scale, with Twitter toddling behind at around a 6. I'm also supposedly on Google+, which sits at more than zero, but less than one on my scale. I'd place you a link for my page on there, if I could find one. Like the rest of Google+, it's pointless trying.
In fact, while we're on the topic of Google+, may I state the obvious and say that I find it incredibly crap. Google, God bless 'em, really did try to drag themselves into the social arena. They just didn't cut it, I'm afraid. I signed up for a "+" page because all the experts said it was the thing to do when you're an author looking to make headway in the big wide world. Now I find myself wondering why I did it. I "circled" a couple of people, shared a couple of posts and "+1'd" a few things (Seriously? +1? Who the hell came up with that???) but it just never grew on me. Every now and again, I drop back and check the page, only to find a disjointed, odd-coloured stream of random things from various people I don't know; presumably things that are "trending" in the magical world of +es. I don't know. Just seems pointless.
Twitter on the other hand, does fill a small gap in a person's social media requirement quota. Though I'm not sure if I use Twitter in the same way as everyone else. To me, Twitter is a great method of speaking, in short sentences, directly with a person, whether it be someone you know, or a person somewhere up in the ethereal wonderland. It's almost like having a phonebook with the mobile phone numbers of anyone remotely famous. You can send little text messages to celebrities just like you would your best mates. I've tweeted to ABC radio presenters (they reply), movie stars and musicians (they don't reply) and even other authors (sometimes they reply). It gives me a little tickle when someone even mildly famous tweets back to me directly, favourites or retweets something I said. It shows their human, and respecting their audience, which is nice. Only a few years ago celebrities where sooo distant from us down here, and the only way you could contact them was to write to a fan club. On paper! Now the world of twitter brings many of them down out of that unreachable cloud, and allows an everyday bloke like myself to send small compliments and opinions to them, and have the sometimes respond. It's nice, and does a lot toward bringing us all together that bit more.
I made the mistake when I first signed up for Twitter of following quite a few people and re-following anyone who followed me, then treating the newsfeed the same way I treat Facebook. It was a big mistake because if I didn't check that newsfeed in a day, I'd have a stream of literally hundreds of tweets to scroll over. And they'd be everything from "I have a small spot on my left buttock cheek" retweeted from some cracker in the US, to a traffic report of a local car accident four hours ago, to a Youtube preview of the latest Dr Who episode, to the twenty-fifth repeat of a tweet about an author's kindle page, or a beautiful picture of the Aurora Borealis. The record on my feed for one 24hr period is 262 tweets, with a ratio of around 70/30 crap. You see, one vast difference between Facebook and Twitter is where the Facebook newsfeed sort of picks out the best things to show you from your various friends and liked pages, which means you may miss the odd thing, Twitter gives you EVERYTHING.
In other words, there was enough important or interesting stuff to keep me scrolling and actually reading, as well as enough rubbish to just make me want to close the account. I've since learned that apparently the way to truly use Twitter as a news facility is to have an app like Tweetdeck or something sitting open all day on your office computer so you can see the feed in real-time, as opposed to exhaustingly scrolling it on your phone while brushing your teeth at 11pm. In such a way, I can understand how Twitter is a massively useful service for news producers and media. Only problem with that is, being a mobile Handyman, I don't work at a desk all day. So using Twitter in real-time for me is unobtainable, even if I wanted to. Just means I get a tweet from an ABC Radio host saying, "an interview with [insert famous person or politician] is live on air right now", five hours after the interview occurred. But as I say, it is still very useful for chatting to people directly, which can be fun... if maybe a little annoying for the recipient. (Sorry Belinda. I tweet because I care. :) )
By the way, I once did a "Know Your Promotional Skill Level" quiz on the Interwebs, that basically asked me questions to suss out how good I was at selling myself and my books. I got most of the questions right, but one of the ones I got wrong was one relating to Twitter. It said something like, "How frequently should you tweet? A: Every hour? B: Once a day? C: 2 - 3 times a week?" I answered 2 to 3 times a week, because at the time I was completely over being bombarded with other people's tweets about nothing, and as a rule that's the rate I'm comfortable tweeting at. I was wrong. Apparently, the correct answer was A: Every hour.
Every bloody hour?? No wonder I was getting bombarded, if that's what the experts are telling people to do. There are people following me that have 25,000 other people that they follow. If every one of those nutters did that quiz and decided to ramp up their profile, that would amount to a total of 500,000 tweets a day! A bloke would do nothing else but sit at a computer all day reading tweets about how cold some lady's toes are because of the snow falling in Istanbul. That's not a life. And the bit that got me the most was, the thing gave me advice at the end saying that I should consider purchasing a third party app that can automate my tweets for me to "boost my market penetration". So I could send out a tweet saying "Buy my book here https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259889?ref=damienlmalcolm " over and over again, every single hour, 24 hours a day. Wow, I'm sure my followers are going to be right into that! I've had that sort of thing in my newsfeed before, and it sucks. In fact, now if I get that, I report it as spam. And I've since un-followed most of my Twitter-friends, the ones I actually don't find any interest in, and thankfully reduced my feed down to manageable levels.
Facebook, on the other hand, ticks every box. I keep my friends down to only people I actually know, I run a page for my first book, another for my local Handyman business which gets great response from customers, and I leave most of my private page open to the public as a bit of an author thing for followers. Facebook's newsfeed scrolls at a comfortable pace, allowing a busy bloke to just pop in once or twice a day for five to ten minutes at a time while hoeing down some lunch between jobs. I can whack up a photo easily (not of my lunch!) and it keeps me abreast of the goings-on. It's great for funnies. Of course the peaceful harmony I speak of can also be abused by some, which leads to addiction. The average young person seems to have around 800 friends on Facebook, and I once saw a profile of a fella that had 2,500 friends and liked 27,000 pages! What's the point in that? If I post something on my page, a bloke like that is never going to see it. My post would be buried under a mountain of who knows what, and unless he checks his feed literally every single waking minute of his day, he'd simply never keep up. Bloody nuts!
From a promotional point of view, Facebook is good in the way that I can rig up a small ad and target it directly to my audience, who then receive a small box at the side of their page with a pic of my book in it. The ads are, for the most part, unobtrusive but focused, meaning my meagre advertising budget is being spent efficiently and it's not going out to people who would only be annoyed by it. Like Twitter, Facebook also lets you talk directly with some people, though if it's a famous person you're wanting to chat to, chances are they're actually paying someone else to manage their page for them and you're not really taking to the stars themselves.
I've never tried out the other social networking sites that seem to be springing up like weeds in a farmer's paddock. There used to be Bebo, there are old narrow-band ones like Myspace and Linkedin, and there are all these new weird little chat things I keep hearing about. But really, there's no point me checking out any of them. Between having a family, running a business, writing books, keeping up with current social sites and occasionally scribbling out something on this blog, this bloke's just a little too busy to need any extra commitments right now. Speaking of which, it's time I nodded off.
Please feel free to let me know what social networks you use most, and what you think of them. Agree with my views? Disagree? Tell me how you feel in the comments below. Thanks for reading.
Till next time,
-Damien.
Now first of all, allow me to clarify which minimal number of sites I use and have an opinion on. It may be obvious from the side bar to your right that I use the basics, Facebook and Twitter. (If you're not viewing this on the actual blog, then you can't see what I'm talking about. I took the liberty of placing a link to here below, as well as links to me on Facebook and Twitter. Bookmark them for endless streams of my brain-dribble.)
{ http://www.damienlmalcolm.blogspot.com }
{ http://www.facebook.com/damienlmalcolm }
{ http://www.facebook.com/WinchesterSeries }
{ http://www.twitter.com/damienlmalcolm or the handle @DamienLMalcolm }
Anywho, I mainly only use these two because, well quite frankly, nothing else measures up. And when I say "measures up", I mean exactly that. For me, Facebook ranks about a 9 on the usefulness scale, with Twitter toddling behind at around a 6. I'm also supposedly on Google+, which sits at more than zero, but less than one on my scale. I'd place you a link for my page on there, if I could find one. Like the rest of Google+, it's pointless trying.
In fact, while we're on the topic of Google+, may I state the obvious and say that I find it incredibly crap. Google, God bless 'em, really did try to drag themselves into the social arena. They just didn't cut it, I'm afraid. I signed up for a "+" page because all the experts said it was the thing to do when you're an author looking to make headway in the big wide world. Now I find myself wondering why I did it. I "circled" a couple of people, shared a couple of posts and "+1'd" a few things (Seriously? +1? Who the hell came up with that???) but it just never grew on me. Every now and again, I drop back and check the page, only to find a disjointed, odd-coloured stream of random things from various people I don't know; presumably things that are "trending" in the magical world of +es. I don't know. Just seems pointless.
Twitter on the other hand, does fill a small gap in a person's social media requirement quota. Though I'm not sure if I use Twitter in the same way as everyone else. To me, Twitter is a great method of speaking, in short sentences, directly with a person, whether it be someone you know, or a person somewhere up in the ethereal wonderland. It's almost like having a phonebook with the mobile phone numbers of anyone remotely famous. You can send little text messages to celebrities just like you would your best mates. I've tweeted to ABC radio presenters (they reply), movie stars and musicians (they don't reply) and even other authors (sometimes they reply). It gives me a little tickle when someone even mildly famous tweets back to me directly, favourites or retweets something I said. It shows their human, and respecting their audience, which is nice. Only a few years ago celebrities where sooo distant from us down here, and the only way you could contact them was to write to a fan club. On paper! Now the world of twitter brings many of them down out of that unreachable cloud, and allows an everyday bloke like myself to send small compliments and opinions to them, and have the sometimes respond. It's nice, and does a lot toward bringing us all together that bit more.
I made the mistake when I first signed up for Twitter of following quite a few people and re-following anyone who followed me, then treating the newsfeed the same way I treat Facebook. It was a big mistake because if I didn't check that newsfeed in a day, I'd have a stream of literally hundreds of tweets to scroll over. And they'd be everything from "I have a small spot on my left buttock cheek" retweeted from some cracker in the US, to a traffic report of a local car accident four hours ago, to a Youtube preview of the latest Dr Who episode, to the twenty-fifth repeat of a tweet about an author's kindle page, or a beautiful picture of the Aurora Borealis. The record on my feed for one 24hr period is 262 tweets, with a ratio of around 70/30 crap. You see, one vast difference between Facebook and Twitter is where the Facebook newsfeed sort of picks out the best things to show you from your various friends and liked pages, which means you may miss the odd thing, Twitter gives you EVERYTHING.
In other words, there was enough important or interesting stuff to keep me scrolling and actually reading, as well as enough rubbish to just make me want to close the account. I've since learned that apparently the way to truly use Twitter as a news facility is to have an app like Tweetdeck or something sitting open all day on your office computer so you can see the feed in real-time, as opposed to exhaustingly scrolling it on your phone while brushing your teeth at 11pm. In such a way, I can understand how Twitter is a massively useful service for news producers and media. Only problem with that is, being a mobile Handyman, I don't work at a desk all day. So using Twitter in real-time for me is unobtainable, even if I wanted to. Just means I get a tweet from an ABC Radio host saying, "an interview with [insert famous person or politician] is live on air right now", five hours after the interview occurred. But as I say, it is still very useful for chatting to people directly, which can be fun... if maybe a little annoying for the recipient. (Sorry Belinda. I tweet because I care. :) )
By the way, I once did a "Know Your Promotional Skill Level" quiz on the Interwebs, that basically asked me questions to suss out how good I was at selling myself and my books. I got most of the questions right, but one of the ones I got wrong was one relating to Twitter. It said something like, "How frequently should you tweet? A: Every hour? B: Once a day? C: 2 - 3 times a week?" I answered 2 to 3 times a week, because at the time I was completely over being bombarded with other people's tweets about nothing, and as a rule that's the rate I'm comfortable tweeting at. I was wrong. Apparently, the correct answer was A: Every hour.
Every bloody hour?? No wonder I was getting bombarded, if that's what the experts are telling people to do. There are people following me that have 25,000 other people that they follow. If every one of those nutters did that quiz and decided to ramp up their profile, that would amount to a total of 500,000 tweets a day! A bloke would do nothing else but sit at a computer all day reading tweets about how cold some lady's toes are because of the snow falling in Istanbul. That's not a life. And the bit that got me the most was, the thing gave me advice at the end saying that I should consider purchasing a third party app that can automate my tweets for me to "boost my market penetration". So I could send out a tweet saying "Buy my book here https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259889?ref=damienlmalcolm " over and over again, every single hour, 24 hours a day. Wow, I'm sure my followers are going to be right into that! I've had that sort of thing in my newsfeed before, and it sucks. In fact, now if I get that, I report it as spam. And I've since un-followed most of my Twitter-friends, the ones I actually don't find any interest in, and thankfully reduced my feed down to manageable levels.
Facebook, on the other hand, ticks every box. I keep my friends down to only people I actually know, I run a page for my first book, another for my local Handyman business which gets great response from customers, and I leave most of my private page open to the public as a bit of an author thing for followers. Facebook's newsfeed scrolls at a comfortable pace, allowing a busy bloke to just pop in once or twice a day for five to ten minutes at a time while hoeing down some lunch between jobs. I can whack up a photo easily (not of my lunch!) and it keeps me abreast of the goings-on. It's great for funnies. Of course the peaceful harmony I speak of can also be abused by some, which leads to addiction. The average young person seems to have around 800 friends on Facebook, and I once saw a profile of a fella that had 2,500 friends and liked 27,000 pages! What's the point in that? If I post something on my page, a bloke like that is never going to see it. My post would be buried under a mountain of who knows what, and unless he checks his feed literally every single waking minute of his day, he'd simply never keep up. Bloody nuts!
From a promotional point of view, Facebook is good in the way that I can rig up a small ad and target it directly to my audience, who then receive a small box at the side of their page with a pic of my book in it. The ads are, for the most part, unobtrusive but focused, meaning my meagre advertising budget is being spent efficiently and it's not going out to people who would only be annoyed by it. Like Twitter, Facebook also lets you talk directly with some people, though if it's a famous person you're wanting to chat to, chances are they're actually paying someone else to manage their page for them and you're not really taking to the stars themselves.
I've never tried out the other social networking sites that seem to be springing up like weeds in a farmer's paddock. There used to be Bebo, there are old narrow-band ones like Myspace and Linkedin, and there are all these new weird little chat things I keep hearing about. But really, there's no point me checking out any of them. Between having a family, running a business, writing books, keeping up with current social sites and occasionally scribbling out something on this blog, this bloke's just a little too busy to need any extra commitments right now. Speaking of which, it's time I nodded off.
Please feel free to let me know what social networks you use most, and what you think of them. Agree with my views? Disagree? Tell me how you feel in the comments below. Thanks for reading.
Till next time,
-Damien.
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