How We turned our financial life around by Creating a leveraged stream of income online.
Hi, My name is Lucy and I am the Owner and primary contributor to this Blog. Welcome.
This page is to share with you the journey I have been on and how I first started to build businesses and income online.
If you know me (or don’t want to read my long story) and just want to get started feel free to jump over to our Start Here page.
If you want to know what this blog is about, just click about us
How Two Oldies made a new start.
I joke about our age, but seriously at the time of writing this page, I am 55 and Gary, my Husband is 63.
We never expected to learn new skills and create a whole new lifestyle at our age, but the Global Financial Crisis left us no choice.
But because of these new skills, we now live an incredible life. We have been able to go from, pretty much living off our credit cards with limited income to making a 6 figure income. We take holidays when we want, we work when we want and we get to enjoy a lifestyle most only dream of.
But a little of our background.
My husband had, for 35 years owned a very successful company. This allowed us a really nice lifestyle and we always imagined it would make retirement extremely comfortable when he was ready to sell it.
I have always loved business. I love Business development and never wanted to work for anyone. The few jobs I had when I was younger reaffirmed this belief and led me to build, buy and sell businesses instead and taught me a heck of a lot in the process.
The last bricks and Mortar business I owned was a cafe. It was also the last bricks and mortar business I will ever own. Why a cafe? To cut a long story short, I was pretty sick in my 40’s and with the help a few wonderful Doctors and amazing healers, I found that a Plant Based Diet changed my health dramatically. As a result, I decided to open a Raw/Vegan cafe in our little country town and it was a great success. We would have people traveling great distances to visit our cafe and we were rated very highly on trip advisor.
I could tell you some crazy (now funny) stories of my time running a cafe with no previous experience whatsoever in the industry and maybe I will one day, but for now, I will just say I was always stressed and exhausted, working huge hours, dealing with staffing dramas and this, of course, was compounded by my lack of experience in that industry. As an introvert, although I loved working with our customers, chatting to them about their health, the reasons to eat this way and generally getting to know them, I still found it incredibly draining and needed time to regroup alone at the end of the day.
At the request of these wonderful customers, we started running cooking classes and they were a huge hit. One week, we ran a raw chocolate making class and had to move the venue to the local school hall when we had over 120 people book in….
Then people started to ask if we had a Recipe Book….
This really piqued my interest; I knew I didn’t want to go down the publishing route so I explored how to create an e-book (a digital version of a book). I found a great course on how to do this and off we went.
This actually was the real beginning of my online journey.
I sold my e-book for $20 and in one night we sold over $4000 worth of books. I loved knowing there were so many people benefiting from the book I created to help them with their health.
Now being an e-book its sales were all automated and it’s a pretty cool experience to log into our PayPal account and watch the sales come in. All while I was sitting at home with my husband relaxing in front of the TV. I knew there was no going back from this feeling. It was at that moment I learned the power of leveraged income!
As our reputation grew, we had more demand for educational material. I created the Raw Food Institute of Australia (online) to meet this demand and it took off. We ended up selling the cafe and I focused completely on my online business. It was going well, I was dropshipping products, selling my e-book and a running an introductory course. Over the next 3 years, we introduced more products including our flagship Raw Chefs Training and this site became an incredibly successful business.
As I started on this journey there was an event sweeping the world.
The Global Financial Crisis had taken hold and almost completely destroyed my husband’s company and we nearly lost everything. I won’t go into this in detail as it’s not my story to tell. All I will say is, we went from a great lifestyle with all the perks of a successful company to living, pretty much on our credit cards. The great news was, because of our experience with our e-book, we now knew we could make money online. (and we had a taste of how easy it could be!)
I am completely passionate about education. I love to study with experts, I invest in courses and books and study how people create success in their lives. Around this time, I was attending a conference run by a group of online experts, each with their own area of expertise and we were fortunate enough to meet a couple to whom we now owe so much of our online success. They were incredibly switched on, they really knew what they were doing and they were incredible teachers. By studying with them, we expanded our skills and strategies to increase our online (leveraged) income and we still continue to learn every day and grow our online leveraged businesses. My husband and I now have an amazing online portfolio and more freedom than we have ever had.
Why did I buy and grow this blog?
So many of our friends were (and are) dealing with similar problems to us. Some lost their superannuation or didn’t get as much as they hoped due to the economic downturn. Some lost their jobs and others just want a better future than the pension. Bricks and Mortar Business owners we know are shaking their heads and wondering how they compete with the online boom and survive this latest crisis.
As a Mum, it also breaks my heart to see young Mums having to make the choice of putting their babies in daycare because they have to go back to work.
I am regularly meeting people with a similar story, young and old, who ask us how they can do what we do. I truly believe and know from personal experience, it’s never too late to learn a new set of skills and grow the income you want. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how much education you have. You can learn this “stuff”!
Whilst we initially thought the GFC was the worst thing that could ever happen to us and nearly cost us everything, we turned it around, saw the blessing in disguise that it was, and created the ultimate lifestyle. We now make a significant (6 figure) income from multiple online (leveraged) businesses, we have more freedom than we ever have had and have the security of knowledge that can never be taken away.
Even as we face another global crisis with this Pandemic, we are secure with our online businesses. We are busy and have seen no downturn in our income. For the first time in our professional lives, we are not at the mercy of what is happening globally and know regardless of what happens, because we have invested in our digital education, we have the skills now to rebuild if need be.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”.
Benjamin Franklin
I hope my story gives you a glimpse of what is possible. We aren’t technical by nature, we haven’t been exposed to an online life-like our kids, we didn’t learn how to code websites at school, we don’t tweet, Instagram, snap-chat or Facebook all day with our friends, (well alright, maybe Facebook!) but we learned (and continue to learn) the strategies to make money online and you can too. Whether you want to create your own blog to share your expertise or find other ways to make money online, Just go to our Getting Started Page, then simply follow the steps, read our strategies and tips and you too can start to experience the same freedom we now do.
Thanks for taking the time to read my story and I look forward to sharing the journey with you.
