Hindsight on 2020

I saw a funny meme that said: “For the first time, on Jan 1 2021, hindsight really will be 2020”. This post is a look back on the crazy year that was 2020. With all of its ups and downs.

Yesterday was Christmas Day in our home, and it was actually kind of nice. We had a slow day, with nowhere to go and nothing to prepare. It was just downtime with our son and calls home to family. We opened gifts and played with our son and his new toys beside the Christmas tree with some Christmas cartoons on the TV. Although we missed our usual traditions of meeting up with friends, eating tons of food, playing board games and actual physical time with family, we also appreciated the downtime and not having to pack up half the house and organise ourselves to be away for the few days over Christmas. Throughout the day our son was saying “happy yup”, so it was hard not to be happy alongside him. I hope that you managed to find some silver linings in this time of isolation as well.

I’m usually a very positive person but I have to admit, 2020 definitely took its toll on my mental health. While we definitely have so much to be thankful for, I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s ok not to be ok too.

Hearing that others are struggling in the same ways somehow helps us feel less alone. Although we are not physically at war, and we have shelter and food and personally are fortunate enough to be in a position not to worry about money, as human’s we need community and safety to be happy and both of those are under serious pressure in a pandemic.

We are isolated from friends and family and every time we leave the house our safety is threatened as we risk getting COVID or risk passing it along to people we care about even if we don’t suffer from it ourselves.

And in this spirit, I’ll start by listing the things I struggled with this year in the hopes that I can finish on a high note with some more positive notes at the end.

Struggles

Return to work from maternity

In March, I went back to work from maternity leave, 100% remotely, which was an experience in itself. I had been looking forward to getting out of the house, getting dressed in my work clothes, going for team lunches and walks. Getting a bit of my old identity back outside of being a full-time mom. Our son also had yet to sleep through the night. Although I was fortunate enough to have had 18 months off with him, I almost cried myself to sleep each night for a month watching videos of him, missing him.

Working remotely with no childcare

Mr. MMH was due back to work in June and due to COVID, we could not find any reasonably priced childcare. We both worked and minded our son for a time until we made the decision for my husband to leave the workforce in order to lead a simpler life.

Lack of interaction for our son

Going down to one part-time income was done partly in the hopes that we would have more time to visit friends and family. To take a long weekend once a month and tour around the country catching up with friends we have hardly seen since moving back to Ireland in 2014. We also wanted more time to get our son involved in play groups and other activities but COVID had other plans. We feel bad for our son who is missing out on his basic human need for social interaction with kids his age. When lockdown allowed we managed to mix with other kids at playgrounds and kids of our friends but I guess we’ll just have to make up for it when it’s safe to do so.

Stressful sale of a property

In July, we posted our apartment in Canada for sale and navigated our way through selling a property remotely during a pandemic. We had a very good realtor who made the selling part of it easy but the stressful part was trying to navigate the Canadian tax side of things when selling a property as a non-resident. Canada has very strict deadlines and penalties if you do not file on time and they do not make it easy for people to figure out themselves. I’d say it took me about 3 full days of my time trying to decipher the tax forms and another 3-4 days since on the final end of year filing. This was still worth it as I was quoted 4,000$ for an accountant to do only one of these filings on my behalf. This was a stressful enough process as, as a non-resident, your lawyer has to withhold 25-50% of the gross sale price in trust until you get a certificate of compliance from the government showing you’ve paid all taxes due, which due to COVID is taking as long as 6 months to process. This means that if you don’t have enough in equity to cover sale costs after clearing down the mortgage, you need to pay out of pocket until the certificate is processed. The 25% or 50% seems to be an arbitrary decision by the lawyer so we weren’t sure if we were going to be caught for an extra 35k or not until late in the process. Luckily our lawyer only withheld 25% so we were ok in the end but still had to have a back up in place in case our lawyer decided to withhold the 50%. This would have meant selling Irish shares/ETFs at a loss and trying to get it transferred to Canada in time for the sale or extending our line of credit and paying interest in between the sale and receipt of the certificate.

Loss

In the autumn, I lost my Grandma in Canada and could not go home to be with my family. I had to say my good bye’s on Facetime. I’m still struggling with processing our loss.

COVID risk struggles

Since October, Mr. MMH has had to go away for 3 days a week every few weeks which put him at greater exposure to contracting COVID and as Mr. MMH is already at risk, this has been scary. It also meant that I was on my own with our son and not able to keep up with my self imposed expectations with the blog and consultations.

All this on top of not being able to see friends and family or have access to a support network to help us cope. Now I know there are plenty of other people in far worse situations and I do count my blessings but just wanted to highlight my own struggles in case it helps someone else feel less isolated or alone.

Bright spots

Luckily, as with everything in life, the bad has been balanced by some good too.

Mini-retirement trial in Portugal

We started off the year with 7 weeks in Portugal which included a weekend visit from Mr. MMH’s sister and a 2-week visit from my sister and her husband from Canada. We were so lucky to have had this time together before the world turned upside down and to have gotten our travel itch satisfied before we were grounded. This feels like a lifetime ago!

Our son

Our son continues to grow, develop and amaze us and makes us laugh on a daily basis.

Weddings, babies and houses oh my!

Mr. MMH’s brother got married in February. Other friends of ours got engaged, announced pregnancies, bought new houses and so on.

Discovering our neighbourhood

We discovered many new nature walks and playgrounds within 2km and 5km radius’ of our home.

Mini-break

We took a week off to visit family and friends in Sligo in the fall.

Keeping in touch

We had many Facetime and zoom calls with friends and family from Ireland to Canada, most of whom we probably wouldn’t have called if we hadn’t been in lockdown.

More work-life balance

As mentioned above, we decided to go down to one part-time income, partially due to not being able to find childcare during COVID but had it not been for COVID, we likely both would have kept working full time and not had the push we needed to make that call. As a result, we have a much simpler routine, with no creche drop-offs and pickups, no false COVID alarms and testing, no rescheduling work to stay home if our son were to get sick, no fighting over who makes dinner or what to eat and so on. Not to mention, our son has both parents at home throughout the day.

Halved our mortgage

Also as mentioned above, by selling our apartment in Canada, we freed up equity which we used to pay down our mortgage here in Ireland. Bringing us within reach of being mortgage-free in 2-3 years time. This is a huge relief and such a great feeling to have our monthly mortgage payments more than halved.

Work from home perks

I was able to work from home which was a huge blessing to be able to keep working. Though working from home has its pros and cons like everything else, ultimately it has allowed us to have more time as a family. I was able to see my son throughout the day and comfort him if he was upset. I had no commute and was home every night for dinner and to put our son to bed. On the one hand, I never worked in the office while having a kid at home so I have nothing to compare it to but I can imagine there would be plenty of times where you would miss bedtime or dinners together. I also find I am a lot more productive working from home as I have fewer interruptions and am able to get more done in less time, keeping my employer happy and allowing me to finish work on time every day. Win-win.

Blog progress

In terms of the blog:

• I wrote 29 articles amounting to almost 56,000 words
• there have been almost 47,000 page views by almost 17,000 unique visitors (not including a 6 week stat gap where I messed up my analytics) – thank you for reading!
• since March, I have provided 35 individual consultations and analysis to readers, just shy of 4/month
• I got to meet Amon and Christina from Our Rich Journey for coffee while we were in Portugal
• I was interviewed on the Superb Diamond Range podcast
• I presented at the online Dublin FIRE meetup on our mini-retirement experience in Portugal and at the FIRE HQ online event on the quickest paths to FI for an average PAYE worker
• I co-hosted the online Cork FIRE Meetup once a month
• I wrote a few articles for the SmartMoney series
• I provided a financial wellness presentation to a small company as well as individual consultations for each employee
• I continued my blog administration education by teaching myself a bit about search engine optimisation, how to write better blog posts, how to speed up the blog load times etc

No wonder I’m tired!

What’s in store for 2021?

Blog related

My main goal with the blog is to help as many people as possible on the path to financial wellness. When I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture, I realised that while the individual consultations were more profitable than any passive income I was getting from the blog, they were taking up all my spare time and becoming a second full-time job on top of my current job. This was also not helping me achieve my goal of helping more people. Although it was rewarding and engaging to work directly with people, it was only helping one person at a time. And so, I have decided to stop offering one on one sessions and analysis and focus more time on widening my reach and increasing my content.

As such, in addition to writing more on the blog, I will be starting a YouTube channel early in the new year. I already have some content recorded and will be editing over the break to try and get some uploaded soon!

Yet another goal is for me to start an etsy store where I will sell excel templates which I have been using in my analysis.

I’d considered branching out into the corporate financial wellness space but will put that on hold until I have more time to dedicate to it.

Finance related

With our mortgage halved, our goal is to continue paying it down as quickly as possible and hopefully halve it again by this time next year.

We also aim to have our annual expenses go from 41k to 30k as a result of not having our investment property expenses, reduced mortgage and reduced travel (we will not be doing 7 weeks in Portugal again next year).

I look forward to delivering more content in the new year. Hope you are all keeping sane, safe and getting some downtime with loved ones over the break. Take care and talk soon.