You were not made for lack.
You were made for freedom.

I have rebuilt my life from the ground up more than once, and each time the lesson came down to the same thing: money, and who controls it, shapes almost everything else.

I married young, into a relationship people warned me about beforehand. They were right. He gambled, he disappeared for days at a time, and no matter how much I worked, there was never any money — because he controlled it, and spent whatever he could get his hands on. Every fresh start — a new country, a new home, a new business — ended the same way: the money disappeared, and the debt stayed.

What ran underneath it was more than financial control. It was fear — the fear that sits under most abuse, quiet and constant, that convinces you the problem is you. I've since learned that money is one of the most common flashpoints for violence in a relationship, and that on average, a woman leaves an abusive relationship seven times before she leaves for good. Not because she's weak. Because leaving without financial independence isn't leaving — it's a countdown to going back. I lived that countdown more than once.

When it finally ended, the system that was supposed to help didn't always tell the difference between the truth and whoever told the better story. I learned that the hard way too.

In the middle of all of it, I prayed for someone steady — and I found him. My husband now is nothing like what came before: responsible, present, there. For the first time in my life, someone else was providing for us, and for a while, that felt like the reward at the end of everything I'd survived. We saved everything we could and bought a home together. For a brief, shining moment, it felt like it was finally coming together.

Then the ground moved again — this time from underneath my own body. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and almost overnight I lost the ability to function normally. I became bedridden. I had always been the one who worked, who provided, who held everyone else up — and now I couldn't. My son pushed me in a wheelchair. My daughter managed the shopping trolley. My husband was wonderful about carrying us. I was not, because the one thing harder than struggling is being helped, especially when you've spent your whole life being the one who does the helping.

Then someone I thought I trusted — someone whose opinion I had let matter far too much — told me, in not so many words, that I had nothing left to offer. That I had no right to want more.

Something in me went very quiet, and then very clear. No.

Rebuilding started with the smallest, most stubborn decisions. I went back to yoga, from the floor. I repaired my credit, one deliberate step at a time. Eventually, despite everything behind me, a bank trusted me enough to help me buy a home of my own. That home meant far more than four walls. It meant I would never again have to depend on someone else's permission to be safe.

My life today holds more peace than I ever thought possible. I would never choose to relive those years — but they are the reason Faith Financial Freedom exists. What I actually teach isn't budgeting. It's the kind of financial independence that means a woman never has to go back.