A woman who left her job to travel regrets: “I can’t afford a down payment on a house nor am I ready to have children”

This could be, roughly speaking, the summary of the life of the American journalist Helen Zhaowho He worked for the prestigious network CNBC and one day he decided to leave his job to travel the world, he spent all his savings, and now he has told in first person why he considers it a wrong decision.

In your textthe woman, who is now 34 years old, tells how at 28 she joined the multimedia department of the aforementioned channel: “My dream job,” she says.

However, the demands of being part of such a corporation got the better of her and she recounts how she often woke up in the middle of the night wondering if eventually, when she turned 80, she would not would regret having lived to work and not to do the opposite.

“I had chronic anxiety and had lost my ability to live in the present,” he recalls. It was then that he made the great decision: to leave his job and go to Peru, where he began a journey of 18 months between South America and Asia in which he spent $34,000approximately 31,600 euros at the current exchange rate.

“Every day was a ‘choose your own adventure’, involving good and bad choices. I learned lessons the hard way about balancing preparation, productivity, and leisure… and I’ve reflected on all those regrets that ultimately They have taught me when to prioritize happiness of the moment and when it is better to sacrifice in exchange for a better future,” he reflects.

Obsessed with control

To begin with, he says, he began to become obsessed with having everything under control, so instead of taking advantage of the experience for which he had left his entire life behind, he planned each trip to the countries he wanted to visit.

This led her to leave Argentina the day they won the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 and miss the celebrations with the friends she had made, or to find herself on a plane from Brazil to Bogotá on her birthday to end up watching alone in a Airbnb through the Instagram stories of their acquaintances how they enjoyed the Colombian Carbaval.

That is to say, instead of staying in each place for as long as his body asked him to take advantage of life there, he became obsessed with an itinerary that he did not need, which has taught him, he says, to leave the door open to plans without notice. since then.

Without money for a house and without being able to have children

Another of his great regrets is economic and family. And those $34,000 that were spent in 18 months were practically all your life savings.

What happens now? That he cannot afford to buy a house – he does not have enough for the down payment, especially in Los Angeles, where he lives – and She is not ready to have children either. for the expense of starting a family.

She believes that this poor financial planning and excessive spending during her gap year is partly because no one educated her on how to deal with the financial part of adult life:

“I left high school knowing how to quote Shakespeare but I didn’t know how to pay the bills at the end of the month,” he says.

He thinks that if he had thought better he could have still enjoyed his gap year, but without running out of moneywithout a home and without a short-term family project at 34 years old.

Now, he is trying to redirect his life after the lessons he says he has received from his trip and the mistakes he made, trying not to let regret be the center of his ‘second chance’which she now searches through a website where she details her experience as a journalist and traveler.