The Start of Something Big

What does the question "How Are U Tracking?" mean to you?

If you are anything like me it probably strikes a few different chords with you and could mean anything from your weight, your level of fitness, the number of steps you are walking, calories consumed or if you have any Irish blood in you it may also simply mean "How are you?"

My day job is in Engineering and that means that I spend a good portion of my day working with, manipulating, creating and checking spreadsheets. I am extremely comfortable with expansive calculations, equations, graphs and conditional formatting.

Recently I have taken a fairly major interest in the space of personal finance and have been keen to work out a way to secure my family's financial future.


Don't get me wrong, my wife and I both have good jobs and earn comfortable salaries but there is a real personal cost of working at full speed all the time. We are thinking about a starting a family soon and the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic has really shown then working from home and a work life balance is an incredibly important driver for both of us.


We don't have all the answers yet, but I am definitely driven to figure them out and see what works for me and my wife. We are hoping to use this site as a bit of a sounding board, journal, chronicle if you will, of the decisions we make and how that actually impacts our future plans either positively or negatively.

You may be asking yourself what kind of topics we are going to be covering here and if I'm completely honest I don't think I know that answer at the moment however a flavour of the content we plan to cover would be:

• personal debt,
• mortgage debt,
• repayment and interest calculations,
• offset mortgage acceleration,
• passive income sources and generation,
• share purchasing selling and dividends,
• the purchase of and cash flow generated from investment properties,
• understanding taxation implications
• and general household expenses.

These are all the areas that we have personal experience within and have made good and bad decisions over the years so we really feel that we can document what we have done and what we might have done differently.


We also hope that this process will allow us to make future financial decisions in a more considered manner. We don't consider ourselves to be absolute experts in every field, but we are willing to learn and share what we learn to hopefully help others and ourselves.

Welcome to what we hope will be the start of something big for all of us.

Thanks for your interest

Brian