The gift of financial first aid
This week marks the 40th annual Volunteers Week.
In this article first published in NRLA magazine Property, we chat to landlord and NRLA member Bill Lovett, who has spent decades volunteering in far-flung locations across the world.
For landlord Bill Lovett, finding a large tarantula in his shower before heading to bed is a recollection etched into his memory.
On that occasion, back in 2019, Bill was in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, preparing to hit the hay after another busy day volunteering at the
local hospital.
“I remember being lost for words,” laughs Bill.
“It was a beautiful creature and quite timid; we managed to coax it out of the bathroom, unharmed.”
A surprise tarantula in the shower is just one of the out-of-the-ordinary incidents Bill has experienced during his
four decades of volunteering in countries including Nepal, Uganda and Haiti.
“Over the years, I’ve seen a huge snake in the toilet in Nepal, climbed over a barricade to get into the hospital in Haiti and experienced an earthquake when living Uganda,” he says. “Once, while remotely emailing a managing agent in the UK, I told him his practice was causing me more stress than the occasional gunfire I was hearing from the nearby town.”
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
Bill, a Christian missionary and an accountant by trade, was in Haiti volunteering at the Hospital Convention Baptiste d’Haiti
– the Baptist Convention Hospital – where he was installing new financial management
and reporting systems. He began his journey almost 40 years ago, when he, his wife and kids flew to Nepal in 1986 for their first
assignment, renting out their UK home while they were away.
“My wife was involved in medical volunteering, and I was involved in teaching local people my trade,” he says.
The couple spent three years in Nepal, with Bill delivering financial training to local managers in Christian mission-led factories.
It was not long after their first trip, the family came back to the UK and became accidental landlords.
“When we came back from Nepal, we had tried to sell our house, but we couldn’t, due to the market slump at the time,
so we took out another loan and bought another house, renting out our original place. And so we became and stayed landlords,” says Bill.
After this, the couple slowly bought more houses, and now have a varied portfolio, which includes a house in multiple occupation in Sussex, as well as family lets in Gravesend and South East London.
After the children left home, it wasn’t long before he embarked on other missions.
In 2008, Bill moved to southern Uganda, spending two years volunteering at Kisiizi Hospital with the Church Mission Society as the
finance manager.
He says: “With no grandchildren at the time, we left behind our two grown-up
children and moved over to Uganda.
There was a window of opportunity for us to make a big difference.”
“Day to day, I helped to manage the cash flow in often very tight circumstances, and I also helped develop donor relations and improve financial reporting. The idea was to give local people the knowledge they needed to be able to train
up their colleagues on good financial practice.”
Bill often found himself making decisions on purchasing medical supplies and all-important drugs and, as a licensed Anglican Lay Reader, preached at church services at the hospital.
His wife, Wanda, was also volunteering as a nurse tutor, providing support on several courses and running public
health trips to local schools.
The couple were paid “a very modest income” while in Nepal, Uganda and Haiti, but their more recent projects are unpaid activities, with Bill currently working remotely on a project in Uganda.
Bill says in the 1980s when they first went abroad to carry out the charity work, his rental properties were looked after by a managing agent, overseen by his father.
“Then in the 00s, I had two local agents, a reliable tenant, email and luck to make it work,” says Bill, who now
self-manages his portfolio.
More recently, for the charity Hope Health Action, Bill has been volunteering as a finance
development consultant, and has been to Haiti and Uganda for shorter periods of time.
These new projects provide life-saving medical and disability care for the world’s
most vulnerable.
“I’m not medically trained, but I view what I do with Hope Health Action as helping people to help people,” says Bill.
“I support the various teams, whether they be medical or financial services, to provide a good service to displaced
people who desperately need the charity’s help.”
Now Bill continues to work with the charity remotely, teaching about good financial practice,auditing financial transactions and keeping donors informed about how their money is being spent.
As for what the future holds, Bill says he’s undecided. “I’m not ruling out further foreign work trips,” he says, “but to be candid, age is catching up. And I self-manage most of the portfolio. With increasing demands, I need to spend more time on theproperties prior to an
inevitable handover to the next generation.”
GIVING SOMETHING BACK
Bill says it is his Christian faith that inspired him to spend decades volunteering.
He puts a proportion of the money he makes from his property portfolio into the charities he has worked with over the years, where
he knows it will make “The money I now make from property is helping fund a Hope Health Action clinic in South Sudan that has very recently opened, and refugee work,” says Bill.
He says he feels there are similarities between his work overseas and his role as a landlord. “There are parallels.
In an ideal world, the private rented sector would be smaller, and charities would not exist at all. But in the real world, in both cases it’s about being clear in transactions, responsive to issues and giving people the assurance that they can expect to be treated well.”a difference.
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