Revenue, Spend and Changes

For the UK, 6th April is the beginning of the tax year. Starting last year, Inland Revenue allowed people to continue selling on platforms like E-Bay and Etsy freely, but anything that accrued sales over £1000 would be subject to tax and the seller would be sent self assessment forms from the tax people.

The various platforms are now obliged to submit client sales figures to the Inland Revenue and that of course that will include PayPal receipts. I can’t actually work out how much of selling your old things like clothes or say a loft clearance can avoid the tax, however someone like me, who only sells wargame related things can easily look like a trader and my understanding is that the ceiling will kick in straight away.

 

The past few weeks have been a bit costly with various pre-orders and purchases, so it is nice to have reached a new tax year, with my allowance zeroed and seeing something going out of the collection to bring some funds in (above parcel).

The collection is a bit of a living thing with regular tweaks and nudges to keep it current with whatever fad I am going through, but playability, streamlining and an eye to storage are generally constant themes and now, increasingly, persistent back and leg pain problems are also taking their part in tailoring what sits on the shelves.

Two mapper type board games become an easy target, as not only do they generally require a lot of bending and stretching across, but by their nature (bigger), they take longer to play, adding to the amount of time spent bending and stretching etc.

I generally sit at the dining table to play 1 mapper and smaller boardgames, while figures and larger boardgames are take to a higher table that is 40” off the floor, at which I stand and it is the prolonged standing that exacerbates my back and leg pain. So bringing more games back to the dining table makes sense and the games at the other table need to be shorter games for less standing.

I was recently having correspondence with another gamer regarding this sort of thing (Hi S) and he felt that the smaller affairs such as Neil Thomas sized games are looking increasingly attractive compared to trying to re-create full battle games. I entirely concur. I have plenty of boardgames that can cover the ‘big battle’ and so I am happy for my figures to be doing something different and I seem to favour the divisional sized game and lower for them.

Why mention this? Well for a while, I have been dithering about getting a smaller scale army for smaller games to take to the dining table (for a 4’ x 2’ mat). I like the idea of the Epic figures, where you get lots of ‘heads’ in the unit, but I don’t like their formulaic method of ranking up in shoulder to shoulder strips, where it looks like each figure is welded to their neighbour …. So I have ordered some Pendraken 10mm, just enough to do an infantry unit, a cavalry unit and a gun battery, so that I can look at the practicality and result of basing the figures up tight, but lose that ‘welded’ look.

I want to get off the treadmill of painting, so buying into yet another project has me wary, but I plan to base them, then spray black primer, a quick light dry brush around the outer facings and exposed areas, then just dabbing on colours where the brush can quickly reach, which will mostly be on the front of the unit and rear of the unit, everything else stays black.

It will be a bit rough and ready and I know, initially at least, I will not be happy with that, but it might be time to get over it and it is radical enough (for me) to make a break on how I do stuff. The figures have been dispatched, but already, as I paint a nice group of 28mm Austrian Jägers, I am cooling on the idea - we shall see. Also I really don’t want to get the smaller lads and end up with project creep with more units and bigger games, that would totally defeat the purpose.

As for the boardgames, I thought that I had pretty much nailed that, but they too have an appointment with Mr. Change!

Anyway the point is that my collection is frequently in a state of flux and that as things leave the collection, posts here will reflect that. My other site (Commanders) regularly gets a little weeding, that totally strips out the stuff that has gone, so that the content stays relevant to what is actually going on and so keeps me true. 

The size of both figure and boardgame collections are kept quite tight and concise, so things generally have to earn their place to stay and by that I mean have a reasonable prospect of getting to the table. A few things might get kept just for the pleasure of owning them, but with storage at a premium, not many things will find ‘favours’ granted to them :-)

Anyway, a word to the wise, if you are planning to clear out the collection, in the UK, it might be better to space this over a couple of years rather than doing it in one go, if the tax implication bothers you.