Pounds and Sense: Money, Home Education & Financial Decisions
Sep 26, 2026
Yesterday, I was a guest on The Home Earning Podcast with Eleanor Marker for an episode called Pounds and Sense.
The podcast is about how people make earning and home education work together, which made it an interesting conversation for me because I have lived that reality myself.
My family has been home educating since 2018, and during that time I have been building and running my business alongside it. Those two parts of life have never been completely separate. Decisions about work affect family life. Decisions about education affect money. Decisions about money affect what feels possible.
In fact, almost every decision we make has a financial implication.
Where we live. How we work. How we educate our children. The opportunities we pursue. The risks we are willing to take. The things we say yes to and the things we decide we cannot afford, cannot justify or are not ready for. They may not always feel like financial decisions in the moment, but money is often somewhere in the background. That is one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation.
Starting to home educate can bring up very real financial questions. Sometimes a parent gives up work or reduces their hours. Sometimes a family has to rethink how they earn. Sometimes home education becomes the catalyst for starting a business, becoming self-employed or creating a completely different kind of working life.
It can feel financially uncertain, especially at the beginning. The financial side isn't only about money. It is also about identity, beliefs, priorities, risk, confidence, responsibility and the decisions we make about the life we want to create. That is true in home education, in business and in life generally.
During the episode, Eleanor and I talked about my own story, my work around financial wellbeing, and some of the experiences that have shaped the way I think about money and decision-making today.
My life now looks completely different from the life I once had.
More than eighteen years ago, I started to rebuild my life after a life-threatening drug addiction. Looking back, I can see that I was already living something I would not consciously understand until years later: if you change your mind, you can change your life.
I became conscious of that idea in 2018, when I began to understand more clearly the relationship between what we believe, the decisions we make, the actions we take and the results we create.
By then, I had already experienced it.
Recovery had required me to make different decisions and take different actions long before I had a framework for understanding what was happening. My life changed because I changed what I was willing to believe was possible for me and what I was prepared to do next.
That does not mean thinking differently magically fixes everything. Changing your mind changes what you believe is possible. It changes the decisions you are willing to make. Those decisions influence the actions you take, and over time those actions can create very different results.
That is also why I care so much about financial wellbeing. We often treat money as though it exists in isolation, but our financial lives are shaped by far more than what we earn.
They are shaped by the opportunities we pursue, what we believe we are allowed to want, what we think we are capable of creating, what we tolerate, what we avoid and what we decide to do next.
For families who home educate, those questions can become especially visible.
Choosing a different path for your children can mean choosing a different path financially too.
It may require creativity. It may involve compromise. It may mean building something new. It may mean deciding that the conventional route no longer fits the life you want.
That does not make those decisions easy, but it does make them worth examining properly.
I loved talking with Eleanor about all of this because The Home Earning Podcast gives space to the reality that there is no single way to make work, family and education fit together.
Different families make different choices. What matters is understanding why you are making yours.
Eleanor’s own work sits at the intersection of coaching and therapy. She has an MSc in Psychotherapy, is trained in CBT and trauma work, and is a certified professional ADHD coach. Her approach brings together therapeutic depth with the forward-focused nature of coaching, looking at the way our thoughts, emotions and physical experiences all influence how we live and the changes we are able to make.
You can find out more about Eleanor and her work here:
https://www.eleanormarker.com/
The episode is called Pounds and Sense! With Sarah McCalden, and you can listen to it here:
https://the-home-earning-podcast.captivate.fm/episode/4
Thank you to Eleanor for inviting me onto the podcast and for creating a space for conversations about work, money, family and the many different ways we can choose to build our lives.