There Are Three Ways This Could Go

I can remember it so vividly.

Lying on my bed, late at night, my husband snoring beside me. Only the light from my laptop, sitting warm on my legs. A spreadsheet open at 11.30 pm. I was supposed to be asleep. Instead, I was working and re-working numbers, trying to figure out if there was a version of my life I could actually stand. We’d even tried running away from it before.

I’ll come back to that spreadsheet. But to understand why I was there at midnight doing this, you need to know a little about who I am.

I’m a UK family physician and mum of 2 young kids. First in my family to go to university. One of five kids. I worked my arse off to get here — and I genuinely love my patients.

But I was burnt out. Properly. Without accepting it.

And I had a bad habit. When things got depressing and hard, I spent, planned and avoided. Clothes I didn’t need…Sephora…or vacations we couldn’t really afford, but that gave me something to look forward to. Dopamine courtesy of ‘add to cart’. I knew exactly what I was doing (I’m a Physician, I understand reward pathways). Didn’t make it easier to stop.

So. Back to the bed.

I’d started that evening, googling jobs that paid better. Then jobs abroad. Then, half on a whim… Canada?

I opened an AI model and ran numbers I’d never looked at properly before.

• A real TFSA (Canada’s version of a Stocks and Shares ISA, or a Roth IRA if you’re American) maxed out.
• An RRSP, our pension equivalent.
• Retained income sitting inside a corporation rather than drawing it all as salary. If we moved, saved properly, and stopped the bleeding, what would we actually have?
• A budget that wasn’t a rough approximation but my future, rolling out in front of me.

My husband slept beside me, completely unaware. Two kids asleep in their beds.

And the thing that scared me most wasn’t the numbers.

It was Australia.

We’d done this before. Packed up, moved continents with a toddler, and been completely floored by homesickness. It was a physical ache compounded by being in a different time zone, a different hemisphere, and the day of travel to get back to family and friends that comes with that. We’d come home, in the middle of the pandemic, grateful but a little deflated. As if the elastic cord holding us to our roots had snapped us straight back. It wasn’t a happy feeling. But at least it was familiar.

So I sat there and made myself name the three possible outcomes.

One: we go, it doesn’t work, we come home. Again. And we survive that — we’ve done it before.

Two: we go, and I just recreate the same life somewhere colder. Different postcode, same patterns, same grind, only now away from family support.

Three: we go, and we actually build something that lets us thrive.

I didn’t know which one it would be. I woke my husband and showed him the projections. He looked at them for a long moment, then let out a deep breath. We shut the laptop.

Here’s where I am now.

Canada. A house that’s ours and a cheaper mortgage. A TFSA that exists in real life, not just a spreadsheet. A portfolio that’s growing without me fiddling with it daily. Old pensions I’d ignored for years, now tracked, consolidated and actually accounted for. A real picture of our net worth that I understand because I built it.

Outcome three.

And the spending? Gone. Not because I got stricter with myself, but because I don’t need the hit anymore. There’s something else to look forward to.

I’m so bloody proud of that. I didn’t think I was someone who got to feel this.

But here’s why I’m writing this.

I think about women who are somewhere in that same place right now. Not necessarily on a bed at midnight, but in that same deadened acceptance of the state of their finances, trapped in unfulfilling careers just to wait for a paycheque each month. Capable, sharp women who daren’t look at their credit card balance for weeks.

Who have old pensions they’ve never tracked.

Who cope the way I did.

Who deserve a clearer picture than the one they’ve got.

I want you to imagine opening your banking apps and investment platforms and not bracing yourself — but seeing numbers that make sense, that you understand, that excite you. Watching it grow without you doing a thing once you’ve set it up right. I’m often found at my kitchen island, logging in to look at my investment platform — not to mess with it, just to look…and feeling my shoulders drop. My coffee goes cold while I sit with a sense of peace about the years ahead. Until this year, it was totally unbelievable.

I’m not here to tell you to emigrate. I’m here to tell you the numbers are less scary than you think, and that building something actually feels completely different from just hoping things improve.

Next up: why so many women hand over the finances to their partner — and what it's costing them.

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