Too little money

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I received a court summons regarding our overdue council tax. Yikes… I know, our fault. We’ve sort of been losing track, like a manager I discussed in my previous entry. We attempted to pay it online a while back when the council’s website was acting up, then we just kind of forgot about it. And money is tight; so very tight. We can’t pay it today but… it’s firmly back on our agenda and we’ve hashed out an agreement with the council.

I’ve mentioned my money trouble before — of falling into debt after pursuing a client for several months of overdue payment. My personal finances are a big part of the reason I’ve incorporated a household context into Marmalade. My worth, personally, is intrinsically linked to my business, and I wanted to see that connection in better detail — to better illustrate the flow of my money and my progress financially, both in business and at home.

When I left university, I figured I’d start working towards my second degree; I’d look into doing my Masters at, I’d hoped, Bournemouth University. But this would be out of my own pocket, or by access to a loan from my own bank; a world of difference from the student loans available for Bachelors studies. So I set out to find work first. Employers will sometimes help with the cost of education, and failing that I’d at least have a security net from which to pay for it myself.

As time ticked on and I came no closer to that goal, I started to consider overseas education. If I could take a course in Sweden, perhaps, education would be free. I’d just need to find and pay for my own accommodation, but the availability of web development work seemed greater on the continent too and so that should be less an issue… if I could just afford to move out there.

And actually, I did apply for Higher Education on the continent. This was around the time I had two web development contracts on the go and I was feeling confident about putting some money away. Alas, we know what happened there. I was unable to save very much before having to tap back into my fund in desperate wait for long overdue payment. By the time that payment was made, I had new debts to repay and little immediate chance of starting a Masters degree in Sweden.

At this point, it’s been years without progress. The media and writing industries are indomitably tough to break into and what little work I have found elsewhere has paid as good as fuck all. In fact, I’m worse off than when I began; gaps between work too long, employment itself too unstable, and payment often not as forthcoming as it ought to be. I’ve had to make some stupid decisions just to get by; my situation, I think, may still be in decline.

A lot of this happened at home in West Cumbria — that’s where I did my first paid web development work from — but before this all, during my transition between Manchester and Cumbria, I was doing something else. It was web development — my first Rails project — partly as a learning exercise and portfolio piece, but also on something I thought was pretty awesome; it was something I believed had real potential. That project was called Quotable and I actually set out to find funding for it. I took a brief business management course and started communicating with local bodies which have helped others establish businesses in the area.

Quotable was and is great. At it’s core, it’s a natural language processing algorithm for selecting full sentences from a text. I’d set up a website for it and ensured that it worked on mobile, then I started showing people. Most agreed, it was impressive. Tap a sentence, hit share, done; so much simpler than copy and paste, particularly on mobile. One contact put me in touch with a local investment body and I excitedly got in touch, describing the potential for this and some of its uses. They too agreed, “this is neat”, but they didn’t invest. It wasn’t the sort of thing they invested in. They looked for quick returns on investment, mainly in products that could be sold to customers directly and immediately. Their main investments were in the nuclear sector, and other than that the only businesses popping up around here seemed to be hairdressers and boutiques. Ours is a boring little region.

Worse, their company were the only investment fund in West Cumbria. I’ve looked, and can find little more; I’ve asked, and my contacts have exhausted their address books in search; there are none that I, or anyone I know, can find. Our options then are government grants, which in this area again target mostly nuclear sector developments, or bank loans. Honestly, I haven’t tried the latter. I’ve long felt already too in debt to my banks, a worsening situation, and am unsure of my eligibility to be approved. Perhaps I should have, earlier, perhaps I should still now but the thought of more debt is terrifying. Instead, I’ve tried making something from nothing.

Quotable was built from nothing, Marmalade was too. Yellow Mountain, Rather Than Smoke; I can build the foundations for some very strong applications without spending a penny. But it hasn’t gotten me very far yet.

And it’s affecting my job search. Because that’s what I keep doing: I do keep looking for higher paid work, so that I can fund my own developments further. I have plenty of time to do that, but when it comes to showing my portfolio I’ve faltered. The last company I interviewed for were impressed by the work I had to show, but… had concerns that my own work would distract me from theirs. And that was the end of it. A Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 job had concerns that I’d be distracted.

It’s frustrating. On the one hand, I feel a desperate need to keep busy and to keep working on things that I think drive me forwards as a developer, perhaps as an entrepreneur. On the other, actually being good at something is killing my job prospects. I get it, I do; I’ve showed work that could be marketable, and that could lead me to leave positions I’ve taken. It’s a good indication of the quality of what I’ve done, just as well as it’s another nail in the coffin of my employability.

Were I able to secure investment, I’d commit fully to my own work, hire at least a designer and another developer, and focus our efforts towards the growth of a fantastic product. But with investment in the area so scarce, and travel beyond it so unaffordable, I’ve been half-focusing on a continued job search which sometimes seems faltered by my own ambition and which is otherwise fruitless but for the lousy paying jobs with little to no career prospects.

I feel driven, but without focus; ambitious, but lacking guidance; I feel… bewildered and lost and exhausted. With bills and debts to pay, a lousy wage for a lousy job, with nothing to invest in myself or my future, and career prospects too scarce and too smothered by my own ambition… I am scared. And despite a long, recent bout with depression, that isn’t normal. I don’t normally get scared. Anxiety and panic attacks are new to me. They’re uncomfortable, but I’m handling them. A little self-awareness and reflection does wonders.

It feels wrong to say that the anxiety is tied to financial matters, but it is. I think I’ve been conditioned from an early age to accept that “money isn’t everything”. It’s not, no, but that phrase has been repeated like a doctrine throughout my life and I think… this must be what it feels like to have religion forced on you. Money won’t solve all of your problems, no, but it will help your money problems. And that’s what so much of my current state revolves around: I have too little money; a matter of underpayment, refused payment, scarcity of development, travel costs, etc. But yes, that is my problem. Too little money; short of robbing a bank, I just haven’t figured out how to solve it yet.