Life update

I originally started this post as our 2024 annual spend summary and attempted to give a brief life update, which quickly evolved into its own post. This post will cover what the Money Hacker family has been up to in the last year.

As you may have read, we moved back to Canada to be closer to family in June 2023, largely for mental health and support reasons after the pandemic took a major toll on my state of mind. That decision has still firmly been the best decision for our family for this chapter of our lives.

I’m so enjoying the connectedness and community we’ve found here. We’ve reconnected with old friends and even made new ones. I’m loving being surrounded by nature and we’re adapting to remote country life. It’s also nice having 4 distinct seasons again. Not to mention the main reason for moving back, so much more time with family.

Work

I started back to work in Dec 2023 after having been off for almost 18 months. I managed to find a way to continue working for the Irish company I had been working for remotely so it’s been really nice getting to work with my colleagues and friends I’ve built up over the last 10 years of working there.

The time difference actually works out really well, in that I have meetings pretty much back to back each morning until about noon and then everyone logs off in Irish time and I have my whole afternoon uninterrupted to focus and get things done. When the team logs on again, they have my outputs waiting for them.

I’m still on a 4-day work week which gives me the balance I need to manage my energy and allows Mr. MH and I to have a day a week to ourselves while Little MH is in school.

Just this week I started a new role in the same company, which I’m quite looking forward to.

Travel

In the year and a half since moving back, we’ve done a good bit of travel, including 3 weeks in France, 2 trips back to Ireland totalling 2.5 months, 1 month in Portugal and 2 weeks in Madeira. I worked through the vast majority of these trips which were a trial run to see what that was like and if it’s something we’d like to do more of.

Some Irish Pics

Some Madeira Pics

Time-off

This summer, I took all of August off and went down to a 3-day week for June and September. The time off consisted of lazy days, reading books, making puzzles, listening to podcasts, catching up with friends and family, walks in the countryside, activities with our son and many trips to paddle board on the lake. I even went white water rafting!

House hunt

We’ve actively been exploring housing options, which have ranged from applying for planning permission to sever a piece of land from my parent’s farm to build, to looking at sites to buy and build, to buying a fixer upper, to buying move in ready homes. We looked at building with a builder as well as at pre-fabricated/modular homes. I filled out applications, met with municipal teams, builders and pre-fab reps, drew up floor plans and so on. We’ve now gotten mortgage approval in place so we can be ready to move on something if the right home comes up. We have our eyes on one so will keep you posted if that goes ahead.

Health

Health-wise, I’m still very much on a healing journey, consuming massive amounts of content and attending virtual summits on neurodivergence, perimenopause, parenting and general healing. Most of my reading results in implementing new tools or ideas and trying new therapies which can be draining before they yield results. Mentally, I’m in a really good place but still have deeper work to do to heal from past trauma and continue to find effective coping mechanisms for the neurodivergent traits I continue to struggle with.

Sleep wins

I’ve made massive progress on my biggest struggle which was quality sleep. This is a huge win. It took lots of trial and error but I have finally found a reliable solution that has resulted in a huge increase in the amount of quality and deep sleep I am getting. In addition to all the other good sleep habits I had to put in place, melatonin has been the game changer.

Studies have shown that autistic people can have low levels of melatonin or have melatonin that’s released at the wrong time of the day and after reading that I felt more comfortable trying it out to see if it helped. It has helped more than all the other things I tried combined. That is until perimenopause kicked in with a nice dose of insomnia and night sweats, though hoping to get treatment for this soon too.

With the melatonin I went from 0-15 minutes of deep sleep a night and an average of 5 hours quality sleep a night to 1.5-4 hours of deep sleep a night and an average of 7.5 hours quality sleep a night.

I also tried an alternative sound therapy, specifically targeted at exercising the vagus nerve and engaging the “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system which is particularly frayed in neurodivergent people. This involved listening to 30 minutes of filtered music per day for 10 days with guidance from a therapist. From day 1, my sleep was as good if not better than with the melatonin, and I awoke feeling consistently rested, probably for the first time in my life. Unfortunately, I also started having other side-effects like nausea, headaches and tinnitus which have continued since I did it. Part of me thinks these are my body’s way of processing stuck emotions/trauma and I have to push through to come out the other side, similar to how you get sick as soon as you stop working after a busy period, you’re body feels safe to let it’s guard down. So I may do another round at a slower pace to see if it makes a difference. On the other hand, these are also symptoms of perimenopause so it’s hard to determine which is which.

The increase in quality sleep didn’t result in any massive energy changes for me but I do have more capacity for things throughout the day, I have more stamina and get drained less quickly than before and I largely stopped needing a nap to get me through the day. It also stopped the extreme exhaustion I would get in the 3 days coming up to the end of my cycle. So all in all a win I think.

Portfolio

Portfolio performance wise, we couldn’t have asked for a better year, with the portfolio closing out at 30% growth between Jan-Dec. This meant that the portfolio earned more than I did this year. Blue line is contributions (we didn’t make any additional contributions in 2024), green is growth.

Family news

Also this year we had a family wedding and my immediate family will soon all be within a 35-minute drive from each other which I’m super excited about.

Onwards and upwards for 2025.