Let’s Talk About Money
Finances are obviously one of the main constraining factors in traveling, moving overseas, or switching jobs between countries once you are on your way. It’s not as easy as just wanting it, or choosing to go for it- at the end of the day you have to be able to pay for it.
And despite what the increasingly MLM funhouse mirror world of “The Secret” type travel blogging courses will tell you, most people can’t pay for it by writing about it.
Money has been a frequent strain and worry from the moment I decided I wanted leave the US again. I wanted to share this personal story about debt, unemployment, money stress, and years of detours to hopefully give a no holds barred accounting (pun intended) of how difficult this can be.
Even if your goal is not long term, savings supported travel, and you plan on working abroad, you will have financial hurdles to jump. Pursuing an international job takes a significant amount of upfront investment and savings. You’re fronting the cash to buy plane tickets, visas, vaccines if you need them, and then setting things up in a new country while you wait on your first paycheck and live off of your savings.
This was something I found out the hard way as I waited for my first paycheck in Japan- there were a lot of noodle cups, and a lot of “holy shit, I really am going to screw this up like I thought and it’s only the first month” moments.
I had sold my car and many of my things for cash, continued full-time work right up until I left, and my family had pooled money together to pay for my plane ticket as a college graduation present. Yet even though I was prepared, somehow, I still wasn’t prepared at all. It was a struggle to get set up and set life in motion. This is a theme of international moves, and money is the undercurrent of that theme.
The Reality of Debt Hits Hard
The first financial come to Jesus moment I had was in Japan, when the full impact of my debt made itself known. To be specific, I was sending 400 USD home each month to pay minimum balances on consumer debt and medical debt. Although I had worked more than full-time between 3-4 different jobs during university, and I had a full academic scholarship, I lived on my own and supported myself. That takes a lot of money in Dallas.
Add in not having health insurance in the US, needing a car to get anywhere, losing my highest paying job my senior year of college, and doing stupid, emotionally driven things like adopting four mangy kittens from the shelter and spending thousands of dollars nursing them back to health, and I had a tidy pile of debt, on top of my student loans.
That year in Japan I had some of the most unbelievable experiences and touched a freedom I didn’t know was possible- but that 400 dollar a month bill was a burden. It cast a shadow on everything, and felt like a hand reaching across the ocean, grabbing me by the shoulder, always capable of snatching me back if it wanted to.
The Debt Payoff Plan is Born
As soon as I returned to Texas in 2006 after that first overseas stint in Japan, I knew that I wanted to work and live overseas again. The moment I got off the plane I was hit by the realisation that I was not done being gone, regretted coming home when I did, and wanted to leave as soon as possible. I also knew I didn’t want that debt hanging over my head.
I had read Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” my senior year of college, so I knew what I had to do. Uncle Dave was going to rule my life for about two and a half years, and then I would skip overseas again debt free, with savings, and who knew when I would come back. So I set about making that happen.
After two terrible jobs back to back in Dallas that had me wishing I had stayed in Japan to work in the hostess bar with Jess, I finally landed a job in financial services in January of 2007. To distract myself while paying off debt and wanting to leave the US, I decided to go back to my old habits of working full-time while going to school full time. A masters in Interdisciplinary Studies (international management focus) seemed like the right choice. At the time, I wanted to get into international non-profits related to education/development work, and my employer was paying for it. Obama was running for office, so I ran for precinct chair and decided to give the next year to volunteering for his campaign. It seemed the perfect way to spend my time in America- paying off debt, getting a master’s degree, and direct political action. I had my path back to leaving, and I set out.
The Day to Day of Debt Payoff
From then on, I was unflagging in my devotion to Dave Ramsey, funneling as much money as possible to paying off debt from college. After a year of travel and living solo in Japan, coming home to Texas to work a corporate job I didn’t love, have roommates again, and dump all my discretionary income into paying off debt from college was a harsh 180. I went from feeling free as a bird to feeling utterly trapped.
Updates from Jess, with stories from the hostess bar and vacations in Thailand (where I had turned down a teaching job) just motivated me even more to stick to the plan. If I wasn’t working, I was in school, if not in school, I was studying, if not studying, I was campaigning and volunteering. In between all that, I had become a coupon person, hitting up drugstores to pay no money for piles of goods I would turn around and re-sell to my colleagues at work.
A small part of the reason I am here in Kazakhstan writing to you right now is thanks to my side hustle of re-selling Venus razors and Air Wick plug-ins I couponed at the drugstore.
Probably couldn’t sell a course on this method
I had done the math obsessively and I had my heart set on paying off debt by August 2009, getting my master’s degree December 2009, and then leaving the US for overseas living again summer of 2010. This time I would be consumer and medical debt free with a pile of savings so I would have the ability to live lean, take low paying jobs, or go periods of time without working at all. I was 23, living on 14 dollars an hour, passing up on new clothes, not going on trips to Mexico with my friends, eschewing a smartphone, and clipping every coupon I could get my hands on.
It wasn’t glamorous, but I knew what it was for- the freedom to move back overseas, this time with no debt, a master’s degree, and more options. I preached debt free and frugal living to anyone who would listen, helped anyone who was interested to set up their own budget, had what I would say was a spiritual reckoning reading “Your Money or Your Life”, and fully committed to a debt payoff life of sacrificing now for freedom later.
I also turned to the blogging community for advice and inspiration, as I had been an early consumer and creator of blogs, since they combined two things I loved- reading and writing- with community. The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly had both just been founded in 2006 as I was starting out, and I would read them religiously. Later I added on The Frugal Girl, even though a piano teaching, homeschooling mom of four might have seemed like a strange mentor for a single, childfree woman trying to save to leave America.
I have no idea why I didn’t think to document my own debt free journey via writing online instead of in a bunch of notebooks with my cramped and illegible handwriting, but I didn’t, even as I was zealously following others’ debt free journeys online.
Now the guys who started The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly are millionaires and that’s great. But this is about how I’m not a millionaire, so let’s keep going.
It was honestly soul crushing at times, because I knew what I had given up. Jess was eventually deported from Japan for her work in the hostess bar, but she was back overseas again after a short (legally required) stop in America. The stories from Thailand, when she could get internet in the hut where she lived with her Thai boyfriend on the beach, were like little breadcrumbs to the future.
I kept repeating the mantra that I just had to put my head down and do the work- which was a lot, when you’re balancing 40 hours a week at your job and four grad classes a semester and denying yourself consumer pleasures and diversions while trying to bring your political ideals to fruition and running a black market toiletry reselling business and driving cars that catch on fire as you head in for overtime on the weekend at the call center. But I bought in as a true believer that I was doing everything right and it would all be worth it.
Unfortunately, life had other plans, as it so often does.
In Which I Make a Poor Career Choice
About halfway through my debt payoff I made a fateful and ultimately terrible decision. I switched jobs in August of 2008, thinking I could be doing more business and accounting and less customer service on the phones. It seemed perfect, but within a month I was given a huge pay cut and had my insurance benefits canceled because the company couldn’t afford them. I was told this was due to the expense of all the new people they hired (that would be me). So they couldn’t afford to hire me when they hired me.
But the salary and benefits problems were just the beginning of what would be a bizarre and wholly dysfunctional workplace culture. Did I mention this was a family member?
I don’t want to go into any more details, but let’s just say I was grateful for free counseling at the university, and took full advantage of it.
The recession was in full swing, and people with programming degrees were fighting for jobs at Starbucks. I hated myself for leaving my old job, but I was lucky to have a job at all and I knew it, so I sucked it up.
In this way I soldiered on, albeit hobbled financially and mentally, for a full year, until August of 2009, when I finally made my last debt payment. This was six months later than if I hadn’t switched jobs, but I had made it regardless. I assumed I would spend the next year saving, at a different job if at all possible, and be on a plane by summer 2010 to whatever adventure awaited me.
Instead, I got laid off that very same month.
A Road Trip Right Back to Debt
This was unfortunate for all the normal reasons being unexpectedly laid off sucks, but it was particularly unfortunate for the following reasons:
- I was laid off in August of 2009, when the country was deep in the recession and jobs were extremely hard to come by
- I had been following Dave Ramsey’s “only keep a 1,000 dollar emergency fund and pay everything else to debt” advice so… yeah, I had only 1,000 of savings
- I was laid off in my last semester of my master’s degree, which meant tuition reimbursement was lost, so right after paying off all my debt I was whacked with about 6,000 dollars of new, unexpected student loans
- I had just, that very month, signed a year long lease on a new place, which I promptly had to turn around and sublet (illegally) and then worry about getting in trouble for that while I was unemployed. Naturally this meant that I also didn’t have a place to live.
- I was laid off by the family member who had recruited me, and then they emotionally manipulated me into not drawing unemployment because “the company couldn’t afford it and everyone would be out on the street when they went under”.
Y’all. Just rewriting this is giving me flashbacks.
So, instead of celebrating being debt free, enjoying my last semester of college, and reveling in diverting all my debt payoff money to savings to move overseas again, I was broker than broke, and all my dreams were thwarted. I sublet my place, packed what I needed in my car, and drove out West to California to take advantage of a free place to live with Jess, who had by this time returned home.
For my own sanity I also needed to get as far away from Texas as possible.
To get to California I took a three week long, manic depression fueled, self pity soaked road trip, car camping along the way with a guy I had been dating for awhile, Bobby. I laughed through my situation with characteristic self-deprecation, and told myself it was an “adventure” to sell whatever I could to get money, pack the rest of my belongings in my trunk and backseat, and stop in McDonald’s or Starbucks to buy internet and check emails/apply for jobs/assure my professors I would definitely finish my thesis (something I highly doubted at the time).
It turns out that putting gas on a credit card Dave Ramsey taught you to hate yourself for using so you can take a road trip to escape a traumatic layoff in the middle of a recession, while you are trying to write a thesis and figure out how the hell you ended up so stuck when you worked so hard and did everything right, is not, actually, an “adventure”. It’s more like “a nervous breakdown”.
I was also incredibly cynical at the universe at this point, so I refused to let myself think about money at all- it was just too depressing. I was living off of student loans and credit cards, and went into a self destructive spiral of acting like none of it mattered.
The frugal mindset and obsessive budgeting habits I had carefully cultivated for over two years just served to rub salt in the wound of where I was, so I ditched them because their presence just hurt too much. It’s counter productive, but the human brain does stupid, self defeating things in the face of stress. If the universe was going to make me unemployed and in debt, I would show the universe I didn’t care about debt, and not worry about it at all. Spite really warps your perspective.
Assessing the Damage
When I got to Jess’ place in Hollywood, I would spend all day researching and writing my thesis, and would diligently send out tens of job applications that were never, not once, responded to. Anyone who was unemployed during this time knows the struggle. I applied to every restaurant in her neighborhood, to no avail.
At one point I seriously entertained foot fetish modeling because I truly didn’t care what people did to pictures of my feet in the privacy of their own homes, as long as it helped me walk onto a plane.
All the while, I drew down the balance in my account, which was almost 100% the borrowed student loan money. What had been a free degree was now a sunk cost that I couldn’t let go of- I had to finish it, no matter what it cost. And what did it cost?
Let’s talk the numbers. After two and half years of scrimping, scrounging, saying no, working overtime, worshipping at the beans and rice shrine of Dave Ramsey, and working my ass off in both school and work, I had paid off almost 20,000 in debt. After my salary cut, benefits cut, getting laid off, having to pay for my last semester, not taking unemployment and taking out more student loans instead, plus ending up unemployed for six months in the end, I had racked up almost… drumroll please…
20,000 in debt. Hmmm. That number looks familiar, y’all.
Oh.
It’s… yeah… about what I started with in debt. It was like those two and half years of hard work, sacrifice, and planning had never. even. happened.
Dear reader, there are not enough words to describe my despair, resentment, and deep seated rage at the universe for how unfair it all was. I was right back where I started. And my leaving date was pushed back by at least a year, and I had a traumatic implosion of a family relationship.
Let it be known- people can work very, very hard, for a very, very long time, and everything can still go to shit.
During this time, several good things did happen: after all the campaigning Obama was President so at least one of us had a job; after Jess I lived with other friends back in Texas and re-connecting during that time was incredible (plus they let me pay them in couponed food and toiletries instead of actual rent money); I dated prolifically and happily until I met and fell in love with B; I got my master’s degree and it was the most enlightening course of study I had yet undertaken; and the two years of therapy via my university was life changing.
A Change in Course & Silver Linings
After almost six months, I finally found a job, but shortly thereafter, I moved to Colorado when Bobby’s job took him there.
It was another detour, but at least this one put me back on track, and conveniently didn’t involve abusive workplaces, selling toiletries out of my desk drawers on my lunch break, or living out of my car. Progress!
It was in Colorado that I decided to get back to the heart of what I had enjoyed the most in Japan- teaching, really teaching, not upselling the private lessons or marketing the school by being a happy clown. Just being in the classroom with the kids.
Had I not come home from Japan that first time, had I not been laid off, had I not moved to Colorado, I might have headed back overseas without a teaching license. I instead decided that I could, and should, use the opportunity to go back to school, get ANOTHER master’s degree, prolong my departure date by ANOTHER year, and become a licensed teacher in Colorado. Let’s talk more numbers.
When I came home September of 2006, I thought I would be gone again in two years, max.
It took me six.
Taking the Long Way
I could have felt shame and embarrassment that it took six years, and a doubling of student loan debt, to get back overseas and pick up where I left off. I could have told myself the window was closed, or I was too old. I was 28 when I went back to school for a teaching career, and 29 when I finally moved overseas again for a job in Albania. It probably would have made more sense to take the job my internship school offered me, interpret the detours as some sort of sign it wasn’t meant to be, and stay in the US. But I went to Albania anyway. And that led to Laos, and then Russia, and then a random, rambling backpacking trip through Europe, and then to Sweden, and now to Kazakhstan.
It was definitely the long way around, but it was the way I took and I wouldn’t change it. Of course, I have the benefit of hindsight now, 8 years into a career that was worth every random turn. But this experience helps me now, when I am in the thick of regret or uncertainty in quarantine in Kazakhstan, questioning decisions or moves- I’ll get there.
If you are feeling like it’s going to be a long road to where you want to go, financially or career wise or personally, honestly it probably will be. And it might be even longer than that, especially in light of the pandemic and how no one knows when anything will get back to normal.
I can see now that getting too attached to a timeline hurt my motivation and mental health more than the things that messed up my timeline in the first place.
Things usually take longer than you think they will. We think we’re messing it up when really that’s just the way it works and we were just being unrealistic about how quickly everything could happen.
This is usually when people give up, mistakenly thinking they aren’t cut out for “it”. Meanwhile “it” is going according to (the more realistic and much slower) plan. But the time will pass regardless, so you just have to figure out how to keep putting one step in front of the other, even when it feels pointless and like you’re getting nowhere. Sometimes you might actually be getting nowhere, and have to find ways to patiently accept that you are just stuck for a bit, and it’s out of your control.
Speaking of getting nowhere, and accepting things out of your control: I’m writing this in my apartment in Kazakhstan, having spent the entire summer self isolating and not doing much other than hanging out in my neighborhood. I just moved here in August of 2019, and right when I was getting in the swing of a new job, social circle, and country, the pandemic hit.
I have spent almost as much time isolated in my apartment as I have actually taking part in day to day life here. The plan was to explore Central Asia, not the inside of my apartment.
But I just have to be patient and wait for time to pass, and do what I can with what I can control. Today that means writing this, sharing a hard financial story, and hoping that even one person reads it and feels some sort of shared experience and empathetic relief.
Money isn’t easy in the best of times, under normal circumstances, but if you are struggling with debt, or trying to build a life that looks very different than the one you have, or completely re-routing your path and need a good chunk of upfront investment, money will be especially difficult. It will probably take longer than you are expecting it to.
This is normal.
You just have to find a way to keep going, and not blame yourself for things outside of your control. And, take it from me, try to find a way not to self-destruct out of frustration. If you find yourself stuck, just sit there and be stuck until something opens up ahead of you. Patiently waiting it out is better than giving up and going backwards.
Free Debt and Budgeting Resources
I’d like to end this on a useful note, and leave you with something practical to take away. If you are interested in resources for personal finance, these are my favorite places to get free inspiration on the internet right now:
- Frugalwoods: FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) married bloggers who saved over 75% of their income to retire to the woods in Vermont. The Uber Frugal Month course is free and is a fantastic resource for doing a deep dive on your feelings towards money. This article on investing takes all the mystery out of it.
- The Financial Diet: The rare personal finance site that acknowledges privilege, sexism, and socioeconomic inequalities. Common sense, straightforward advice that never veers into heartless bootstraps “just try harder and you’ll make it” mantras. This video breaks down the intersection of race and economics in a thorough and factual way.
- Rich and Regular: A married couple on a mission to make financial success a tool of empowerment and social change. Read their Letter to Middle Class Black America. You should also check out their fantastic YouTube channel.
- Budget Girl: A woman who paid off a massive amount of debt, single, on a low income. Her YouTube videos are vulnerable, honest, and she shares real numbers. I suggest starting at her oldest video uploaded so you can follow along with her debt payoff.
If you have the resources to buy some financial education, I recommend these books:
Mindset Shift: Your Money or Your Life
Basic Budgeting and Debt Payoff: You Need a Budget
Investing: The Simple Path to Wealth
Habit Change: Atomic Habits
