Origin story

Let me know if this sounds familiar. 

I was several months away from turning 50. My partner and I had been together for almost 25 years and were a few years away from an empty nest. I had been with my employer for the last decade and paid well enough to own a small home, drive a nicer used car, and live modestly in a large city.

The reality of paying for college and needing to retire someday came screeching into our lives and my partner and I felt a bit like we had showed up to the test without studying. My natural instinct when faced with uncertainty is to try and learn as much as possible and the more I understood about planning for the future, the more humiliated I felt about being so ill-informed and unprepared to be an adult in midlife. 

Thus began months of frenetic researching, scenario planning, and drafts upon drafts of spreadsheets trying to make the math work. During this time, life began to feel short and joyless and the negativity began to creep into my social, physical, and mental health.

Then, one morning while loading numbers into a compound interest calculator (this is my favorite), three entangled ideas began to snowball in my mind. 

First, I had lived paycheck-to-paycheck, trying to occasionally save for my entire life and knew nothing about building wealth and making our money work for our family. AND, that my children would inherit my ignorance if left unattended.

Second, building wealth is more expansive and holistic than just hoarding dollars; it is about freedom to use our time as we choose and feeds off of our stores of social, physical, and mental wealth (Keisha Blair’s book speaks to this idea in more depth). 

Third, more than any other time in my nearly 50 years of life, I now had the wisdom, experience, drive, and discipline to radically alter my financial, social, physical, and mental well-being and that those changes can reverberate for generations. 

The 1,000 Years Wealth Project is here to document my learning journey, to leave a record for my children, and to hopefully help a few people out along the way. 

Come along for the ride.