I look at my daughter and I see an entrepreneur. Okay, it is all in my head, but I want it with all my heart. Because entrepreneurs are the ones who find their passion, do something about their passion, rake in all the money and success and (have the potential to) make the world a better place.

I want that for my daughter. So I transferred her to another school.

It was a summer and I was learning about and loving finance, and the idea of a different school for my 9-year old daughter kept growing (gnawing) in my head – an entrepreneurial school that would give her a love of finance and help her find and inflame her passion. The next day, I started interviewing other schools. She was, at that time, enrolled in a traditional school – rigorous daily classes, heavy assignments, a bag with wheels that would make her shoulder stoop, teachers that taught but did not really teach. She had the burden to understand concepts that were taught to her in 30 minutes or less, and the burden to ask mother for help, yes, me, while I also tried to remember and understand concepts that I already buried in the annals of my memory. We were a mess. Well, me mostly.

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I ingest recipes and then imagine cooking them in my head. And then I forget about them.

Because I eat out – we eat out – a lot. And those recipes lose their allure to gastronomic treats in restaurants with ambiance that is well worth the money. And I do not have to clean up (look, ma, no dirty hands!).

It is because of experiential eating. And when I say experiential eating, I mean Sonya’s Garden, which entered my reality more than ten years ago. Because of that one fine afternoon when we got lost looking for what would be our wedding reception venue, I found out that eating should not just be about good food. It should also be about having a great experience – a meal amidst a lush garden, fine bone china, rose petals in the salad, sheer white gauze in the windows, dew on the flowers, a singing dog (believe me) and a goddess in a flowing chiffon gown… And since then, we have been on the search for “the dining experience”. And the Manila restaurant scene did not disappoint – there is Antonio’s (Tagaytay), Ugu Bigyan (Quezon Province), Bale Dutung (Pampanga), Abe’s Farm (Pampanga) and the other places that have been getting acclaim – the so-called best-kept secrets.

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Exactly one year ago today, You Want To Be Rich made its debut in the blogosphere.

Interestingly, June 12 is also independence day in the Philippines so I thought it would make for a great beginning – an independence day for people who wanted financial freedom. And it was a great year. Although it was a challenge to keep writing and internalizing and coming up with interesting insights and articles, I enjoyed every minute of it.

But let me confess something –the days leading to this first anniversary were not easy ones. As a matter of fact, they were the most challenging of my life.

But let today be one of celebration because it is, in very many ways. Please allow me to process what has happened this past week and I will share it with you in the coming days.

For this anniversary month, I am also launching a contest. Please watch out for it.

To all my readers and supporters, know that I am very grateful – one year after – to still have you with me on this journey.

I irritate my husband with one habit.

I get myself invited to open houses – of summer houses – and I drag him with me.

For some reason, summer houses appeal to me. I tried to enter an exclusive one once and I was turned away (not a member, no invitation from a member, no appointment to go in – how was I supposed to know it was that exclusive?). And maybe that is where the appeal lies – it is so hard to get in (well, okay, that one time, but memories of experiences sometimes stick around longer than they are wanted).

Hard to get in but also hard to keep one. But that is another story.

Summer houses in exclusive enclaves. They are the playground of the rich, and when you own one, it means you have earned the right to squander money away – and squander you will because although you paid an arm and a leg for it, it is a place where you will stay maybe only 1 or 2 months in a year.

But like I said, I like them. So yesterday, we went again to another one – in Anvaya Cove which is off the coast of Bataan, very near Subic Bay.

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One year. That was how long my relationship with the stock market has been. But there was a pre-story, which was training, lots of training, before I found the heart to jump in and play for real.

Flashback to 2008, giddy and excited and with fake money at hand, I started with the online stock exchange (it offered a practice account). Prepped by my financial planner, pumped up with some reading I had done here and there and some monitoring of the market, I found I gained some fake USD$600 in a few months. But I since I was in no real danger of getting poor or rich, I soon found myself bored. The market bottomed out too, wiping my gains, but ironically, it was also the perfect time to get in for real, to play for real.

Last night, I did not know what to expect.

My mind was filled with doomsday scenarios. After all, it is election time in present day Philippines. It is the first automated voting in the country, which was precipitated by calls for manual counting – the PCOS (precinct count optical scan) machines from Smartmatic were conking out, the mock elections (the rehearsals) did not go as expected, the practice votes were not counted accurately – and then there was the usual election fare – mud slinging, vote buying, violence.

The election bug bit long and it bit hard, raising the temperature of the country to fever pitch.

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I like hotels.

I like them so much – and traveling! – that we bought our own timeshare. But like I said in my MoneySmarts guest post:

It gives birth to other expenses – yearly maintenance fees (which went up from P2,500 to P4,000 in the blink of an eye), RCI fees (S$150 annually –in Singapore dollars, but with the current exchange rate, it might as well be in US dollars), booking fees that could range from P2,500 (Asia) to almost P10,000 (outside of Asia). It does not include airfare, or the cost of food. The RCI hotels, although three or four stars, are almost always in the outskirts of the city – that means it is 30 minutes away from where the action is. With the cab fares we are paying, we could have had a decent room at a city hotel with dancing lights, Prada and great food at our doorstep.

But it is not all bad, as we have found out in our two years of owning one.

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Postscript: Man’s Inhumanity to Man

A crisis makes heroes and villains of people. While there are many stories of heroism, one cannot ignore horror stories of fastfood chains turning away people who wanted to use restrooms or who wanted to charge their cellphones (one gave an emphatic “no”, another charged a USD$3 fee), or those who pillage the houses of those hardest hit, or those who charged USD$500 at the height of the storm for the use of a rubberboat before a family can be brought to safety, or those selling (selling!) relief goods to those who cannot take another blow.

Please choose to be an angel during these times. And if you have employees, likewise instruct them to open your doors. The next life you save may that of someone you know, or yours.