Dazza1976

Hi all,

How much can i expect to earn as a self employed spark, with regular work coming in ???
Do you guys make a comfortable living from the trade ?

Have any of you noticed things slowing down of late, with the credit crunch kicking in, and the housing market suffering ??

p.s im not a nosey ******* !!! just want to know i made the correct career choice.

sparkyork

hi mate if you charged say £25 per hour and have forty hours a week then you got a grand less tax, wink wink

or more an hour more a week, get a good price in on a job and be quids in, make money on materials etc

im only just starting to get sorted for work, partly cos ive only just started advertising (wanted to wait till nic thing was sorted)

building game does seem to have suffered but theres allways people wanting work done, and if they dont want to buy new houses theyll build extensions.

although a bit stressful at times i dont think i could ever work for anybody else again.

if you keep your self busy you should turn over a minimum of 52k plus extras

tony.towa

Whilst the present situation has had a dramatic effect on the building trade and the house market, the last time this happened it actually created a greater demand for people to have things done in their home (once they had stabilised their personal situation). Sales of things like conservatories and small extensions increased as people were wary of moving and decided to maximise on their existing property.

Realistically this is likely to happen again, before the market picks up and so a good sparks is likely to maintain a half decent work load, although the larger jobs may be further apart.

I think I might have said it somewhere before, at the end of the day the more you put in, the more you get out.

Spudmiester

It is a bit slow for me at the moment, but I do other stuff as well.

Tony is right, reciperical returns , you gets out what you puts in , I am about to do a marketing pitch on the electrical stuff, trouble is I do mostly industrial, and factories are few and far between round our way.

'Midnight......One more night without sleeping'

Carter

Don't see any soft landings this time around, the financial and geo-political situation is very different and the last real scare was the '73 oil crisis. Then they just asked the House of Saud to open the oil taps to redress the supply vs demand imbalance which at the time stood at a mere 6%. Just a 6% differential caused the oil price to triple and it took nearly 10 years for the world economy to readjust.

The "open the taps" option no longer exists as all the 'low hanging fruit' has been found and extracted. Only 1 barrel of new oil is being found for each four used. The term "credit crunch" is merely a euphamism for a much deeper set of problems. Oil now UNDERPINS EVERY HUMAN ENDEAVOUR AND INTERACTION.
The days of sparks clattering 100miles up a motorway and back each day are coming to an end. there WILL need to be a re-assessment of what 'local' actually means.
For credit crunch substitute the term energy crunch and on to the real issue; the "CONFIDENCE CRUNCH".

The gnomes of Zurich have finally taken the cloth off their crystal ball and don't like what they are seeing. They know that every pension, investment, insurance policy, bill of lading, mortgage security and bank note in circulation only has value because of the PROMISE of continuing oil and downstream energy security upon which pretty much all commercial activity is dependant. That promise is about to be broken big time. I hear the sound of banking house ladders being drawn up and the drawbridges dropped.
Why else would they have bailed out Northern Rock at the drop of a hat. No question about it, they had no choice since the government (with its wallet boggling PSB (Public Sector Borrowing) liabilities and the wider nation (with £1.3b of lending are effectively in hock to them. £50 BILLION! with a possible exposure topping £100b!! Jeezus H Christ. How long did it take to arrange that? 3 days? Bloody hell I wish I had a bank manager that accommodating and responsive. The true reason of course is that the illusion of calm financial probity and rock solid security had to be maintained AT ANY PRICE as the cost of not doing it would have triggered a full on financial China Syndrome. Anyone who doubts that need only look at the reaction of stock markets and trades when any slight tremor interrupts the game. They bail out like rats from a sinking ship, so much for their confidence or lack thereof. They'll lend an umbrella when it's sunny then demand it back (with interest) when it looks like it might rain.

The coming change of govt in 2009 will do NOTHING to halt the decline, because there is nothing they CAN do and any pretence to the contrary is just bulling so as not to frighten the children. If people really understood the scam of fractional reserve banking they would be stringing them from the street furniture.
We have a demographic timebomb waiting in the wings, land use issues that must be adressed NOW in order for the long term vialbility of this country to be assured in the medium term never mind the long term. Unfortunately the modern politico defines the concept of 'medium term' as no more than the time remaining till its next election. I doubt their definition of 'long term' encompasses even a generational span. Men of Vision?? Knobs of butter more like.

I have a bad feeling about this and if anyone else mentions the pointless and self indulgant sodding 2012 Olympics (panem et circenses) Bread and circuses - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia or the need for priority diversion of tax receipt to 'offset' Anthropogenic Global fricking Warming one more time I swear to God I will explode and rip them a fresh one.

mpfisher@hotmai

Nice light hearted read there Carter! Glad i'm goin on my jollies on Sunday

See y'all in a week

Mark

Spudmiester

Crikey Carter, are you Shakey in disguise.

Good point about tearing up and down the motorway doing jobs in each others back yards, have thought this situation ridiculous for about ten years, since I myself packed in doing it. Used to have to go from Yorkshire to the other side of Bournmouth to change a fuse or re-set an overload. I kid you not !

'Midnight......One more night without sleeping'

mpfisher@hotmai

where in yorks are you spud?

sparkyork

i was watching a program the other day about oil and very confusing it was indeed! from what the program told me was that there were still vasts ammounts of oil left in the north sea alone, they estimated at least another 40 years worth, plus what ever is in saudi and the like. they did also say that it costs them so much more to get it out the ground as well!? so if theres so much of it still left why is there all this who har about it all, and why do we need to pay over 75 percent tax on the bloody stuff, i say scrap or drstically lower tax on fuel, jib the nhs and do wat evry other country does and stop bailing out other countries when they have some sort of disaster, oh and also stop letting the foreigners in our country aswell, who come along for a free house.

Carter

There isn't, even industry insiders and CEOs are admitting that North sea production peaked around 2001-5. It's practically impossible to get a true picture because an oil company's long term stock value depends entirely on its stated reserves. It is in the company's interests to claim the maximum reserves they think they can get away with. How on earth do stated reserves stay the same and in some cases increase when there exploration results indicate so little actually recoverable oil found?

The same mechanism applies to oil producing countries as a whole; trading agreements mean that the amount they are allowed to trade on the market depends among lesser things on the stated level of that country's reserves. Same thing has happened, they grossly overstate their reserves in order to maximise their levels of trade. But it says precisely f*ck all about the true level of reserves which as I said is almost impossible to seperate out from 'theoretical reserves' or 'developing reserves' or 'newly discovered reserves'

It's not so much the fact that oil is running out, (it will never actually "run out" as the production downslope will never actually hit zero until the last human has given up trying to extract it.) the issue is one of demand exceeding supply. Like I said in 1973 a difference between the two of only 6% practically tripled prices within a week.

Imagine 2 graphs, one a steadily rising line indicating world consumption of oil from when it was discovered through to the present and into the next 50yrs or so.

The other one is a smooth symetrical "bell shaped" plot. The low point on the left represents 1860 when the first Texan oil was produced, the peak of the graph represents the midpoint of reserves left and the right hand slope signifies the drop in production as it becomes harder to find.

Suppose the two plots (correctly scaled) are placed one on top of the other, so long as the production curve stays above the demand line all is hunky dory. But things aren't happening that way, the extraction curve cannot be manipulated as ultimately it is NOT A VARIABLE. Oil IS finite. The world population/oil demand IS a variable, the only problem is that it is varying inexorably upwards. It is growing and fancifully projected to keep growing ad infinitum. No upper limit is admitted. Sooner or later those two lines will cross and production will start to tail off and some say this is happening now i.e. we are at the peak of oil's historical production and use graph. From here it can only slope downwards and therefore it is inevitable that a deficiency of supply versus demand will arise. It is believed by many that we have or are about to reach that point when the lines start to diverge and THAT is the real crunch point, i.e. how will the market and wider society as a whole, react to that realisation. The current strains may be the start of that process of adjustment or merely the tremors preceding it and many quibble over the actual timing but unless you're one of those who believe oil is continually manufactured majicaly in the earth's core then it has to be faced up.

Personaly, I think the party's over and has been for a long time. It's been well concealed mind you behind a veneer of superficial affluence and ambitious sounding (but innefectually crap) policy designed to cover the cheapness of the political carcassing in this country.

Simply put S.Y. but none the less sensible for it! I could run with that as a basis for a manifesto. Wouldn't it be a sweet relief if all politicians and particularly that waffling monocular ringpiece Gordy Brown was as succinct.