Janine

As clients of Lighthouse Financial, we have all been asked to fill out that balance sheet full of circles. You know the one, it’s the one you stick in the folder and never look at. Until one day, I decided to stop avoiding what I already knew and that was seeing in black and white where my life was out of balance.

Sometime later, I decided to take what the English call a gap year off to decompress,
travel and create more personal time. In that year, I hiked the Inka trail, met my husband, travelled to Europe twice and ventured to New Zealand. I helped establish a Neighborhood Community Organization and began to work with a local entrepreneur with her start up business. When my finances started to disappear, I knew I had to re-establish a balance between my new found personal life and my business life.

For the next couple of years, I had the opportunity to support a couple of entrepreneurs with their ventures and to work on my personal life as a wife, I felt very balanced and blessed. Then suddenly, I found myself without a job and no income during what I thought was the worst financial crisis in my lifetime. We had more bills than income and I began to panic. I quickly realized that I was getting nowhere with that attitude and I needed to get on doing what I do best, talking to people. I picked up the phone and to my surprise, the person on the other end offered me a temporary opportunity that would get me by for
the next couple of months. This led to another meeting and another opportunity that was waiting for me.

Every time I thought I didn’t have enough, there it was just enough. I am certain you all have had this same experience before but just never looked at it as proof for your own future. One wise person in my life said; we are all destined to make a certain amount of money in our lifetime. You can choose to make it quick or slow and steady so that it will support your whole life. I am here for my whole life! While it wasn’t Robert who said this to me, it might have well been as I believe Lighthouse is founded on a whole life principal otherwise they would have fired me as a client a long time ago!

Today, our country and world is facing an even tougher economic crisis and yet there are opportunities. Fred & I set out a plan to rebalance our debt to income for 2011 so that our family had more freedom and fun. Because of the bleak outlook on real estate, we took advantage of refinancing and negotiated a loan down saving us thousands of dollars. It was nothing short of a miracle and felt like we won the lottery.

While our lives continue, change is all around, you can choose to look at it from a negative viewpoint or look at it as an opportunity. These words are a reminder to myself and hopefully inspiration to you, to believe and trust in yourself, surround yourself with people that do the same and close your eyes and let go. God will only give you ONLY what you can handle.