retirement savings – A travel writer realized—at 3:32 a.m., after flying home from Norway—that her checking account held $247 and that years of choosing experiences over savings meant retirement planning lagged badly. In the wake of that wake-up call, she leaned on a spreadsheet f
At 3:32 in the morning—the kind of hour she called the “witching-est of hours”—she woke up jet-lagged after flying home from Norway. Her suitcase was already on the floor, waiting to be unpacked and repacked for another trip in just two weeks.
She didn’t reach for comfort. She reached for numbers. She had $247 in her checking account. She tried not to think about her savings account because, she says, it was probably “less.”
Now 53, a mother of four adult children and a travel writer in her “new-ish” phase, she describes the moment as the start of a realization: she may have taken a wrong turn a few years back that felt like a right turn at the time.
When she was raising her four sons as a single mom. she says travel lived in her plans rather than her calendar. On Friday nights, instead of socializing, she would map out pretend itineraries online. Friends would share their own routes—tours of Egypt. hiking trails through Portugal. weekends in Paris—and she followed along with her morning coffee. thinking “one day.”.
In her 30s, she couldn’t travel. She worked cobbled-together jobs as a local baker, waitress, and receptionist—anything to pay the bills. “We survived together,” she says, and then her sons grew up into their own lives.
Her turning point came when her youngest turned 18. She was 46 then, and she says she could have pursued education she missed when she became a young mom at 21—education she believes might have led to a job with a retirement plan and more security.
Instead, she wrote. She wrote for her local paper and online magazines, writing about motherhood. Then she finally traveled—small, cheap trips at first that she wrote about for her local paper and online magazines. Over time, travel “miraculously, impossibly” became one of her jobs.
She calls that work a dream in many ways. especially because it has let her travel with her adult children in a way she says she might never have experienced otherwise. Her memories are specific: she and her son went on a safari in South Africa after he got married. She took her daughter-in-law on a trip she describes as “our own little honeymoon” to celebrate their new status. a journey she says anchored them and helped bridge the in-law gap. She has flown solo to Morocco and Copenhagen. gone on a wellness retreat in Mexico. and stayed in a chateau in the south of France.
She hears “Must be nice” all the time, and says it’s true.
But the same life she calls incredible also collides with her finances. She describes looking at her bank account—“barely fueled with small payments trickling in for articles”—and realizing that she will need to retire someday and has done “nothing to prepare.”
Her preparation has been the wrong kind: she says she saved up air miles instead of money. prioritized experiences over security. and can’t even bring herself to think clearly about the legacy she’s leaving for her sons. She adds that she doesn’t blame travel writing for her bank account balance as much as she blames her “all-or-nothing attitude.”.
She says she knows it’s possible to travel and still put money away for retirement, because her 26-year-old son sat her down with a spreadsheet to help her start saving. In his calculations, she might be able to retire by the time she’s 75 and still travel “a bit” if she’s smart about it.
That shift is where she is now: tired of feeling ridiculous, she says she’s finally ready to be smart about money—without abandoning the experiences that have shaped her life.
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