- Helen Chao quit her dream job and spent her life's savings of $34,000 on travel.
- Chao wrote in a CNBC article that she wishes she had continued to save money while traveling.
- Chao said she could have spent less on fancy restaurants and shopping for clothes.
A woman who quit her dream job to travel says she regrets not saving enough money for a house or retirement.
In an article for CNBC, Helen Chao wrote that she quit her dream job as a video producer in 2022 after working for a news organization for four years. Ms. Chao spent a year and a half traveling to 18 countries in Asia and South America on a budget of $34,000, she wrote.
In the article, Chao outlines her biggest regret from the experience. One of them was that she spent a significant amount of her life savings.
“At 34 years old, I have very little savings for retirement, I'm nowhere near the down payment on a house in my hometown of Los Angeles, and I'm not ready to have children,” Chao wrote on CNBC.
Chao said she doesn't regret spending money on the trip, but added that she wished she had been more financially prepared for the trip.
“If I had studied personal finance in high school and started saving, investing, and career planning, I think I would have been able to take a sabbatical without significantly delaying my other life goals,” Zhao continued. Zhao did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
More than 54 million Americans traveled internationally in 2022, according to a report from the International Trade Administration. The average amount he spent on international travel that year was $1,783.
Not all travelers have financial regrets after spending a lot of money on a trip abroad. In 2019, one woman told BI she planned to spend $50,000 on travel in a year, and she said she had no regrets. And in February, another woman told BI that she had spent all her savings on a trip to Europe and was encouraging others to do the same.
