Redundancy – what next?

A senior in the UK finds a niche busi­ness, which allows him to keep active … and travel and save some money at the same time.

BY: Brian Luck­hurst, UK

In Jan­u­ary 2009, I attended a meet­ing with col­leagues, where our MD explained that, because of the down­turn in our busi­ness due to the eco­nomic cli­mate, he had to make the dif­fi­cult deci­sion of mak­ing some of us redun­dant. It was not a pleas­ant meet­ing for any of us. There was no need to ask why we needed to reduce staff, I think we all had sus­pected this would hap­pen at some time and per­son­ally I was sur­prised that it hadn’t hap­pened earlier.

We were all asked for our thoughts and com­ments in writ­ing along with alter­na­tive pro­pos­als to avoid this action. As my job was unique within the com­pany and one that I had cre­ated, I did not want to see the posi­tion dis­ap­pear, both per­son­ally and com­pany wise, so I sug­gested that I work a shorter week to help reduce the com­pany costs. This at least would retain the job that I had worked so hard to estab­lish and one that I saw as being of great value within our busi­ness. Luck­ily, (I think that is the cor­rect term to use), my pro­posal was accepted, so from Feb­ru­ary 2009, I found myself work­ing a two-​day week or, in other words, earn­ing 60 per­cent less.

Although I had been in the indus­try for over 30 years, I had only worked for this com­pany for the last six, so any redun­dancy pack­age would have been lim­ited, so we were nat­u­rally relieved to still have some money com­ing in.

The ques­tion now was could we sur­vive finan­cially and what would I do with the other three days. Yes, we could sur­vive with some changes and care­ful money man­age­ment but what do I do with the three free days I now found myself the not-​so-​proud owner of? At the age of 59, I did not expect it was going to be easy to find other employ­ment, espe­cially in a reces­sion and with so much com­pe­ti­tion from other unfor­tu­nate indi­vid­u­als, and so it proved. At least I had some work, unlike many of my contemporaries.

I had always said, indeed boasted, that I could stop work­ing by tak­ing early retire­ment and I would not be bored. Wrong! I found myself at a loss as to what to do, hav­ing car­ried out all the post­poned jobs around the house. I also felt guilty being on the golf course when my wife was at work, (at least I was now doing the weekly shopping!).

Our ven­ture

For the pre­vi­ous year, my wife Catri­ona and I had talked about set­ting up a web­site when we retired to keep us active. It would be some­thing we could do together and even, if we were lucky, earn some money from. We decided, there­fore, that we should bring for­ward this project. How to go about it, was the next question.

We have always thought that Home Exchang­ing for hol­i­days is a great con­cept, hav­ing swapped our home a few times. We decided that there was a place for another Home Exchange web­site, but only if we spe­cialised. We decided to con­cen­trate on a par­tic­u­lar age group, one we know well as it includes our­selves, hence www​.home​ex​change50​plus​.com evolved. We believe that exchang­ing is likely to be more suc­cess­ful with peo­ple from a sim­i­lar age group who have shared inter­ests and values.

Although we both knew a bit about com­put­ers we did not have the exper­tise to design and build a web­site, so we needed help. We approached a few design­ers, some of whom seemed very good but came at a price, how­ever we were lucky to find a recently estab­lished designer who was keen to work with us to build up his port­fo­lio. Although it took longer than we had antic­i­pated and proved to be a steep learn­ing curve for all, we launched the web­site in late 2009.

There are many good Home Exchange web­sites out there and, in truth, some not so good, so by look­ing at the com­pe­ti­tion we could eval­u­ate what we wanted to do but, per­haps more impor­tantly, what we didn’t want to do. Our main cri­te­ria was to try and keep it sim­ple and easy to use, and hope­fully we have achieved this. How­ever, although in our opin­ion it is easy to use and nav­i­gate around, due to the type of web­site it is, requir­ing pub­lic input etc, it is quite com­plex in the back­ground. It is an ongo­ing project and we have a list of updates and improve­ments that we wish to make given time and finance, and I sus­pect there will always be some­thing that we want to tweak!

By spe­cial­is­ing in a par­tic­u­lar mar­ket, you limit the mar­ket­place. Although seniors, boomers, 50plusers or what­ever we call our­selves, are expand­ing hugely in num­bers, the chal­lenge now, and indeed in the future, is to locate those peo­ple and per­suade them to become mem­bers of our website.

As a new web­site we wanted to pub­li­cise it but we also wanted to keep costs down, so took a view that, as it was a long-​term project for us, we would not spend money on adver­tis­ing it, rely­ing on word-​of-​mouth and other forms of pub­lic­ity like an edi­to­r­ial we received in “France” mag­a­zine. We had also decided early on not to charge ini­tially for becom­ing a mem­ber, unlike many of the other exchange clubs, as we hoped this would encour­age peo­ple to join us.

At the time of writ­ing, we have 115 exchange homes in 15 coun­tries and over 100 rental prop­er­ties (which are not age-​exclusive), and long-​term we would aim to have num­bers in the thousands.

Our con­cept

What is Home Exchange? Home Exchang­ing or Home Swap­ping is when you agree to swap homes, and often cars, with some­one; you stay in their home and they stay in yours, and no money changes hands. It is an eco­nom­i­cal way to hol­i­day and an excit­ing way to travel, to expe­ri­ence other cul­tures and see other coun­tries dif­fer­ently, through local eyes, not as a tourist.

Home and Hos­pi­tal­ity Exchange for hol­i­days is not a new con­cept, indeed it was started in the 1950s by a group of teach­ers. How­ever more and more of us, from all walks of life, are now doing it, not least to save money in these finan­cially dif­fi­cult times.

Why do it? Sav­ing money is the obvi­ous ben­e­fit – with no accom­mo­da­tion costs, the sav­ings can be sub­stan­tial. Imag­ine how much more you will have to spend by not pay­ing hotel bills or villa rental! Other major sav­ings can be achieved by swap­ping cars, sports equip­ment and even boats, by not hav­ing to dine out every night, even by play­ing as a guest at your host’s sports/​golf club.

As I write this arti­cle, Catri­ona and I cer­tainly have no regrets about cre­at­ing the web­site. Yes it has taken time and money to get it to this stage, and yes there were times when we asked our­selves, have we done the right thing, but we are glad we did it. I would rec­om­mend to any­one in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion to go for it, do plenty of research and plan before­hand and do some­thing that is of inter­est to you.

We both see the web­site devel­op­ing and given time our “long-​term project” will pro­vide us with a ful­fill­ing and busy “retire­ment”, with lots of travel thrown in and per­haps even a sup­ple­ment to the pen­sion as well.

Brian Luck­hurst is a Scot, now 60, who arrived in Lon­don in the late 60s and never left. He and Catri­ona have a son and daugh­ter, both of whom have more or less flown the nest. Hav­ing over 20 years’ expe­ri­ence as an estate agent in Eng­land, Luck­hurst now spends two days a week as an audit and com­pli­ance man­ager for a chain of fran­chised estate agents.