DISCLAIMER: I’m in Australia
I’m sitting here writing this as I start another 12-hour night shift making building products, for a company that is just all forms of incompetent and greedy and if it wasn’t for the need to have a regular income at the moment – I’d be so outta here (the guys I work with are top notch, it’s management that piss me off).
Normally I can keep a pretty straight face and work with what life throws at me, make the most with what I have and adapt to make it better.
Right now though I just ran into roadblock after roadblock that I couldn’t help but feel exhausted and defeated that where I am is actively pigeonholing people. For context I make a food product, biltong specifically. The roadblock came when a biltong business (Brick and Mortar – that’ll be important later) came up for sale, really good price and already established – for reference I hadn’t committed to buying but there were a lot of positives that come with buying an already established business you can grow and work with.
So I looked at options:
-
Finance: nope, need to put down your own equity as a deposit
-
Investor: also nope, haven’t been in business long enough
-
Use my own super: nope, it would come under the prohibited investments
So what about making and selling it myself? Well to do it ‘officially’ I’d need a food grade site, food license etc etc.
Asked for advice from people who could advise some way to either make a break or where to look, and it all came back to either ‘no’ or the advice seemed so out of touch with my situation that I just had to stop before I got too frustrated:
-
Just save enough for the first year: if I did that I’d have $200,000 and may as well invest in something less risky. Not to mention between rent, child support and food what I have leftover goes into things like vehicle maintenance or rainy day funds but as I don’t do credit, anything that happens just drains the savings.
-
Just work more: sure, but then when do you or could you work on the business to a point where it could be self sustaining?
Bit of a rant because after seeing some of the responses on other subs I wasn’t prepared to listen to smug boomers or those with a windfall telling me to pull my bootstraps up.