It seems like everyone says the like to travel. It seems like most people mean they like to go on holiday (or vacation for our North American readers). There is nothing wrong with going on holiday. Holidays come in all shapes and sizes and, by design, are meant to be enjoyed. Holidays also have connotations of taking a break from real life, of spending money and enjoying yourself in a place you don’t usually spend time. Holidays usually come at an expense, even if you shun 5 star hotels in favour of camping in a national park there is still going to be some cost of travel or equipment.
The best financial decision I ever made, though I had no idea at the time, was to travel from the UK to Asia and begin working there. When I was living and working in the UK, we struggled for to afford a 5 day holiday to Morocco, which turned out to be the worst holiday I’ve ever been on. Hundreds of pounds, which we’d saved for nearly 3 years, were spent on what turned out to be a very disappointing week. My experience was that holidays seemed to be both expensive, temporary and sometimes not even that good.
I still wanted to travel, but holidays didn’t seem to be working for us. That trip to Morocco was the only holiday Converse and I took while living in the UK. We could have saved up for another three years and tried again, but instead we decided to find work and move to another country. We made a list of countries we would not consider living in, and applied to every suitable job that came up anywhere and everywhere else. I told my employer that I’d be applying for work abroad in December, I spent my Christmas working on applications, and by February I’d been offered a job in a city in Asia. One month later Converse had been offered a job in the same city too.
At the time, this just seemed a great way to explore the world. We weren’t just going to visit a foreign city, we were going to live there and really explore it. We knew the salaries were high, but we assumed this was because living costs would be so expensive. We imagined living in an apartment the size of a shoebox and eating cheaply at street food stalls because it would be all we could afford. This was not the case. Our jobs are just more lucrative in Asia.
The number one piece of advice I’d give to people looking for a larger salary is to move. Travel. Whether this is in the same country or to the other side of the world, it doesn’t matter. Go to where the money is. Take the risk. At the very least apply, see if you can get an interview, see what pay you’d be offered.
The salary wasn’t the only benefit to my finances. It challenged my assumptions about possessions. I had ingrained beliefs about what someone in their mid-twenties should own: matching bowls and plates, a bookshelf’s worth of books, a car, plants, shoes for every occasions. But all of these things had to be given away in order for me to move. I arrived with two suitcases containing all my worldly possessions. At the same time, old school friends were starting to settle down, buy houses and fill them with stuff. Once I’d moved to Asia, I felt no envy over this. If anything, possessions, no matter how nice, felt like a weight. Something holding me down in one place.
Even if I hadn’t had a profession which was highly paid in Asia, I would still tell my younger self to find a job in a different city, to either find work that is better paid in a different location, or to find work which is the same pay but in a location with a much lower cost of living. Apart from saving more money, it was incredibly important for me to reduce what I owned down to a couple of suitcases, or to what I could fit in the back of a car. Arriving in a brand new city is like a new slate. It broke old habits that I didn’t even realise I had. I was able to shape what I wanted my new life to looks like in a very intentional way.
Think about the top 10 places you’d like to go to on holiday. The chances are high at least one of those places has a job that you’d be suitable for. Your first impulse might be to imagine all the reasons why you can’t pack up your things and travel, but instead, try to imagine everything that might change for the better if you did.