LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan After all our initial planning was said and done, there was only one thing to do: save, save, save. Keep in mind that our planning began back in 2018. Remote work didn’t seem like a possibility for either of us at the time. Plus, we wanted to do a lot once we hit the road. A lot. (Have you seen our map?) So it didn’t seem feasible for us to work during the Big Trip. We intended for it to be a true pretirement; one last hurrah before we’d settle down and start a family. As you might imagine, our thoughts about work shifted several times in the following years. You can read more about that here. Jason’s calculations estimated that we could quit our jobs and set out on the Big Trip in 2023, when we’d be approaching our 31st birthdays. That gave us a little more than five years to save up.
Fortunately, our financial prospects looked good overall. Jason had paid off his student loans, and I had graduated without debt (thank you, CSULB scholarship donors). We also didn’t have many expenses beyond the usual bills. It helps that I’m pretty frugal, too—perhaps painfully so, in Jason’s opinion. We faced just one big hurdle: We were living in Los Angeles County, where the housing market is just as brutal as the traffic. And we were staying in a two-bedroom, 600-square-foot apartment. I hated that apartment. The paint was peeling. The stove was cracked. The drains clogged regularly no matter how hard we tried to prevent it. Roaches popped up so often that I grew certain they were paying rent, too. In the summer, the place turned into an oven. In the winter, our heater was about as reliable as LA’s Metro system: Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it left you stranded and thinking you should definitely be somewhere else right about now. If you’re a friend or relative of ours, you can imagine why we didn’t invite you over, can’t you? All that said, the place was cheap. We’d moved in right after college, and the rent could increase only so much each year. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was livable. Drains could be unclogged. Roaches could be squished. Most importantly, savings could be saved. Keep in mind: We entered our save-save-save mode with the sobering knowledge that anything could derail our plans. A relative could fall seriously ill. One or both of us could lose our jobs before we’d built our savings. (Funny enough, when your partner’s a page designer for a newspaper, you spend a lot of time crossing your fingers that the number of print subscribers doesn’t drop too low.) Or, I don’t know—a pandemic could bring the world to a standstill. Fortunately, the first two never happened, and the last steered us toward the Big Trip rather than away from it. All of which speaks to our luck and privilege more than anything else. Still, something eventually did threaten to derail our plans. Neither of us saw it coming. You can read more about that in What About Our Jobs?
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