I’m haunted by the fates of people whose paths crossed mine, however briefly.

The guy I went to uni with – by every measure an exemplary human being, who met an early demise alone in a seedy hotel room overseas.

The woman from work who went to court for sexual assault charges – with a minor.

Of course, I barely knew them. But seeing their names in the headlines shocked me to the core.

And of course, closer to home, I’ve been faced with the reality that you can never really know another person.

If someone betrayed you before, how will you know if they’re lying in future?

You don’t know what will happen. Trust – so hard won, so easily broken, and not quickly repaired.

And with the Epstein file horrors trickling out, I gotta say, I can’t even engage with that story – but god, does it make me despair of it all.

I think it was about 10 years ago when politics started shifting around the world – I could sense it in election results in country after country. It made me uneasy. And now, here we are. Can’t say I could ever have imagined things would be this bad.

This is a rambly post, I know – is this really what I came out of hibernation to say? Well, it seems a good as time as any, particularly with the full moon in Leo.

Yes, I’ve gotten deep into astrology. Who would’ve thought? Not me. But, over and over, it has proven to be uncannily on point for me. The evidence, for me personally, is undeniable. It explains a lot. How I’ve been so damn lucky career-wise (and I can finally feel secure in that – like I don’t need to wait for the other shoe to drop or the streak to end). Why I can’t say the same for home, family, close relationship dynamics. The fact that I could never really get into the intense, extreme, consistent dedication to money stuff like the rest of the personal finance blog world – I’m not meant to. And so much more!

All this to say… I’m not the same person who last showed up here nearly 2 years ago. Going back beyond that, my experiences in my 30s have irreversibly altered me. I miss the old days of the blogosphere, and I know they’re never coming back. I don’t know what I want to do with this space going forward. But, I’m still here. I’m better than ever. Living life. I can’t wait to see what 2026 has in store.

School life

Uniform costs, out of this world! Hundreds of dollars to outfit Spud with shirts, shorts, jumpers, shoes.

No school fees though at this one!

School is part of the free lunch programme. Most kids are opted in from what I see. But also, at least in the youngest classes, most don’t seem to eat it. Spud doesn’t. Maybe the older kids are less picky.

Partway through the first term, I booked him in for a couple of aftercare sessions to see how it would go. He thrived. So, I now don’t have to rush home on office days. It’s almost $100 a week for Mon-Thurs aftercare, which is less than daycare (which was $250 while aged under 2, then down to $150).

Figuring out the world of holiday programmes has been a ride. Too tired to detail it all, though.

Spud has now been at school for two full terms and is partway through number 3. He started in term 4 last year in the new entrants class, and moved right up into Year 1 when the 2024 school year began. It’s a big step up and was a shocker of a transition. There’s been a lot of anxiety (ongoing perfectionism, plus so much separation anxiety for weeks, until we got Covid, and then he seemed eager to go back :D), I’m more than ever convinced ADHD is in the mix (and I date this right back to his incessant moving in the womb; I could never count movements because was that one loooong move or like 15 little linked moves?) and tummy troubles.

Think we’ve figured out the digestive stuff – if you’re interested, the culprit seems to have been Nutella sandwiches, a regular aftercare snack. (Contains both dairy and nuts, problematic for him.) On top of that, he had full body hives recently in response to a ‘sour cheese’ flavoured snack that I thought I’d let him try. Clearly a bad call.

Investing

The last few months in the markets have been interesting! I’m at a point where swings do make a noticeable difference to my balance.

I put a little play/experimental money into some individually picked US stocks and funds a couple years ago, and not long after came the 2022 crash. Some of those are finally starting to recover. Even the small amount I chucked at a bitcoin based fund is out of the red.

At some point I need to consider my NZ dividend ETF holding – receiving dividends has been great for my nervous system, seeing those payments come in – but perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate the strategy.

Health and insurance

I continue to sing the praises of insurance. Health insurance has absolutely been worth it for Spud, and now it’s my turn to make the most of it.

This meant… getting super uncomfortable and advocating for myself. Admitting that I’ve gotten used to this struggle. Being either constantly blocked up, or constantly runny/drippy/sneezy, and all the associated things.

My experiences were similar to Spud, but now I’m better at strategising and advocating. We both seem to be in rude health in the bigger picture but suffer greatly from chronic everyday things, and our symptoms are not always typical, and/or certainly not severe enough to be picked up in the public system.

So … I got tested and am allergic to dust, dogs, and cats.

I had a deviated septum and inflamed turbinates and sinuses.

I spent months on a regime of sprays and rinses. It helped. It wasn’t a magic fix.

Then I had surgery – septoplasty to straighten the septum, and reduction of the enlarged turbinates and a light touch on the sinuses.

This, my friends, was the cure. Even straightaway, with the splints and packing and whatever needed healing from the operation – I could just sense the difference. A couple days before I got the splints and stuff removed, air started flowing a little more freely. And once they came out? Everything moved easily. Night and day.

I can now wake up and I’m still breathing through my nose, mouth closed. Life changing.

And when I wake up, I don’t start sneezing and have to deal with sneezing fits and a drippy nose for like an hour. (Why does this happen? I’m super sensitive to temperature changes and I’m certain it’s due to the shift in going from being under the warm covers to cooler/colder temps outside of them.) I’m not only going to save so much on tissues, but the quality of life is a million times better without that drama first thing in the morning. No more scrambling to always make sure I’m stocked up with tissues in my pockets or in my bag before I leave the house, and avoiding people’s side eye in a post-Covid world on the train.

It’s cost me about $1000 out of pocket – $775 excess on the surgery, $88 on medications, and a couple hundred for some other test/procedure early on. Unquestionably worth it.

Early days still, but life’s good so far on the other side.

The odds that I would achieve a perfect score on the Australian / NZ English competition in intermediate school?

The odds that I would have basically just the right amount of money to round off my RTW trip by the end of it?

The odds that Spud would have severe cow’s milk protein intolerance (CMPI) yet tolerate goat’s milk fairly well? (The numbers for this are supposedly really low… but I wonder, how accurate can these stats really be, and how are they calculated?)

And if we apply this thinking, we can wield and deploy it either way.

Believing we can beat the odds. Time the market. Be a little delusional in betting on ourselves.

Or believing there’s no point even trying. Stopping before we start. Writing it off with a defeatist sigh.

Look: maybe you WILL be the exception to the rule. What if it’s your destiny? What if the gamble pays off?

You can do your bit to reduce risk. To mitigate and anticipate headwinds and hurdles. Weigh the pros and cons. Consider the options to improve your odds of success. Try to tip the scales in your favour, weighting them towards triumph.

But let it be an informed decision. Take the time to discern, to decide just when it’s wise to bet on yourself and when to play it safe. Exactly how much you stand to gain, vs how much might be lost – the potential upside vs downside.

Consider the value. The net return, against the raw odds – as Annie Duke puts it in Quit, the expected value. What would beating the odds really mean? And truly, what is the likelihood?

Maybe if there’s a high risk of losing it all, you can design a lower risk bet, an MVP venture, something more experimental and incremental.

Low risk, high gain – that’s the holy grail.

But we’re mostly operating in the grey zone, with uncertainty about payoffs.

Annie Duke points out that you will gain new information as you act. Valuable details. Once you move, more will reveal itself.

I’ve been experiencing this a lot lately. It’s like opening up your field of vision. Rounding a corner. When you’re stuck in what I call the SWIRL – that swirly place where thoughts are rattling around your head, you can’t quite seem to grab onto any of them, you’re going in circles and treading water – the only way out is to take a concrete, tangible step. Commit to making a real move. You can always walk it back or change course. But you need to dial up the clarity available to you by making a move, and changing your viewpoint and horizon.

We have to constantly make choices without knowing the full picture. Keep stepping in the direction you want to take, and adapt as you go. That’s how you position yourself to take advantage of the odds.

One memory I’ll always remember from back in school, shortly after moving to NZ.

Way back when, we were given a maths problem, and we had to insert our own variables. In this case, the price of a hypothetical concert ticket.

I was so naive. I literally had no idea what something like that cost. The teacher said to pick something realistic, not like $20. But I had no frame of reference myself – maybe movie tickets?! – and although I heard his comment, it just did not compute in my mind. I thought maybe I misheard the number he said.

Anyway, I obviously chose an unrealistic price and felt so ashamed and silly. And it’s far from the first time I’ve experienced sticker shock in life. But that can go in any direction, positive or negative.

All that to say: stop waffling, going in circles, and just find out! That thing you’re contemplating? Get some quotes. Check your assumptions. Don’t mull, guess, panic, project, catastrophise.

My mum asked for ideas on how much it would cost to cut down the massive trees on their property (how TF would I know?) Turned out it was way less than she imagined.

Maintenance jobs I keep putting off like getting a chimney clean, gutters cleared, even renting a chipper, are often less than I anticipate.

And some are more – renting a big skip bin, a full car service, etc. Sigh.

But the only way to know for sure is to get out of your head and find out.

Get real numbers.

Price it out

You’ll often be surprised but either way, information is power.

I am a Cancer. It absolutely sums up my personality.

I am an ISFJ. Also eerily accurate.

I am a dragon. Growing into this – I never at all identified with it, but I’m now stepping up into some of these traits. Especially in 2024, the year of the dragon.

Over the past few years I’ve experienced and become an advocate for many body-based practices, methods, and modalities. I can personally vouch for somatic therapy, EFT tapping, hypnosis, and Emotion Codes.

When you run up against the limit of what you can achieve working on the mental and cognitive level – just look over the wall (or more accurately, below the neck) and explore what’s stored in your body.

Get out of your head and into your body.

I use tapping (which is based around acupressure points) multiple times a week to work through triggers, tough emotions, or just to recentre and calm myself. I also run through energy centre (chakra) breathing most days, and can literally feel the thrum and tingle of energy moving upward as I do.

Energy matters. I’ve seen this first hand, over and over. Witnessed the difference that acting from clear, strong, high energy makes.

While I consider myself a bit of a skeptic by nature, I cannot deny what I’ve experienced, and nor do I want to. I’m grounded AND I’m spiritual.

Where I’m going from here…

The how, I haven’t quite grasped. Maybe getting my head around it requires getting deeper into physics.

I believe, I trust, and I know, and yet I’d also love a concrete, tangible explanation for how it all works.

“You should’ve gone out with him when you had the chance.”

So said my friend, back when we were awkward pre-teens trying to figure it all out.

The gentle nerd with the soft eyes, big glasses and floppy hair was suddenly cool (I couldn’t work it out – why?) and she thought I’d missed the boat.

But, no.

As lovely as he was, I didn’t want the chance in the first place.

You can’t fake something you’re not into.

You can’t be swayed by what others think.

You can’t go far if your heart’s not truly in it.

Fuck the shoulds, the noise, the chatter, the buzz.

Trust your Knowing, as Glennon Doyle says.

Follow what feels light, bright, and expansive. Move towards it and don’t look back.

A word I’ve been using a lot lately is discernment.

Honing our sense of judgement is such a crucial life skill. Discerning what we actually want and the best way to go about getting it.

And going into 2024, I think I can boil that down to two things:

Awareness – of who the hell you actually are; how you feel and react to people and situations

Deliberation – and working toward showing up consciously every day of your life and being intentional about your actions

(Throwback here to 2016 and the 2 things I learned that changed my life)

When you know what you want, and you’re fully dedicated to making it real, things start to click into place. Next steps reveal themselves. Opportunities unfold. Things start happening, flowing, without too much pushing or forcing.

You follow a simple framework to manifest it: clarity, conviction, and commitment. Setting the vision, holding firmly onto the purposeful sense of guaranteed success, and channeling it all into consistent, embodied action.

(More on that full process here.)

Crucially, you’ve got to believe first.  The steps are be > do > have. It starts inside, within. Expanding who you are, which flows into what you do, and finally, the results.

It’s so much about how you feel and what you consciously and subconsciously believe. Leaving behind old wounds and patterns. I spent my 20s saying I didn’t care what my parents thought. I didn’t care about their judgement. I wasn’t trying to please them or earn their pride. BUT, that wasn’t entirely  true underneath the surface. That wasn’t fully congruent. I was partly trying to convince myself. Only now in my 30s am I truly starting to release that hold … and it’s just the start.

This year, it’s your time. Tune out the noise. Discern what your heart truly wants. Then, keep cutting out the shoulds, and keep attuning to what feels like it’s pulling you. Discern your next moves, one aligned decision at a time.

You don’t need to know it all right now. You don’t need to see the full journey. Who knows where the path may take you? Follow the signs and breadcrumbs. The snippets, slices, slivers of a future vision that come to you unbidden. And trust the tapestry will weave itself together.

No. Not this. No more.

Something powerful happens when you reach that point of no return. When you have finally had enough. You aren’t going to bend and accommodate anymore.

Trust. Your. Gut.

Your inner knowing and inner voice.

No one strategy works for everyone. Don’t feel like you need to follow a formula or conform.

People who insist otherwise may not be safe for you.

I think of instances when I did trust others over myself, and instances when I reversed that and chose to honour my intuition instead.

You can probably guess which served me better.

Not obeying the rigid rules and expectations of family, or playing the games a toxic work leader played.

Not chasing external metrics (one of the things that really solidified my self trust, hilariously, was the retirement of Facebook’s relevance score for ads. A colleague, and of course Facebook reps, were obsessed with getting this score as high as possible. Sure, it’s a factor – but it’s not the most important. Sometimes people need to see important information, whether they want it or not).

You don’t owe anyone explanations.

You can try once. Maybe even a couple of times. Beyond that, I wouldn’t waste your energy. The people who get it are your people. Those who don’t, aren’t.

Honour yourself even if it means disappointing others. Don’t twist yourself into knots trying to get others to understand you. Some people cannot and will not. Some are actively (though not always consciously) invested in not understanding.

You think you can help them see the light if only you land on the right combination of words, the magical example, the key that unlocks that breakthrough and aha.

Being misunderstood is inevitable. Letting others down is inevitable. What matters most is honouring, understanding, and trusting yourself. Being an upholder of what you know.

Choose yourself. Honour yourself.

Parenting has changed me in so many ways. I didn’t stand up for myself enough in hospital, but once I left, I started to build my confidence, strength and conviction.

Before I left, one sleepless night, I wrote a long explainer on the hospital feedback form. I poured it all out. I didn’t sign my name, but I figured they could pretty easily ID me. I was very open about how I felt about their approach to breastfeeding, pumping, and visitors.

My midwife asked if I would meet with the hospital to discuss what I wrote.

The old me would have agreed to meet with them. My people pleasing tendencies would have insisted. But that was a turning point. I paused and thought about it. The new me, the exhausted mother, took no shit. And she did not have the energy for that kind of interaction.

I said what I said. I stood by it. I let it stand alone.

There is a tendency for women to be written off by much of society as hysterical and emotional. I’ve definitely experienced this a lot since becoming a parent.

I feel like I would have been gaslit if I went. No, I KNOW I would have been gaslit if I went. Nicely, Logically. It would have all seemed very above board. And it would have done so much damage to me and caused me so much doubt.

Listen to your sacred NO and don’t dampen it down.

Protect your energy at all costs.

Without it, you can’t achieve in any area of life.

Choose where your energy goes. Be deliberate. Be intentional. Be selective. Instead of fixating on fears and doubts, real as they feel, direct your energy towards your intentions and goals.

And choose to trust yourself.

I’ve previously written about how I had started thinking about mindset work as my full time job.

Let me amend that.

When it comes to money and life, I’ve realised, regulating your nervous system (that’s brain AND body) is what supports you in making sustainable progress and simply easing the regular ups and downs.

It’s the foundation for feeling relaxed, safer, optimistic, confident day to day.

Thoughts create feelings; they can and do absolutely influence them. One thought can change it all. One different perspective can open up a whole new dimension. One new lens can instantly shift how you feel.

As you become more skilled at managing your thoughts and shoring up your mindset, though, you start running into limits. Because working from the neck up inherently limits you. You can only go so far without venturing lower.

Our massive brains are what set us apart, but we’re still mammals.

The vagus nerve is a communications and sensory superhighway, connecting the brain and various organs. Like the main control room for our fight/flight response. It sends signals from brain to body, but mostly, vice versa – body to brain.

It’s not all in your head

“It’s all in your head” we say, but in fact, it goes so much further than that, deeper than the subconscious even, beyond to cellular level. Your body, physical reactions, the state of your nervous system.

Imagine you overspent, blew your budget, miscalculated and went totally overboard with brunches and drinks and dinners and takeaways last month. Yikes.

Maybe your jaw clenches. Shoulders go up. You feel tense and hot, but also a bit disembodied, disconnected, frozen. This immediate, instinctual reaction is automatic. The dysregulation going on there shows up in your body instinctively.

Anytime you do anything with or even think about money, emotions can trigger you into fight or flight mode. It’s a subconscious response to money anxiety. Obviously you can’t function well or think clearly or act brilliantly in that stressed out mode.

It all gets easier when…

You can start being more conscious and compassionate with yourself. Cultivating safety and comfort at every level and every step. That opens up space to go even bigger and beyond. That’s the real key to getting, well, whatever it is you want, ultimately.

This is the work: being okay where you are right now, so you can then clear the way to take things to the next level from here.

You can feel scarcity and fear at any level, any point. You can feel guilt and shame at any point. Soothing yourself at every step helps you start expanding past those familiar internal set points you’re so used to.

9 ways to return to neutral

Stressed about money or something else in life? Get back to baseline in the moment by doing something for both your brain and body.

Brain

• Think about how much you can buy with the money you already have, right now. Or, think about 3 things you can appreciate right now
• List all the ways you could take action to generate cash today. Or, think about 3 things you can do now that would feel 10% better than what you’re currently doing

Body

• Turn your head sideways, 90 degrees to your body, and hold for 30-60 secs. You’ll start to feel your whole body relax subtly, like a reset
• Stand, focus on your breathing, in and out, and shift your weight from side to side, foot to foot, aligned with your breathing
• Grab something in your hands (stress balls are great, or anything similar) and move it from hand to hand, side side, across the centre line of your body – think like a pendulum
• Make your entire body stiff like an uncooked pasta noodle and hold for a minute, then consciously relax
• Vocalise out loud! Brrrrrrr is a classic, but any sound you feel coming through you is great – do this till you feel some release
• Shake, move, dance, stomp, rock your body – get very physical and move that energy through
• Do a round or two of EFT tapping (there’s lots of videos on YouTube)

Self-soothing when it comes to money

How often do you handle, interact with, touch money in some way? A lot, right? Add to that, how often are you thinking about money?

Imagine if all those touchpoints were a little more positive. What a difference that might make.

How can you bring a little more positivity and safety into them?

The more goodness you can inject, the bigger the ripple effect… infusing and informing the overall holistic relationship.

Create stress free spaces for managing money. Low stress money dates where you go over your finances, celebrate progress and momentum, make plans for the future. Pair with delicious snacks and treats.

Create parameters for safety that you can set and honour. You may chafe at structure and rules generally in life. I know I do. But they can actually be an ally here. Guardrails to guide your experiments or baby steps into the unknown, and ringfence risks or losses. Playing with a business idea? Give yourself permission to try, with a set allowance for experimenting. Making bigger investing moves? You can decide on limits, set stop orders for buying or selling. Have kill criteria for any money moves – a point at which you call time and quit like a pro.

This goes for more than money

This doesn’t just apply to financial anxiety. It goes for everything else in life, too. Anything that feels hard, tough, sticky. That isn’t flowing the way you’d like. Where you don’t feel great.

You can start shifting it from the inside out.

Pause and get clarity. How do you want to feel instead? Identify your desired feeling, and think back to other instances when you felt this way. Recall exactly how it felt, and the circumstances that led to it.

With this in mind… How can you get more of that? Kindle that flame? Expand that kernel? What step could you take right now to get closer to that feeling?

It’s like… preplanning success. Celebrating it now, despite our lifelong indoctrination to ‘not count the chickens till they hatch’. In a practical sense, that is fantastic advice.

But internally, creating a sense of success in your body – a memory ahead of time – goes a long way toward prepping your nervous system for receiving and accepting it. Like athletes visualise doing the thing, triumphing, ahead of time … you can do the same with anything in your own life, no matter how mundane.

Because when success feels unfamiliar, parts of you aren’t really open to it, and are even repelling it. Shout, move, dance, pump your fists, whatever you would actually do when the time comes. Practise it. Embody it. Encode it.

This is how liberation starts

From within. Cultivating true and lasting financial power is an inside job.

Then, it’s always with you. Accompanying you wherever you go; it becomes part of you.

Have you ever worked with incredibly reactive people always on the brink of an emergency?

How painful is that?!

You just want to shake them and shout “Get a grip! Your failure to plan is not my problem!”

I’ve been going through life like that. Reacting and panicking, getting caught up in other people’s drama. That was my MO for most of my life.

Now I refuse to play that game. I operate from intention and intuition.

Slow down.

Ask why.

Does this really need to be done?
Why now?
Who does it serve?
What are the alternatives?
What are the consequences?
What are the desired outcomes?
What are the expected outcomes?
What will the long term effects be?

Question everything. (If you’re a parent of a young child, you know how to do this! Channel your toddler. Just keep asking why, over and over again. The 5 Whys principle exists for a reason – that usually does it.)

Evaluate. Analyse. And do the selfish thing.

If there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that if there is a choice that feels selfish to choose, that is almost certainly the way for me to go. The scales have been so out of whack for so long.

It’s time to fix that. Redress the balance.

Less triaging for everybody else. More slowing down and self-honouring. Start rebalancing the scales.