The Catalyst

Our plan was to take a year off to go travelling, instead we bought a house.

Whilst it wasn’t our plan, after years of travelling followed by a stint of house sharing I found myself longing for some stability in my life and a place to call home.

A house that needed enough to make it our home.

We shuffled our money around and pushed ourselves just a little bit more than we were comfortable with.

As we moved in January 2020 little did we know a pandemic was about to happen, an event that would change our lives and shift our perspectives in one way or another.

At the time I was working for a travel business, I’d invested a not insignificant sum of money in to the business and slowly watched as the travel industry imploded.

Our phone lines were jammed, our social media channels were jammed and so were our emails.

Every customer was clamouring for their money back.

As the tech guy in charge of the business, me and my teams needed to think on our feet and find a way our business could stop refunding millions of pounds every week.

If that wasn’t enough my partner had handed her notice in and was due to leave her job….right in the middle of a pandemic.

As home working began to bite, I found myself panicking over our finances.

Would we be able to keep up our mortgage payments if one or both of us lost our jobs?

With our savings eaten up by the deposit on our new house, I felt as though our finances weren’t in our control.

I’m no financial planner, but i worry about money, and in that moment I felt I was strapped in to a rollercoaster with no means of getting off.

Deep down money has always been a worry for me.

My parents were hard workers and provided a solid home environment but as a child i began to connect the dots and realised we weren’t quite as well off as most of my friends.

Thirty years later I’d carved out a good living for myself in technology which gave me a good salary, frequent bonuses in recompense for the long hours I worked tireless for any business paid my salary.

Somewhere right there I’d lost perspective, mixing with private equity investors and wealthy business executives, attending board meetings I tried to fit in with designer clothes, and watches.

Yet COVID provided a harsh wake-up call.

It forced us all all reassess what was important.

As I began to tune in to financial independence, I realised that my expenses had mushroomed and I was too dependent upon a comfortable salary and full-time work.