We got into the Barefoot Investor, all the rage in the late 2010s, and got our finances in order. My husband and I aggressively paid off any and all debt we had and started saving for a house.
We went step by step starting with our dates, which was actually hard at first, because it meant getting super clear about any and all money we had or owed between us. Eventually these dates became fun though and enjoyable. We set up all the buckets, paid off all of my student debt and my husband’s other debts, and we were saving for a home. Amidst all of this I was applying for Permanent Residency and then citizenship, we had two children, had a side business, and my husband was working full time. Unfortunately his father passed while we were expecting our second child, it was heartbreaking. My dad had passed just six months after our first child was born too. It was a lot of loss to take on, but these things cannot be planned. When he passed my husband inherited a bit of money, enough to help us with the rest of our deposit on a house. I don’t come from a family with any kind of money at all, and I think I had looked at inheritance differently, but it hurts because it only happens due to death of a loved one. It helped us out financially but it broke our hearts as well.
Okay so at this stage we have a deposit, we found a house that met our requirements, a run down fixer upper was all we could afford and it was half a million dollars, which is truly nuts. Cost of living, in particular housing in Australia, is astronomical. We got into the house and we started renovating. Every extra dollar we would put into our mortgage, determined to pay it off as quickly as possible. We have a friend who helped her mom buy a house who told us how they paid off the entire mortgage in less than 5 years, so I knew it was possible and the goal was set. If we could get the house paid off and then we could prepare ourselves to take over my husband’s family farm where we had a side business. We continued to scrimp. Looking back I really could have done more of the “splurge” part of the Barefoot Investor and I see now why that’s so important because I held the goal so doggedly that I just wanted to achieve it and I became a bit too intense.
in late 2019 I was granted citizenship, which was a tremendous relief that I could legally stay in the country where I had set up my entire life. It was in the Blue Mountains and the bushfires were starting, even on the day it was smoky outside. Then came the official Black Summer where the bushfires raged. The house we bought was in the lower Blue Mountains of New South Wales and we had to self evacuate twice. It was terrifying, with no rain in sight. Ash fell all over our house and yard, and at many stages I couldn’t even see the neighbour across the street’s house the smoke was so thick. Eventually rain came after hundreds of thousands of acres were burnt all over the country, and then flooded everything. We kept renovating, my husband kept working, and we kept paying down our house. With the craziness we did buy a cheap second hand caravan in case we needed to evacuate again we’d have some more security. This story is getting long and everyone knows that come March 2020 Covid was in full swing, and there was so much uncertainty in the world. We were in lockdowns now and I had just returned from a funeral in California and spent my 40th birthday in quarantine just before they closed the international borders. The whole situation was so utterly topsy turvy and disorienting. Then my husband’s mother passed. We both did not see it coming, she was a farmer and one who we both expected to live for at least another decade or more, I still have a hard time comprehending how quickly that happened.
This next part I’m still grieving over and I’ve done a lot of therapy to try and come to peace with it. Long story short, things didn’t go as we had been planning, as we had hoped, and since there wasn’t anything in the will that we would then buy the farm ourselves, the option was taken away from us. The only reason we even went to the city and Blue Mountains in the first place was to be in a position to buy the farm because better wages are available in the city rather than regional areas. We made the best of the situation by choosing a house in the lower mountains so my husband could still commute to Sydney by train if needed, an hour and 20 minute trip. The combination of all the things, the trauma from the bush fires, the trauma from covid, the grief from his mom passing and the last suriving grandparent in Australia for our kids, and the trauma from family dynamics that followed led us to make some decisions that we made. I would caution anyone else to not make any major decision when deep in grief or after any major upheavals in life. We bought a second hand RV, sold our house in the Blue Mountains, and my husband let go of his long time job. It was a lot at once. Even selling our house didn’t mean that we would be allowed to buy the farm, and we set off, completely and utterly untethered to anything, in our RV – my husband, myself, and our two young kids. Then covid ramped up again and we found ourselves in the height of the Australian covid-19 pandemic stuck in Queensland for months and months. While in Queensland we had to go into at least another lockdown, it’s kind of a blur. It was beautiful and we were grieving, and just wandered. I wasn’t expecting my husband to quit his job, he had been trying to move to part time but the company didn’t do part time and it just wasn’t a thing. After doing all of that saving and scrimping and planning, to then not have any cashflow other than a lump sum from our house sale was disconcerting.
I see now how important mental health is, and I know we made all of the decisions we did based on what we knew at the time, so I can’t regret anything but can just learn and grow from it.
Eventually another small bit of inheritance came and we had no home, no outside family support from his side due to the craziness than ensued after his mom passed, and we just kept wandering. As we wandered we got to experience a lot of really cool things and ways of living life. We hand-fed dolphins in Tin Can Bay, we mined for precious gems in the Gemfields, we checked out dinosaur tracks and discovered the Golden Age of Paleontology is happening in Australia right now, we walked on boardwalks in ancient rainforests, and soaked up the diversity found in this part of the world. As we kept going we continued to narrow down what our family liked doing best, where we enjoyed it most, and by time the borders opened, we headed to Tasmania. I know now that my husband wanted to be far away from everything and there isn’t any further away you can get with the Bass Straight separating the island state of Tasmania.
As soon as we got to Tasmania we collectively took a huge exhale. It was the end of December 2021, we had gone though a lot and it felt safe, peaceful, relaxed, beautiful, and the place where our family could enjoy a slower pace. A house came up right next to a good school, right at the beach, and we put in a bid and were able to buy it outright, so we did. We chose a beautiful spot on the Central Coast in North West Tasmania. A town with a sense of community, a spirit of entrepreneurship as shown by all the small businesses, a newly opened art and science centre with a planetarium, lots of fresh food grown, and a good school. In February 2022 just before school started, we got the keys and began rebuilding our lives.
I’d like to say it was an easy process, than instantly things were all great. It wasn’t that simple. Turns out when you go through so much trauma and grief, that it really needs to be acknowledged, worked through, and made peace with in order to genuinely move forward. That is only one part of the next stage of the story, but a big one that must be noted. Another is moving to a regional area, where we knew a single person, meant having to rebuild all social ties in every direction. Soon we began to realise that in the same way we had to leave the beautiful Northern Rivers of New South Wales where my husband’s family farm was to the city in order to make enough money to move forward, well, the same is true for this beautiful coastal area. The jobs around here are mostly labour jobs, or in support work like healthcare or education. We decided to give a startup a go, since entrepreneurship is the way out in these kinds of areas, and made a software training program to help businesses train and upskill employees with low literacy and low digital skills including the islanders in their native languages who come for seasonal work here. Again, we are an unknown entity in a very tight knit community and I’m sure that and many other reasons it did not work. I realise that most startups fail, but it’s still hard when you’ve spent a lot of time and energy building something. I lost the steam to keep pushing it forward as did my husband and frankly, we were needing some cashflow as our savings was dwindling.
So we reached the Financial Independence stage as in, we own our house and our vehicles completely. We have some investments in ETFs and some savings left. It’s not enough to retire early on, but the FI of the FIRE is there.
So in the last two and a half years of living in Tasmania in this kind of stage where we are Financially Independent, I have gotten a glimpse into what it will be like when we actually retire. I’ve also talked to so many people who have retired at 65 and then their health declines rapidly, or they blow a knee out, or something equally as horrible happens just when they think it’s time to chill and enjoy their golden years. Obviously this isn’t how it happens with everyone but I see some things in my own experience and from peopel I’ve talked with to help me get a bigger perspective on it.
- Choose a job now that you genuinely enjoy that brings in some money. Ideally this is a job that you can keep doing even into your 70s, 80s, 90s. I say that in part because the job needs to “pull” you towards it, “pull” you forward. This is why so many farmers live to be so much older, they have things they need to tend to. I’m not saying to work full time, I’m just saying something that you enjoy that will keep you motivated to keep going.
- Start building ties and connections in the area you want to live when you “retire”. This way you don’t have to start completely from scratch when you do. Social connections mean so much for longevity and health. There’s something incredibly special about seeing people who you recognise and who recognise you, something I’m appreciating more and more as I get older.
- Mental Health is as important as Physical Health. Make it a priority to take care of yourself – whatever that looks like. It’s worth the cost to see a good therapist, like a clinical psychologist who can help you work through things. Reframe experiences so they don’t weigh heavily on you, it may take time, but keep at it.
- Have a system in place for working your body so you stay strong as you age. I have been going to Physio for a swollen bursa in my shoulder and now have a Pilates Reformer at home along with an Elliptical to use when the weather is inclement.
- Have hobbies or things that you create. I read The Gift by Auschwitz survivor US Immigrant turned psychologist Edith Eger who says something along the line that Expression is the opposite of Depression. Find some way to create – write, talk, video, make collages, widdle wood, create mobiles, paint, draw, play an instrument, sew clothes, do something.
I’m going to also add that celebrating the small milestones as well as the big ones feels good, and as far as I know I only get one life in this body and those celebrations feel good and add up to feeling even better.
If you see typos, please excuse them and go for the gist of what I’m saying. I often get caught up when having to go back to edit and then never share my stuff outwardly, which doesn’t feel good and I’m trying to break that habit and just put it out there.