I loved sleeping in a fishbowl
Upside of this great place was that I was so close to work and the city, but the downside was that I could see work and they could see my apartment. Not a great place to be if you wanted to chuck a sicky. Some of my colleagues thought I was crazy to be paying inner city rent, but when I did the sums, it made perfect sense to me. I could pay lesser rent in the burbs, but I’d still be paying public transport, or parking and when I sold it like that, people were on board. Plus, I was a city slicker. I don’t do well in the burbs, so I was paying for the convenience. I had come out of a situation where there was joint income and even while we were cohabiting, we split the living expenses and now, here I was on my own with nothing but a car, a few possessions as assets, and a lot of sexually transmitted debt. So many women find themselves in this very same situation after making the decision to free themselves in order for happiness – or having that decision made for them and if I was to have my time again, and knew what I knew now, I would have definitely done many things differently around how I managed my money and how I would have progressed that relationship. I, like many others is/was/is a spender and this new lifestyle meant that I had to be totally responsible for myself financially and as the old saying goes, cut my cloth accordingly. I was being paid monthly in my role in Brisbane and also being paid monthly here in Melbourne and this was also a challenge and here’s how I managed to navigate my way through the new financial chapter.
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