Sophie's Story
When I was twenty, I justified not going to university by deciding I wanted to be a stay-at-home mum. I thought life would be just perfect. My dream got crushed when I was divorced just two years later. They took my house. My plans vanished just like that.
I didn’t know how to survive financially. I decided to learn. I chose finance as my elective at university because I thought it might help me become financially independent. As soon as I started upgrading my knowledge, my whole paradigm around financial survival started to shift.
For the next few years, I worked weekdays, nights and weekends to survive. I scrimped and saved hard. Then one day at work, the financial adviser who looked after our staff superannuation fund gave such a captivating presentation, I had to ask her if there were any jobs going.
Six months later, she called me out of the blue and offered me a job as a junior adviser. I jumped at the chance. Little did I know how crucial that decision was. About a year into my junior advisor role, one of the partners at the firm had a stroke and gave me the first option to buy his business.
I saw an opportunity to go beyond securing my survival to build a life of financial abundance. I bought my first business in the year 2000, except creating an abundant life wasn’t that straightforward. I got a job on the side to support me financially for a few years but it was too stressful in the end.
By 2003, I ran my business full time, and had completed my Bachelor of Business and the Diploma of Financial Planning. I also moved into my first home in the Inner West of Sydney. Although hard, I look back on these times with pride. I don’t know how I did it. I had little spare money and hardly any social life. But I had a great system that allowed me to grow my business methodically.
Twenty years ago, the financial advice industry was very different. I recall going to industry training events, and the “brown suit brigade” would say to me, “Oh, you’ve brought the business with your husband?” I would say, “No, I don’t have one of those. It’s just me!”
Women weren’t expected to take charge of their financial independence. It gave me that much more reason to launch my own financial services business and push back on all the masculinity. I called it Visualise Wealth to represent visualising my future goals.
Until I met a colleague at a conference, I had very little social life. After six years together, I had a daughter and a son. I was happy until my partner left me when my son Luca was four months old. I battled him in court and through the Child Support system over the next seven years; enduring endless interim orders, two-three day trials, appeals and unpaid child support.
Luckily, my business continued to grow. After twenty years of dedicated efforts and setbacks along the way, I have consolidated a system to achieve financial abundance. I’ve now turned this system into a methodology my clients can follow to do the same in much less time. Today my kids are healthy and happy, and so am I.
My journey to get to this point has made me very passionate about financial literacy for women. My goal is to help women be more involved and understand their finances. Helping them learn how to be financially self-sufficient is critical to me.
With so many marriages ending in divorce, careful planning is imperative for women. That’s why I believe you should never stop setting goals and taking steps. Anyone can achieve financial abundance with the right system and tiny steps to get you where you want to be. I believe, when you put your mind to something, how far you go is limited only by you.