Secret Life of a Broke Personal Finance Guru

Our family was featured in a national newspaper as the picture of fiscal responsibility. A few months later we were drowning in debt, and I realized we were looking at everything dead wrong.

Illustrations by Jesse Zhang | Edited by Farah Mohammed

On a warm spring day in March 2015, I fluttered around our family home with nervous energy. In one hour, I had a phone interview with Canada’s largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail. As a budding freelance writer, I had pitched the story of my family’s downsizing journey, hoping to get my first big assignment. Instead, one of Canada’s most well-known finance reporters would be calling to interview me. Six months earlier, my husband and I, used to going against the grain in many ways, had chosen to leave our trendy home with natural sunlight, cherry-wood cabinets and fossil gray carpet, and move into an underground abode without a speck of color or luxury. The trade-off: We could finally afford diapers.

To pass the time before my interview, I read Sometimes I Like to Curl Up in a Ball to my two daughters. From my position, cocooned in their room, I had a view of the window that framed the feet of visitors walking down the steps towar…