Do you have hard time feeling safe?
Background: 37m, wife 32
HHI: $400-600k where its solely on my side and my wife helps a lot with the admin side of my business
Liquid inv / cash: $2.3mil
Home: $1.8mil
Mortgage: $750k
Just a bit on my childhood maybe it matters: Growing up i was always a odd kid, i have friends but i was also getting targeted by bullies so while my highschool life was overall good i had to endure volatile moments. Being a new immigrant my mom was the sole caretake for my sibling and i since my dad had to work oversea, so she didnt have time to really teach me or talk to me. I had to handle these bullying myself or with my best friend. I never knew what “being myself” meant and had to worked on myself a lot since meeting my wife.
I only worked one job at 24 and then i jumped into entrepreneurship. That 1 job was extremely demanding and i learned a lot but also completely traumatized me because my toxic boss. So i vow to never be an employee again. While my family is middle class because they didnt agree with my path (it wasnt toxic they were supportive but still disagreed) i didnt ask for money and relied on myself and had been dirt poor when i met my wife. We are talking about worrying about a $500 credit card bill end of month that kind of poor. I grinded very very hard for 5 years to survive and eventually we stablized and can save some money. Our savings were maybe 80-100k at 30.
Then covid hit and while everyone in my field gave up I continued to grind by moving everything online. Revenue blew up 5-6x in those years and propelled my career 15-20 years ahead of schedule.
So now here we are with a beautiful child, life is good and business is going well but i still couldnt shake that survival feeling in back of my mind so i feel like whatever we have is not “safe”. Just yesterday I updated our quarterly networth calculation and saw our liquid position gone up by 350k YTD yet i still find myself thinking “ya but thats not enough if i lose my business today”
Im wondering if any self employed or business owners have similar experience and can share? Maybe my early years of grinding combined with bullying during highschool traumatized me.