How I ended up $150,000 in debt before I knew what I'd done

I want to tell you the whole thing, because I don't think the number at the top of this site — $131,000 — makes sense without it. Debt is never really about spreadsheets. It's about the version of you that signed the paperwork, and what she was carrying the day she did.

Before the money

I grew up in Northside Edmonton, in a neighbourhood most people called the ghetto. It still is. We had a police helicopter — Air One — that circled above us with a spotlight sweeping the streets at night. My friends and I used to run through the field below that light, carefree, laughing, not understanding what the spotlight was actually looking for. We were kids. The danger was background noise.

We did not live in a house. We lived in a townhouse, and it was not quiet. It was chaotic, messy, depressing — a place where the laundry had its own geography and the dishes told their own history. My mother was depressed, and depression in that home looked like piles: clothes, papers, unpaid notices, things she meant to deal with tomorrow, then next week, then never. I loved her, and I was also ashamed of the living room. Both things were true.

Money was weather. It arrived, or it didn't. You planned around it the way you plan around a storm — quietly, and mostly by hoping. We moved a lot. The fridge was a moving target. The adults around me were doing the best they could with tools nobody had taught them how to use.

Before I turned thirteen, my sister was jumped and almost killed. That was the line. I remember sitting at a computer and emailing my dad, who had remarried in Nova Scotia and built a quieter life, and asking if I could come live with him. I didn't say it out loud to anyone else first. I just knew I couldn't stay.

What came back was a one-way ticket. My sister and I landed in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, and walked into a house with a stepmother who ran it on strict rules and high expectations. My sister was grounded to her room for the entire time we lived there — months on end, door closed, the world narrowed to four walls and a window. She had no choice but to study. And she did. She graduated on the principal's list, with one of the biggest scholarships into vet school that the school had seen.

I was not built the same way. In grade ten I ran away to live with a friend's family. I was on welfare, working three jobs, and trying to finish high school all at once. I remember being so tired that sleep felt like a luxury I couldn't afford, and so proud of the small paycheques that I didn't notice how fast they disappeared into bus fare and food and the basic cost of staying alive.

I learned early that safety was something you built yourself, and that if you wanted a thing, you had to want it hard enough to work three jobs for it. Nobody was coming.

That belief — nobody is coming — is a good work ethic and a terrible financial plan. I want to say that clearly, because I think a lot of people reading this were raised on the same one.

The years between

I went back to my dad and stepmother's house and finished grade twelve. Then I enrolled in community college in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, thinking I could build a credential the way my sister had — something solid, something that would let me stop working three jobs just to exist.

I rented a small apartment on Yukon Street, right downtown Halifax. It was the first place that felt like mine, even though the walls were thin and the money was thinner. I was proud of it. I had a street with a name and a door with a lock and a life that looked, from the outside, like it was going somewhere.

In my third year, at twenty-one, I dropped out. I don't dress that up now. I was tired, I was broke, and I was not sure the credential was worth the debt it would take to finish it. So I went back to Edmonton to stay with my mother, who was working as a nurse in a care home. She wanted me to get a job at the Fairmont Macdonald, and I did.

Three months into that job, I found my mother hanging in her closet.

I am not going to describe that day in detail. It is not the part of the story I want strangers to carry. What matters for this page is what came after: a grief so total it rearranged the furniture of my mind. I spent the next stretch mostly upright and functionally in pieces. Work, sleep, eat, sign, spend, move. Anything to keep the hands busy while the rest of me tried to figure out if the floor was still there.

I was too distraught to work any kind of normal schedule. The inheritance my mother left became my cushion, and I used it to live simply and work part-time — a job here, a shift there, nothing that required me to show up whole. When the grief got loud I got on planes instead. I traveled through the U.K., Europe, and the United States, not because I was curious in the happy way, but because distance felt like the only thing that could drown out the noise inside my head. For a while it worked. Then I would land back in Edmonton and remember the closet and the quiet of the apartment and it would start all over again.

The first business

At twenty-nine I started a home care business for seniors in Edmonton. I was not a nurse like my mother, but I knew how to show up, how to be patient, and how to do small things with care. For two years I worked it straight — no vacations, no long weekends, just early mornings and tired evenings and the particular loneliness of being the person other families trust with the people they love.

Those two years were the first time I understood, on a lesser scale, the kind of depression my mother had been carrying. Not the same weight, not the same shape, but the same language: the heaviness of getting out of bed when the work doesn't feel like it belongs to you, the way a body can keep performing while the mind begs to stop. I wish I could have told her I understood. I wish a lot of things.

What saved me financially during that stretch was my accountant. She sat me down and showed me how business expenses and tax breaks actually work — how a humble cleaning business, run with a receipt book and a little discipline, could keep far more of its money than I ever had at a part-time job. I saved almost ten thousand dollars. It was the first time I saw entrepreneurship not as a fantasy, but as a tool. A real, legal, powerful tool.

The problem was I started to believe the tool was the same as skill. I had saved money in one business, so I assumed I could start another one. I had survived grief, so I assumed I was ready to take a risk. I confused the end of one hard season with the beginning of wisdom.

That confusion — I survived it, so I must be ready now — is the most expensive belief I have ever held.

The road south

After I closed the home care business, Edmonton felt like it was closing in. The city had gotten harder after COVID — emptier in some ways, sharper in others, and full of memories I didn't have the energy to keep walking past. My sister had built a new life in Florida with a new family, and I decided the best thing I could do was get in the car and drive down to see her.

I was not running away, or at least that's not what I called it. I told myself I was taking a breath. I told myself the road would clear my head. I told myself a lot of things that sounded like hope.

The engine blew in Tennessee.

It was my GMC Terrain, the car I was driving to my sister's, the one I had trusted to get me out of Edmonton and into something gentler. A few months before the trip, my mechanic had caught a leak in the engine and talked me through a rebuild. I spent four thousand dollars on it — a huge chunk of what I had managed to save — because I believed the car would be solid after that. I needed it to be solid. The rebuilt engine was what died on an American highway with no warning and no backup plan.

The Yukon came later, and it ran fine. But in that moment, on the shoulder at two in the morning, hours from anyone I knew, I did the math for the first time honestly. It was not a good number. It was the number that eventually became the top of this website.

The rash decision

Not long after Tennessee, I decided to start a chauffeur business in Banff. On paper it made sense — I knew the mountains, I knew the drive, I knew the kind of client who paid cash to be taken care of. In my body it made even more sense, because for the first time in years I had something to point at that wasn't grief.

I did not run the numbers the way I would today. I ran them the way a person runs them when they need the answer to be yes.

• A used GMC Yukon, financed — because a chauffeur without a vehicle is a hobbyist.
• Insurance, commercial plates, permits, a website, a booking system.
• A Scotiabank line of credit I opened "just in case," and then used, the way lines of credit always get used.
• Five Visas across three banks, opened for float and utilization I didn't understand.

Inside of about ten weeks I was roughly $150,000 in the hole. Not gradually. Not "sneaking up on me." I signed for it, one signature at a time, in the state of mind of a person who had already decided she was going to survive this by refusing to look down.

What I learned before I learned anything useful

I want to be careful here, because I don't think grief made me stupid. I think it made me fast. Every decision I made in that stretch was a real decision — I was not sleepwalking. I just weighted the wrong things.

• I weighted momentum over margin. Getting the business moving felt like healing. Every dollar spent to move it forward felt like a dollar spent on being okay.
• I weighted independence over interest rates. Borrowing from a bank felt cleaner than asking anyone I knew for help. It wasn't.
• I weighted the story over the spreadsheet. "I'm a business owner in Banff" is a much better sentence than "I'm renting a car by the hour," and I paid a lot of money for the better sentence.

Why I write this in public now

I'm still driving. Bow Valley Chauffeur is real, it pays, and most months it pays more than a job would have. The debt is coming down, slowly and honestly, and I write about exactly how on the rest of this site.

But I don't want anyone to read Northern Debt and think I'm a personal finance person who happened to run a business. I'm a person who made a decision at the worst possible moment in her life, signed for six figures of debt while she was still learning how to sleep through the night, and is now writing her way out with the receipts open.

If any of this sounds like a version of your own life — if you're carrying more debt than you can say out loud, and you made most of it in a season you'd rather not talk about — I want you here. This whole site is for you.

I'm not writing from the other side of it. I'm writing from the middle. That's the entire point.