I'm finding it quite difficult to determine the difference between making your home available to a lodger and making your home available for bed and breakfast. And what is a paying guest?
Taking in a lodger seems very casual (if you register for the Rent a Room scheme, the tax is easy too) yet a lodger can be someone who stays in your home for years or someone who only comes to stay every second Tuesday or once in a blue moon. Or I suppose, just the once.
Bed and breakfast seems more formal, with the necessity to register with the local council, food and fire regulations etc yet a bed and breakfast guest could stay in your home for months, visit regularly or just visit the once.
Can anybody help me here?
For the record, the context in which I'm coming to this is as follows: Retirement isn't that far away and I'm thinking about ways of passing on some the knowledge and skills I've accumulated over the years. Something like U3A though not necessarily directly under the auspices of U3A. Doing this for free isn't really a problem and local people could come and go at will but there could be people who live further afield who might like to visit for weekends, weeks or longer and I'd like to think that accepting them as paying guests didn't hurl me into a regimented council "scheme."
Oh well, then there is the planning aspect. I noted that training is some kind of special use so residential sites that do education have to apply for planning permission.
Very relevant here but sensitive in that full planning may not have been obtained.
Local authorities take a close interest in the accommodation available within their district. Lots of boxes to tick:-(
A danger is that while tax reliefs encourage you to take a lodger, the same space used for B+B or short term lets may be considered a business use; requiring planning consent and potentially changing the status of part of your home.
This can impact on community charge and the taxation of any future sale.
When we were looking at running a B&B, lots of the regulations were based o= n the idea that the guests would be unfamiliar with the house, so that for = instance in a fire, they wouldn't know the escape routes. I expect that a l= odger would be expected to be either a regular guest or longer term, so tho= se issues wouldn't apply. Getting the permissions was fairly painless, and would have been very strai= ghtforward in a 2 storey house - the only problems we had were around fire = regs for the attic.
My thanks for the positive comment - and the useful and positive comments of other contributors to the thread.
This is probably TMI so and move on if terminal boredom sets in but:
I enjoy working with musical instruments: I look on retirement not as getting away from them but as not having to make money out of them any more.
Musical instrument makers don't make a lot of money (cue old joke about the guitar maker who won the lottery). You may think I was prescient about the way pension schemes have nose-dived but I decided from the outset that making my assets and savings work for me in retirement was going to give me a better pension than going into a scheme. In my circumstances, I still think that I was right, but realising the income is the current issue.
Plan A was to buy additional property to let. Round here, the rental earnings vs property prices graph makes cheap property most profitable at about 7% gross pa but unless you plan to be a slum landlord, the overheads will eat a lot of that and overheads are in real £££s not notional percentages. And IMO, the days when you factored rising property prices into the equation are over for the time being. Besides, signs are that bureaucracy is going to make property rentals even more of a hassle in the future and I don't need that in a pension scheme.
Plan B is to buy a bigger house so that I can let part of it without everyone getting under each others feet. Naturally, a decent workshop at the end of the garden. The idea of using it to teach others has an appeal. This really enthuses me.
However, I've sort of stumbled into a Plan C. Given that most of the good things that have happened to me have been things that I've stumbled into by accident, I'm giving it consideration because I stumbled into this from a chance conversation.
I've got the opportunity to buy a huge 5-story mixed business/residential building and I'm trying to see if I can tease out of it a business plan that won't bankrupt me. I'll probably take the safe option and pass this opportunity by because I can see it being a local authority nightmare and a money pit. Northerners will know the sort of building I mean: a combined overdwelling and underdwelling where it presents as a modest 2-story building from the road but a towering five-story Grade II listed edifice from the canal. I can envisage big workshops and residential courses (and as I hinted in my first post, I'd like to make the money from the residential bit but make the courses free) but all the other considerations aside, I'm not sure I'll want to run something that complex when I'm in my seventies
- that's if I make it into my seventies, of course.
You are all very welcome to comment and I'll read the comments with great interest but you ought to know that I'm not really into crowdsourcing a business plan when it's only my money going into it.
Some distant friends tried this in France. They are keen on quilting and fabric collage. The concept was short residential holidays with quilting tuition.
Unfortunately the recession coupled with property price changes and threats of changed taxation rules hit them very hard leading to a housing downscale on their return.
I suppose you need to be confident that potential guests would find the area worth visiting anyway. They won't be beavering away constructing instruments for 24 hours each day. Are you likely to provide catering or must they forage locally. If a couple, what does the wife/husband do while the other is busy. Is the timescale for the finished work within what might be afforded for a holiday?
These things can work. My wife and a friend had a week in Majorca last year doing water colour and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. That was a full package with airport transfer, catering and tuition.
Sometimes these holidays involve art combined with walking for the spouse.
Listed - money pit. And one assumes a huge amount of space. This is supposed to be "retirement" and "enjoyable". What ever you go for needs to run and provide enough income without a great deal of effort from yourself, baove what you find enjoyable. As you say is this practical in your 70's?
Is there scope for having a sort of music/craft co-operative of some sort with others renting space in your building?
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