surviving the recession

Even with petrol prices dropping, cars are expensive to maintain (and there is always the possibility that oil prices will rise again). However, you can save costs by sharing journeys. This is particularly recommended for those who are on a tight budget and have to cut back on travelling expenses.

Liftshare.com is a UK website that allows you to find people to share journeys with - they have 85% of the UK car-sharing market. The journey can be something like a one-off cross-country trip, or regular journeys to and from work or school.

They recommend that those sharing journeys share the costs of petrol (doing more than cost sharing and trying to make a profit could invalidate your insurance).  The website itself is free to join and free to search for other travellers.  They charge businesses who set up car-pooling schemes on their site, and businesses who use the scheme can make their pools private instead of public. They have no referral schemes.

You can make money by placing ads on the body work of your car.

Register online free with a company called AdsOnVans. They accepts both cars and vans. They will then try to match you with an advertiser. Once they have found an advertiser, you need to take your car in to have a second “skin” put on your car with the advert (it won’t damage the car).

They then pay you to carry the advert - either in free petrol or cash. Cash is about £70-£200 per month, depending on the size of your car and how many miles you do each month.

It all looks horribly garish, but it’s money, and if you need the cash, why not?

The UK newspapers have been full of stories about a couple who had a mortgage with Nat West bank, and who have received a notice insisting that their entire £226,000 be paid back within 30 days, despite the fact that they have never missed a payment. The couple have another loan on the property, but this was disclosed to NatWest when they took out their mortgage with them. The real reason for the withdrawal of the mortgage seems to be that their mortgage deal is very good, being a tracker mortgage charging just  0.4% above the Bank of England base rate, which is 2%. But then NatWest freely sold them the mortgage at this very good rate, and they should really honour the deal (especially as they charged them an arrangement fee of £1000 for the deal).

Apparently, under English law, practically all mortgages issued have a clause saying that the lender can demand repayment at any time. Banks such as the NatWest have lost a lot of money investing in scams such as the Madoff hedge funds and worthless US sub-prime paper, and are now trying to claw back money from the little man.

Be aware that your bank may do the same to you, especially if they have somehow identified you as a “risky” customer - and it might be down to something as simple as being employed in an industry that is currently in the doldrums.

How to protect yourself from this happening? Well, in the past you could have just re-mortgaged with someone else, but no one is lending at the moment. Check your mortgage clauses to see if they allow you to make overpayments, and start overpaying the mortgage. It reduces your risk, and the bank concerned might want to keep you on if they see the loan being reduced in this way.

It’s obviously hard to overpay your mortgage, but see the list of articles in the sidebar for ideas as to how to reduce expenditure and how to raise extra cash to pay off debt.

The property experts say that house prices will fall another 9-10% in 2009, thanks to banks being unwilling to lend to any but the most creditworthy customers plus demands for a large deposits to be put down.

Of course property never stays down forever, at some point pent-up demand and restricted supply due to strict planning permission means that prices will rise again. So it makes sense to try to buy at the bottom.

However, for most people this is out of the question. They are carrying too much debt at present, and cannot afford to take on another property. By the time lending criteria relax so you can buy more than one home, property prices will already be rising and the bargains will have gone.

How to get round this? Pay down your existing mortgage as fast as possible, and start building up a nest egg to put down as a deposit on a second property. If you have reduced your current mortgage sufficiently and are able to put down a large deposit on the second home, you should be able to be classified as an extremely good credit risk, so that lenders will lend on the second home.

It sounds impossible, but read some of the articles on this blog about how to raise money, and do as much as you can to pay off debt. Property prices will start to move up at the end of next year, and this once-in-15-years opportunity to buy a place very cheap will disappear.

The New York Times had an interesting article about people who are making six-figure incomes from YouTube. YouTube will share advertising revenue with you if the videos you upload are created by you, and you own the content.

How do you go about earning from YouTube? Simple, you need a video camera, and a computer, and you need to join YouTube’s partner program, which allows you to set up a channel. Once you have uploaded your material, they pay out based on how the advertising set up on your channel does, which in turns depends on how many people are viewing your video. You can upload all sorts of things - chats to the camera, songs you have sung, recitals of poetry, videos you’ve created from scratch, anything at all, as long as it is not pornographic, abusive and you own the content. I definitely recommend YouTube users to read the NYTimes article - it’s an eye-opener as to how much can be earned.