MONEY DIARY: Health Crisis, Homelessness & Now Happier Than Ever

Hello, my name's Santasha Nabananga Bamblet. I'm a proud yr

Let's get into it.

She's on the Money.

She's on the Money.

Hello, and welcome to She's on the the podcast for millennials who want financial freedom. Welcome back to another one of our money diaries where we get to talk with one of our incredible She's on the Money community members all about their journey. Let's jump straight into it, because this week I got a message and it went a little bit like this.

Hi, Victoria.

I went from financially stable to jobless and homeless with my young family after.

My husband was fired due to being deaf.

We navigated thirty thousand dollars for medical treatment in the US for our son and relocated to the other side of Australia.

It's been a huge journey of so much growth.

And I am now running a thriving solo business. I cannot wait to share my unique journey with your community. Money Diarist, I nearly used your name, which is awkward.

I'm sorry. Welcome to the show, and nice to see you again.

Thank you.

I'm excited to get into it. Bit nervous, my heart's beating a million miles an hour.

But oh my gosh.

No, for those of you at home, I met this money and diarist when I was in Perth actually recently on our International Women's Day tour, and her story was just too good not to share.

So Money Diarist, are you ready? Do you want to get into it?

Let's get into it.

Let's do it all right.

So first question I've got for you is what grade would you give your money habits from an A through to an F.

This took a little bit of thinking, but I think a PASS.

I think that's pretty pretty smack bang in the middle. That's pretty good. Let's learn a bit more about you, though.

Money Diarist.

I want to know this is as everybody knows my favorite question, Can you tell me a little bit more about your money story?

I well, both my husband I grew up in solo parent households. We have completely different attitudes towards money. So we now yeah, married and have three kids. But it's been a bit of a journey to get here growing up.

My mom ray, my sister, and I on her own after my dad left.

We had two young left over, two young daughters and a mortgage and forty dollars to her name. So I learned everything and though I feel like from her and how to live frugally from her. She's an amazing woman and I owe so much of my financial literacy, work ethic and knowledge of how to use power tools.

So I love that you just got to do what you got to do, like you're a single mum, not absolutely useless, like you just got to get stuff done.

Yeah.

Yeah, So we made all of our decisions in our householders, the three of us together, And when we sold our childhood home, we got an offer and Mum set us down and said, you know, this is the offer. This is how much it was, and I was like, no, we could do better than that. We're worth more than that. So Mom didn't accept the offer, and then they came back with another ten thousand or so, and then we

And yeah, I love that.

Do you ever find I feel like a lot of people aren't ready to talk to their kids about money because they just think that their kids aren't old enough or mature enough to understand the concepts. How did you start introducing that to your kids and how do you think that they conceptualize that? Like, are they taking a well or do they find it a challenge?

What is that like at times it carried challenging because they are kids, and at the end of the day, it's all going to be age appropriate. And so I kid to ten, seven and five, so the youngest is a bit more challenging. But I've always loved doing grocery shopping with my kids. Like a lot of mums cut way together the house and leave their kids at home, but I've always taken them. It's a chaos, but they've got their own list, and I'm like, Okay, let's go,

I feel like that's just so important as well, and I feel like grocery shopping is probably a very good gateway to teaching kids about money, where you can budget and you can cash flow, and you can work out things without you know, lumping them with the electricity bill or what it's going to cost for medical this month. So I think that that's a very good way of starting it. I want to know now, obviously you said, oh my gosh, I went from financially stable to jobless

I do a lot of things, So I run my own solo cleaning business. This fun as you I'm expecting the annual business income to be around forty thousand dollars.

Oh cool, which just some that won't seem like much.

But I've created my business to be flexible and to work around our family, so only work roughly three and a half days a.

Week for forty weeks to the year. I take balls for holidays off and weekends off.

Ah living the dream.

I feel like that context is actually so good because I immediately was like sick, like you're earning money from your own business, and when you gave us a bit more. It's kind of like you're living within the parameters of the lifestyle that you have. I mean, you have three kids, seven, ten and five. I think it's just one of those things where how cool is it that you've got this job that's completely flexible to the way you want to live your life.

Yeah.

Well, we've been living over here for two years now and I had to find something that was flexible around the children as well as my husband's work, and also for our location where we live fifty k from the closest big town, so there's not much employment where we live, and I don't want to be traveling one hundred k round trip every single day for work because then we have to look into childcare before and after school care and it's just not something that we value losing two

I do more when.

We need more, which is really great that they are flexible like that. So over November and December, I was doing probably three nights a week, and that's come at our spending money for our Ballei holiday January as well as.

Our daughter's full fees.

Oh, how good.

Yeah, it's awesome.

So probably annually I own about eight to ten thousand dollars with that, and then we've also got rental income, which over the last few years has been positively good but unfortunately won't be this year with the rate increases yep. And then we get roughly five thousand dollars annually in child.

Support for our oldest m M.

And then my husband is on roughly eighty thousand, so we estimate our family income to be around one hundred and forty thousand.

And I'm alost for studying full time. So how good.

I feel like you are in an absolute hustler, like a cleaning business. You're also doing casual work on top of that, a nightfiel. That's tough work because it's nighttime work and you would be tired. And I'm assuming you've looked after the kids all day or been cleaning all day. I just think that's so admirable, Like, get it, queen, I love it. I love hearing stories like that. I want to know, though, what does your husband do? So eighty grand that's pretty good income. What kind of role is here?

So he is he's to be a dairy farmer in Victoria and he moved over to wa It was the second COVID lockdown. He got to jump over here and they waited for us to get over in the January of twenty twenty one, which was great, and we moved over. We have secure housing now and we don't pay anything. We pay internet and that is it for our house. We live on campus at it's a government role and s he's still farming.

So yeah, how good.

And that is a very big money when definitely to add into I guess this conversation that we're having housing, My gosh, that costs so much money. So is this why you're able to rent out the house that you currently have because you're not paying anything in rent to live where you're currently living.

We actually that's a two bedroom unit that we owned, so we never bought that with the intentions for us to live in. But after my husband lost his job and we lost our housing through that back in Victoria years ago, we wanted something that if we had to live in, that we could and we would make it work if we had to, because we wanted to back up so, yeah, that's always been an investment, but it's always been in the back of our mind is that if we had to live there, would make it work.

I feel like that's very admirable and actually really smart, especially when you know what you've been through as well. I think you just get to a point where you're like, I don't care what it is, We're just having a backup plan because that's what's going to make me feel secure.

You mentioned in your letter.

Into US you said we navigated thirty thousand dollars worth of medical treatment in the US for our son.

Can you tell me.

A little bit more about that, because that sounds hectic free young family of three.

Yeah, so our middle child is born with food alogies.

So we recognized that at about six weeks of.

Age, he had head to choe x mile was red raw bleeding, and we seen many specialists and he was diagnosed with a dairy allergy, which is a bit ironic.

Giving you your husband's a dairy living on a dairy farm.

Yeah, so it got more complex as he got older. We added in a peanut allergy, egg allergy, some tree nuts, wheat, and cow.

He was contact a little.

Bit to cows, no, and you lived on a dairy farm.

Yeah, so my husband was coming from work from milking and have to chuckle his clothing machine and shower before he.

Could even hug our son, which was what we had to do. But like it was lawful that.

Yeah, Like a little boy was screaming for his dad because he'd come home from work and he just had to wait until he could, yeah, give him a cuddle.

No, that's the worst. So what happened.

He had a severe anaplectic reaction to cheese. He ate about two grams of cheese in our home. So you know, we were told constantly the strict avoidance was all we could do food alergies in Australia, which.

We thought, that's not good enough.

Our child's just had an anaphagic reaction that required two EpiPens in ten minutes. We live twenty minutes out of town, with three ambulances show up at our house.

His lips went blue.

It was just awful, so traumatizing, not just for him myself, but also his older sister, who is an amazing advocate for him, and she's been there for every reaction that he's had and calmed him down and she always makes sure that whatever he's touching, or if someone offs in food that he can eat it. She's amazing, but it just being told strict avoidance is all we could do just didn't sit right with me. Knowing that this is

That's not an option.

Yeah, oh my god.

Yeah, And then the more we think about it, like you probably couldn't be in the army, or you couldn't be a chef, you couldn't be a pilot, like there were so many things you probably couldn't do because you know, like if he's a pilot, he's flying a plane. If he were to have an allergic reaction or anefect reaction, then everyone's at risk.

And it was just it was heartbreaking.

So we yeah, my ADHD hyperfocus brain did its thing, and three am one morning, I discovered oral immunotherapy that was offered in the US as well as some other countries, but the US was just something that we could probably make work, and so we found a doctor in Atlanta in Georgia, who would take him on for six weeks and then Yeah, the planning went from there, and it was going to be about ten thousand dollars for the treatment cost plus all the travel expenses.

We couldn't afford the whole family to go. It just wasn't going to work.

Our youngest was only nine months old then, and he had his own health issues. My husband was working. He couldn't afford to take six weeks off, so we thought that I would just go on my own with him.

Yeah, so we made it work.

We crowdfunded the ten thousand dollars for their treatment costs, which I was really hesitant doing in the beginning because I just thought there's a lot more children and people out there in the world that need that help and I didn't feel like we need that. But a friend sort of said, people aren't going to help you if they don't want to, or if they can't.

Afford to one hundred percent.

And trauma's not comparable, Like you can't compare your trauma to somebody else's trauma and say they've got it worse. Therefore I should not be looked after like And I think that that's a really good point, right. You could put up a million gofund me, so that doesn't force people to contribute to them. And I think if people resonate with it, like it just makes sense.

Yeah, So it was.

Our little community in Victoria was absolutely amazing. Like blew us away, and the local Lions Club donated quite a substantial amounts. We held a community walk and like barbecue events, we held a movie fundraiser event. We did some raffles, a lot of local businesses donated to the raffle, and just everyone got behind us. A local newspaper published an article about us, and I was on the radio.

Station and it was absolutely amazing.

So I can't believe we did it, and I'm so grateful that for everybody.

That helped us out.

That's so wild.

I love that story because it's about tenacity as much as it's about finding the solution.

But my question is how is your son now?

He's amazing. So he's in grade two.

Now he is safe to go to school, And that was our biggest concern is that it would be a lot of stress on the teacher, the staff at the school, the other parents making sure that everything in the lunchboxes were safe for him because he was contact allergic to dairy as well.

So at school he's thriving. He's happy. He's now eating dairy every day.

What so you can now eat dairy after going through that? That is wild.

Yeah, so he can touch cows.

We also found out he had a horse allergy and dust mites dogs and cats, so working through that. But he can touch cows now and hug them, and he feeds the calves and he's eating peanuts. And we found out actually over there that he no longer had an egg allergy. But because he was classed as high risk, no one in Australia he would even challenge it. So it took us having to go over there to find

And yeah, oh my gosh.

Well I love that and I feel like that's been a really good sidetrack, but I am going to get back on track. I just I love hearing stories like that, and I think everyone in our community would've been pervy and want to know, well, how did you do it? Obviously, thirty grand is a lot of money. How did you raise that? What did that look like? So thank you so much for sharing that. All right, next question before we go to a really quick break, I want to

So a big goal would be divine investments, probably in the town that we live in. Anythink won to happen with employment, my husband's employment here, we would then have a backup plan and then our children would be able to finish school in here instead of moving to a different town, which with the house in crisis, a lot of families unfortunately have.

Had to do here. So that's our Yeah, big money goal.

I like that.

Well, let's go to a really quick break and I have a whole heap more questions for you right after this.

All right, money dirist, we are back. You dropped before that.

You have an investment property, so I want to know more about him investments. What current investments do you have and can you tell us a little bit about them?

Yeah, so we.

Have that investment probably and we've had that I think about four years now, so that was just what we could afford to buy at that time. We also have both of our super so my husband's is quite substantial, but mine's only just hit twenty k. But my goal is to contribute more than the ten point five percents of that through my business income, which I think i've alreadcontributed about five thousand this year.

So pretty stoked with that five grand and you've made forty what that is so good. I just feel like so many small business owners completely neglect their super so it's very sexy to hear that you're caring about it.

That's one thing that I've really been on top of that. I've wanted to do that from day one. I was like, I need to do this for myself, and then when I hear of anyone else starting a cleaning business or any small business, make sure you look after yourself and you pay your super because that's really important hundred percent.

I went on a rant yesterday with somebody because I went and spoke at an event for small business owners, and as you guys know, small business is something I'm so passionate about, and I was like, why are we in this position where small business owners are taking on so much more risk than people who are employed payg right, Like it's such a burden we put ourselves out there so that we.

Can earn our own money.

We work so much over time, we go above and beyond, and then we shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to retirement time because we don't have what somebody who is in a salary payg job who had just had their guaranteed super being paid each and every single month. We don't have that because we tried to reinvest back into our business not realizing that it stops us from getting ahead. So I'm just I love what you're saying.

Yep.

So we also have an investment bond set up for our eldest child, when our middle child turns eight in June will start his, and then saying for our youngest

Oh I love that.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your decision to get into an investment bond? I feel like there's so many options out there when it comes to saving for children and investing for your kid's future. What led you down the path of going you know what? And investment bond is the right decision for us?

I didn't do my research at all. I saw a post on Facebook someone else doing it.

I was like, here, what the heck?

Okay, all right, great, great solid research.

I mean Glenn James from my Millennial Money is a really big advocate of investment bonds, and I talk about the benefits of them on the pod. So I mean the Facebook post got you there, But I mean I wouldn't fall for everything you see on Facebook. So maybe we need to talk together about this after all.

Right, But let's move on in questions, I want to know, do you have any debt? If so, what is it?

Sorry we do have more investments?

Oh okay, sorry, sorry, I just moved on I moved on.

Tell me what are your investments.

We also have a block of lands in Victoria that we sort of willing nearly put a found dollar deposit on before the subdivision was completed, and then two years later it titled, and we sort of thought about pulling out, but our mortgage breaker sents that would be silly, and we've probably just made about one hundred thousand dollars by waiting the two years for it to title. So we thought, why not, we'll build out forever home here, and we bought it.

And then a few months later we found out we're moving state.

So it's just a vacant lot now that's being used as a parking lot by the trades that are building all the other houses around.

Yeah, are you charging them for that?

Well, I'm actually I'm really tempted.

Yeah, absolutely, if they're using your property. It is not a free car park.

My friend, Well, it's saving us having to mow that part of the lot because it's yeah, it's all crushed down and all muddy.

So I guess, oh, yeah, totally totally make money though bay and make money.

I've also got an emergency funded offsets against the block of land and then I've got my own emergency funds in my business account, and I have a whopping twenty seven dollars in chais Ah.

Big Dog Energy is ten dollars of that from using the SotM code.

It is Yeah, thanks, yeah, good, good good.

I love to see it. How did you pick your first shares on chairs?

Eas?

My first one was actually cochlear because my husband is deaf. He doesn't have a cocklier implant. He wears hearing aids, but I thought, yeah, that was something that and also elders because yeah, farming.

I love this.

Oh yeah, my first two Yeah, value investing it through and through all right, money dressed, I want to know. I feel like you've grown up super savvy and super thrifty and been able to save. So what is your best money habit?

Do you think?

Probably frugality.

So I research every big purchase to the point that if I don't need it right now, I'll crack the sheets and close one hundred tabs and then come back to it when we desperately need that ard them it.

Yeah.

It could be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time, but at least I go into every big money decision with the knowledge and the research and everyone else's.

Opinions, which can be annoying. But the kids also wear a lot.

Of hand me downs and cheap kmark clothes off the one dollar rack and secondhand clothes.

They've got some good quality.

Clothes like Country Road and likes, but I usually buy them on sale or on second hand Facebook groups. And food is obviously one of our biggest expenses living technically clusters remotely and in Western.

Australia, which food can be very expensive.

With three kids, I don't eat meat, for the rest of the family does, so whatever meat AD buy is always marked out, and we have a big deep freezer, so over and then gets stored in there, and we generally can stretch two hundred fifty grams and mints to get two nights out of that by bulking up.

With veggies and lentils and beans and all that sort of stuff.

Oh my gosh, that is super good.

Two hundred and fifty grams would be like, I don't know, two meals right usually, but being able to stretch that that far what a queen.

I love this.

I feel like we need to make like a Sheese on the Money cookbook where everybody sends in their best frugal recipes that are like tried and true because you can google frugal recipe and you're just not sure if it's going to work out, But like, we trust the community to provide, right, So I feel like we might need to favor recipe at some point in the near future to flipiate though. I need to know what is your worst money habit.

My worst money have it is probably the few nights a week my husband and I text each other before we get home from work, saying snacks, which then means one of us ends up down at the local Ida five minutes before they close, panic buying aisle two, and we come home with thirty dollars worth of Lollly chocolate chips,

I feel like that's not the worst money habit to have in the world, but maybe we need to put that into the budget for the groceries.

Yeah.

He also wanting to provide everything we possibly can for our children and give them every experience possible. It's not always the worst thing, but it can be when it comes to having five nights a week after school completely booked out with activities for three kids between swimming, netball, football, basketball, wile and everything else.

And then we look at the budget and we're like, oh, can we actually really afford all of this?

So now we've had to put limits on it that we only do one thing a season and maximum of three things a year for each child. So we're working on that slowly.

But like wanting to give your kids the world, that is not a bad money habit, Like that is a very wholesome habit, and I will get behind that one for you money, darrist, It has been gorgeous talking to you, But now we've had a chat. I feel like you're a queen. You have a block of land, you have an investment property, you have investment bonds set up for your kids, you have an emergency fund. Do you have your own business, you do multiple things. Like you said

Yes? I still probably believe I'm a B plus.

Like I feel like our family has achieved a lot and I am proud of us, but at the same time, we know.

How things can quickly change.

So even today we can be a B plus tomorrow we could be an F because anything.

Could happen, so I believe it.

Yeah, by educating yourself on financial literacy, having an emergency fund, they're both equally important because at the end of the day, as women, a man is not a plan.

So no, it's not absolutely.

Not got to have something, Yeah.

Absolutely not, But it sounds like you've got your own plan going on somewhere else. So I am very proud of you, Money Diarist. It has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your diary with us. I think this one is going to hit the ground running and people are going to love it, so I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

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