Today I am excited to introduce you to Steve Brennan aka @Travelpilot on Twitter. His story is one of family sacrifice for an ultimate outcome of lifestyle he now working on to give his children the best he can and more.

The Sacrifice

My two children have never had a normal lifestyle relationship with me.  Since before my daughter was born I have always had jobs that required me to work away from home.   I would commute back on my days off but this was usually only for a couple of days at a time and was never enough.  I always wished my family would move around with me however my partner thought it better to stay in the one location.  When leaving them to travel back to work was heartbreaking, the only conciliation being that the children thought it was normal and seemed not to be upset at all.

Why would I do this you may ask, why would I put myself through the pain of living without my family, missing out on their birthdays and watching them grow.  In hindsight I believe there were two main reasons, I wanted to earn the money to provide a better life for them and also because I was chasing my dream.  I had always wanted to fly and my ultimate goal was to be the Captain of a commercial airliner.

After many years of working different jobs, each time flying an aircraft that was a little bit bigger I finally achieved my goal, in May 2005 I became the Captain of a Boeing 767.  On top of this I was finally earning a decent income, enough to provide a good lifestyle for my family.

The Cost

The downside, two years later my partner and I separated.   Living separately on and off for almost thirteen years had taken the ultimate toll on our relationship.
The burning question I ask myself often is:

would it have been different if I had taken a normal job and lived at home like a normal Dad?  Would I still be with my family?

I didn’t want to be away from them but I also did not want them to be disadvantaged due to a lack of money either.

The Comeback

Since my separation I have been working very hard to build up a regular passive income, my new goal is to replace my income so that I can move back close to my children and still have the income to give them a great life.  This is something I wish I had thought of doing a long time ago.

Amongst many that I am currently working on, one of the income streams I have set up is through investing with a company that offers a diverse number of share market strategies.  This has worked so well for me that I decided to write about it in a blog.  I feel that if I can incite people to take responsibility for their own finances then they may achieve a better quality of life.  I am not saying that money is the answer to all problems and that it would have definitely saved my relationship, however what it would have done is given me choice.

I have achieved massive personal growth in these last two years and believe that by having this knowledge earlier, life would have been a lot different.