The idea to travel through Southeast Asia was a faint idea but in a couple days it exploded into a plan with a start date. I wanted to leave around my 22nd birthday, I decided that three months before my departure date was set. I had three months to get everything in order for my trip.

I got a job in a week, I started working 100+ hours a week. Before it would have be awful but with this new goal it was easy to find the motivation. Anytime I wasn’t working I was getting my gear, budgeting or trying to get all the vaccines taken care of. I have trouble researching about places and things to do or planning exact routes so I focused on the basics of how to enter each country, the currency and the plants and animals because that is just fun for me.

I started selling everything I could sell, I sold my car my laptop, my bike, and anything that had value that I wouldn’t need.
I got my finances in order, I wanted to have money to come back to that was separate from the money I would travel on, I wanted a small portion of that saved money to be in my brokerage account while I was traveling, I hadn’t set any plans that I couldn’t cancel free of charge so those were easy to stop payments to and mostly I worked as much as I could to reach my goal before I left.

By a week before departure I had nearly everything ready to go. I had made it easy to get up and go by not having many payments to worry about and by saving a portion of my income the year before. When I added the three months of intensive work to that I made my goal no problem.

I left with three months of funds to come back to, and enough to travel for 8 months with a 1k emergency fund. I didn’t went to set myself up for failure so I made sure each estimate and budget I made was very conservative. I didn’t want to be living on the edge of a knife. I heard it was possible to live on around 15-25 a day so I budgeted around 35 per day.
I know the mistakes of shortsightedness my generation are prone to and I don’t want to subscribe to living my life one away from collapse.

It was hard work but hard work isn’t very hard when its for a good reason.