The Old Figure
I have a regular client who pays me the fee I named when I badly needed a regular client. He pays promptly. This is one of his irritating qualities. There is no unpaid invoice I can wave about, no offence against our arrangement. Each month I write his company newsletter and he pays the agreed sum. I charge him considerably more in my head. His bookkeeper is unaware of this.
The newsletter has grown a little. Not enough to account for the difference between what I get and what I want. I have looked for that excuse. I have counted the extra paragraphs, thought about the calls, tried to establish that he is receiving something he hasn’t paid for. It would be easier to ask for money if I could catch him doing something wrong.
When he asks for another round of changes, I become a man of principle. We agreed on two rounds. Here is a third. I can talk about scope and professional practice until neither of us wants the newsletter. What I cannot seem to say is that the original arrangement no longer suits me. I defend its little perimeter as though there were treasure inside.
Seventeen pounds ninety-two would be well within my fighting weight. It is also an amount I might surrender without answering a letter. I am capable of both reactions, sometimes before lunch. It depends on whether I am hungry, whether I have work due, whether the demand arrives while I am already angry with somebody else. This is an undignified way to manage money. It is how some of mine gets managed.
A renter in Elephant and Castle was asked for £17.92 more a month on a one-bedroom flat. His existing rent was £2,560. I find the smaller figure easier to think about. I can place it among things I might buy. The larger figure has the dead weight of an arrangement already made. You can get used to anything being due on the first.
If that little increase arrived here on a Friday, I would want to put it away until Monday. On Monday I would have work. There would be a perfectly good evening available at some point, but I would want that one too. Not for anything admirable. To go out without having arranged to meet someone. To eat slowly somewhere that would not hurry me along. To get home with no useful account of where I had been.
The price of the evening would be £17.92, and then the same again each month, although I would have stopped doing the calculation. I would call this being practical. It might be practical. I don’t want to spend my life establishing the correct price of everything. But an unanswered demand keeps being answered by the standing order. That part doesn’t require any of my time.
The man in Elephant and Castle used AI to help draft the paperwork for an objection, arguing that comparable local flats were cheaper. This interests me more than having a machine write a poem. There are plenty of poems I can leave unwritten without someone taking money from me. An objection has an audience already waiting, and that audience has a way it wants to be addressed. A man may have quite a clear idea of what is wrong and no appetite for turning it into the document required.
There was still an independent property tribunal to decide the case. It agreed with the comparison and ordered the rent reduced to £2,350 a month, £210 below what he had been paying. The proposed increase had brought an older figure into question. I keep coming back to that. He had not merely won the right to stay where he was.
My client’s fee is old enough now to seem impersonal. He could almost claim it was there before either of us. But I remember naming it. I was trying to sound as though I had several clients waiting and had graciously found room for him. In fact I needed the work, and I made the price attractive enough to spare myself a second conversation. I have had that second conversation alone for years.
He isn’t obliged to discover that. He doesn’t know what I rehearse while cutting his managing director’s greeting down to something a person might read. I know, too, how I would receive a request for more rent. I would want a reason. A repair, perhaps, or a bill the owner could produce. I would not be delighted to learn that his earlier asking price had reflected a temporary lack of confidence.
This is where I generally give up and return to the extra paragraphs. They are countable. I can make a case for them without admitting that I want more for the work I was already doing. Even if he agrees to pay for every added paragraph, the old work will still be going at the old rate. I will have won a small, exhausting dispute and preserved the arrangement I dislike.
I have considered getting a machine to draft the request. It could save me the first awful paragraph, in which I express my pleasure at a relationship I am about to make less pleasant. There would be no tribunal afterwards. He could say no, or find someone cheaper, and I would have to decide whether to keep doing it. That is part of why I have left it alone. The risk is real, although I have also used the risk to excuse a great deal of waiting.
What I want to ask for is more money for the same newsletter. No expanded package. No promise to be available in the evenings. I keep offering those in rehearsal, furnishing the proposed fee before he has even questioned it. Soon I have invented enough new work to need another increase.
The newsletter is worth more to me now. That isn’t quite what I mean. Writing it costs me more than I want to keep accepting. I am trying to say this without first putting something else on the table. I would like to keep the evening out of the bargain.
Original reporting: Their landlord tried to raise the rent. Instead, they got a reduction. (November 11, 2026).