Times are a changing!

Many of you may or may not be aware of what is going on in British politics at the moment, but as well as the upcoming general election where we may be seeing a new Prime Minister, or even another 5 years of a new coalition (yuk!), there are also some sneaky austerity moves happening in the shadows of the economy that will seriously affect lots of entrepreneurs, self-employed single people, and creatives such as artists, sculptors, writers etc.

New welfare and benefit changes are coming in from this month that will see an end to a lot of small and micro businesses that are not seen as being financially viable in the eyes of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. This will also cause increased unemployment amongst mothers who have been working hard on part-time businesses from home trying to supplement their household income, and I could be one of them!

Basically the government want everyone to be in work and paying taxes regardless of whether you have children, or are caring for elderly relatives. But it is not enough any more to be running a business that you can fit around your family life - it has to earn you at least the national minimum wage each and every month. This will obviously be a problem for artists and creative types that can take weeks or months putting together a piece of work that will sell on completion. The government are basically saying they are not prepared to support you with tax credits or universal credits while you are busy creating your piece.

For someone like me who writes for a living, it will also become very difficult to prove that I run a viable business simply because I cannot predict what my income will be each month.

Say I spend two months writing a book, then a month is spent on editing and proof-reading, cover design and formatting etc. Once I publish my book, I have no idea if it will sell one copy of one thousand copies!

It is the same with my website that I am building through Wealthy Affiliate. As Kyle says, success does not happen overnight, and it can take a good year of building and refining your site before you see any tangible results. Unfortunately this will not be good enough for the government, and they will more than likely want me to give up everything I am working towards to dedicate 35 hours per week to work search duties to find a conventional, and frankly quite boring job at minimum wage so they can have my tax payments filling their coffers, despite the fact that I actually do earn enough from my self employment to pay tax, albeit a small amount.

The trouble is - where I live is quite rural, and there are no suitable jobs around, plus what little employment opportunity does turn up locally will have so much more competition for it from fellow mothers who have also been forced to abandon their work from home job to become a wage-slave sheep.

I am still waiting for all my tax-related paperwork to come through my letterbox and hit the matt, and this year it is surprisingly late arriving, I would have normally had all the paperwork through by now, so this does not bode well in my opinion.

I sincerely hope that I will be allowed to stick around WA to continue my longterm self-sustaining plans. As they say - watch this space!