A woman who quit her job to travel the world says she now regrets not having the funds for housing and retirement. Helen Chao called her “her dream job” after serving for four years as a video producer at the US news network CNBC, although she admits that she once loved her career. I quit.
Helen wrote to her former employer: “I was excited to strip off my clothes every morning and throw myself into the work I felt I was born to do. I was jumping through the days, often waking up in the middle of the night. There was.” A creeping sense of dread. ”
And she said she imagined her life going by at warp speed and that Helen would suddenly wake up at 80 without having really “lived.” “Being burnt out and chronically anxious,” she had lost her ability to live in the moment.
So one day, at age 32, she quit her job and bought a one-way ticket to Peru, spending 18 months and $34,000 (£27,000) exploring 18 countries in South America and Asia. did.
Although Helen doesn’t regret going on the trip, she now wishes she had been more financially prepared. She wrote: “At 34 years old, I have little savings for retirement, nowhere near the down payment on a house in my hometown of Los Angeles, and I’m not ready to have children.
“I don’t regret my sabbatical or how much I spent on it, but I do know that my lack of preparation as a young adult put me in a position where I had to choose between personal fulfillment and financial security. I regret it.”
She continued, “If I had studied personal finance and started saving, investing, and career planning in high school, I think I would have been able to take a sabbatical without significantly delaying my other life goals.”
The trip was full of highlights, but Helen said the low point was having her two-month-old iPhone stolen in Cambodia, leaving her crying “hysterically”. Having lost all her photos, she paid her £635 the next day to buy her a new mobile phone.