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On 04/08/13 18:13, bad apple wrote:
On 04/08/13 17:50, Henry Bremridge wrote:Been there, using a professional can cost a lot but sometimes a lot less than someone who isn't.I've got a neat system for this: over the years I've done work at insanely cut-price levels in exchange for future services from professionals at very favourable rates. For example, the VDJ I was doing data recovery for the other day has a normal day job as a sparky, and luckily he even lives a couple of doors up from me so he's nice and easy to get hold of. I charged him nothing but beer and he in turn promised his help when I need it - following a complete laptop rebuild for another friend of a friend 6 months or so back, that makes two "tame" electricians I have on tap. A few doors down, an old friend of the family runs his own plumbing business - I fixed his wife's email issues, rooted their cheap Android tablet for them to fix skype video calling and voila: a "tame" plumber for my contacts list. I've also got a newspaper editor, a 2nd line tech support guy at a certain Exeter-based ISP (handy for calling him up and getting him to do line tests, etc, for me), several graphic designers (did my business cards for free), a landscape gardener (the decking out back), two motor mechanics (lucky, considering what a piece of crap our car is) and an entire small army of variously skilled-up professionals who all know they owe me a big favour. I don't know if you can really call it a system, and it's certainly not novel - I'm not claiming to have invented a revolutionary new labour-exchange method or anything - but it's certainly proved very, very handy over the years. The other advantage is that I frequently recommend my contacts to other people I randomly bump into looking for electricians, plumbers or whatever and in return, get a pretty steady flow of computer work coming back from them. So far it's worked extremely well for me, to the point I'm immediately disconsolate if I actually have to pay list price for something (the missus: "What do you mean you don't have a tame orthodontist on your 'owes me a favour' list?!") Regards
Sounds like tax avoidance to me Tom te tom te tom I don’t do emoticons... -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq