Hello there!
My name is Sorina and I started Digital Train.
I am the mom of a beautifully developing 1-year-old girl and the wife of a wonderful man. And yoo-hoo, we are now also expecting our second little one!
I have created this blog because of my firm decision to improve our personal finances and because I want to share my journey as a stay-at-home, work-from-home mom.
This blog is a little bit of everything. It’s about parenting, web design, blogging, budgeting, living in Germany as an expat, crafts, random stories, geekish humor and more.
A short background story about me. I went to Business School and also studied Law. Right after graduation, I spent a few years working at different companies in Romania, my native country. Even if I tried different business environments there, I felt like I actually know nothing at all about business and finances. I was stagnating and nothing in my life was progressing as I had in mind. Honestly, it felt and still feels like all those school years were a total waste of my time. Seriously, who is a supposedly expert in business and finances before actually working in the real world or owning a real business?
So I decided to take a big leap of faith and move to Germany with a new job that I personally scouted while visiting Germany. The job allowed me for 3 years to travel and do marketing and public relations for super interesting countries around the globe, in a 100% professional environment.
Soon after this 180 degrees life change, I met my wonderful husband Ilja. We very quickly saw a future together and got married last year. Ilja completed his computer engineering degree in Würzburg, Germany and has been a self-employed web developer for the last 4 years. He loooves to talk about taxes.
My baby love Luna was born in October 2017. I love being a mother and my personal wish is to stay at home with the children during their first years. And after they grow to be able to travel the world. So I figured in order for this to be possible, I need a plan and action. So I switched to my first love – the online. I legally entered my maternity leave 6 weeks before my first daughter was born and I used all of that free time for nesting and learning from zero Photoshop for web design.
In January 2018, while she was taking her multiple daily newborn naps, I started experimenting with 99designs. I mostly worked late hours at night, but in less than a year, I actually ended up winning competitions and getting recurring clients for which I did logos, brand packages and even a website.
Learning this new skill and adding up Illustrator to the mix actually helped me make some side money for our growing family. All of this either from home or even while traveling for a month and a half. I need to stay productive and creative and this domain brings me constant challenges that I am working to overcome.
I personally love staying home, having a flexible schedule, preparing 3 healthy meals a day for my family and spending time with them. There are so many pros to it for me. But motherhood, home management, cooking – they are all super new. Just like having a restricted budget, because my guess is unless they are quite lucky, most new moms aren’t exactly bathing in cash. Plus really, just getting the time to pursue growing my online skills is something that needs loads of self-discipline and time management, which I am constantly working on.
I always dreamed of having my own online business. Which is why I am starting this blog. I want to share my journey and hopefully connect with other women and their stories.
SO THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET
Savings for our next house, having a blog, finding new clients, high taxes in Germany, tax declarations, health insurance, web design, coding, software development, food bills, baby products, baby poo – these are just some of the topics in our life right now.
So, I’ll share some of these mini-stories with you. Admittedly, I am not the greatest writer out there, but I do love to improve and get things done. Plus there are tremendous proven advantages to writing and setting up plans. To make blogging tons of fun, I actually choose to write about things that I am passionate about.
My hope is that this blog will end up helping you save up some time to pursue whatever passions you might have. Or motivate you to start an online business of your own and eventually get to spend more time with your loved ones.