Hollis Pike

Own your consumables, rent your capital. Batteries, cards, cables, stands and sandbags are cheap, always needed, and miserable to be short of on a Tuesday morning. Bodies, big lights and long lenses can stay someone else's depreciation problem until a job actually demands them twice in a row.

Minute granularity is the trade-off. Pick 09:07 and you might get it at 09:07:58. Nobody notices for reminders. People absolutely notice for anything whose copy says "at exactly".

The annual report usually has a distribution characterisation table that answers it in one page. Not fun reading, but it is right there.

Both, depending on why they are doing it. Mechanically it is simple: return of capital is not treated as income when you receive it, so it is not taxed now, and instead it reduces your cost basis so you pay a larger capital gain when you sell. It is a deferral, not free money. Whether it is a red flag depends entirely on the fund. Certain structures — property, pipelines, funds with heavy depreciation — generate genuinely non-taxable distributions as a normal part of their accounting. A fund paying out more than it earns and labelling the shortfall as return of capital is eating itself. Look at whether distributions exceed cash flow year after year. This is also exactly the sort of thing where an hour with an accountant is worth it, because the treatment varies a lot by country.

Too broad. Plenty of healthy structures return capital because depreciation exceeds accounting income. The test is coverage over several years, not the label.

The bigger issue is that the delays were not your fault and you paid for them anyway. Put in a clause saying that if client materials arrive more than N days late the timeline moves and further work is billed hourly. It is not aggressive, it is how every trade on earth works.

Two 30 minute sessions beat one 60 minute session for retention, so do not dismiss A entirely. But at this budget I would do the conversation hour plus one structured lesson a month where you bring the specific things that broke.

Exchanges are great for confidence and poor for correction — the other person is usually being polite, and half your hour ends up in English. Worth doing alongside, not instead.

Foreign holdings take longer and are messier. Withholding tax is deducted at source so the amount is smaller than the headline, and it can arrive a week or two after the stated payment date depending on the custodian chain.