Age: 33
Married with 4 children.

My Qualifications.

Bachelor in Business - (Double Major in Accounting & Marketing from Edith Cowan University)
Working as a College Bursar with over $2m in annual revenue.

My Story

I first got excited about business and money when I was about 18 when my father introduced me to a network marketing scheme called Omegatrend. It was an off-shoot from the US' Amway. I worked every available moment trying to make this work for the next 3 years to no avail and finally decided to get a life when I met my wife to be.

My next scheme was producing a trading magazine for collectable cards which we began publishing from our own home and self-distributing to newsagents across the country. After our first 2 editions (they were produced monthly) we realised that the printing and distribution could be outsourced but it meant producing more than 5000 copies each edition. We borrowed some money from my dad and ran up a huge bill with the printers and finally called it quits after our eighth edtion.

It took us another 2 years to pay those debts back but we didn't reneg on those liabilities.

Having been burned a couple of times, I went to Uni to study accounting and also began our third business producing dried tomatoes. I hired a couple of dryers from Perth and we began selling 5 litre tubs to local restaurants. We were very succssful and were soon unable to keep up with the demand so we borrowed some more money (this time off my father-in-law) and had him also build another dryer that was capable of producing 4 times the current amount of tomatoes.

Alas, this dryer never worked to its capacity and we were soon hunting around for a machine that we could guarantee consistency. We found one in Melbourne (the opposite side of Australia) and began calculating our break-evens. Unfortunately the machine produced more tomatoes than we could foreseeably market so we made the decision to cut our losses and walk away. I had also come to the conclusion that cutting up tomatoes wasn't a fun way to be spending my life no matter what the reward.

Today, I'm working as a College bursar overseeing a budget in excess of $2m and have been for the past 7 years. The college has been through some highs and some lows during those years but we've always managed to keep it floating financially because we have learnt some great financial principles which will become the back-bone of this blog.