What’s one thing you know now that would have
saved your younger self a lot of pain?
If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to get some good financial advice early in life.
We’ve lived a rather unconventional life. For most of our married life, we’ve lived in work-related accommodation or rental properties. Our journey has been quite different from that of many of our friends, who bought homes, paid off mortgages and watched their properties appreciate in value.
I’ve never regretted the path we took. We followed opportunities that mattered to us, doing work we believed in. It’s been a rich and rewarding life, and I wouldn’t change it. But what I didn’t fully appreciate was that an unconventional life needs a financial plan to match.
Early in our marriage, we bought a property in another state. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t a particularly good investment either. There was an oversupply of properties in the area, and its value went nowhere. I learned something from that experience. Never buy a property unless you’d be happy enough to live in it yourself if circumstances required it. But the more important lesson was one I didn’t learn quickly enough. We should have sought good professional advice before making significant financial decisions.
Nothing catastrophic happened, but it was a waste of time. Some of those early decisions created anxiety at the time and meant that we’ve had to work harder to put ourselves in a solid financial position during the final decade of our working lives. With hindsight, I wish we’d recognised earlier that choosing a different path required us to think more carefully about how we managed that.
I don’t wish we’d pursued more lucrative careers or made money a higher priority. The things that have mattered most to us have never been about accumulating wealth.
But there’s a paradox here. I’ve never wanted money to be the most important thing in my life. The irony is that paying more attention to it earlier might have allowed me to think about it less later.
That’s what I’d tell my younger self. Get good advice. Make a plan that supports the life you’ve chosen to live. Then get on with living it.
After all, the purpose of good financial planning isn’t to have more money. It’s to give you the freedom to pay attention to the things that matter more.
What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?
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