The Real Reason I'm Not Financially Free After Ten Years

Here's something you're not supposed to say if you do what I do.

I've spent nearly ten years helping other people get closer to financial freedom. I've sat with people and consolidated their debt. Set up the standing orders that quietly moved money into their ISAs every month, without them having to think about it. I've had coaching clients ten-x their income. I've watched people go from a quiet week and a half-empty diary to a full client roster.

That's not a pitch. That's just what the last decade has actually looked like.

And I am not financially free.

It isn't incompetence, and the real answer is worse

If you're sitting there thinking "well, she can't be very good at it then" — that's fair. That's the obvious conclusion. But it isn't what happened, and the real answer is more uncomfortable than that.

I knew exactly what to do. I did it, successfully, for other people, hundreds of times.

But I was doing it inside somebody else's script. The bank's script. I could run their system brilliantly. What I never did was build the same thing for myself.

And in the meantime I spent tens of thousands of pounds on courses. Genuinely, tens of thousands. Most of which moved me backwards. I've consumed this stuff every single day for years, to the point where it all turns into white noise. You know the feeling. You watch the video, you nod along, you feel like you've done something. And then nothing changes.

The layer underneath

"I was busy" is too easy an answer, and it isn't the true one. Here's what I think was actually going on.

As long as I hadn't properly tried, I got to keep believing I could.

That's a very comfortable place to stand. "I know how to do this." "I could do it if I actually put my mind to it." "It's easy for them, they had a head start."

Every one of those sentences requires absolutely nothing from you. And every one of them protects you from the thing you're actually afraid of — which is trying properly, and finding out you might not manage it.

Does it make us feel better? Honestly, sometimes, yes. For a while. It just doesn't get you anywhere.

The structure was fragile and I knew it

Then something happened that took the choice away.

Until fairly recently there wasn't really a gap. I was working at a rate that covered what I needed. It was fine. Then I lost my biggest contract.

This is the part that stings, because it's the exact same thing that had already happened to me once before.

When I was at the bank, I survived three rounds of redundancies. Three. And every single time, you sit there and understand very clearly that your entire income is one decision, made in a room you're not in, by people who are not going to ask you first.

So I left. Went self-employed. Which is supposed to be the answer to that.

Except almost the entirety of my income was then coming from one company. Again. Same structure, different name on it.

And here's the uncomfortable bit: I knew. I'd seen how fragile that was from the inside. I had sat with clients and helped them reduce exactly that exposure. I could explain the risk to somebody else in about ninety seconds.

I just thought I had time.

That's the thing nobody warns you about. You always think you've got more time, before somebody else makes a decision about your income without asking you. And then they do.

So I'm currently on my lowest income in years. If you do the maths on anything I share going forward, you'll work that out. That's fine. I'd rather you knew. Because that's the actual starting line — not a comfortable one I've tidied up for the camera.

This part isn't about me

There's a second thing going on, and this one isn't about me at all.

Most of the advice you're being handed was written by people who got where they are under a completely different set of conditions.

Buy a house at twenty-five. Save a deposit in three years. Be sensible, be patient, do it properly.

That advice made sense when a house cost twenty grand. Now you follow the same sensible, patient, do-it-properly plan, and you arrive at roughly the age you were hoping to retire.

That is not a discipline problem. That's a maths problem. And being told to try a bit harder at a plan that doesn't fit the actual numbers is genuinely maddening.

I remember being eighteen and quietly assuming I'd never retire. Not in a dramatic way. Just as a fact about the world. And it has got worse since then, not better.

Why I'm doing this in public

This isn't a new idea for me — I've already written about step zero, the bit before the advice starts working, where most people actually are and almost nobody covers.

But me explaining step zero is fine. Me standing in it is more useful.

You don't really learn this from someone describing it. You learn it from watching someone do it, including the bits they get wrong. If I waste three months on something that doesn't work, you get those three months back. You don't have to make the same mistake to learn from it. That's worth more than another explainer, even a good one.

Here's what I could have done instead. Kept my head down for ten years. Sorted my own money out quietly. Then turned up with a camera going, look, I'm free now, here's the system that worked.

That's the easier version. It sells much better. And I don't believe it — because that person's system worked in that person's conditions, and you have no way whatsoever of checking whether it still works in yours.

So I'm doing it the other way round. Starting from here. From genuinely not being there yet, in this economy, with the actual numbers, while it's happening. Not ten years after the fact with the hard bits edited out.

If it works, you'll have watched it work. If something doesn't work, you'll see that too — which is honestly the more useful piece.

What I mean by financial freedom

I mean something specific, because the phrase gets used to mean almost anything.

I don't mean a big salary. I mean income that doesn't require me to show up. Genuinely passive.

And the route there isn't one jump. It's two things at once: get the active income up to what I actually need, and build the passive streams alongside it. So that over time, the thing paying me isn't me.

On time, before anyone assumes

I am not trying to work less right now. I'm deliberately in a grind period. It's like a plane taking off — an enormous amount of energy to get the thing off the ground, considerably less to keep it in the air. If you measured my hours right now they'd look terrible.

But hours aren't what I mean by time freedom. My real measure is: did I do every bedtime, can I pick my son up from school, do we eat dinner together, do we get the weekend. Yes. All of it. And if that means I'm working again at nine at night, that's a trade I've chosen and I'd choose again.

So I'm not time-poor. I've got more control over my time than I've ever had. What I haven't got is the money side working without me. That's the half I'm building next.

What I'm committing to

I'm doing my own Freedom Audit. The same one I built, the same one I give away free. On camera.

I'm going to work out what my version of freedom actually costs, as a monthly number, and tell you what that number is. And then every month after that, I'll tell you how close I am to it, as a percentage — whether it's gone up or down.

Some months that's going to be a good update. Some months it really isn't. I'll post both.

That's the whole thing. Not a system I'm selling you from the finish line. A thing I'm doing, from here, with you watching.

If you're in this too

If you're somewhere between knowing what you should be doing and actually doing it - tell me where you're stuck. Not the tidy version. The real one.

I genuinely want to know whether it's the same thing that had me stuck, or something else entirely. And I'll read every single one.

This is education and general discussion. It isn't personalised financial advice.