Charlie

Then you don't have a doubt problem, you have a focus problem. Stop building anything new for two months and just sell more of that one thing.

Eight months at £150 a month isn't a bad sign, it's an unmeasured one. The number that matters isn't the monthly total, it's the direction and where it comes from. Pull your last eight months into a list and answer two things: is month 8 bigger than month 4, and did any single month's income come from a source you could deliberately repeat?

If it's flat and every sale came from somewhere different and random, that's the actual warning. If it's slowly climbing and there's one channel doing most of the work, you're fine and you should be pouring time into that channel rather than into new ideas.

Stop checking the balance monthly. Genuinely. Quarterly at most, and set a calendar reminder to look rather than opening the app when you feel like it. The emotional cost of watching a flat line is real and it's the main thing that makes people abandon a plan that was working.

Stop work today and send one email. Not a confrontation, a summary. Something like: here's the original scope we agreed, here's what's been added since, here's what's complete, here's what remains. Then give them two options — deliver the original five pages for the original £600 by the original date, or continue with the expanded scope at £X additional.

The reason this works is that you're not accusing anyone of anything. Scope creep is almost never malicious, it's a client who doesn't have a mental model of how much work each request is. Putting it in a list is often the first time they see it.

And send it now, at halfway. At 90% done you have no leverage and they know it.

That's the usual outcome. The client who blows up over a scope email was going to be a nightmare at the invoice stage anyway, so you'd rather find out at week three.

Honest question worth asking yourself: is 70/30 still your real target, or did you pick it three years ago and never revisit it? If you're genuinely comfortable at 78, changing the target on purpose is legitimate. Drifting there by inaction isn't. The difference is whether you'd hold it through a 30% drop.

Then rebalance. The allocation you can hold through the worst month beats the one with the better backtest.

Before you decide, ask the £45 client whether it's genuinely ongoing or a three month project that they're describing as ongoing. Those are very different bets and people use the words interchangeably.

One thing to verify: is 4.1% the APR or the flat rate? On some car finance the advertised rate is calculated on the original balance rather than the reducing one, which makes the effective rate close to double. If that's the case, pay it off and stop reading.

One thing to avoid: if the funds are close enough to be considered substantially identical and you sell one at a loss to buy the other, some tax systems will disallow the loss. Doesn't apply to you since you have a gain, but worth knowing before you get clever later.

Also, ask your friend directly and specifically. Not 'let me know if anyone needs help' but 'do you know two people running a shop or trade business who've fallen behind on their books?' Vague asks get vague results. Specific asks get names.

Also set aside a percentage of every payout into a separate pot from now on. Pick a number that's higher than you think you need — you can always give yourself the surplus back, but scrambling for a tax bill you've already spent is genuinely miserable.

That explains it perfectly. So I should be keeping a running record of these amounts?

It's the taxable one unfortunately. Spreadsheet it is.