After traveling the world, she’s returned home — only to find she can’t afford one.
A Millennial who quit her dream job to explore 18 different countries says she doesn’t have a deposit for a house after spending tens of thousands of dollars on her epic travels.
Helen Zhao, 34, left her plum gig as a CNBC video producer back in 2022 amid the “Great Resignation” — a term referring to the gigantic wave of young workers who quit their jobs following the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
Zhao spent 18 months traveling Asia and South America, before arriving back in her native Los Angeles.
“The $34,000 I spent on my sabbatical was a significant portion of my life savings,” she explained in a new essay penned for her old employer.
“Now, at 34, I have very little saved for retirement, I’m far from a down payment on a house in my hometown of Los Angeles, and I’m not ready to have kids.”
Zhao described the CNBC gig as a dream job, but said she decided she didn’t want to wait to see the wider world.
“I imagined time racing by at warp speed until I suddenly woke up at age 80, regretting that I lived to work, instead of working to live,” she explained in the essay. “After all, I’d spent most of my adult life focused on the future. Burned out and chronically anxious, I’d lost my ability to live in the present.”
After she quit CNBC, she bought a one-way ticket to Peru to find adventure and explained that she “learnt lessons the hard way about… prioritizing happiness in the moment, and when to sacrifice it for a better future.”
Zhao says she has no regrets about her incredible adventures, instead saying she should have learned to be more financially literate in her 20s.
“While I don’t regret my sabbatical or even how much I spent on it, I do regret that a lack of preparation in my young adulthood landed me in the position of having to choose between personal fulfillment and financial security,” she added.
Zhao — who graduated from UCLA — explained that while she “could decode Shakespeare,” she didn;t know how to pay her bills.
She had spent time her 20s being unemployed and working at internships that barely paid a dime.
“I suffered anxiety and burnout trying to catch up,” the journalist said. “Had I studied personal finance and started saving, investing and career planning in high school, I believe I could’ve taken my sabbatical without significantly delaying other life goals.”
Meanwhile, Zhao also revealed that she stopped investing her money into stocks in 2022 after the market went downhill.
“I lost all my gains, I was scared to lose more,” she said, adding that she also stopped contributing to her Roth IRA after she stopped working in August 2022.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom, with the ex-video producer saying she still has some savings in her bank account.
“I had enough savings left over after my sabbatical,” she stated. “But to ease my fears of running out of money, I also could have spent less on nice restaurants, clothing, daily lattes and cocktails.”
