As a child I never really thought about money, seemingly I had everything I needed, I never wanted for anything. My parents were low income earners and worked hard to ensure there was also a roof over our head, clothes on our back and food in our cupboard. I learnt a great deal from my parents in regards to hard work and providing for your family, however I always knew that I did not want to be like my parents, in a financial/career sense. My dad worked long hours and often weekends, my mum worked early mornings. Because of this there were a lot of times when my brother and I were in the care of others (before school) and we didn’t get to spend as much time as we wanted to with our dad and often when we did he was tired from working such long hours.

I was bit of an outlier in my family going up, in that I had a keen interest in sports and computing/technology, which led my towards a different career path to the rest of my family. Typically my family were very hands on and mechanically minded, labourers, car & motorbike mechanics etc so for me to be interested in computers was considered “different”.

It was difficult for my dad to relate to my interests (he didn’t understand why I did not have an interest in riding motorbikes and would rather create a spreadsheet on my computer tracking basketball statistics) so we were fairly distant while I was growing up, however my mum was a great encouragement. At a young age I was very interested in statistics, which I think developed from my obsession with basketball and football cards. I enjoyed analysing the data provided on the back of the cards and would even create my own spreadsheets (on paper!) and record statistics whilst watching games on TV. Despite not having much disposable income my mum bought me a computer, this changed my life! From that point on I knew that whatever I did when “grew up” it was going to be involving numbers and computers.

Fast forward a decade or so and I am in the project management field with a reputable shipyard earning a modest income. My partner was also working in a similar field but for a manufacturing company. At this stage we had been together a few years and things were getting serious, so naturally we were looking at moving in together. First we were looking at renting but eventually decided we were serious enough to look at buying our own home together. This was back in 2003, the time when banks were lending money to almost everyone, at 0% deposit, that is before the property boom and the subsequent GFC.
Of course like many young couples we wanted it all now. We wanted to big flash house in the newest suburb, big TV and surround sound and the banks were willing to lend us the money (on our very modest wages).

Thankfully we had a very wise mortgage broker who explained to us what we were giving up if we took on such a large mortgage at such a young age (at this stage we were 21 and 22 years old). So we ended up buying a modest 3 bedroom house is a average suburb and a small mortgage and we loved it.

Then came the property boom

Our small house doubled in value over the next 3 years and we used the opportunity to move up in the market and purchase our “family” home. We moved into the flash house (flash by our standards at the time, not a mansion by any stretch) in the nice up and coming suburb. Whilst ultimately I believe this was the right move for us (the prior house was less suitable for a family and had a problem with snakes!) I do wonder what life would be like for us now as incomes have drastically increased I believe we would probably be mortgage free (in our 30s).

Then came the bad financial decisions

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph our incomes drastically increased. I had since moved on from the shipyard and landed a job with a reputable engineering company right at the start of the mining boom here is Western Australia. From 2003 to 2012 my income increased 7 fold. This is were my lack of financial literacy really burned me. Instead of maintaining our lifestyle (we didn’t lack for anything) and saving/investing/paying down the mortgage with the rest of the money we splashed out on cars, holidays, unnecessary home renovations, having kids (lol). The strange part is I felt all along that I should not have been doing this, but I couldn’t hold myself back, perhaps maturity was the issue. Whilst we did put away some savings and we did invest some money, we could have been in a much better financial position now than what we are now.

My journey starts now

I regret many of these decisions; however I refuse to live in the past and vow to make smarter financial decisions for my family from now on.
In my next couple of posts I will be sharing my net worth, and explaining why I track it on a regular basis and I will also be sharing my goals for 2017.
Thanks for reading and I hope you got some enjoyment out of learning a bit of background about The Spreadsheet Dad ?