Anyone who says reverse culture shock doesn’t exist is lying. After Going Global and trialling that #digitalnomadlife for an incredible handful of months, I’m back in New Zealand. I’ve had just as many thoughts coming home as I had while travelling overseas:
What do you mean, there’s no Skytrain between terminals at Auckland Airport?
I love that it doesn’t rain all the time.
Why is food so expensive?
OHMIGOSH, our mountains are spectacular.
Why are so many people monolingual? (guilty).
Not for me, settling back into the hometown where I spent the first 30ish years of my life. I’ve uprooted myself once and had a taste of the wide world. Now I’m on the move again.
I’ve quit freelancing and made the big move south to Queenstown Lakes District, land of snow-capped mountains, extortionate rents, and more outdoor adventures than you can shake a stick at. Yes, paragliding is on my list of to-dos. So is the Hydro Attack boat ride. And bungee jumping, thank you, A.J. Hackett.
But first… I’m going to need some money. Moving is expensive, my friend.
So I’m back in an office again for the first time in years. More than that, I’m part of a close-knit team (five people) and a wider department (about thirty people). And I am loving it. It’s teaching me so much, not just about the work and the organisation, but about money.
Let’s face it: I’m a finance blogger. I’m always going to find a way to learn about money, no matter what I’m doing.
Sure, the banter is top-tier, and the espresso machine is great. But it’s more than that. After years of working from home, there are things I’d plainly forgotten about office life.
For one, I find it so much easier to focus on my work when I’m surrounded by smiling, whip-smart workmates who are also focused on their work. Do we get sidetracked sometimes? Sure. But there’s always someone to bring the conversation back around to our original objective. We have our individual projects and areas of speciality, naturally. We’re also — all of us — working toward a common goal. We’re stronger when we collaborate. Anyway, things are just more fun in community.
All of which could also be said about phoning up my money-minded mates all over the country. We might be paying off our student loans, or saving for a house deposit, or investing for an early retirement — but we have those common goals, and boy, are we focused on them! We have a few laughs along the way, too. Focus and fun aren’t contradictory. If anything, I find they go hand-in-hand.
My team does a lot of pre-launch system testing. As such, a common phrase among us is, “We can’t fix it until we can replicate it. Do it wrong again.”
The first time I heard it, this rang a tower of bells with me. Heck, I wrote a whole blog about recognising and labelling the holes in my PocketSmith setup: Why I Have A Regret Category. Everybody makes mistakes; that’s the nature of humanity. It’s also the nature of humanity to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and say, “How did I do that, and how can I stop it from happening next time?” So, we replicate the route we took to make that mistake. We find the pothole in the road. And we implement a patch.
It might look like staring a credit card statement in the eye for the first time in too long and then sitting down and making a plan to get out of debt. It might look like capping that weekly Dining Out budget and finding time to meal prep. It might, for some of us, look like transferring those just-in-case savings sitting in a dead-end bank account across to a high-yield investment account.
Whatever the mistake, recognising it is the first step. Fixing it is the second.
As a veteran of the working world, I’ve had all sorts of training and onboarding experiences, ranging from really good to atrocious to frankly non-existent. This has been one of the best. It’s thanks in no small part to something my manager often says: “One thing at a time, okay? We’re not here to overload you, we’re here to make this sustainable.”
It works! I learned an incredible amount in my first month. It stretched my brain and my abilities in the best way possible. Have there been moments where it’s felt like a lot? Absolutely. Which is when I take a step back and say, “I need some time to get this part down first,” or when a workmate says, “I’ll give you time to let that settle, and we’ll come back to this tomorrow afternoon.”
It’s the same with money management. It has to be consistent and it has to be sustainable. Could I dive gung-ho into my latest financial plan, strip my lifestyle to the bone in the name of doing That Thing, and reach the goal faster? Yes, sure. Would it be utterly miserable? Yeah, probably. Realistically speaking, would I burn out before too long, give up, and fall far short of That Thing? Yeah, unfortunately.
If I take one giant leap, all I’m likely to do is overbalance and fall on my face. But small steps consistently? That, I can do.
So, I give myself leeway for the hiccups of life. I give myself grace for the occasional stumble. I take small steps often, and sometimes there’s a lurch backwards, and that’s okay. As long as I’m still heading in the right direction (and I am, thank you, Net Worth Tracker), it’s alllll good, mate.
Rachel E. Wilson is an author and freelance writer based in New Zealand. She has been, variously, administrator at an ESOL non-profit, transcriber for a historian, and technical document controller at a french fry factory. She has a keen interest in financial literacy and design, and a growing collection of houseplants (pun intended).
