This week’s Money Diary is one of those “wait… this is actually so relatable” conversations. She’s a newly admitted lawyer who spent years living paycheck to paycheck while studying, prioritising travel over investing and genuinely having no idea what an ETF even was.

Fast forward a few years and life suddenly got very expensive, very quickly.

An apartment. A wedding. A honeymoon. Another holiday. A puppy. Moving costs. Furniture. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she and her husband had the slightly nauseating realisation that they’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a year… without really stopping to think about where any of it was actually going. And honestly? I think a lot of people will see themselves in this one. We talk about the pressure to buy property because everyone else is doing it, the reality of owning an apartment with brutal body corporate fees, lifestyle creep, ADHD hyper-fixation becoming an unexpected budgeting superpower, and what happened when she finally sat down and looked at her finances properly.

Now she’s investing 40% of her income, building a portfolio she actually understands, and rethinking what financial security is supposed to look like in the first place. This one feels a little bit like a group chat with your financially self-aware friends. Slightly chaotic. Slightly confronting. But in the best way.

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Acknowledgement of Country By Nartarsha Bamblett aka Queen Acknowledgements.

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