I’ve NC as this will be massively outing.
Im also not cash rich, I would be but we’ve invested it all into property.
I grew up in a council house, single unemployed mum. I also had a baby very young, under 15 years old.
I left home at 16 and met my now husband who is from a much poorer country than the UK and I was a stay at home mum until I was 24 and dh worked a full time NMW job and was topped up with tax credits.
when I was 24, we took out a loan and opened a few credit cards, this was all to go and see his dying father that me or the children hadn’t met, he passed before we could go and we then took a massive risk and invested all the money from the loan into a commercial property that had become empty and used the credit cards to buy all stock.
For the first three years me and dh worked 7 days a week. We open during the evenings so I used to drop the children to my mum and I picked them up (usually asleep) and carried them from mums to car to bed. It was hard, the late evenings and early school runs.
But we started with nothing and so heavily reliant on benefits.
The business has been going for 8 years, in year 6 we bought a commercial property which we opened as the sister premises but still trade mainly from the original property.
We have 25 full time staff and 12 part time.
We left our housing association property after 3 years trading and bought our first home, which were still in. It’s not massive, just a modest 4 bed detached. We own a 3 year old Range Rover and 15 year old bmw.
Along the way we’ve purchased property and own 2 outright and 5 with small mortgages. We rent them out to families who pay local authority figures.
most of our shares goes into pensions and we’re a bit backwards and pay ourselves a salary of 32k each rather than paying it out in dividends.
we traded 2.4 million last year, obviously most of that goes to taxes and overheads so we’re still not nearly as rich as many people in well paying jobs.
I don’t have any staff at home, not even a cleaner, and we don’t live in a mansion. But our lives are infinitely better than when we were poor. The best thing is probably just being able to buy whatever I want whenever I want it, and to be able to buy things for the kids that once upon a time I couldn’t have done.
The worst thing is probably certain members of my family thinking they are entitled to charge me extra for doing a job for me because I can afford it, or borrowing money from me (which I don’t mind, and wouldn’t mind them not paying me back) but certain people have this expectation that they don’t need to pay me back just because I can afford it, which I can, but we’ve worked bloody hard for it, and the early days were dire, utterly dire.