Answering questions I've avoided..

Would you ever quit being a nurse? I don't think I've ever publicly openly said this before. Hello friends, welcome back to the channel. This is the very first video that I'm filming this year and I thought what better way than to answer some of the questions I've been kind of avoiding or haven't really actually directly answered. So I'm a tad bit nervous but let's just jump into it. I know you guys are curious who paid for the house. So if you don't know how buying a house works, typically what you have to do is pay a down payment. So that's anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the house price and then the rest of the you know 80-90 percent you take out as a loan and then you pay back the loan over 30 years and that's what's called a mortgage. So if you're wondering who paid for the down payment then yes it is me, yours truly. It only really makes sense that I'm the one who's paying the down payment because I'm the one who has multiple streams of income. I also have been working fully immersed into my career for quite a couple of years. Kevin is obviously a resident. He still has med school debt that he needs to pay off and obviously he's going to have different priorities than me because we are kind of in different stages of our careers and so I did not expect Kevin to have to put down anything for the down payment and so the relationship really is more so that I am the owner of this home and Kevin is the tenant so to speak and so in the same way that he would pay rent to a department that he was renting he would be paying rent to help me pay off my monthly mortgage. I should probably charge him soon. How much was your down payment? So we decided to put 20% down for this house and if you put anything less than 20% down then you typically have to buy an extra mortgage insurance so if you put 5 or 10% down then you know every month you have to pay an extra 50 to 100 dollars in mortgage insurance and so we decided to put 20% down and I won't give you guys the exact number but I will tell you that it is in the six figure range so it is something that obviously I have worked hard to save over the last couple of years. I'll probably film a full video explaining exactly how I saved the entirety of the down payment since there are quite a lot of strategies that you have to take advantage of and I also did a financial analysis of Kevin and my spending in the year 2021 and I would say we spend roughly 25% of our income on all of our expenses, vacations, rent, utility and then the other 75% is actually saved or invested which I feel like is a pretty good ratio but there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. What happened to grad school? So if you have seen the first vlog then you know that I did end up applying to MBA programs and some things have happened and I have made an executive decision about what I want to do moving forward. Again a full video on that coming soon, sorry to leave it as a cliffhanger but it ended up not quite going the way that I had initially imagined and so more on that soon. Would you ever quit nursing if you made more money as an influencer? So in full transparency, well okay let me just preface and say that I hate that it's a taboo topic to talk about money both in the healthcare world as well as in the influencer content creation world. I really appreciate when people are transparent about their salaries and I love talking about it with other people because it gives you a good gauge for whether you're overcharging, undercharging, etc right? To be completely transparent with you guys, content creation and being an influencer is obviously a very lucrative field and my influencer income has far surpassed my nursing income for the past couple of years. While you would think that being a content creator eliminates my need to be a nurse, I think that being a content creator actually helps me love my nursing job more and let me explain to you why. Because number one, I was actually able to reduce my working hours so instead of being full-time, I'm now part-time and instead of having to work because I have to pay my bills, I have to make money, I get to work and it's a privilege to be able to serve and to be able to help the patient and to interact with my team. It's a fully different experience when I am dependent on that job to financially support me and when I get to do that job because I actually enjoy it. I think if anything the last couple years has taught us that employees are at employers disposal. They can fire you, they can lay you off, they can reduce your hours, they can make your job 10 times worse than it already was and if your interests don't necessarily align with their interests then they don't care about you and I think the worst thing you can do is to put all of your eggs in one basket and I think every single adult out there should have multiple streams of income. You should never depend on one singular source to provide for you or for your family. I've honestly been really lucky, I've experienced exponential growth on my TikTok, on my YouTube, on Instagram, really on all the platforms over the last couple years but it did not come without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, hard work, strategy, consistency, etc. But I think now more than ever it is the best time to start your journey as a content creator, as an influencer. The influencer marketing industry is a billion dollar industry and it is expanding every single day. It's really incredible how much money brands are spending on their marketing and outsourcing a lot of their work to micro influencers but one of my biggest goals for 2022 is actually to teach my own course and to be able to guide students throughout this entire journey of how to become an influencer, how to monetize your influence, and in turn be able to either reduce or eliminate your current work hours, become more location independent, and be able to do what you love for a living. If being a content creator is something that interests you then I'm going to actually leave a Google form in the description box below and you can sign up for the email list. If you sign up for the email list I'll be sending out lots of tips and tricks including how much you should be charging for your brand deals, how to understand the algorithm, etc. and you'll also get the first updates when the course is about to launch. Kind of going alongside that, would you ever quit being a nurse? I don't think I've ever publicly openly said this before but my ultimate goal in life is fire, which if you don't know what that means it's financial independence and retire early. So my goal is to achieve financial independence to have enough money so that I can retire in peace and I don't think I ever fully retire and not do anything. But once you achieve financial independence you obviously have more flexibility to say no to projects that you don't want to work on, say no to shifts that you don't want to add on for. If I ever achieve fire, yes I would like to quit my jobs. I will probably continue to content create and I would love to volunteer and contribute to the community in other ways but I probably wouldn't want to be tied down to a job if you know what I mean. Do you plan on staying in Seattle long term? So obviously we just bought a house in Seattle and if you look at the average returns annually in the greater Seattle area it's anywhere from like 7 to 15 percent in certain neighborhoods which is a pretty good return on my investment and I do think that in general Seattle is a great place to have a home. I mean to be completely honest if it were up to me I probably would not want to stay in Seattle after the duration of Kevin's residency but again I'm the one who has a little bit more flexibility in terms of my work location, being able to move my career from place to place. You know just like in the same way when I was a new grad nurse it was super hard to find a job and I had to go wherever they wanted me. It could be a similar situation for Kevin as he is searching for attending jobs so I am incredibly flexible to move to wherever we need to for Kevin's career but ideally ideally it's somewhere that's not super cold or super snowy because god home girl is still California born. Actually I'm not even California born I'm just California bred. Did Kevin get COVID? So by the time you guys see this video I don't know if the COVID vlog will be up yet but yes Kevin did actually end up getting COVID-19. Quick disclaimer both Kevin and I are triple backs we have gotten both of our vaccines plus a booster. Kevin is obviously a frontline worker he sees consoles in the emergency department all the time and he ended up getting COVID in mid-December which was when he was on a full month of night shifts. So on these night shifts he has to cover three different hospitals and he's seeing a bunch of consults in the emergency department and all he does on night shift is eat sleep and work. Kevin did not travel anywhere we did not see any friends our family already left at the beginning of December and so we are pretty confident it was from the workplace. Now whether it was from staff or from a patient that is incredibly difficult to trace but thankfully Kevin was vaccinated and one of the amazing things that comes with getting vaccinated is that even if you do get COVID-19 your symptoms are much more likely to be mild you are much less likely to have severe symptoms or be hospitalized or die. Kevin's workplace was incredibly supportive they did end up giving him a full 10 days off from the start of the symptoms and he was able to be quarantined upstairs and so during the entirety of the 10 days Kevin stayed in his room which obviously has an attached bathroom and I deliver food upstairs for him and I slept downstairs and so I was actually able to remain COVID negative even with someone COVID positive in our home. Again we vlogged the entire process so that video will be out soon. And then finally I want to tell you guys that in 2022 the channel is going to be looking a little bit different and so I did just turn 25 yay which means that I'm officially in my mid-20s and while that is a little bit terrifying I will say that over the last couple years I feel like I've really matured as a human being and the things that I enjoy and the things that I am spending my time doing have really shifted and changed and as that has changed the channel is probably going to look a little bit different too so I will definitely be keeping the life unfiltered series. I absolutely love the vlogs and making them for you guys but I also feel like there's a lot of room for improvement on this channel because I would love to be able to bring more educational value to talk to you guys a little bit more about you know investing, how I save my money, how I'm working towards financial independence, learning to cook, all these different things that I'm going through as I am you know learning how to be a real adult so watch out for that. If you made it all the way to the end of this video thank you so much don't forget to hit that thumbs up it really really helps out the channel and it's completely free to you. As always make sure you're subscribed and don't forget you're 10 out of 10 don't let anyone ever make you feel otherwise and I'll see you guys so soon. Bye!