One of the attendees at my recent CashFlow Clinic was telling me how she finally turned her cash flow problems around dramatically. I thought you might be interested in her story.

Bridget was struggling as a single parent working a number of jobs to barely make ends meet. With a $250,000 mortgage, the repayments on this debt alone was gobbling up a large chunk of the monthly income. She had a 4 bed 2 bathroom house with a detached double car shed in the back yard and everything was going into just hanging on to that. You could not describe her life as 'living'. It was just an existence.

She had already come up with the idea of taking in Exchange Students on 6 month contracts but this had just made her busy life busier and there were more mouths to feed and extra expenses gobbling up the extra income. It had not worked out as well as she had hoped.

Finally it got too much. It was looking more and more like the choice was coming down to either 'go mad' or 'lose the house', neither of which were attractive options.

Then an idea began to grow in Bridget's head of another way out of this dilemma.

Bridget told me her friends said she was mad to even consider it, but this is what she did.

She borrowed some money and paid to have her detached garage modified so she could live in there with her children. A buyers edge card was used to purchase a new fridge, washing machine and stove and a trip to St Vinnies added three second hand beds to the inventory.

The house was rented out furnished for $350 a week and her new life began in a newly fitted-out granny flat in the back yard.

In Bridget's words, this was the best thing she has ever done and now she is looking for another older home she can raise and build in underneath so she has more rooms to rent out.

In less than two years all the borrowings have been repaid and she is way out in front with savings and surplus cash flow.

The bank previously valued her house at $280k and now they have valued it at $325k because of the great little granny flat.

Not one of her friends has a negative word to say about it now they can see what a difference it has made in her life and they kinda like what she has done.

Of course it would have been easy to find all the reasons why this could not be done and just as easily it would have been possible to find other variations on what she did that would have had just as good an outcome. e.g. a Caravan might have been involved if there was not a separate car shed that could be modified. OR a floor plan might have been modified to allow some other variation on the same concept.