A Life Changing Reality Check | Life Love and Hiccups: A Life Changing Reality Check
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Wednesday 23 November 2016

A Life Changing Reality Check

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Brought to you by Nuffnang and UBank

If you have been reading this blog of mine for a while or ever had the time to poke around and read through some of my past posts, you might know that two and a half years ago, I chose to walk away from a high paying twenty year corporate career.

I didn’t do it because I had amassed enough money to retire… oh my lord far FAR from it.

I didn’t do it because I had achieved everything I had hoped to achieve in my career… nope, not even close.

I didn’t do it because I was brave enough or crazy enough to believe that I could just flippantly change my mind about my chosen occupation and try my hand at something new.

Nah ah.

I did it for no other reason than an accident that changed my life and a consequential 2am emotional breakdown that finally opened my eyes to what was most important to me in life… my family, and the time I could spend with them.

You know, I thought I had it all figured out when I was growing up. As a child, I watched my mum and dad head off to work everyday to jobs that let’s face it - were very good jobs, but really didn’t make their hearts sing. 

But they went anyway and they worked hard, damn hard to pay for their dream of a house on the beaches that they had always dreamed of, and the chance to provide us kids with the life that they believed would make us happy.

And it did make us happy, we were very happy and we had a wonderful childhood with everything we ever needed. 

We went to great schools and we had most of the things we could have wanted and yet in all honesty… if it all boiled down to it, we would have been just as happy without all of that too because we were so loved by parents who cared for us and would do anything for us and we were blessed to be together and healthy.

When my turn came to go off to work, I did so with the same dream tucked under my arm. The house on the beaches, the money to send our kids to good schools and to provide them with everything they could hope for and more. 

I worked to provide, I worked to amass and if I am honest - I worked to keep up with the Joneses.

I did the long hours, I trekked my way up and the irony is - in my bid to have it all - I spent such a massive amount of time away from the people I loved and the ones I was doing it all for that I questioned why? What is the point?

It just doesn’t make sense does it?

Living within our means, whatever that may be, is SO important to our wellbeing both financially and emotionally. What is the point of putting ourselves so far into debt and so beyond exhausted if at the end of the day we don’t get to enjoy it with the ones we are doing it all for.

For us, it was an easy decision. 

We didn’t want to give up our home… we love every single brick of our home, so we knew I needed to continue to work, which was totally fine by me. 

It did mean however that without the corporate salary, we needed to give up a lot of the unnecessary stuff - overseas holidays, regular dinners out and all the new hoopty doopty new thingumabobs in order to be in a position to keep our home and pay for it by doing something that I not only loved to do, but would allow me to spend more time at home with the boys whilst they are still young.

The long and the short of it was - we decided we did not want to trade ‘stuff’ for regrets because at the end of the day, I would imagine that there are very few people who on their deathbed say “I wished I had spent more time working to pay for more stuff”.

Imagine being told you only have a few months to live… would you change the way that you live?

Would you do things differently?

If you answered yes then let me ask you something… why would you wait for something like death sentence to make the change? Isn’t that too late?

UBank recently made a short film where six terminally ill people share their wisdom and their advice about what’s really important in life to them now that they are facing the end.

I am not going to lie to you… this is hard to watch and for many of us, it will be quite a wake up call.



UBank want us Aussies to reevaluate what is really important to us. 

They encourage us to find a dream that will enable us to afford our ideal home… but within our means. Borrow less and live more and be free to focus on what is really important to us - being with our loved ones without an overload of financial pressure.

What would you do differently given the chance?