About Me!

Yawn.

That's your reaction when you read most blogs. The material, especially in the personal finance niche, is incredibly dry:

  • 10 Ways to Avoid Lifestyle Inflation
  • How to Grocery Shop on a Budget
  • Spending Recap: April

These are blog posts I actually spent time writing back when I looked at this website as a personal blog. How naïve. This website shouldn't be a place where you read dull blog posts about boring stuff, but rather, a place where you read interesting blog posts about quasi-boring stuff (hey, writing about finance is inherently boring, give me a break).

And that's where you come in. You're here to find interesting things to read on Monday and Friday mornings when you're bored out of your skull at work or hiding from your children in the bathroom. If you feel that the gap between Monday and Friday is too long, I agree, which is why I publish a Wednesday newsletter called The Super Entertaining Newsletter. Original, I know.

So who is this character behind Vanessa's Money. Shockingly, a very nice person named Vanessa.

I'm a planner extraordinaire who schedules her life into 30 minute blocks and tries to be as productive as possible. A Montreal transplant, I now live in a tiny town in Alberta where there isn't much to do besides socialize with people over coffee. I recently adopted a senior cat who shows up on my twitter and Instagram pages an embarrassing amount.

Volunteer-wise, I try to reign in budgets and get grant money for organizations in town. None of this would be possible if I had a traditional 9-5 job.

“Why don't you have a real job?” – actual question someone once asked me to my face.

I've tried three times in my life to have a “real job”:

  • Immigration paralegal: 8+ hours a day, phone calls and emails from clients at all hours of the night, tears aplenty at my commute and lack of social life
  • Hotel worker: 8+ hours a day, insane hotel guests, death threats, periods of incredible boredom coupled with periods of incredible business, tears aplenty at my commute and lack of social life
  • English teacher: 10+ hours a day, continual overtime, lots of downtime with nothing to do, tears aplenty at my commute and lack of social life

What a terrible life. Each time I vowed to never return to a lifestyle that had me trading my time for money. Instead, now I trade my production for money. I am entirely self-employed both online and offline and I love it.