Hello Hivers! It's been a while since I've posted here! I tried to be so active when I just joined here, but life happens! Other priorities took most of my time and I almost forgot I have this account. Now here I am, here to share some slice of my life with you so please bear with me hehe Before we begin, let me just share a bit background about my family. We're a family of 3 (me, my mom, and my brother) and we are renters here in Metro Manila. It's been my lifelong dream to be able to rent a house with a space that could serve as a small sari-sari store (sundry store). Now as the title suggests, sumakses na ako eh! (I've succeeded!) I've dreamed of this for a long time and now it finally came true! We finally found a house for rent that has a store. If you're living in Metro Manila like me, you'd know how expensive it could get to rent a house and a separate store plus the utilities' bills for both. So, being able to score a house with a store is indeed a steal--a real dream come true for us! Before the year 2024 ended, we moved in our current house and not a month later, we finally opened our mini store with only ₱15,000 as our capital. That's when I realized how little ₱15,000 could purchase. The items we've bought were not enough to cover our store front! Our store looks bare we even had to cover some parts of it with cardboards so our house will not be fully exposed on the street. Mama's strategy is to just keep reinvesting the earnings—whatever we earn, we use it to buy more items for the store. Little by little, our store is starting to fill up. But it's slow...and tough. When I was just dreaming of this, I really thought once it comes true, everything else would just fall into place. I thought it would be like hearing the birds chirping in the morning, the dogs are happily playing and running around with the kids, the neighbor's plants are blooming with flowers and the butterflies are all around it, mothers are happily cooking lunch while fathers are tending their poultry and livestock. That's just in Wansapanataym , isn't it? The struggle is real, reality hits super hard! There were times when I'd be overjoyed for ₱580 total sales for the day that I'd even write it down on our calendar. The following day, however, would be a realllyyy slow day that I opted not to record our sales for the day. Sometimes, we earn up to ₱3,000 in a day. But that only happened because a nearby store was closed from Holy Week until now. They just reopened today… and just like that, our sales dropped—not even ₱1,000 as of this writing. So here I am now, sitting in our store while making this post—because there really aren’t many customers today. Sometimes, I wonder: is this really worth it? It’s tough enough being the sole breadwinner in the family, and the business you hoped would help lighten the load isn’t really contributing much to the household expenses yet. Well, I guess that’s how it really is. Just because a dream came true doesn’t mean life gets easier right away. Just like what Niña said, step by the step. Success isn’t instant. Even when it’s hard, even when it’s exhausting, we just keep going. What matters now is that somehow, I fulfilled the dream of my younger self—and this story isn’t over yet. Thanks for reading. It’s just that no one’s really buying at the moment, so I ended up typing away. 😅 See you all on my next post!