The adventure starts!

We begin our story on 17th September 2007. I had arranged to meet Nezetta at a pub in north London at 7pm (she was late of course!!) and we started to hit the coffees. I'd met Nez about 3 times before and was helping her to manage her finances better. At the first meeting it was like watching 'stress on legs', she was feeling a little down, well a lot down actually, but two hours later I think I'd managed to explain everything in simple terms and she felt a lot more comfortable. Nez's main problem wasn't about her finances but her whole attitude to money. So I recommended a book for her to read, emphasising that I felt that, once read, her life would change for the better and money would be something to embrace and not fear. For those who are curious enough to want to know what the 'recommended' book is, here's a link



I can't recommend this book highly enough! - you WILL find it VERY rewarding

Anyway, after a few meetings it became apparent to me that here was a lady who complimented my skills with her own brand of 'streetwise', energy, youthfulness and naivety, and that the idea in my head was worth pursuing as a joint venture with Nez. And on top of that she passed the 'test'. Whenever I meet someone I always ask myself the same question; If I was stuck in a lift with this person for 5 hours would we run out of things to talk about? Well, we wouldn't even have scratched the surface of potential discussion topics in 5 hours. Anyway I digress, back to the pub and the coffees.

I had been reading over the past year or so about people who had been trading up from a 'paperclip' to a 'house' or a 'plastic cup' to a 'Ferrari'. Only a few had seemed to have had any success at this, and having read some of the 'swap boards' on the net it seemed that an awful lot of people were stuck with various items of pottery and paintings desperately looking for a 'trade', ANY trade!! The outlook, however, did look good for both potters and artists!!! The main problem with the 'swapping' idea is that your tied to negotiating with whatever item you are holding. There seemed to be no flexibility in trying to trade up whilst in possession of 4 ceramic mugs 'hand made' in Barrow in Furness!! (with apologies to residents of Barrow in Furness). At the end of the day the most flexible of commodities is cash!! So I calculated some 'rules', built a spreadsheet and came up with the plan to make £100,000+ in 52 deals. (the original spreadsheet will be published on here after the 52nd deal)

I explained the plan to Nez and suggested she takes a few days to consider it. After 3, maybe 4 nanoseconds had passed she looked up from the spreadsheet and announced 'I'm in!' And so the adventure was 'born'. We had some more coffee and talked out all the rules, and the potential deals already on the table. We had jointly invested £6 on the previous Saturday on the National Lottery and won £10 so it was decided that this would be our 'starting capital'.

The rules are simple and we will be disclosing them in subsequent posts. We will deal in anything, well anything legal that is. There are no limits to the type of deal we will do, as long as we can reasonably expect it to deliver the required profit. We wont always hit the required target, in fact, we may even lose on a few of the deals, but overall we should achieve our goal. We have built in certain 'risk management' strategies and allowed for the occasional indulgent expenses.

The 'blog' idea started out as a 'diary' that we would keep and one day publish. However, it occurred to us that by opening up the ongoing progress of our adventure to others, we may find people along the way to help us, either as customers (we will post links for our latest offers), suppliers (again, we will post for any specific requirements), advisers (for when our brains switch off), critics (we love critics, they tell us where we go wrong) etc and maybe even sow a few seeds in peoples minds to 'copy' this idea.

Please let us know if you start, or are thinking of starting, to copy the idea, we will do our best to offer any advice we can and maybe even do a few deals with you along the way.

And so, with the background info done (well some of it anyway, we will add things as we go along), lets start the adventure!!

Current cash position: £10.00