My financial demise

I had the best of intentions, I promise.

It’s just that nothing really went to plan.

Once upon a time I worked in a leadership role within the construction industry. My role required frequent travel, for long periods of time. But the pay was incredible.

Initially, I loved my work. It was challenging, most of the people that I worked with were great, and I was consistently receiving promotions, pay increases and large bonuses.

Over time, however, the gloss began to wear away. And I started seeing cracks where cracks shouldn’t be. But this didn’t deter me from continuing with my work. I could never leave a role that allowed me to easily save $5k per month.

But then the worst year of my life happened. I won’t go into too much detail as it still hurts to think about. The short story is that I attended 4 funerals in one year. These funerals were for:

• one of my closest friends
• my Aunt
• my grandfather
• my 18 year old cousin

At the time, I failed to truly recognise how hard the deaths of my friends and family affected me. Looking back on that time now makes me think that I quite simply didn’t know how to properly grieve their passing.

During that same year my employer unfortunately experienced two fatalities in the workplace. I was on site when one of these took place. And was responsible for assisting to secure the scene and escort the police to the site of the incident.

This event most certainly had a severe impact on my mental health. However I felt compelled to hide how poorly I was handling the situation so that I could provide support and guidance to my team.

So what has all of this got to do with the demise of my finances you might ask?

Everything, really. All of these events brought into stark reality that we only live one life, and how important it is to spend as much time as possible with our friends and family.

And on top of this, we must be happy with our work. Being miserable at work is one of the worst things in the world. And having your life cut short as a result of your work is an incredible tragedy.

Making vast amounts of money is great. But if you rarely see your family as a result of your growing wealth then what’s the point of it all?

So I started researching the various ways what I could make a living while being able to see my family and friends on a more frequent basis. And one idea kept coming back into my mind.

I could buy a business.

And so I started my search. I studied business management relentlessly, and searched for businesses available for purchase as often as I could. And I met with my accountant frequently to discuss my plan, review the books of various businesses that looked suitable and to gain further insight into what was required.

And after 18 months I finally found what looked to be the perfect business.

And so the demise began

On paper the business looked amazing. And even after owing it for 6 months, it still looked great. It wasn’t until I recognised just how toxic the workplace was that it began to dawn on me why the previous owners had fled.

In short, I had to go on a firing spree and then a hiring spree. But sadly, the damage had been done.

And to add to the stress, it was too much to learn how to operate my business, manage my business, and hire and train a new team all at once.

Our standard of service slipped and so did the revenue. And after 2 years I began to realise that my business wasn’t able to recover.

bye bye self employment.

It took 3 months to sell my business. But only 2 months to land a new job in my previous industry. So thankfully I was able to quickly regain a decent income and start the financial recovery process.

So how deeply am I in the hole? I’m glad you asked. Because this is where we establish what I have set out to achieve in the coming 2 years.

• I had $20k in credit card debt
• $25k owing to the tax office
• $90k owing on a business loan
• $12k owing to my accountant

In total, $147k in debt. Which makes my eyes bleed to look at.

I’m writing this post 3 months in to working on this goal. So I am happy to report that the credit card debt is gone, $20k of the debt to the tax man is cleared, and $2k to my accountant has been dealt with.

Future posts will detail how I have structured my finances, and how I managed to knock so much debt off in such a short amount of time. There’s no real magic there, just some clever strategies and hard work.

So, hopefully you’ll join me on this mission. I look forward to giving another update soon.

Image sourced here

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