A Castle For Your Thoughts

Sorry, this is a little later than planned because I have been on the road with my tiny human, medium human and Bryan, as well as several other family members. It is time for the annual research trip combined with vacation for the family.

Because I write so many books that are set in our world or variations of our world with magic and dragons and all sorts of other elements, I try to learn as much new as I can while I have the chance, knowing I’ll use it in a book somewhere.

This means I’ve seen a lot of castles the last few days and I’ll be seeing some more, I’m sure!

But that’s not quite the subject of today’s blog, although it plays a part. Once a month I want to blog an update of where we are at with the financial part of this, make sure the progress bars are up to date and all the other elements that go into working out how close we actually are to the dream.

In terms of the capital needed and investments needed, there’s not a lot extra. My investments have grown a small amount, but it only moves the income needle up a handful of dollars at most. There is still something wonderful about seeing progress, however, even if it’s only slow right now.

Where the progress was a lot faster, was paying off debt. I have some automatic ones, like my student loan and the loan for the visa costs, but I also managed to put some money toward another one, which means in just one month, where money has been fairly tight, I’ve managed to pay off approximately 4% of the debt.

And of course, there’s a little gain in paying off the mortgage for another month, not that it’s a lot, but it all helps.

Considering my book income is lower right now because I’ve had releases delayed and was very sick over the winter, I’m happy that we’ve made progress. There will be more faster once the releases ramp up again.

For now at least, it’s time to get back to resting and researching ready to make even more books happen.

One of the biggest elements of reaching a financial goal that’s larger than just putting a few hundred £ aside for a few months, is knowing how to make money with your money. Or save long term and not spend it.

I never had much of a financial education as a child. My mum did her best, but there’s some degree of, if you want to educate someone on what to do with money, you kind of need money to help them.

No one really taught me what you were supposed to do with money other than open a savings account and put some in when you can and try not to spend it.

That strategy isn’t going to cut it when it comes to buying a whole castle and making sure I have the funds to run it no matter what. There’s a whole heap of other things people do with money, especially those who have lots of it. So I’ve been researching what people are supposed to do with money and strategies for saving it more effectively.

That led me to two books that came highly recommended. One called Profit First, which is aimed at small businesses and entrepreneurs just starting out, and another called The Richest Man in Babylon, which is more about how to save and invest and what amount to do so and how you know how to do all that sort of thing sensibly.

So, I’m going to sum up some of that, but the essential component they both recommend, is that the money you want to profit/save/invest, should come off the top of your income, royalties, or money in before anything else.

You shouldn’t be waiting until the end of the month to see how much is left after you’ve paid bills and spent whatever you want and then just save or call profit whatever is left. Partially because it is very easy to keep spending money on in the moment feel good things, like buying that fancy coffee, or staying for another pint at the pub when you said you’d only have one.

Even if you have a healthy income, it is very easy to spend what you were going to save.
You should be seeing how much has come in, work out what you absolutely must spend to survive, what you want to spend, but isn’t necessary, and how much you need to save or want to pull out of your business to reach your goals.

With The Richest Man in Babylon, it recommends that 10% of everything you earn should be saved and invested. No matter how much you have coming in. 10% of all the money (including the money from your investments), should be invested. Then you pay your bills, etc with the rest. And if you have debt, you use 20% of your income to get out of debt as well (essentially living off 70%).

Profit first is looking at business expenses and is about understanding how much you need/want to take out of your business as your profit and then only investing what’s left.
As I’m an author who essentially runs her own publishing business, I am using a mixed approach of the two. I look at what’s come in for my business each month, how much I need to pay my basic bills (and I mean the basics, rent/mortgage, electricity, not Netflix, or meals out).

Then I work out what I must pay for in order to perform my business. I have my editor on retainer, I need dropbox to store all the audio files etc. There are some costs that aren’t entirely necessary. Is it nice to have all my team on Notion, yes, but not fully necessary, for example.

Everything left over is my ‘profit’. That’s what I split up. I don’t do 10% of everything like Richest Man of Babylon, but a much higher percentage of this profit amount. It often works out that I am dividing it into four. A quarter to pay off debt, a quarter to invest to fund the castle costs, and a quarter to save to buy the castle/property. And then that final quarter is money I get to enjoy along the way, reinvest into the business or do whatever else I want with.

Once the debt it paid off, this will become a three way split, but for now quarters work quite well.

And that’s basically it. I don’t spend money and then save/invest. I save/invest, and then spend what I’ve got left over, both in business and with life.

There’s a little more nuance. I know that this can be really tough when there isn’t enough money for what is necessary. There is a threshold where you can’t cut subscriptions, luxuries or anything like that out any more. I’ve been in the place in life where my phone is the cheapest sim only contract I can find, there’s no money for netflix, TV, cinema, days out, or hair or nails, not even money for makeup or clothes and all my clothes are birthday presents from family. I’ve looked at cash and had to try to do a week’s shop in such a way that it covers everything I need and I’m not eating rice and ketchup every day.

Thankfully, I’ve not been there in a long time, but I don’t have a problem with deciding that I’m still probably not going to pay to have my nails done because I’d rather pay for marketing, or some character art. Or invest enough to get my castle. My nails can wait… cause a castle is what I want more.

I’ve also noticed that this way I spend money intentionally, not reactively. I have a budget and I choose what to spend it on specifically, then don’t spend any money otherwise.

There is a little for incidentals, especially with tiny humans. An eating out budget, or takeaway, especially with my health being a struggle sometimes, but even that is an intentional choice. There’s money there for when I need it most. And once it’s spent, it’s spent.

I’m also entirely reinvesting investment money so far. It goes back into growing the money. And of course, owning a house, even as I pay off a mortgage

So, today I’m going to do something that is considered very taboo in the UK and talk about actual financial stuff. Buying a big castle or property big enough for the number of people we want to help isn’t going to be cheap and I stuck up a progress bar when I started the blog, but you’ll notice there are now three.

I’ve been doing basic research into how much castles in Scotland cost over the last few years, working out what’s feasible, how much we’d need and what sorts of bills we might expect, problems etc and it’s brought me to the conclusion that there’s more than just saving up to buy the castle.

We obviously need to buy the actual building, which is our first progress bar. The literal liquid cash (or buying power), needed to make the offer on a Scottish castle. This hasn’t been difficult to work out. For about the last two years or so, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Scottish castle market and we’ve established that there’s a range of about £750,000 for the lowest end of castle which needs a lot of work, or isn’t ready to live in yet, up to approximately twice that, £1.5m if we want it ready to go.

The latter tends to be the price for castles that are already being run as hotels or whatever, and we’re going to shoot for that larger amount, for two reasons. Reason 1, I believe in aiming for a goal that is slightly above the basic necessary, because even if you don’t quite get there, it gets you somewhere awesome. Reason 2. Even if we got one cheaper, we’d have to sink a significant amount of funds in order to renovate, and that’s a lot more hassle that I’m only likely to take on if the building was otherwise perfectly what we wanted.

As you can see, we are 23% of the way there (23.33% to be precise). That’s made up of the mortgage we can get, the amount of cash we can already buy with (Bryan and I), money in our current house, etc etc. This is the most obvious, but will be the hardest progress bar to fill. It’s basically liquid assets and the mortgage we’re able to commit to. This is where the majority of the fundraising will need to focus and we will need to work hard at.

I am encouraged that we’re already almost a quarter of the way there though. I won’t go into backstory here either, but given how life took a sort of hard reset for me in the last few years and I’ve only been moving forward for a year or so now, this is a positive start and makes me glad I finally crunched the numbers fully.

The next bar is a little bit more difficult to pin down and is where a lot of my research will have to go into ongoing issues. It’s not smart if we raise all these funds for buying a castle and then can’t afford to look after it, pay the fixed cost bills and keep the lights on etc. Now some money will probably go towards this from people coming to stay for retreats, others who come to live with us more long term etc. But I wanted to know for sure that if the worst happened and it was just Bryan and I by ourselves in a castle, can we keep it. I’ve worked out that for things like council tax (British equivalent of property taxes), internet, maintenance, electricity, gas etc. We need to make sure there’s about £1800 coming in per month.

I’ve not included things like food, cause that fluctuates entirely with how many people are in the castle, or any cost like that which we cover for ourselves already. If anyone stays with us, comes to do a retreat, or we host a conference, feeding those people and any extras they generate will be part of the cost we pass on. Or we decide to cover to sponsor someone free or something. Either way, it doesn’t need to be included in the amount for making sure we don’t lose the castle once we’ve gained it.

Similar to the castle fund itself, we can already put some money toward this that already goes to those costs in our lives and I also already have some low level investments generating monthly income that can add to the pot. As such we are 27.2% of the way toward this goal as well. It might not seem like a lot of a fairly small monthly sum, but we’re not factoring in things like food, clothing, mortgage payments or anything like that which I also already pay for and would be paying for in the castle too. I expect this will be the easiest bar to increase, however.

The more I have invested, the more that takes care of itself. The more I earn and have disposable income, the more I can contribute. And the more books I have, the more that will go up. It’s also the hardest to calculate accurately, so I’m being cautious. My book income is often higher than the amount I’ve used for my calculations and the investments can return higher amounts, but I’ve used the base levels I’d expect if I was sick for an entire month, or whatever.

Which brings me to the final bar. Debt. This is probably the hardest part to talk about. Bryan and I have some debt. In the grand scheme of needing £1.5m for a castle, it’s not a lot of debt. Maybe about 1% of the total. But I wanted to include it simply to be accurate and complete. Part of the debt is also my student loan. I’m close to having it paid off and if I do get it paid off then I regain 9% of my income each month (UK student loans are paid back via a percentage of income per month). There’s also a small loan we took out to cover the cost of the first stage of Bryan’s spouse visa when it ended up twice as expensive as we budgeted for.

Getting the two of us to the point where we could live in the same place, be working together, and both be able to support each other has taken some serious energy, money and stress. We couldn’t even begin to think of working toward a goal like this until we were able to actually be in one place with half the bills and everything else that gets easier when you’re in one place.

That’s left us with some debt to settle and paying that back would free up a lot more cash to go toward the ongoing costs when the time comes. We’re sorting that ourselves anyway, and will continue to do so, no matter what, but I felt it would be disingenuous of us to talk about making forward progress without showing the whole picture. Part of that financial progress is getting to the point that we’re not paying interest on debts anymore. Paying off my student loan also directly impacts my buying power in the UK.

So, that’s the three progress bars. We plan on focusing on getting the debt sorted to start with, but we will be working toward all three simultaneously. Next, I will aim to increase investments and income to tackle the monthly amount needed, partially because having that amount coming in sooner also grows the liquid assets faster.

And then finally we’ll focus on building the actual pot needed to go buy a castle. The buying power will also automatically grow as my book income goes up, but, as I’ve already said, I’m wary of relying on that solely too much. Book royalties are inherently unstable, so this will remain a conservative part of the process, but probably the bulk of what gets us there.

I’ll blog some more next week on some of the work related stuff I’m doing to bring in funds, and also on the financial advice we’ve been looking into and getting to help grow those numbers.

Thank you everyone for reading this, not so easy to write, but necessary part of the process, look at financial numbers and the actual money behind the goal. I hope it’s not been too dry, I tried to keep numbers brief and talk about the reasons behind them.

If anyone wants me to talk about anything more, has questions about what we’re doing, looking at etc. feel free to drop them in the comments.

One of the big ways I plan on paying for this castle and to help fund the running of the retreat, is essentially my own creativity. Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know, I write novels. I’ve written quite a few already in various genres.

So far these are getting me toward my goal, but if I’m going to get to the amount of money needed any time soon, I’m going to need my books to pick up some of the slack. This blog is also partially about me helping people.

I firmly believe that on the way to big goals and dreams, it helps to start doing the parts that can be done already, so on Monday’s I’m going to blog a bit more about the creativity side of things, marketing, publishing, trying to make money from my creativity.

This is also part of the plan, which I started to mention last week. A dream has to be turned into a goal and then a plan has to be made to reach the goal.

Writing good books at a good pace is a big part of the plan. Marketing them is another part of the plan. So, this last week, I spent a lot of time setting this up, writing books I have contracts for and already promised readers and starting to think about how all this aligns with my goals.

I’ve already worked out that I write faster without dropping the quality of my work if I have at least two books to work on at once. My mind can be mulling over plot issues from one in the background while I work on the other.

The last month or so, I’ve pushed that up to five to see if there was an upper limit to the number. I think we’ve discovered that it needs to be three or four in at least two genres. It’s been a bit too much to keep straight in my head.

It’s okay to discover that though. It might change in the future, but for now, I’m going to focus on finishing some books over the next couple of weeks and bringing that down to a manageable level again. I’ll talk more on coming Mondays about the goals and longer term plans around my books.

This week, Bryan (my husband) and I also started our youtube channel for audiobooks. He’s been narrating one of my fantasy series and we’re trying a new platform. It’s yet another avenue for revenue to come in for us and it gives readers who struggle to afford audio a way to listen and generate us some income at the same time. Early days there, but I don’t like leaving money on a table we could have.

I also set up a Patreon for the castle, since several folks asked for it, both here and on social media. I’ve set it up with a sort of pay what you want tier, only. You just select the $1 and change it to whatever you want to give monthly.

Because there isn’t a bunch of actual tiers, and I don’t really know how long this is going to take, what we’ve decided to do is keep track of lifetime Patreon amounts (thankfully Patreon give me a total for that really easily), and give people some rewards based on where they get to by the time we buy the building.

It still feels totally strange to me to have one, but it’s there and I am so so grateful that you want to help in this way. You can find it here.

All that said and linked to, there will never be any pressure to give and I really don’t want folks to get themselves into a bad financial situation or anything like that.

There are also loads of other ways to help me get there that don’t involve just donating money. You can tell people about this. Both this blog and recommending my books to people. You can go listen on our youtube channel, read the books on kindle unlimited, and I even have signed print copies and merch on my website if you have folks in your world who would appreciate those things as gifts. Links for both these are at the bottom of the page with those super cool icons.

I’m also very eager to learn about lots of different elements that go into getting to the castle and running successful retreats when we have it, so if you have advice or knowledge about anything like financial investing, retreat budgeting, hidden costs, or anything else I’ve not thought of, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

It also helps a lot to know you’re all there, reading, encouraging and hopefully being inspired too!

I’m going to blog again on Thursday and this time work out the big, what do we actually need, part of making a plan, so until then, as my adorable husband often says, keep being awesome folks, and thank you for being so amazingly encouraging so far!

When I wrote my blog post on Monday and put it up on this very simple little website, I almost didn’t tell anyone I’d done it. I wrestled most of the day with a lot of my own fears and insecurities. Fears that people would think I was crazy. I would be laughed at, no one would take this seriously.

This is a big dream.

I’ve also wrestled a lot in the past with feeling like talking about this sort of thing is a weird sort of brag. A call for attention. And for an extrovert, I don’t particularly like a lot of attention. I love people, spending time with them, talking and all that sort of thing, but I’m happy to be part of the crowd. I don’t have to be out in front. I just want to be there.

I’ve also carried this dream around in my heart for so long and had so many negative reactions at the beginning that I have only recently begun talking about it again. Here and there, with people I thought could handle me saying it. But it was always ever so slightly jokey. A defense mechanism that if maybe I didn’t take it too seriously when I talked about it, I wouldn’t notice if other people didn’t take it very seriously either.

But I also know, my biggest goal for all of this, is to help people. And a very special conversation happened with a 4thewords friend a couple of weeks ago (4thewords is a writing website for those who aren’t familiar). They were there for me when I was trying to figure out if I should even start this blog at all and reminded me that not only could this be good for me to have accountability but that in general people are inspired by seeing others achieve their dreams and goals.

I was so worried that I would come across crazy or attention seeking, that I had forgotten how much I could help if I got over my fears.

So, I gave myself a little pep talk, reminded myself that this is probably just the first of many fears I will have to push past, and shared my blog with folks.

While I had hoped people would be encouraging and encouraged. I hadn’t expected anywhere near the level of support I was shown. I may have cried a few happy, relieved tears over the last few days.

Thank you, everyone, for believing that this is possible.

I’m pretty sure I’m still going to have days where I look at this and wonder if it really is, but for now, I’m going to try to hang onto this feeling, and come back to this post when I need reminding that I’m not alone in trying to make this happen, or believing in it.

Dreams are a big part of our lives. They give us meaning and help us strive, but to turn a dream into reality, it is going to require goals, or at least some kind of plan.

I’ve always thought that the biggest difference between a dream and a goal is that one is the end result you’re dreaming of having, and a goal is something you can plan to get to. I dreamed of a building full of creatives. My goal is to buy a castle and invite creatives to come for retreats and projects. They sound almost the same, but they’re actually slightly different.

With a goal, I can start thinking about how to do that precise thing. It’s going to help to know how much a Scottish castle actually costs. Or at least a range.

A goal is like the first part of making a plan. It’s a tangible, final step. And often it facilitates a dream.

To think of it another way. You might dream to see the northern lights. The goal would be to book a trip where you’d get to see them. It’s like the practical part of the dream.

Goals are also something much more controllable. I can control whether I book a holiday or not. I might need to find the money, but it’s still something I control. Roughly.

So, my next task is figuring out my exact end goal. What do I physically need to aim for? I’ve done some of this research already. Maybe quite a lot of research.

I want a castle, or really cool looking building, in Scotland, that has at least 10-15 bedrooms and some good communal spaces for creativity.

That’s the goal. The next part is figuring out the plan to get there. The building blocks of stuff I can control and tasks I can go through to get me closer. Mostly because I can’t do anything without knowing what my next step is.

But this blog is already long enough, mostly cause I was a little overwhelmed at how awesome and supportive everyone is being, so I’ll blog again in a few days about the plan part of making this dream a reality. 

Short answer. Yes.

Well, this one does. I’m sure some don’t. This wouldn’t be a very sensible blog if the answer were no though.

Longer answer: That’s essentially what this blog is going to be about, and it’s complicated and there’s many reasons to it, and I don’t have all the answers, but this has been a dream of mine for a very long time.

So let me explain the dream and how it began.

I’ve always loved helping people and unlike a lot of other authors, I’m an extrovert. Possibly an ambivert at times, but I am certainly not an introvert.

Since I was young, I was used to a bustling house where there were plenty of people to spend time with. I also had a mother who would welcome in any other kids who needed somewhere safe, caring and welcoming to be. She would feed us all, no matter how much it cost her.

And she always cooked extra for dinner, just in case someone walked in the door at the last minute and she wanted to invite them to stay. It invariably led to us eating leftovers for lunch, and sometimes even breakfast, more often than not. But it was a way of life I grew used to.

Mostly, that people were safe in my house, no matter what was going on in their lives. People were accepted for who they were.

One of the harshest parts of growing up for me was discovering that others aren’t like this.

It also took being in my adult years for me to work out that I wanted to be creative above all else. I tried to do a maths and physics degree, and while I could manage to understand it and I was passable at it, my heart wasn’t in it. I then tried to be an accountant, and while this also wasn’t what my heart wanted, it has proved useful, and will hopefully come back up in future blog posts.

Most importantly, I finally worked out that I had been telling stories in one way or another since I was tiny. So I told some more.

I quickly discovered the world isn’t particularly kind to brand new creative folks. There’s bills to pay, a muse to figure out how to wrangle, and a lot of people look down on being creative for some very silly reasons that I’m also not going to go into today, other than to say they’re very silly indeed and I don’t agree with them.

Being creative is one of the things that makes humans, well… human. It’s how we express so many parts of our souls, hearts and minds.

Without creativity we might as well only exist to survive.

If you can’t at least, to some degree, agree with this statement, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. None of what I’m trying to do will make much sense without the idea that creativity is one of the most important pursuits in our lives.

Anyway, back to the point slightly. I’ve gone off on a small tangent. The point is that all these things add up to make my goal make sense.

I want to make it easier for creatives to be creative. I want to help practically, financially, and I want to recreate that safe, accepting, nurturing environment my mother provided when I was young in order for others to flourish.

My first visions of a large building full of creatives that I manage and teach in came to me like many things do.

As a dream.

In this dream there were some friends who helped me run it, and students, or people we were wanting to help, for lack of better ways to describe them. We worked on projects in collaboration, separately, and just generally worked together to make the world a better place through story in one format or another, including, music and dance and painting etc.

It took several more days for me to realise that this idea excited me way beyond any other.

At the time, well over fifteen years ago, when I told people they laughed at me. No one took the idea seriously.

The weight of life, the negativity of the people around me, and not managing to get my own creative career off the ground squashed the dream, for a while, at least.

And then I had my wake up moment. The moment I decided that my life had to move toward my dreams again and I was going to have to make it. I think all people have these moments in them, and I’ll talk more about what caused my wake up moment another time. But it happened in June 2019. June 2nd to be very precise.

It took me a little longer to figure out exactly what I wanted to do about this wake up moment, but I clearly remember staying up very late only 3 weeks later to put together a plan for the first step. I wasn’t ready to think about it getting me the big creative retreat yet, but it was a step toward making my dreams a reality.

Over the next few years, I took quite a few steps, shedding what had been holding me back, finding other creatives who understood me and a support group to get there. My own creative career started to flourish and make the idea of more possible again, until I finally dared to utter my dream again to someone.

I dared to tell my now husband, Bryan. And unlike everyone before him, he was enthusiastic about the idea. He asked questions and, most importantly, he believed it would happen.

At some point around this time I began to look at possibilities finally. I quickly discovered that not only was Scotland far cheaper than many places in the world to buy large houses for creative retreats. But they also had a massive amount of castles that had been maintained as homes or hotels.

On top of that I discovered one very important element. I like Scotland more than many other places I’ve visited.

So, my biggest dream, and the one I’m aiming for, is to buy a Scottish castle, turn it into a creative retreat, and help other creatives fill this world with wonderful stories.

There’s still a long way for me to go to get there, and thank you for also reading this far with me. I hope you’ll come back and keep reading as I blog about my journey toward the castle. And hopefully beyond.

You’re cordially invited to join me on my quest to raise the funds, find the right castle and get started with filling it full of creatives.

I hope me being open, honest, and letting you in on this quest will be inspiring and help you too. For me, putting this into words helps. It gives me a tangible feel to a very large dream. And a first step.

I’ll be back on Thursday to blog more about turning a dream into goals, and figuring out the actual goal a little more. For now, I think this is long enough.

If you have any dreams and goals that scare the pants off you, but you’re going to try to do it anyway, I would love to hear about them. Maybe we can cheer each other on to victory and success, and much celebrating!

Why do I want a castle? What is this blog about? Who is Talia Beckett? And who does she think she is telling everyone about all this?

I’m sure you have lots of questions and I will do my best to answer them over the next few months. To start with, the simple part is that I’m an author, and it’s been a dream of mine for several decades now to run a creative retreat for all sorts of creative folks to come and get help with making creativity a career, finishing a project, or just hang out with other cool creative folks for a bit and learn what they can.

There’s a lot more to this than that, but for now, that’s sort of the summary. I’ll blog more in a few days about some of the other details!