WHO IS... Suzanne Manar: Tragedy That Led Me To Trading
what's going on everyone i am mark you're watching trading with a dummy as i said last time in the last interview i'm going to start dropping more interviews before not just once a month now i have a list of people who i want to talk to as well who are reaching out to me so i'm really excited to bring on a brand new guest um some of you may not have heard of her her name is suzanne she is a author she has a trading group she learned options and she has a very very interesting story that i heard about through third party but i want to hear it from her myself and i think it's a great opportunity for us to learn about her as well as basically getting to know her story so ladies and gentlemen give a round of applause for suzanne how you doing i'm good thank you i'm doing well thank you for coming on so i've heard nothing good things about you so tell me a little bit about your background yeah thanks for having me mark um okay so my background i am syrian american and i was born in the states but my parents had actually met in syria and my father works in the oil industry so for much of my childhood i actually had the opportunity to travel the world really and live overseas and i think that that really gave me a much wider world view about which i think really impacts how i teach and i talk about trading which is why i bring it up even though you know childhood is it feels a bit far um you know back but then as an adult i decided that i wanted to work in the area of human rights so i actually studied law in the uk i studied at the university of exeter and since 2006 i've really been working in the area of humanitarian aid and in human rights and in the charitable sector and so part of my journey is that i was um in 2008 i actually moved to cyprus the greek island out in the mediterranean and i met my husband there he was actually working for world vision and we met um we were actually working in the same building and that's how we met and my husband my late husband was cameroonian and he decided that he wanted to carry on his education and so we ended up moving to germany well he moved to germany then we got married then i moved to germany so i've been now in germany for the last 10 years and i think that that again it gives me a completely different kind of world view or like you know point of view when talking about trading because so much of what we're discussing is global economics and we're trying to trade you know individual equities but without sometimes seeing the wider picture so i think sometimes people like that they like having the ability to feel that they're getting a snapshot of what's happening from like you know that kind of you know global aspect of things yeah and then dig down into the sector and into the equities that they are trading um and sadly just before the coronavirus um the before the pandemic my husband was in a car accident and um and died in in this car accident and so oh and here's my little guy i'm gonna leave this like i'm gonna probably edit some stuff in there because this is part of how it is when we have kids right oh but i wanna i wanna go back a little bit further before we we talk about um your late husband now when you said you you traveled a lot when you were younger so are you only child no i do have a younger sister but she's like six years younger than me okay and just growing up for the most part overseas is like what places have you gone to so far so where i've lived so i've lived so first okay i was born in the states and then we moved to the uk and we lived in london for two years then we lived in the emirates for four years in dubai and then we moved back to the states and then i stayed in the states until i finished my bachelor's degree then i actually moved to syria back to see my my mom's family and to live there for a year and then i decided to carry on my studies to do my law degree but i decided to study in the united kingdom instead of going back to the us for a number of different reasons and then so i studied in the south part of england and then moved back to syria and then while i was there i was actually offered a job that was based out of cyprus so then i moved to cyprus and i was based out of cyprus for almost three and a half years but then the laws in cyprus changed and my residency status was changing and at that particular point in time my husband was doing his master's in robotics and automation engineering here in germany and so we decided that instead of me moving to some third place and then when we got married then moving to germany that we would just speed up the process so we got married fat like sooner than we had expected so and then i relocated to germany we were in dortmund for about two years then we actually moved to czech republic for a year and we also lived in abu dhabi for about a year and then when we came back to germany to be here permanently then we decided to move to koblenz which is just it's halfway between frankfurt and cologne and my husband was working for a services com company as an automation and robotics engineer and that company was actually bought up by tesla just as like when my acc my husband's accident happened so at the time of my husband's accident he was actually doing a project for seatt in barcelona and sadly died in a car accident in barcelona and then that was just before the corona um situation and everybody going into lockdown so that was in january of 2020 then of course march 2020 we all went into quarantine wow okay so sounds like you you were yes very worldly is that the word you've been to a lot a lot of places oh i you know it's funny because i moved a lot too i live you as you and i both know i grew up in germany uh but i grew up in germany but in germany we moved a lot so i can't imagine growing up in a situation like yours where you're constantly moving it was kind of hard probably to build relationships with friends and stuff right so i'm assuming that you and your sister that was it right it was the two of you and you just had to try to adjust moving forward even though she's like six years younger than you i'm sure that that was kind of the relationship right and well so my sister and i being six years apart we're actually seven grades apart so when i graduated from high school my sister was just going into junior high so their the age gap was actually quite significant in in that sense when we were younger and my parents actually divorced when i was 10 and my sister was four so we are very close in that sense because it was you know we were together a lot but sadly because of the age difference i you know i moved out when she was still quite young so we are still close till now but i think that had we been a bit closer in age it would have been a bit easier to feel that you know like sisterly dynamic i think actually if you would ask my sister that she felt more like i was her mother than than her than her older sister because for a lot of her really for her childhood i was a really consistent presence in her life because we were always together but because of the age difference it was more like mother daughter than um then like sisters got you got you okay but i mean it was definitely rough though i would assume moving from place to place to place to try to establish those relationship with friends at least i know that's how it was for me at least but it also makes me a pretty easy person to talk to when people i can fit in anywhere and everywhere i get along with pretty much everybody so i assume you're probably the same in the same situation well okay so growing up though was finances a huge thing in your in your life at all were your parents like big on on finances they talked to you about it a lot or was it more of a situation where it wasn't spoken about no so finances was definitely something that my parents took very seriously and for two totally different reasons so both of my parents grew up in really um i don't like to use the word poor but they did grow up in very um tight circumstances financially and so my my father is what you know they both grew up with you know lots of brothers and sisters and my dad grew up in a really small town in minnesota and then kind of you know got an opportunity to go to university and received a scholarship to study engineering and so his life kind of really blossomed from there because he really has a very my father's very gregarious in that sense that like if an opportunity is presented to him you'll do what it takes to kind of like do well in that opportunity and so he really excelled in that into that university experience and that basically allowed him to find um financially a lot of really positive opportunities for in his career as a geophysicist and my mom also came from you know she was from a very big family and they grew up in a time in the in syria when things were economically very difficult and so you know her mom had to be really careful because there just was so many children and so because of that my mom really learned that to like take care of things and to really be exacting when it came to money and so my parents are really in that sense very different and that my father is probably like more easy going about money in the sense because he knew that he would always be able to work and money would be there but he did always talk about like your 10 tithe 10 savings live on the rest and then as he got older and i think he started to realize that just saving and having you know somebody else invest that you know when he did like all the you know all the different retirement options that were available to him and you know maxed all of those out but even as as he got older and the oil industry went through so many changes right so at every stage he was really open about you know what was going on because there was only three of us so i mean i think it was difficult to um to hide you know from your kids when you're in a you know divorce situation what's happening in your own economics and so i think that put finances really up front because neither of my parents were living in a situation where they were like hiding what was going on and and so they were both really open but also because they both wanted to instill in us you know we got here because because you know maybe different personalities my dad always talked about any time and opportunities presented be ready to take it always you know be ready to to move forward whenever you know a door is open as long as it's right you know not don't do things that are don't make sense but you know if there are opportunities in front of you try to walk through those doors and my mom was very much like you know be organized be be strategic think about what you're doing like how are you going to get from point a to point b so she was much more like looking at the pieces of the finance my mom studied economics i mean accounting i didn't say that before so my mom very much was like always had the books in order all the bills were paid on time never paid an overdraft fee never never paid um you know she was like not into paying interest on things so she really had like finances on lockdown like she knew what she was doing and my dad was a bit more easy going but the financial aspect for him was much more like to lean into all the opportunities that are presented to you so that that's very interesting especially um seeing that they're polar opposite in a way right that's that's uh that's that's interesting now when they because you said they divorced right so once they separated how did that work who did you mostly stay with was it your mom or your dad um so technically i was my dad was our um like custodial parent but my parents literally lived like not even 30 minutes from each other so both of them were very involved in our lives and you know were really equal parties and raising us so it was mostly just the schooling aspect that we lived with my dad so we went to the the school that was in his district so it was more important about where he lived so that we had access to better schools and for my mom she was a bit more flexible to find something that was accessible to where she was working so that was probably the only like major significance of like why my parents didn't actually end up living closer because they did get along with each other but they were not uh they they were not meant to be yeah yeah it happens it happens and especially during that time i don't know how old you are you're never supposed to ask the lady how old they are so i'm not going to ask but like i'm assuming you're probably around my age and i know back in the day it was very much frowned upon right when people get divorced so it was probably kind of hard for them to do that my parents for example they were always arguing always fighting it was a a very some somewhat their version is very different than mine let's just say that but i'm an only child right but there was a lot of um drama within my upbringing and i just remember as a kid i was like i just wish i would just get divorced that way both be happy but it never happened so um i'm glad it worked out for you especially as your parents got along and it wasn't like any major issues and stuff like that so yeah i mean the i think my parents really worked at it i i credit them that that they really worked on um trying to have a nice dynamic and then as we got older and we were like kind of past the whole drama of actually getting divorced and you know all that then it was much more like okay now we're in the life that we're going to live for the foreseeable future so we all need to kind of make the best of it and um i think my mom was also you know she had a lot going on because you know as a syrian coming to america that was like one that was a huge change but also the fact that like once my parents were married and i was and then i was born we were always overseas and then when we came back to america then my parents divorced and so i think my mom had a really heavy burden to lift in the sense that like now she was really for the first time in america like living in america and you know then having to to find work in america her degree was from syria trying to finish her university so that like finish her university courses so that they would be recognized in the states and then trying to find a career that was fulfilling for her because now you know she has to she's really in a lot of ways like taking on all the burdens of you know a single person that she's you know having to work and care you know care for herself separated from my father so i think that you know she really did a phenomenal job of you know also you know always working whatever opportunities were handed to her and you know really doing a great job always trying to be like outstanding in her career so i think that just her her work ethic i mean i don't know if other women would have been able to do what what she did and so i think that that really instilled in me this kind of you know unless like you know excuses exist you know there's other always times where you know life can become just you know untenable but you really have to like dig deep and then just try to be um really consistent in in what you're doing and whatever you whatever you're doing at that time for my mom you know she like as she was looking for work and a new career she always had her best foot forward and you know tried to do her best job and you you see it on all her job recommendations that she was just stellar and at you know what she was doing and that she was really focused on being great at that and i i i you know i have to give her all the accolades because now i'm i'm 40 i'm i'm not ashamed i'm 40. and looking back to think man my mom like was really i think at that time she was just in her early 30s and really in a new country and you know rebuilding her life from scratch after having built everything in in syria at that time like her whole career everything expecting to marry my father and then you know that her life you know grow a life from there but because of how much we traveled she every time she you know started a new job then we would be transitioning somewhere else so that so i i really have to say like now in my age looking back what my mom what my mom was able to accomplish was just you know i think sometimes it gives me that fighting spirit in spite of my circumstances yeah absolutely and i'm wondering as a kid growing up it sounds like you really had your head on your shoulders am i right like you didn't get in much trouble it sounds like it no not at all i was i was really focused i think that um so there were there was a period like at the end towards the end of my parents divorce that i think that my parents felt that i was struggling and they they tried to move me schools that wasn't really a great fit so they moved me back to the public school system and just because the area we lived in had so many um opportunities that you know really even if at a private school they weren't really able to compete with with that and so um but i think there was like that that kind of moment between junior high and high school where i was really trying to discover myself and then i really just had this strong sense of conviction that you know i i wanted to go to law school i wanted to become a lawyer i really felt that that was you know kind of like you know stamped into my life that that was who i was meant to be and i think having that goal and that vision for my life really um that really allowed me to get focused because i was i constantly had in the back of my mind like you need to get good grades you need to work hard you need to do well because you know if i if i wanted to have that future of going to law school i needed to make sure that that you know that i kind of put all the chips in my favor so or whatever the saying is but card's in your favor okay you got it right don't ask me i mess up more things all the time okay so in the end yeah i think that the that you know having that kind of drive allowed me to really focus and then kind of drive the rest of my life behind that so i yeah so i think that as a kid my parents would say that there was there was a season where maybe they were a bit worried but then definitely once i got to high school they they they felt quite certain that i was um very you know head strong in that sense out of all the places that you live would you say that england was your your most favorite place to live or was it syria okay so my favorite place like my dream was to live and work in in the middle east and to live in syria but after i got married and the war started it became quite clear that if the war did just carried on as we now know that it did that that would become you know an impossible dream at least so till now inflation is just so high in syria that even though things are relatively safe in that sense the the kind of food instability and other aspects of instability are still quite high and with covid it's just yeah that's not something that i'll probably ever be able to to do but it was something that i had you know i had hope to um live in syria wow okay because as you know my background my name i was in the military and um my experience with syria seem to be very dangerous to live there especially if you're not directly from their culture like the rules and everything is so much different over there i'm surprised you were willing to live there am i maybe seeing this in like a different lens than you and you did yeah so really syria was extremely extremely safe and very diverse and very you know is you know big cultural experience now i lived in damascus i wouldn't necessarily say you know international people should you know expats should come and like go live in some of the maybe more um you know different areas but you know aleppo and and damascus the the two largest cities were just they're they were great they had great education system extremely safe um you know i think that overall it was a really wonderful place to live also you know you have to think like at that time before you know before the war it was you know it was just one of those places where you know grain everywhere even though you're in the middle of the city it felt like there are gardens just all over the place and and um and just you know like people are so warm and friendly very much like the i guess the mediterranean stereotype so and then and then there's also a lot of like cultural activities so you know celebrating the different christian holidays the different muslim holidays and even just different you know celebrating different cultures so especially in in damascus you have a lot of syrians who are background either armenian or arab or turkmen or you know and then a diversity of religion so i think it was like one of those places where there really was it wasn't like a melting pot like everybody is coming from different places and then we're all trying to become like each other but actually that oh we're all here from different backgrounds and we want to celebrate each other's diversities and i think that is that was something that was extremely unique about syria and specifically about damascus and elephant and it's sad because i i think i haven't actually been back since the war um but i i think that that has likely changed just because of the fact that demographics have just changed so so significantly in that area over the last 10 years yes i don't want to say anything like super controversial or anything i'll put you like in a hard position but i would say do you think that because of the the americans interference or or plans to go out there and start fighting that that really kind of changed the entire dynamic of syria you know i think that the biggest problem was really that what happened with what was going on in iraq basically iraq just created this significant instability and there had already been a lot of demographic issues in iraq um with the different ethnic and religious groups it wasn't it was it wasn't the same as syria in this in the sense that um because the the president's background and religious background was not represented by a majority of people he also had to exert a lot of let's say diplomacy between the different um ethnic and religious groups inside syria and in iraq you didn't have that as much and so once like all the power was basically this there was like a power vacuum that created a really significant amount of political instability between really like the iranian powers and the and the gcc countries but that's kind of political so i don't know if we should talk about that yeah if i if i give my honest opinion yeah no no listen i i totally get it it's funny because um me and um one of my best friends um know we talk politics all the time but it's probably stuff that we can't say openly but a lot of times we we talk about all these other countries that had we not came in there and supported war or invaded or tried to change the regime that was in there a lot of some of these countries would have probably been better off and um and i know like i knew nothing about syria until i had to go in there and we had to do missions or whatever so uh i can only imagine it um like in iraq you know i was on the ground there so i saw firsthand um the impact that we had over there positive and negative so it was one of those situations it was just very interesting to hear that that you live in syria so so much just for a long time because my only experience is like that place is dangerous i would not want to take my family out there and live like it's it would be really really scary just knowing that my family will be there and that things can happen so that's just very interesting that that was uh your preference of place you would love to live had it not been for the war and stuff um yeah um so tell me a little bit about your husband if that's okay if we can if you can talk about that a little bit um what did y'all meet okay so my husband was working for world vision at the time and he was living in cyprus as was i and that's that's how we met we actually were going to the same church and we happen to be working in the same building so we started seeing each other you know quite quite often here and there and then that's how we met and the nice thing was that actually i had been independently friends with um with his sister and um with other a number of other cameroonians that were from like the same group as him and so slowly we ended up like our kind of worlds just kept kind of rotating around each other and so we were really good friends for a long time and then when when he was going to it was clear that he didn't want to carry on doing it that he really wanted to get deeper into engineering and he was he was really gifted so you know he wanted to study robotics and automation and germany was kind of the place for him and so that changed the dynamics of our conversation because now it's not like we're just like socially friends and can all go out together if he's like leaving the country and so we being that my husband is my husband was cameronian and i'm not cameronian we weren't really sure like how that would all you know if you know such a situation would work so actually the year before my husband moved to to germany my mom actually came to cyprus and met him casually and i actually went to cameroon and met his his parents and some of his other brothers and sisters and then um later on when we were more serious than my dad and his wife came over to cyprus and you know met us all there and we did like a two-week vacation going around and seeing all the like biblical sites and stuff and yeah and so then we kind of got all their buy-in and when this residency issue came up we kind of asked our family like what do you think do we delay and maybe i have to move to the uk and then from the uk to germany or and everybody was like why are you waiting i mean you know i was already almost 30 as was my husband he was like you're not kids anymore if you know that you want to get married just you know just start the process and so we did got you okay and then from there um obviously you decided so when you guys were working together at that at that one spot what were you doing at that time no so we weren't actually working together we just happened to be in the same building so i've always worked in the area of human rights and humanitarian humanitarian aid so i actually work as a legal advisor to a number of different charitable organizations that focus on supporting um ethnic and religious minorities across north africa and the middle east so he was the id guy in that building and that's okay that's how you guys met okay i thought maybe you guys were doing similar things when you were doing this legal job you had you had graduated from college at that point yeah so that was it so i finished law school in 2006 and my husband and i were we independently like living in cyprus from about 2009 no 2008 to about 2011 so he was there before me so he was actually there for a year or two before me okay and then obviously your parents got they gave you the blessing you guys got married and uh when did the kids come on the way yeah so we were actually married five years before we before we decided to have kids i mean we assumed that we would eventually have children but i think that my husband wanted to be done with his master's well actually he did two masters so he wanted to be done with that and to be you know working and then at that point we could kind of decide you know how we would move forward with like having children because somebody would obviously need to take some time off and so at that time then when we decided to have kids fi well yeah so we my daughter was born in 2016. and the very end she was actually born the day before new year's so um we yeah we decided to have to have children and then we ended we had my daughter and then a few years later then we had my son zavier how was he with um the whole financial literacy space at all was he pretty was he like your dad was like everything else whatever making money so in that sense my so my husband being african was much more into tangible assets so he was he was more into like if you were going to invest in a business actually knowing what the business was what it was doing really understanding their financials and he liked that i mean he in his bachelor's he actually studied business and nit in his in his undergrad so he really liked how business has actually worked kind of behind the scenes so less of a kind of investment in like buying and trading stocks and then his father actually was really into real estate and so i think that he always came from that background like i really want to see what is the physical asset that we are investing in what is it going to do you know what what is you know and looking more deeply there where i was much more into the like i really like being able to invest in kind of the innovative space and what is up and coming so i was really into um cryptocurrencies back even before 2016 i was working for a season with a with a telehealth company and a lot of what we were doing was actually trying to well we knew that the new privacy laws in europe were going to come out and that would change how you could move patient data between um you know doctors or specialists that are that are you know aren't actually at physically at the hospital but are you know providing reads from you know anywhere in the world really and so we had to figure out you know at the moment where you you know most telehealth companies were using forms of either vendor neutral archiving or cloud systems but when the new gdpr the european privacy laws kind of came out we knew that that wasn't really going to work anymore that we would we would basically have to move towards the blockchain and around 2016 the only real use case for blockchain that had had some kind of you know development was really in the cryptocurrency space so i was you know like totally trying to edu you know i i was trying to educate myself and almost everything that i was learning all the education that was kind of accessible online or through e-learning was really something relating to blockchain and cryptocurrencies and that's actually where i started to build my technical analysis skills and why i got so deep into the technical analysis is because especially back in the day there's so much volatility in the cryptocurrency space that if you wanted to actually learn how to chart and understand cryptocurrencies you really needed to understand how the different types of technical analysis worked with volatility and so i didn't realize how important like that season in my life was going to be once i came to trying to scale my my day trading let's say and so my husband was more like i said into like the physical assets aspect of investing where i was much more into the like oh let's look at what is what's happening in telehealth and let's look at what's happening in like the innovative space and so everybody used to be like oh my gosh suzanne you're all over the place but you know part of that was being a global person and you know constantly asking those those like harder to answer questions about like where we're going to next and how is innovation going to take us to the next you know to the next step it um it always made me more curious about those maybe more innovative types of investing and so that's why i really dug you know dug more into stock trading and so i had a small iran in america even though we are now like you know totalized in the german system i had this ira in the us and so i was kind of that was self-directed and i was there developing my stock trading skills and and and my husband was kind of like you know checking it out but he wasn't deep into it because really his passion i i would say would be more in the actual like physical aspect of like growing a business or owning property so since you were into the crypto space at that time and since his whole philosophy is more like tangible assets did you all butt heads a lot when it came to where you wanted to diverse to diversify your money and put it into no it was much more that my husband was like if you are interested in this and this is something that's interesting to you then then you need to you know you need to actually like be into it so he was because he was so he was into engineering and robotics and and working in that space you know in the autumn in the automotive industry he oftentimes would think that maybe if like i thought something was kind of new and interesting that i would want him to explain it to me and so he was he was really good at saying like if this is interesting to you go for it do it um also because i think that you know one thing with i don't know if this is i don't want to say it's african like you know every generalized but my husband very much came from a culture where if a woman chose to work and his mother worked his mom was actually with the un peacekeeping forces so not a small job but you know when when both parties worked they had a lot of autonomy over the money that they had so i was i can say that my husband gave me a lot of freedom to do like whatever i wanted as long as i wasn't like doing something that was like harmful to the family but that's just not my personality anyways so he was like okay go for it i mean it's not gonna be the end of the world um you know you just try see you know figure out what's what's going on and so um yeah so his big thing was more not to lean on him to follow my passions he was like if that's your passion you do it i'm happy for you to do it like go for it i'm not going to tell you not to do it but i'm also not going to tell you that this is going to become my passion because he was like no i want to go check out all the robots that abb and and kuka and all these different companies were like releasing he's like that for him was really really interesting was was really being into the physical aspect of the of the machinery and the innovation where i was on the like philosophical kind of side i guess actually yeah and you said this was back in what 2015 2016 is when you start getting heavy into the crypto space right at that time i believe bitcoin the ethereum even exists during that time so at that time there was so the big thing at that i remember well it was actually 2017 that okay so if i look back bitcoin was like the thing but yeah every all the other like like staying power coins have have been around um the issue would have been like if you could actually trade them on the like whatever you were using so if you were using early base or or finance at that time that you know it was very difficult i mean i remember when like you literally had to like go and meet the person and like you know change exchange yeah they were you know they used to call them um like bitcoin atm so you'd have to find somebody that actually had bitcoin to be able to like put it on to your hard wallet now that aspect of it i was like i don't know how to do that my husband did help me do all of that um that aspect of it because i'm not like i wouldn't say that i'm like the most tech savvy person when it actually comes down to the hardware um of like implementing something so he he did help on on that side but to actually learn what i was doing and what i wanted to invest in or buy that was something completely different then that was like my responsibility to manage because at that point you you you already had kids right from whatever call you were saying you already had i had zelaya saraya but i didn't have xavier yet okay so were you a stay-at-home mom at that point or were you still working and doing this so i literally worked until the day i gave birth with zepaya and then i actually reduced my workload on like a maternity leave but with my daughter i was still working for uh i was working as a consultant with a number of different entities so i didn't have maternity leave so i literally went like right back to work after she was born i mean she was with me the whole time but um i was you know working from home mostly working remotely and then but with my son then i had maternity leave because at that point i had actually transitioned to working for a german company and had earned the right to have you know the like paid maternity leave i take it you speak multiple languages right yes okay that's one thing i noticed in in europe i speak german in english but when we went over there during the pandemic which was uh bad timing unfortunately for us um i that's the first time i really realized that majority people in europe speak at least three languages typically so it's very impressive but how does that work seeing that you're an american citizen right because you were born in the states my dad's american also okay and you but you had dual citizenship correct no so syrians actually are not allowed so syrian women don't pass citizenship so technically i mean now they're changing the laws so technically i could probably um no i think this the law is still pending but they will change the law so i could have syrian citizenship but no women don't pass citizenship sadly so we i i was i was american until um until now now i can become german now i'm like at the end of my citizenships ah that that sucks yeah that's awesome because i had dual citizenship until 23 i think then i gave it up to join them military and came to state it was so stupid looking back i should have kept it so i'm trying to get it back now but i think it's like a long process or or something but how does that work for like anybody who's interested because like you're the first person that um interviewed that's traveling lives overseas and everything how does that work as a american citizen moving from country to country and working in all these different places like do you have to get like a a basically a visa is it like a temporary um citizenship for you to work in these countries until the job no longer exists how does that exactly work yeah so any time that you have to be based in the third location the company has to basically sponsor you so they have to go through a residency process and sponsor you for your visa so that's always how i had always traveled a lot of countries with americans because you can get a visa on arrival you have like this cushion of being able to travel freely while you're getting your paperwork set up but that's not available to everyone so you know any time that i've lived overseas or you know after in my adult life i either had a university sponsorship or i had residency through employment is that pretty hard to get overall is it like a long process like in the states where it takes years sometimes yeah so if you are trying to achieve citizenship then the process can be take a really long time if you're just looking for permanent residency like you know a green card then that's much more achievable and really usually the only thing you're not allowed to do is vote so your rights are not you know are not that different between permanent residency and citizenship and so really it's just finding a job that you know a career that will be able to sponsor you now one of the big changes in europe so when my i think that probably you know in the 80s and 90s it was a lot easier to find employment as a non-citizen or like as an american in europe but now you have the different european competition laws so a company has to actually prove that there's not somebody that's already in europe so somebody that already has residency or a citizen of a european union country that can fulfill a particular job before they start out sourcing beyond the scope of the european union so actually being an american was was sometimes not advantageous to me it did make my paperwork a lot more difficult and most of my colleagues then were actually european and not american because of that because it was just a heavier lift to get um to get documents to people so even with investing side um that's also somewhat different as well right because you can't really have an american account overseas right yeah so i i mean as an american legally i have to trade like an american would so everything is us based i'm not i can't trade in germany i can't trade on a german platform so i have you know everything is is u.s facing in that sense so
it would be like i did every set everything up in america and then just went on vacation to europe when it comes to the investment rules now for investors it's a totally different ballgame when it comes to citizenship because a lot of com com countries not companies countries offer what they call like the golden passport which is essentially that if you can invest a minimum amount in property or i'm trying to think in property or into like a local company then you automatically get citizenship and so i mean sometimes it's a process because you actually have to hold that you know that property or your investment for a period of time and then you can get the citizenship i know countries like portugal malta cyprus montenegro there are a bunch of different countries that offer this stream yard what's going on y'all i gotta tell you i love the platform this is amazing however the lag that happens sometimes the pixelation you guys gotta fix this i'm just saying you guys seriously can take over on zoom but this is insane uh so if you're okay to talk about your husband um a little bit so unfortunately you said he passed in in a car accident so he you said he said this was in another country right he went somewhere else for like a job interview or was just like working so he was doing a project for seatt and while he was and so he went down to their factory in barcelona and then during his time there he was in a car accident and and passed so and that was how many years ago that was just before the pandemic so we've just had the two-year anniversary of this passing and then and then a pandemic happened which terrible news on top of terrible news and i know you're where you were living at they went like full-fledged shutdown so oh yeah oh i'm sorry to hear that obviously um and i'm sure that was pretty shitty news to get when you know you're you're on the phone and then you know your husband is gone how um at that point what was going through your mind like moving forward yeah i mean like everything was it was really it was it was crazy circumstance so my husband wasn't supposed to go on this trip it was like the very last minute you know he's like okay i have to travel to spain i'm gonna travel tonight and i was like oh that's like so random so i was like okay well i'm gonna then go travel to my sister-in-law his his sister's house in switzerland so he left and then that morning i packed up the car and the kids and i actually went to switzerland and the whole time i was driving like i had no idea what was going on because he wasn't answering his phone so thankfully that i wasn't like driving and got the news i arrived in switzerland and i asked his sister i was like have you heard it all from me because i haven't heard anything and then that's you know then everything transpired so then his brother who lives in germany and my sister-in-law and i the three of us we went to spain we organized with the cameroonian consulate to have the body expatriated so he could be buried with his family and then and then i and then we flew back to switzerland i packed up the kids and then we went back to germany to begin all the paperwork and you know the thing is is that like you don't even have a second to breathe like this happens and then suddenly you're organizing with a forensic lab the police the you know the his his employer and all that you're like you just you're working with so many different people that you don't even have a moment to realize like what's going on and that you know you just have to keep going because there's so much happening you can't kind of like lose your rhythm because they're just so many people and you don't have a lot of time right because like the body is sitting in a morgue and you like need to go there you need to identify it get all the permission so that you can expatriate the body make sure that you know all the insurance companies are understand what's going on they have all the documents that they need so it's so much organizing that your body literally goes into this kind of like organization mode and i'm not like i'm not the kind of person that's like oh i love being organized all the time but it was kind of like you know those moments it's like super high stress and you just you something changes you just realize you have to get things done in a very timely fashion or otherwise you'll end up with like a significant catastrophe i mean you don't want to like wake up to a phone call and like the body never left spain and you know and also coordinating everyone now to to get to cameroon to you know get our visas get our flights get our passports we don't know when the body is going to arrive in cameroon so it's all kind of like this huge chaos all the way through january and february and then you know by the time we get to cameroon it's a big ordeal because you have all the ceremonial um you know the ceremonial aspects of burying somebody especially somebody who dies young and um so suddenly and you know to really make sure that we we cared for the parents as well because i mean this was like a huge shock to them and you know we really like we were really nervous that you know the the the news of this would just be not just devastating for me but for his entire family i mean it was yeah it was just it was just so shocking you can't absorb that kind of news easily it takes a long time to believe it's happening and then and then also to respond to that belief like it took me uh i mean i don't even think that i really realize that my husband has gone until probably close to the two-year point so any time i heard the door open i was like my brain was automatically like oh yeah it's gonna come walking through the door so it just was like your body never really like absorbs such big news but the rest of your life keeps moving forward and you realize you have to respond like i'm going to start getting bills and my husband was really the main breadwinner because even though i work in law and that's you know i studied everybody's like but you're a lawyer you make lots of money i'm like i work in the charitable sector like i promise you refugees refugees and people in prison don't pay very well so and i didn't need to like you know the the thing about my career is that i didn't need to pursue an aggressive paying career because my husband had a very good career so it was kind of like at that point i could really do what i was passionate about and what my husband also like my husband was also really passionate about the work that i did you know he really loved that he was able in that way to like contribute that i could have my time to do things that i believed in and that he also believed in so um that kind of sense of camaraderie then you kind of realize that that's gone and now you have to work you have to pay all your bills and so everything kind of hits this this uh kind of like wall of reality and then you have to start making things happen and that's really where i i realize that okay if i'm going to get over this hurdle the the main the like the big thing that i'm going to have to kind of overcome is the like changing my month-to-month income situation and the thing is i couldn't really change my cost of living because i couldn't just like move out of my house or like change my kids school and like i didn't want to create a whole bunch of chaos for them as well that would just have been way too much change all at one time so by not being able to like minimize my like month to month expenses because i didn't want to make any changes on the children it meant that i had to significantly increase my my income because now my husband's income was basically gone and being that it was coveted and that barcelona like barcelona was totally shut down so i didn't even actually get my husband's death certificate until almost 14 months after his accident wow so you think like oh people are like but didn't you get the life insurance didn't you you can't get any of that i cannot prove you know like everybody knows that my husband is gone but there is no documentation that my husband is gone um so a quarter you know so that just kind of created a whole covid kind of like ex just put a bomb in the whole ability to be efficient in applying for anything like i couldn't i couldn't go anywhere and say you know even you know just like something silly with the child um the the child benefit you know in germany they pay it every month in the us they pay it once a year but i couldn't even get that like into my name because i could have proved that my husband was was gone that he had passed so i mean or closing bank accounts or changing the name on bills you can't do any of that stuff because you you can't prove that the person is gone i mean technically it just looks like you're trying to do some kind of funny like bank fraud so you know you just have to then like sit on your hands and and wait waiting for this death certificate to come so uh did you know between covid and being totally locked down being quarantined um it was like i was gonna go i would have gone crazy so i was like okay my favorite thing to do is learn i love studying i love love i mean i went to law school and i finished my law degree in two years i mean i just i love studying and and um and i'm kind of like one of those person like if i have a goal i want to be like all in right i mean maybe people are like yeah yeah we we can see the level of intensity and passion that you have but because of so at this point i had a lot of knowledge about trading stocks how to use my platform that kind of stuff that information was there and i knew um i knew all about like in that sense i knew a lot about cryptocurrencies how to trade them how to do the charting and how to do technical analysis so i didn't use all of those technicals all those like technical skills because i wasn't within my stock trading i wasn't trying to day trade so i wasn't trying to like read the technicals in that sense i was like looking for for charts and general information about what was what was happening in overall trends like on a month on month not day-to-day basis but i kind of realized that okay there's no it was just way too stressful with two small kids so when my husband accident happened it was like a couple weeks after my daughter's third birthday and my son was six months old so you know when i called my parents to like tell them you know called all of our parents actually my my my mom my dad their spouses and of course my husband's parents to tell them i mean the i i i tell people i'm like no literally like i was at the fore like at the morgue identifying my husband's body and like my whole dress was like covered in milk because my son was in switzerland and here i am in spain and it just never occurred to me that this is going to be like be a problem but to show how young my my my son was i mean he was still you know he was what hadn't even been weaned like is just one day i had to go to spain and leave him behind and that was um and that was you know just that occasion but so you know you're in quarantine and i have the two kids and so i'm like okay i don't want to do stock trading that's really intense because you're you're basically like having to trade a high number of shares and you know constantly and then you have to be watching the markets and i was like this is not this is not what i like about trading and this isn't really what i want to do and so this is really what birthed my like deep dive into options trading but it also kind of created this world of of the candlestick journey so that's really where during this quarantine period is where the book series was the idea of it was born and also for the trade speakeasy was during that like hardcore time of of quarantining do you feel that maybe part of the reason why you got obsessed with options and the book and everything was also another form of coping to keep your mind busy because it sounds like i mean everything was like really bad timing and you have two kids you have this traumatic experience and you don't even have time to breathe or to i guess really process what just happened and now you're like cop it happens you're stuck at home with two kids you're like and there's no income coming in anymore i need to figure something out do you feel like that that whole process kind of helped you a little bit on oh definitely i mean you know there's there's a reality that you know you can you can train ever like every day for your life to do something but until the pressure of that event is kind of impending you notice that like your whole body like moves into the a different kind of overdrive and so you know i was i was telling my dad i was like i really feel like i decided i wanted to do a marathon and i moved like to ethiopia or to kenya to learn to run marathons at like the highest possible altitude so that you know i could you know like put my body in that like extreme level of you know learning to cope in the harshest environment in this like adverse environment so that when i came down to easier environment you know i'd perform better and that's i mean that's really what my husband's death did right it just it took all the flowery language or hopeful language that you might have like if you want to buy a house and you're like okay well you can't do it this month because but it's okay because you have next month when like when the soul breath like the the main breadwinner of your family just disappears there is no more like i hope that next month this or i hope that next month that because everything that you delay starts to compound to a point that if you just leave it compounding you will end up with significant problems that cannot be solved like you will really end up putting yourself in just you know an absolutely miserable situation and i think having worked with so many refugees and seeing what it's like to come back from like literally losing everything and then having to start your life from zero whether it's emotionally or mentally the healthiest thing to do those that kind of like just said like regardless of what's happening around me i have to hit the ground sprinting they are the people that at least get enough traction or momentum that they can like kind of keep going even if they're limping to the end but they actually get all the way through that like horrific period in their life and i think maybe i saw that also with my mom like when my parents separated she didn't just like sit around doing nothing she just said you know even if i have to take a job that's not like what i'm like qualified to do something you know below me in that sense like i'll go and do it and i'll do great at it and i'll get great reviews and i'll you know and so i think that having had all of those experiences that kind of falling apart right at the beginning is not going to do you any favors because you're still going to wake up and all of the same problems are going to be there that i that yeah definitely i i found something that i that i knew i already loved and i wouldn't regret i mean it's not like gambling or some kind of weird habit that two three years later you're going to be like oh why why did i spend all my time doing that like i would i knew that by learning i would always be benefited and by having this structure in my day like not having not having um you know any kind of like normal day of plan besides like that the children wake up and they're hungry and need to be fed there is no rhythm to your day but if you start to structure your day like i'm gonna study this at this time and then my kids and i are gonna go and do this and then we're gonna go and do this then while they're taking their nap i'm gonna study this and when they go to bed at night i'm gonna do this because otherwise you just have like sleepless nights for no reason you like have nothing to show for it but this this gave me something that i felt like okay i i won't regret like one year from now i won't look back and regret that i look that i learned all the candlestick patterns and that i read you know the the steve nys
2022-04-13 00:28
