I did all the
"right things."
And still felt exposed.
I grew up working class. First in my family to go to university. I worked hard, qualified as an accountant, built a career advising some of the UK's biggest financial institutions. I was determined to create something solid, for myself and for my two kids.
But the career came at a cost. Excessive travel. A life balance that had completely gone. I was rarely home, and I knew something had to change. So I took the skills I'd spent years building and decided to take back control. I left and started my own business. I was solving a problem. The problem was that I was giving everything to a career and getting very little of the life I actually wanted in return.
What I didn't anticipate was that the business would create an entirely different version of the same problem. A decade of fighting to keep it alive. Creditors. Cash crises. Lying awake at three in the morning. I'd done the "right things", paid into pensions, invested in property, built equity, and yet I was dangerously exposed, with no clear picture of how all that accumulated effort added up to actual security.
At fifty, something shifted. My aspirations weren't the same as they'd been at thirty. I didn't want to keep running harder. I wanted the life I'd been building toward to actually start. Less stress. More peace. The freedom to choose how I spent my days. Still ambitious, still driven, but differently. I wanted to make the fruits of everything I'd worked for actually work for me.
"When I finally built the framework, a complete, honest picture of where I was and exactly what to do next, everything changed. That's what Poreia exists to give you."