(Another) New start

For reasons that I won't bore you with, this is an attempt to, beginning this week, do 52 blog posts for the Three Fivers project.

As ever, I've taken it to the wire and this is the final day of the first week. Failure, as ever, is tantalisingly close.

To summarize, I want to see if three viable businesses can be created, capitalised each with a crisp £5 note.

Over the many months of inactivity, I've decided upon the three areas that I'll work on. I'm going to tell you exactly what they are, so that you can copy/compete/scoff at my efforts. They are:

1. Start a publishing company

2. Trade shares

3. Trade 50p pieces

I have a back up idea which, if I can make £5 of profit from any, or all collectively, of these ventures I'll start. However, here is the rationale behind each of these businesses.

A publishing company - I love books and the process of making books, having dabbled a little in that industry. What with the upsurge of self-publishing platforms, the apparatus of starting a publishing company has never been easier to access, though creating profit from one is probably more difficult than ever before.

Share trading - app platforms allow us to invest in shares "from as little as £1". I always had an ambition to own a stock portfolio, having grown up in the grasping, Thatcherite 80s, although I'm almost entirely against share ownership these days, having lived through the exciting period of history that was Kwasi Kwarteng's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer. As share trading is essentially gambling that is wearing a nice suit, I'm pretty sure that the distraction of watching share prices will be short-lived, as my capital dwindles with astonishing rapidity.

Trade 50p pieces - I have collected some averagely rare 50p pieces over the years, some of them no longer being legal tender. A super-specialised trading company, and being an expert in a very narrow field, appeals and - let's be honest - it's not the most stressful of occupations.

There are no barriers to entry into each of these markets, and the biggest hurdle is me. And now, seven days to set up the first business, whichever that might be.

Comments

Beginner’s luck

Three Fivers is predicated upon being able to start a ‘business’ that makes money from just five pounds of investment. Today I could close it down as successful. In my first ever venture into share dealing, I bought £5 worth of Harland and Wolff shares at 4:05pm. At 4:38pm, I offloaded them for a 13p (2.6%) profit. Not enough to pay the mortgage, nor even to qualify as a side hustle, but profit nonetheless. 13p doesn’t buy much these days - not even a Freddo - but, 2.6% profit compounded does add up; my love of a spreadsheet shows how profit becomes more interesting over five days below. Over 12 months (365 days, although you cannot trade for at least 104 of these days) that would turn my humble £5 into around £5300. Not bad. I’m not especially enamoured of share trading, but it can be quite interesting I think if I add in additional rules; devote a maximum of 5 minutes a day to it and invest the whole of the capital at once - no portfolio. Whether this will survive even the next ...

Failure is not the same as a business failing

Already, I have failed. It's not terminal to the project, maybe not even to the strand of the project, but it's failure nonetheless. Despite literally *minutes* of trying, I've been unable to link Google's AdSense to this blog to (hopefully) monetise the blog. (If anyone can explain to me how I get round a circular set of "Press this to verify > You need to do this in blogger.com > Go to Google AdSense > Press this to verify", I'm all ears.) Now, I'm pretty unmoved by this - I've lost nothing and I'd be writing these anyway. Everyday I hear of more and more businesses that are laying people off, closing UK operations or just plain going under. That's heartbreaking, because they're not just venturing a fiver and writing stuff in lunchbreaks. Fortunately, I still have a nominal five quid left - having used no resource other than my time - to invest into another venture. Comments are open and I'm open to ideas, before I start ...

Why the delay?

It's not going well. My vow to blog weekly has fallen by the wayside, and a blog a month must have tripped over it. However, to try to take any positives from it, I'm learning. Content planning is key. Plan it and you'll have it, or at least have the time allocated to make it. But, the whole blogging situation has made me realise one thing; I am the inverse of someone on the breadline/on Universal Credit. So ungenerous is our Social Security - it's not 'benefits', they are a right, not a gift - that people in receipt of it spend much of their lives, and probably all of their energy surviving. They've no time to enrich themselves, to 'invest in themselves'. I am the complete opposite - in trying to see whether it is possible to take virtually nothing - £5 these days barely covering a loaf of bread and some spreadable butter - and spin it into a business, I'm consumed by well-paid work which keeps me from experiencing the desperation to make mone...

Three Fivers

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