Hi Steemit community
I'm Natalie, from the UK. I'm currently enjoying renewed health and fitness after a couple of years of weight gain and fatigue due to a thyroid problem. It's made me appreciate my health more, and I love getting out in the fresh air to climb mountains or just for long walks.
I've also discovered indoor climbing and bouldering, which I have an absolute passion for.
My former job as Editor of a trade magazine gave me up eight years ago, when I was made redundant after a lengthy period of bullying from my employer. This was really an attempt to drastically reduce my wages, but it effectively put me off full-time work for life, as I had spent years building up my career and being quite ambitious before this crisis started – trying hard to be the perfect employee. I thought that would give me long-term job security, with enough solid experience to guarantee another job if I needed one.
I had been a proud member of a union, but it was utterly impotent to help me. Even when my boss was literally screaming abuse at me in grievance meetings, the union reps would only shake their heads and shrug their shoulders, and later say that the current employment laws made taking any further action inadvisable. This was after 13 years of a Labour government being in power.
I was already pretty cynical about politics at that stage, but that experience certainly put the lid on any old self-identification with the left-right paradigm, and probably made me a bit more questioning about social justice issues.
Despite having a university degree and a solid record of years of obedient hard work, that one bullying work regime left me with no job prospects outside unskilled work at minimum wage level, as numerous visits to job centres and employment agencies revealed. I began to realise that our UK welfare system didn't provide the safety net we taxpayers were led to believe it did, even after years of a "left-wing" government in charge.
Running a cafe
I used my meagre redundancy pay to launch my own business, a juice and smoothie cafe.
Before I was made redundant, I had been forced to work very long hours, and I never had any time to buy or cook healthy food. I had developed a lot of stress symptoms. All the food outlets near where I worked served fairly unhealthy food, and I wanted my cafe to provide healthy convenience food for working people.
However, it turned out to be a lot of hard work for very little reward. The main problem was the very small size of the premises I was renting. Although we had a lot of very satisfied regular customers, and for a while we did quite well providing juice cleanses, any money we made was soon eaten up by the overheads. "Economies of scale" were impossible.
Buying a shop
In my search for larger premises to operate from, I found out that I could invest part of my pension in buying a shop, which would certainly be more economical than renting one in the long-term. My father was an accountant, and had persuaded me to take out a private pension from quite a young age.
Over the years, the performance of this "blue chip" pension had gone from not bad to shocking. I also had a smaller private pension that had been provided by a former employer. So to cut a long story short, I was able to buy another shop, as part of a "self-invested pension plan" (SIPP).
The process of finding a decent shop that my pension funds could afford and finding a financial advisor willing to arrange the SIPP took about two years, and by the time it was settled and I had the keys to the door, I was exhausted and my business was not going well at all, mainly due to an explosion in juice bars and healthy eating outlets. I decided to rent the shop out to someone else instead.
I currently do part-time work to make ends meet, as under the terms of the SIPP, almost all of the rent from my shop goes into my pension funds or to pay for administration costs.
Poorer but happier
The financial struggle is frustrating, but I feel happier than I've been for years. I have no desire whatsoever to return to the world of full-time work, which I feel is mostly exploitative and very injurious to health.
I used to be a fairly ambitious person. I now realise that that ambition pitted me against other people, making many of my relationships with others difficult, and giving me unnecessary psychological stress, for reasons that were totally misguided.
I'm much poorer financially now, but I'm fitter and healthier and I have a better work-life balance. I love getting out into the hills, and I've met so many friends on these excursions and through indoor climbing and bouldering.
I'm no longer interested in climbing the career ladder. I prefer to climb hills, mountains and rocks, for fun and enjoyment. And that's why I'm a social climber.