1) The $10 Million Dollar Question:

While having dinner with a few friends from work about a year ago, one of the girls asked us what we would all do if we were given $1 million dollars tomorrow. My response to her was that $1 million wasn’t enough and I’d probably still be at my job but living in a nicer house. I now know after reading finance blogs that if I was smart about it, I actually could leave my job with $1 million.

She upped that number to $10 million and my response was this (skipping over boring stuff like paying off family members debts bla bla): I would quit my job immediately, buy an RV and spend a few months driving around exploring as much of the US and Canada with my husband as possible. Then I would spend a year or more traveling the world (of course this dinner and dream was pre-coronavirus days). Once we were bored, I’d want to purchase a home in the Okanagan overlooking a lake. The house wouldn’t need to be outrageously big; but I would want a porch with a lakeview and a nice yard OR a small farm where I could have a horse or two. When I went home that night, I realized that that dream isn’t really that extravagant and maybe it’s actually attainable without $10 million. For a few days I started wondering if I needed a vision board to make these things happen. Disclaimer: While I am a firm believer in visualization and goal setting, planning etc., I am in NO way artsy, creative or any of those fun things. I couldn’t get behind the idea of sitting on my floor and cutting out pretty pictures from magazines and pasting them onto a board. At one point, I actually googled “excel sheet dream boards.” Spoiler – I didn’t find any. But I began to browse finance blogs again and my passion was ignited. I realized that having a blog of my own could in a sense become my dream board. It would be a place where I can track my progress (and failures), stay focused on my goals and be accountable to myself.

2) Over the last few years I’ve grown more and more interested in personal finances and this Financial Independence community

I love personal finance blogs. I don’t remember how I first stumbled across them years ago in Vancouver but I remember the first one I read (wish I could remember the name) was this girl who was writing anonymously and tracking her net worth each month. I was fascinated by her graphs and her calculations. Over the years the interest has come and gone, and I’ve continued to browse blogs such as Mr MoneyMustache, Millennial Revolution and 1500 Days but as of recently the interest is slowly turning into a passion and maybe even an obsession. With that said, I must admit that I know very little about investing. One of my main goals through this blog is to learn as much as I can about investing so that our earnings aren’t wasting away in a savings account (as they are now).

3) I don’t love my career. I don’t hate it either, it’s fine.

I’m an accountant. I love numbers, I really do, but like a lot of millennials, I don’t like being required to sit at a desk for X hours a day working for a company that I’m not passionate about. I left my most recent job a few months ago to travel (that didn’t work out), but I was there for just over a year and I was fortunate enough to have a great boss who didn’t micro-manage, let me work from home when I wanted, encouraged vacation and time-off and overall let me do my thing. Yet, I still wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t dread going to work, I enjoyed the people around me, but something was missing. Fine is not ideal.

4) I want life to be more than just going to a fine job, and vacationing when you can get the time off work.

Working “9-5” and essentially living for the weekends is not a life I want to live. I’ve always felt that I want to live a life different than the norm – school, work, family, retire, die – and I need to learn how to do that. To be clear – I’m not super adventurous. This isn’t a blog about how I want to quit my job with my husband and spend the rest of our lives traveling. I actually do want a home. I want a family. I want pets – lots of pets. I want to feel more in control of my life and have more freedom. I want to vacation more than once a year. I want to be financially independent. I want to work in a job where I am there because I truly enjoy it, not because I need the income.

So there you have it – the reasons above are my main reasons for starting a blog. I don’t know what will come of this, but I’m excited to finally get started.