I am back baby

What happened?

Well, as you know or as you’ve heard from the history books, in 2020 we suffered a pandemic, and our lives changed in a blink of an eye. At that time I was living in Tasmania, Australia. I remember Christmas Eve, watching the news on TV that the city of Wuhan would impose a draconian quarantine—something the journalist covering the news was saying almost like a joke, that “this only happens in a communist country.” He didn’t say that, but that was the message between the lines.

The journalist said, I have to cut the transmission, because I need to enter the airport to take the last flight to Australia.

Little we knew at that time, Australia had a direct flight from Wuhan to Sydney; a few weeks later Australia started to suffer the first cases of Covid-19 and not much later the first deaths. By the end of January we started to see more and more cases, and restrictions started to be imposed.

By mid February the school of my kids got closed for two weeks, until they defined what we needed to do. In March they returned to school with some new norms of behaviour; in theory kids don’t get Covid-19 so no problem for them to be at school.

At the same time the Prime Minister was recommending that Australian citizens abroad return home; that ran for about two weeks, until on March 20, 2020 the country declared a lockdown; Nobody goes out, nobody goes in.

We had a trip prepared to Spain and Portugal and I was in conversations with my friends in Madrid, and she said, nothing is happening here, you can come no problem. Later Spain was in the top 10 of the countries with more cases and deaths.

I didn’t travel overseas until the end of November 2022. But to be honest, we saw the pandemic on TV. Let me elaborate a bit more. We had some cleaning recommendations and a couple weeks the schools closed and we had a hard quarantine process if you got in contact with someone infected, but outside that life was almost normal in Australia.

When I said to my friends that I was watching a football game of my kids, they were like “What? You are joking right? we cannot go to the corner to buy groceries.”

My family and I were so lucky to be in Australia at that time. My respect to all the people that died and those who have to suffer extreme conditions during the pandemic.

Something good happened?

I would say that I was more focused on my family during the Pandemic, continued to work remotelly and stopped writing in my blog.

Investing

Yes, at the end of 2019 I was studying the option to invest in the stock market. I have to confess that not having a mentor is a nightmare. I read a lot of books, and watched a lot of videos on YouTube. When I figured out what I would do I put together a presentation to present to my family (kids aged 14 and 9) about our new investment strategy.

But, then on March 6 of 2020 all the markets collapsed, I hadn’t opened my account yet, but I was thinking to open it. I have to confess I got a little scared and delayed my decision until May 2020. Finally I decided to open my account and my first four purchases were ETFs MGK, VTI, VOO and VNQ all from Vanguard, but in that month I changed my strategy to Stock Picking and until now so far so good.

Citizenship

We came to Australia with a temporary visa, that eventually became permanent residence and on July 2024 we got our Australian citizenship.

That was the culmination of the goals we had for our family when we moved to Australia.

• Live in a first world country
• Live in a ONLY ENGLISH speaking country
• That my kids learn English at native level
• Improve our English ( Mom and Dad ), I got 8.5/9.0 in my IELTS to get the citizenship
• Improve the option of high quality universities for our kids
• Got the Australian citizenship

All was accomplished according to the plan. We all now had two citizenships, which later became a third for my kids when they get their Colombian citizenship. They are Costa Rican too.

Next stop: Spain!!

On 2023 my son finished his grade 12 (College in Australia), my kids grew in the anglosaxon culture (a big part of their childhood), so for them after finishing grade 12 one of the most important things for them was to leave home and we agreed with that.

So our plan was that my son would live in a different city than us, and because after his move the house would be a little more empty or big for us we started to think about why not moving to another city, and because Australia is SO BIG we started to consider moving to another country.

We started to search for options in other countries, for a long time Portugal was the decision. How sure we were about that, let me put it in these words: I learned Portuguese until A2/B1 level (Yes, even for a relocation, I applied a systematic approach ). But in 2023 Spain released a new “Nomad Visa” named “Visa de Teletrabajo”, and we decided to take the Spain option due to language affinity and the speed up time to get Spanish citizenship due to our Colombian heritage.

That is why we landed in Spain in December 2023, by mid January 2024 we got our residence and soon we will start the process to get our Spanish citizenship.

What is next?

Well, I have been cultivating some passions/interests and new entrepreneurial ideas. I will write about them soon.

I will rebuild my blog using Astro.

Kudos to you if you reach until here.