Episode Details

When thinking about financial autonomy we are typically talking about medium to long term goals, and then developing strategies to get to those goals. The transition then is a planned one. What if your transition was thrust upon you? I met someone recently who faced this challenge, and with her permission, I thought it was worth sharing with you a little of her story and the learnings that we can all take. Financial autonomy is about standing on your own two feet and not being reliant on others. Having choice. Part of that should be having the capacity to withstand adversity. Having the financial resilience to not lose your house or be forced to ask family for hand-outs. Lets take a look at Jenny's story, I think there are some great lessons we could all benefit from. I met Jenny at a social function a few weeks back. Through the course of our conversation I mentioned that I had made a podcast called "Financial Autonomy" and told her a little bit about what that was all about. She said, "That sounds exactly like the help that I could use," and so started to tell me a little bit of her story. I had never come across something like it before and thought it would be a fantastic thing to share to my listeners and those in the community. So I have subsequently had a phone call with Jenny and got a little bit more detail and that's what we will be sharing today. So I guess Jenny's story started when her and her husband were in the process of separating and they were selling their house. The day that the sale went unconditional Tim, her ex husband, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It happened really quickly, he was just feeling unwell and within a few weeks he had turned yellow. With this diagnoses, pretty soon after he went in to have some surgery. The surgery wasn't particularly successful. The surgeons couldn't get to where they needed to, and so the advice was that he had 6-12 months to live. 12 months if he goes on chemo, but going through chemo is pretty unpleasant, so there is a quality of life consideration. But he came back two weeks after the surgery for a checkup, and they found that the cancer had actually shrunk. The surgeons couldn't really understand why, but I guess you just take it if you can get it. So that was some good news. Now in the process, Jenny and the kids decided to move back in with Tim to help care for him. He migrated from England and he didn't have any family here so that was obviously a fantastic thing that she was able to do for him. So Jenny moved back in with Tim into a rental property, the house has been sold, and they each got their half of the money. Now that was in some ways fortunate because Tim had no insurance. Ironically Jenny did have insurance, and this had been a cause of a bit of tension before they were separated. I guess Tim, probably like a lot of males, assumed it would never happen to him, and didn't want to spend the money on having insurance. Also Jenny was telling me it was a bit of a factor that he was self employed so things like Income Protection weren't easy because the insurer required financials, and so it wasn't an easy straight forward solution as if say he was a regular employee. Although he didn't have any insurance, Tim at least had his equity from the house that had been sold. This was very fortunate, because if he didn't have that money to support himself, all he would have had would have been Centerlink and that would have been a pretty grim outcome, resulting in most likely sharing a house with a stranger. Could you imagine going through chemo in that kind of scenario, just horrible. So any way, he was very lucky to have Jenny there to move back in with him to support him and they battled away. They went through the chemo and all the things you have to do. Fantastically, now about 6-12 months since treatment (I'm not sure of exactly how long) he seems to have made a recovery. He needs