My ah-ha moment came when I had left my thirteen-year retail career and had just started as a Financial Advisor. (Which by the way I knew nothing about). I was chatting to a client about 6 months after I had started, and I was asking them to share a summary of all their assets, liabilities and investments.
I was wearing a crisp white shirt, black pants and stiletto heels that made me feel confident and I thought made me look professional and typing on a beautiful new top-of-the-range laptop.
I remember sweating through my shirt and being struck by a horrifying thought. What happens if they ask me to see my list of assets, liabilities and investments?
And I had nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I was forced to contribute to my company's Pension and Provident fund and I owned my own home. But I was bankrupt. I wasn’t able to make my monthly bond payments and I was paying for my groceries on my credit card and putting those purchases on budget.
I was a single, white female, with a mother who could barely take care of herself and with no backup plan in place.
In my world, I had reached rock bottom.
During those thirteen years I had paid close to R1 million of student loan and credit card debt and bond repayments and I had nothing to show for it.
But I was looking to live a different sort of life. The universe showed up with a story for me to read.
A story about a young couple travelling the world housesitting.
Travelling the world while staying in other people’s homes for free might sound too good to be true but here they were. Doing exactly that.
I remember showing my boyfriend at the time (we’ve now married) that article. That newspaper clipping sat next to his bed for weeks. Every once in a while I would ask if he had read it and the answer was always the same.
Finally, I decided to read the article to him.
This was something I wanted us to be able to do but we had to figure out how we were going to do it.
It’s probably no surprise, then, that I first heard about the financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement. And I was hooked.
People were retiring in their thirties?! How? People who didn’t create apps or invent the next unicorn were leaving their corporate jobs barely 10 years after starting them, and I was intrigued, to say the least.
Financial independence and retiring early offered a path that just made more sense to me.
At that point, the goal was merely making it to the weekend. Every week.
I started wondering if I could work hard enough, save aggressively enough, and pay off all my debt quickly enough so that I could stop having to physically meet clients face to face but I could continue doing so virtually?
And that’s where I am today.
Financial independence isn’t about whether or not you like your job. It’s about having control over your time.
