Lee’s story

The power of matching more than dollars…

Lee is a recent graduate from our Matched Savings program.  This is her story:

As I come up to the one year anniversary of when I started the Matched Savings Program with Launch Okanagan, it is obvious that my financial picture is dramatically different.  One year ago I had severe anxiety about my debts and was frantically trying to dig myself out of a rather grim situation.  Here I was, in my 50s and nothing saved for my retirement, with each day focused primarily on making sure my daughter would be taken care of and have enough for her future.  Krista’s consistent, even-tempered, sound advice and solid lessons were a very placating salve to my distress, and I learned a great deal from every class.

I had reached such a low point before starting the course that I resolved to be a star student and I began dedicating ten minutes a day to doing just a little something extra to fix my mess … whether it be researching my bank fees to find a better account or cancel online subscriptions that were not really necessary… those few minutes every day added up to an extra five hours each month focused just on bettering my financial situation.

I was unemployed when I started the course, but within a few months I had not one, not two, but three jobs and as the money started coming in, I took purposeful moves to eliminate my debt and live below my means.  I became an extreme couponer and saved hundreds of dollars on groceries and gas.  I created a six-month goal of taking my daughter to a concert in Vancouver in October — a splurge that would require dedicated savings each month to make it happen.

The real breakthrough came in September when my long-fought battle with CRA came to an end – in my favour – and $7000 in clawed-back benefits was suddenly deposited in my bank account.  The old me would have probably done something decadent with this windfall but the new me was suddenly much wiser.  After paying off my credit cards and putting some into a HISA emergency fund, I tentatively began investing in some ETFs.

This was huge:  my father was a stock broker by day and gambler by night who won and lost many times over his lifetime, sometimes even putting our home in real danger of being lost.  He died nearly penniless and I had always been terrified of the stock market after too many childhood memories of seeing my dad on calls with people demanding money.  For me to invest in anything riskier than a GIC was unheard of.  But Krista had taught me new ways of looking at things like my risk tolerance and I felt a new confidence in buying some ETFs.

Through the Matched Savings Program I was definitely turning my financial life around for the better.  But there has been a more subtle change as well.  I started reading more books, not only about finances but about personal development, and those ten minutes a day are now more like 30 minutes a day.  About two months ago, after thinking a lot about Krista’s class on the power of compound interest, everything sort of clicked and I could see how it was all intertwined:  my attitude towards my job, my health, my family, and of course my finances… they all benefited from the magic of consistent little positive efforts, just like compound interest.

Just spending a little bit of time and effort each day wasn’t hard to do, and for months and months I didn’t really notice a difference, until suddenly I looked back and saw how far I had come, and how those teeny little changes in my habits have compounded and multiplied over time.  I feel like a totally different person from who I was a year ago, and am excited for who I will be a year from now.  In the last month I have had three major unexpected expenses (totalling many thousands of dollars) but I am not panicking like I would have done a year ago.  My new emergency fund will take care of the first two expenses and I immediately negotiated a plan with the third one to pay off in instalments over the next several months.

Thank you so much to Krista and everyone at Launch Okanagan; this has been a truly life-changing experience for me and I’m super excited to pass my knowledge along to my daughter, breaking the pattern of big wins and losses that was passed down to me.  Consistency for the win!

To support the Matched Savings program and Launch Okanagan’s work in the community, donate now.