Happy New Year folks! As mentioned in my last post, I’d planned to start up a YouTube channel and have now posted my first video with a second on the way this evening! My aim is to get more content out on both the blog and YouTube this year in order to more widely share the knowledge I continue to acquire through the various consultations I’ve done and all my reading and FI community involvement on various whatsapp chats, forums, facebook groups and through fellow bloggers/podcasters.

I’d very much appreciate if you could subscribe to help get me towards YouTube’s minimum subscribers for monetization to help keep the content free and cover ongoing hosting and insurance costs.

You can check out my first video here (and for those who prefer to read/skim read, transcript below)

In this video, I go into a little about me, why I started this channel and why I’m qualified to talk about financial wellness and investments.

The channel will be dedicated to helping others see money differently and build a life you love. I hope to demonstrate sustainable ways to build towards financial security and how money can be a tool to help you build a life you love, not by buying material things but the most valuable assets of all – TIME!

If this sounds of interest to you, please subscribe and stay tuned for more videos on topics like, the psychology of money and recipe for human happiness, how to build a budget that is sustainable without reducing happiness and how to invest here in Ireland.

Now onto a bit about me.

About me

I’m a married mother of one in my mid-30s, originally from Canada. I first travelled to Ireland after college and met my now husband 1 month to the day after arriving back in 2005. We travelled around a while and then moved back to Canada until my husband got his citizenship and then returned to Ireland in 2014. Since then, I’ve been trying to navigate the various investment vehicles and their tax implications here. After thousands of hours of research, I wanted to share my newly acquired knowledge to help others navigate these options much more quickly than I had. And so the blog Mrs. Money Hacker was born in 2019. In early 2020, I start providing consultations and analysis to readers and although this made far more money than any passive income from the blog, this reduced the time I had to share my knowledge more widely and so this channel was born.

Disclaimer: I am not a qualified financial advisor or tax specialist. The views on this channel are my own and not to be taken as investment advice. All investments carry risk of loss and you should do your own research and due diligence before making any investments.

Why I’m qualified to talk about financial wellness

From the outside looking in, we probably don’t have the appearance of a successful family. But that all depends on your definition of success.

We don’t:

• Have nice new cars
• Live in a well-to-do neighbourhood
• Have a massive home
• Wear designer clothes

We DO:

• Drive an old but reliable 2005 toyota
• Live in a slightly undesirable but safe area within a 20 minute walk to the city center and within 20 minute commute of work, requiring only 1 car
• Have a comfortable sized, relatively energy efficient house, decorated to our taste

By living a fairly traditional life working average jobs with standard career progression we have:

• Lived and worked in 3 continents
• Travelled to at least 40 cities in 21 countries in 4 continents
  • USA (LA, New York, Las Vegas)
  • Fiji (Nandi, Waidroka)
  • New Zealand (Auckland)
  • Australia (Melbourne, Syndey, Cairns/East Coast)
  • Hong Kong
  • Singapore
  • Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur)
  • Thailand (Bangkok, Phuket)
  • Vietnam (Hanoi, Ha Long Bay)
  • London, UK
  • China (Guangzhou)
  • Philippines (Manila)
  • India (Delhi)
  • Spain (Malaga)
  • Portugal (Portimao, Albefeura, Lisbon)
  • Italy (Rome, Venice)
  • Greece (Santorini, Athens)
  • Croatia (Split, Dubrovnik)
  • Canada (Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Alberta, Nova Scotia)
  • Cuba
  • Ireland (Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford etc)
  • Tenerife
• Paid 20% down on 2 properties
• Paid cash for our (old) cars
• Paid cash for our wedding and honeymoon cruise
• Pay all our annual expenses in full
• Took a major gamble and left good-paying jobs and decent lifestyle to move back to Ireland, where I had to go 8 months between pay checks for my visa to come through and allow me to get work
• I was able to take 18 months maternity leave unpaid without going into debt
• Husband took 6 months statutory parental leave unpaid
• During maternity leave we: spent a week in Tenerife, 7 weeks in Canada, and 2 months in Portugal (pre-lockdown)
• Gone down to one part time income so my husband can be a stay-at-home dad and I still have time to work on my passion projects, and still able to save a large portion of our income

Even with all this time between jobs we are:

• On track to clear our mortgage in the next 2-3 years
• On track to no longer need to work for money where the interested from our passive income from investments covers our expenses in 12 years (or less if my husband goes back to work once our son is in school)

Our expenses in the last 2 years have averaged 41,000€ including all travel, new baby costs, house maintenance, a family wedding and 50^th birthday, investment property costs, work/blog related expenses etc.

We recently sold our Canadian property and will be paying down a large portion of our mortgage and will no longer have the investment-related costs for this property. This should bring our expenses down to about 30,000€ in the next 12 months!

Why I’m qualified to talk about investments

In addition to living beneath our means for most of our working life, through extensive research we’ve figured out how to do all of the following mostly without any outside help:

• Navigate settling into 2 new countries and obtaining work there
• Apply for and obtain Canadian citizenship
• Apply for and obtain permanent residence in Ireland
• Bought a house in Canada and Ireland
• Sold a house in Canada while non-resident living in Ireland
• File taxes in Canada and Ireland including more complex returns like non-residence rental income, sale of a property from another country and as a sole trader company with separate investment income to report in Ireland
• Opened and subsequently closed a limited company in Ireland
• Setup a blog which has grown up to 5,000 pageviews a month by 1,600 unique visitors from all over the world
• Transferred my retirement account from a managed to self-directed investment vehicle in Canada
• Opened a self-directed investment account in Ireland and started investing

Anyone who has been through these processes can attest to the level of effort required to get started or get the documentation and analysis just right in order to succeed. And it’s these same skills I use when researching how to invest and build wealth here in Ireland

Onto my day job then.

While I’m not a qualified financial advisor, my day job is as a business analyst.

For those who don’t know what this is- At a high level:

• I use detailed analysis to research and document business cases to highlight which projects are most profitable for a company to pursue,
• I review and identify processes that can be changed to introduce greater efficiencies and
• I support software development projects through the entire lifecycle to translate what the business wants into detailed specifications that developers and testers can follow to develop software.

The same skills I use in my day job, are used in my personal life when researching anything new that I do including learning to invest and build wealth here in Ireland which I hope to pass onto you!