Okay, so, I've tried blogging about a dozen times, and I've never been able to stick with it. I've also never had a long term project like I do right now.
For the moment, anyway, I am working at a call center doing technical support for the paltry sum of $12 an hour. This job is thirty miles away from my home, so, as you might imagine, a good chunk of my money goes to the folks at Exxon and Conoco-Phillips.
I live in a small apartment in Lawrence, a college town in Kansas, which I share with my roommate Tori. And over the next year I'm going to save enough money (and part with enough junk) to go on a long vacation to South America.
By "long vacation," I mean if I leave in mid-October of 2012 and return before New Year's I will have failed miserably. I'll be happy if I'm able to turn travel into a lifestyle, but I won't know if permanent nomadism is my cup of tea until after I've tried for a little while. Which I haven't.
I'm thirty years old. My passport expired in 1992, and I've never even considered replacing it before the last year. I've never saved money -- however much money I had generally turns out to be exactly what I needed. And in a year, I'm going to Argentina.
But first, there's work to be done:
Step 1: Clean
My room is a wreck. The rest of my apartment isn't great, but that's evened out by the wonderful Tori preventing me from messing it up.
Step 2: Simplify
This is related to step 1. To put it bluntly, I have way too much crap, and I'll be parting with large chunks of it to make my life more reasonable.
Step 3: Save
$12/hr * 40 hrs/wk = $480 wk, minus $90 in taxes. After my various bills come out of that, it comes to just under $12k a year for food, clothes, gas, and travel. My goal is to save, at minimum, 25% of that over the next year.
Step 4: Prepare
So while the final travel itinerary is in the "I had this awesome idea this summer and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make it happen" phase, I do have some goals for my vacation. One of them is to speak in the native language of wherever I am (thanks to Fluent in 3 Months for that inspiration). My other goal is to bring something real back with me specific to where I travel. Since Argentina is the only thing that's chiseled into the Itinerary Rock, that list is entirely "Learn to tango." Which is going to require me to probably be in a little less bad physical condition than I am now.
In short, in the next year I plan to conquer the three problems that I feel are at the root of the disconnect between how I am now and how I want to be: That I'm a fat slob who's bad with money. And then there's a big vacation at the end to celebrate.
