When I started this blog I pretty much assumed that no one would read it aside from a few close friends. Since it’s actually gaining some legs and being read by people who have probably never met me, I figured I should do an introduction. Hopefully give you a better understanding of my background and where my approach to money comes from.
I am a 36 year old mom of two boys. They are 7 and 10 and you will probably hear quite a bit about them in here. They teach me plenty about how simple and beautiful and abundant life can be. Being a mom has been the motivation for me in diving deep into all the areas so I can step up and be a solid role-model for them. It’s one thing to be broke and have poor coping tools and relationships, it’s another to think of that being passed on to your sweet babies.
I have a business management diploma specializing in accounting and over the last 12 years since then I have worked in all types of finance based positions. I worked in banking, accounting offices, for a dental office and real estate company, I helped run my ex husbands construction company, I worked for municipal government, CRA.. a whole lot of places. I have experience in bookkeeping, payroll, personal banking, I’m not formally trained in mortgages, but I have researched it to death and the same goes for a lot of other financial topics. The last 7 years I have primarily done personal and small business income tax preparation. With two kids and the cost of child care the seasonal aspect really worked for our lives.
I’ve come to really love doing the tax preparation. I found a lot of the accounting type jobs to be quite lacking in the social aspect after working in customer service for years before. Tax preparation to me is a really cool combination of all my skills and I get to talk to people about all sorts of financial and personal issues. There is always a corresponding financial piece to go along with life events such as the birth of a child, marriage, separation, death of a spouse, death of a child, illness or injury, retirement, etc. I thrived on being able to help people navigate those tough times by just offering information and direction on the financial weights they’re carrying, and sometimes just by being a space to talk about it all without the judgement. While my job was to prepare their tax returns, I also helped people understand CPP and OAS, helped people understand more about the types of savings and retirement plans, EI programs, explained all sorts of aspects of small business to people, and on and on. I love learning about all the ways to save and receive and effectively manage money.
There was one year where there was a glitch with CRA that showed a tag on everyone’s CRA account that had ever gone through bankruptcy where normally we would just see current ones. The sheer volume of people who had gone through bankruptcy or consumer proposal was really eye opening, but the conversations around that and debt was even more so. Most of the people dealing with this weren’t even what I would call low income. A lot of the times it was people and couples with a pretty decent family income.
Then there was the slow down in trades here in Newfoundland following the completion of some major projects. The fall out from that was huge. It blew my mind how many people were in the same situation where they made fantastic money for a couple years and then went back to a lower wage and were struggling severely and even losing homes and vehicles as a result.
In the midst of that tax season I decided to start writing a book. I had been working really hard on tackling our massive debt and had learned so much about it that I felt compelled to share. Honestly after all the books I had read on finance, I didn’t find the general message of just cut all this back and make more money to be very helpful. Many of them even had a very condescending tone to them that I really didn’t like. It was really in reading personal development books that I found helpful approaches to cutting back spending and found blocks and beliefs I had around making more money. I had huge ideas for this book I would write, but with working fulltime and all the rest of my responsibilities mixed with heaps of doubt, I didn’t make tremendous progress on it and pretty much put it aside again.
This last two years I heard hundreds of stories of all degrees of financial fallout from Covid. So many people were living so close to the edge that even having a pay disruption for a few weeks was unmanageable, let alone the impacts of those with longer term income changes. The first shut down from Covid also marked the last straw in my marriage. I had left my husband after ten years together, and started the road to building a new life on my own. We sold our home, I moved in with my parents and then began building a new home.
After a serious stress-induced health problem, and another round of school closures and the really shitty way I was treated at my job in the middle of that, I decided to leave my job of seven years too. I dove headfirst into getting to the roots of why my life was how it was and my role in it and I started massive work on making it better.
It was in the middle of all this deep work with an amazing group of growth focused women last winter that I resurrected the idea of writing about finance. It’s funny now that the first time it came out and I spoke the words ‘I want to write a book’ I didn’t even believe myself. I had an image of me with a pen name writing just the lessons with none of the shitty, messy story that the lessons were born through. This past week I got a loving, supportive ass-kicking in a personal growth group I’m in and it was needed. Re-ignited the spark of hope for what my words could be.
My experiences, both personally and professionally, have brought me to this place now where I feel drawn to share my lessons and my story. I am starting to realize that I have something of value to say. While I don’t have all the answers and I am still very much in the writing of the story, I do have quite a few answers and they came hard fought. My hope is that by sharing, the lessons can come without the blowing up your life and starting over like I did.
I am so grateful for every person who has read what I write about this. I am so grateful for every person who has reached out in any capacity to tell me that they got something from what I write. It matters more than you know, so thank you for the support. I’m not sure the direction this will take yet, but for now there will be lots more writing.
Lots of love
Dawn
Tax Wise 