OK. I'll admit it... I totally realise I've absolutely been slacking on the Sunday Study Edit emails recently, so I wanted to take a step back, reach out and start this all over again.
Let me back up a sec and tell you how I got here...
The 2020 version of Charlotte, sat in week 4 of the first lockdown, was in love with her new rescue dog and decided to make a change. Four weeks earlier, on the very first day we were about to be locked down in Britain, I'd gotten a call from the Rescue Centre where I'd registered my interest for a not-so-small ginger boulder and was told 'We have to close to the public in an hour, so if you can get here before then she is yours'.
Safe to say i'd broken every single speed limit on the newly empty roads to pick up Fox (and there's the picture of us both in the carpark of Manchester Dogs Home, both equally a little excitable but mostly terrified).
Skip forward four weeks and I was at my newly built home office desk with a pre-historic laptop my manager had dropped at my front door, with a note that read 'DISINFECT BEFORE USE - BRING BACK TO OFFICE WHEN RETURNING TO WORK', wondering how I'd ended up working a 9 - 5, in a job that I hated for little more than minimum wage.
In that moment, I decided that THIS - the office environment, the hours, the job I didn't love, the "living for the weekends" - was NOT going to be how I lived my life, or how Fox lived hers.
I didn't want to go back to a boring job and barely get to see my family, friends or fur-kid.
I wasn't willing to settle. I decided, in that moment, to get serious about creating a different version of my life that could give me the freedom I wanted.
I decided to trust and believe in myself.
After hours and hours of googling "best paid jobs" / "working from home jobs" / "good pay no qualifications job" (no i'm not kidding), I then went through to meticulously remove anything that was going to take me 3+ years to qualify in and that left me with one obvious choice.
A career in mortgage advice. I took the leap, six weeks into the official pandemic and as everyone kept telling me 'the worst possible time to leave a job' I took a job working as a customer-facing agent for a Mortgage Broker, a position that was entirely remote.
All of a sudden I was working from the comfort of my own sofa, In my pijama bottoms four days a week and IT FELT LIKE I'D WON THE LOTTERY!
But that was just the beginning, I still had to actually get qualified if I wanted to start earning the big bucks I'd seen my colleagues bringing in month after month. After picking their brains on the best route to take they all told me the Exact. Same. Thing. "Do a fast track course. It's expensive, and it might be the worst week of your life - but it's the fastest way to get qualified" I kept telling myself it really couldn't be that bad. Except literally everyone I spoke to said the same thing. So - that's exactly what I did. And guess what ... I still failed the exam. By this point, I was frustrated, poor and a year further down the line than I'd hoped to be after a 'surprise' lockdown baby which meant I was even poorer AND now also sleep deprived. Result... As I watched all my friends and work-besties sit through the same, boring, fast track courses that came with little / no support and zero guarantee that you would ever actually pass the exam I decided there had to be another way.
And that's how Future in Finance was born! So now, when you message me at 3am the night before your exam, freaking out about what-the-ever-living-fuck an Uncrystallised Pension Fund is, I need you to stop apologising for asking questions! Every morning I wake up SO. DAMN. GRATEFUL. that I get to do this as my job. I want to create a service that provokes change within the industry, and I want to do it by telling each and every one of my students the same thing.
I WILL STAY WITH YOU UNTIL YOU ARE FULLY QUALIFIED. My support never wavers, there is no time limit, no extra charges, no small print T&C's.
XO,
Charlotte
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