We moved for family… and life had other plans.

Most people know we moved to North Carolina in 2019 with one main intention: to help care for my husband’s dad.
We drove across the country in my parents’ RV (yes… RV life 😅) while I worked to either secure a job here or get a transfer that made sense for my career path.

When we arrived, we realized something quickly…
Our hearts were in the right place, but he wasn’t ready to accept help the way we imagined. Our plan was to cohabitate, take the load off cooking, cleaning, and day-to-day life… but that wasn’t the reality.

So we pivoted. We found our own home and got settled in Wake Forest.
And if you’ve ever relocated and thought, “Wait… why does this feel harder than it’s supposed to?” — same.
Back in California, we had a village. My mom could pick up Janice, help us breathe, and help life feel manageable. Here, we had to build a whole new normal…just the three of us…..learning everything from scratch.

Fast forward to 2022–2023 and we hit a crossroads as a family.

Riki realized something painful but important: you can only help as much as people are willing to receive. And at the same time, reality was getting heavier. He wanted to make sure we were building toward a future where if anything happened to his dad, he would be prepared to take on everything that could come with that.

Because the truth is: his sister is completely dependent on him for housing and she comes with two kids. That responsibility doesn’t pause just because life is hard.

So we started thinking differently. Not just about surviving… but about building something stable enough to hold our family up.
That’s when we started looking into businesses and landed on FedEx Routes. We knew our skill sets matched:

  • Riki had route experience from delivering bread

  • I had the business acumen from years of side hustles and figuring things out as we went

We went all in—researching, learning, asking questions, meeting people, running numbers. We thought we were being “smart and strategic”…
What we didn’t know is that buying an established company would turn into a two-and-a-half-year process.
And because the stakes were HIGH—8 delivery trucks, 15 drivers, and a lot of capital—Riki went to work for the company we wanted to buy. Not for comfort… for preparation.

Meanwhile, I was holding down the steady job. The reliable income. The “we’ll be okay no matter what” foundation.
We used savings and equity from the house we bought in 2020 and started taking steps through SBA lending, doing everything we could to set ourselves up to win.

And then… right when we thought we were finally approaching stability…
I lost my stable job at the end of 2024.

Part 2 is where everything changed.