How we changed our relationship with money to be able to travel more as a family

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of HSBC UK.

 

Deep down I have always had wanderlust. That tingly feeling of always wanting to go somewhere, see something different, experience life to the full! I wanted to travel the world and learn more about other cultures, learn new languages, explore amazing landscapes. I dreamt of buying that one way ticket to the first destination of my round the world trip, slowly indulging the world, one place after the other!

But then, what happens? You get a job, get married, have kids, and settle into a normal life of chore after chore… All of a sudden life is very, very different from what you had envisioned. But somehow you didn’t even see that happening….

Sounds familiar? Have you found yourself living a reality that doesn’t look anything like the one you have always dreamt of?

That is what happened to me. But the good thing is that you can change your reality at any point in your life – and I am here to prove it! Read below to learn exactly how we changed our lives completely and I hope this will inspire you to follow your dreams too.

 

 

My life back then was life as many people know it – eat, work, sleep, repeat. That lifestyle, however, wasn’t bringing my family and I much pleasure.

Don’t get me wrong, we felt lucky to actually have jobs in an economy slowly recovering from recession, which is more than some can claim. We managed to feed everyone, do the shopping and pay for our living expenses and some conveniences. We were working very hard and long hours to maintain what many would call a “perfectly good life” but it all came with a pretty high cost.

My husband worked away from home, and we were lucky if we ever saw him at all. We had little time together as a family, lots of stress of living the rat race, and above all the thought that every month the mortgage had to be paid off.

Basically we were working to pay the bills and not to live. We desperately craved for a better money life balance.

Still, it is hard to make a change when you seem to be living a stable life. You know how every day is going to go and that used to give us some sense of control and stability. Only later we realized that we didn’t have any control at all!

Like most people, our life is full of ups and downs. It just takes a turn down in the oil price, something no-one had any control over, for a promising career to be made redundant overnight. And that feeling of control and security vanishes from your life in a split second.

Funny to look back and see that those days filled with insecurity were actually a blessing in disguise. That down moment shook us and made us rethink our ways of living. We were forced to take the time to decide what we really wanted to do with our lives.

We wanted to be together, closer to the Atlantic coast and we wanted to see more of the world. I envisioned my daughter being an open mind citizen of the world, having learnt not only from the classroom but also from real experiences in this beautiful world we live in.

 

 

We decided we needed to get a grip on our lives, and change things for the better, but the main worry and biggest limitation has always been the finances. How could we afford our dream lifestyle? We definitely had to figure out a better relationship with our money to be able to pursue our dream.

And so we did, almost 2 years ago! We decided to sell up, which released ourselves from our high crippling fixed rate mortgage, and changed our life and lifestyle completely.

Fast forward to today and we have bought a new house in a different country, with a much more affordable living cost and far better quality of life, where we can run our own businesses to support our travel bug. Finally living the dream we could say, but it took us a lot of hard work and preparation! And we couldn’t have done it without finding our own Work / Money / Life Balance.

It was not easy to get to the decision as my husband and I are not natural risk takers. We basically had to go through a lot of trial and error to finally figure out what our financial personality was and how we could steer our money relationship to our advantage.

 

 

We had to learn the hard way but we recently found out about a test that could help you to avoid this steep learning curve! Now you don’t have to go through tough months like we did to develop a better relationship with your money. HSBC UK is committed to helping customers create an optimal Bank Life Balance by developing innovative systems to help us manage our finances.

Their latest innovation has just been launched; the Bank-Life Balance Test. The Bank-life Balance reveals your financial personality type and helps you understand it. I took the test myself after we had already made our major life changes, and it was spot on for me!

I am a Self Sufficient Spender! A little bit of my results here:

“For you it’s all about being independent and making efficient financial decisions so that you have more time to spend doing what you love.

You’re a confident multi-tasker who knows what they want. You’re independent in spirit and like to make things as easy as possible, so you’re a keen online shopper.

Although you’re not flashy, investing in quality matters to you and you like to live life your way.”

It is so right! Find out your financial personality type now, click here.

HSBC UK has also created the Connected Money app, which allows customers to see their accounts, loans and savings from all of their banks on one dashboard. This innovation also helps people like you and me with the important task of managing our finances.

Even though your passions and dreams may be different than ours, I suggest you to take the Bank-Life Balance test to discover more about your financial personality.

Having a good bank-life balance is different for everyone. For us it is not about making a fortune but it’s about enjoying something far more valuable than gold – our family. Plus we have time on our hands to spend doing what we want and what matters.

How is your relationship with money? Would you like to improve that too?

---

 

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of HSBC UK. All opinions are my own. For more information on sponsored contented in this website please visit our Disclaimer and Disclosure page.