He Said/She Said Edition: Traveling Around the World

She said:

We had spent ten years saving. I always had big dreams of doing something.

What was that something?

I had no idea. We had discovered from our previous adventure that the kiddos traveled so well. Loved exploring. Learning and seeing the sites. We loved it too. New people, smells, and places. Matt had been with the same company for 7 years and in the job for 14. He was ready for a change, I was too. But man, old dreams die hard.

What could we change? What about a new job for him? What if we sent the kids to school and I worked too and he could work locally? Sell the house? Move to Spain? In our heart’s we wanted to travel. We looked at our savings and THOUGHT it was going to be for a house by the beach, maybe a new car, college tuition, to open our own business. Yes, all those things. We talked (exhaustively) about all those possibilities.

One story that changed it all was remembering 7 years earlier. Matt’s dad had just retired. He was 72 and kept the fields at the local high school. He worked there 22 years, blazing hot sun, perfectionistic qualities. Those fields never looked so good but boy was he ready to be done. He retired. Two weeks later he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We spent four more years with him. He witnessed his first granddaughter get married, his first grandson graduate from high school and our three sons being born while undergoing chemo treatments, vertigo and shingles. Years of dreaming, years of waiting. Our time with him was precious. Life changing.

How could we hold these dreams of the future, all that we waned to do when it is right in front of us? We wanted to travel more, not later but now. 6 months after, we rented out our house, Matt quit his job, and we ventured out for a trip around the world.

See the World…….Around the World Trip.

xoxo- Jess

He said:

The price of progress is the pain of change. I have no idea who said this, but this is a personal truth for me. From an outsiders view, beginning a journey around the world probably seems like pure bliss if one could afford it. This is not an absolute truth and I came to find this out the hard way.

I’ve seen first-hand both sides of the money conundrum. No one in America is immune to the financial pressures we’re all experiencing. Rich, poor, uneducated, educated. The life of living paycheck to paycheck, which my parents gracefully did my whole life, served as a beautiful reminder of how living for the day with faith can bring joy, albeit with financial insecurity. 

For them, it all worked out.  I learned my own personal truth that rich people worry as much about money as poor people. But worry is worry,  and it's destructive as hell no matter where it comes from. My work on Wall Street, advising millionaires to the risks of running out of money in retirement, a fear-based vision that I proliferated every day of my working life, spilled into my unconscious and I became a full-fledged financial alcoholic. I couldn’t go one day without thinking of my 401k. Was it going to be enough if I compounded at a certain rate? Were my kids going to be able to attend the colleges of their desire without breaking our proverbial bank? These were not my worries from the womb. They were learned and practiced. When passing someone on the street dressed in nice clothes or driving an expensive car, I would immediately wonder how much money they had and if they were happier than me. Talk about a self-induced psychosis. It took seventeen years in finance to develop this way of thinking. Breaking out of it would be the hardest thing I would ever try to do.

Fast forward. Traveling the world. Wow. What a thing to attempt.

Homeschool dialed in? Check.

Organized wife researching every last detail so that we are maximizing our time and money? Check.

Forgetting about our negative cash flow reality and how quickly we would be depleting our savings? Big, fat nope.

Some days were better than others, but wondering how an extra ice cream or bottle of wine would affect the bank statement at the end of the trip was hard for me. It took me quite a while to work through this. Sitting on the banks of the Siene in Paris relaxing fully? Nope. Worrying. Wondering. Wasting joy. I was a faithless, financial weakling and it affected my experience in being fully present on the journey. In retrospect, I still had the time of my life, but it could have been so much more.

The world taught me a few things. 1) Shit is expensive in Western Europe. I mean, $12 for beer in Norway? That's enough to not drink. 2) When humans are unburdened with money worries because family or your community has your back, people are more present and nicer,  i.e. Balinese people. 3) Even traveling among packed cities with insane, self-serving, selfie-taking tourists, you can find peace with the right mindset.

Gratitude determines happiness would become a mindset for us. All in all when the journey was over we reconnected to each other, explored, laughed, cried and realized that we wanted more out of life. Now was the hardest part, returning home and figuring it all out.

Cheers to dreaming- Matt