I’m so thankful for the opportunity to have had traveled abroad, though the trip was not what I expected, to say I've been to Greece is a plus.  

After traveling for 23-hours, I can say I finally made it home. After a review of things, I found that I am at fault, rather than relying on others to plan the trip, I should have been more involved in the planning,  asked a ton of questions, and shared my expectations. 

What I learned was that you can’t travel with everyone, including friends. One traveler was solely traveling for social media likes so we would get to a location after traveling for hours only to spend thirty minutes for a photo-op, while the other was so “cheap” and inconsiderate of time, that the trip ended up costing way more than I anticipated/budgeted (penny wise pound foolish).

Things were so poorly plan; for example, I didn’t get the itinerary, that I asked for multiple times, until the day before (couldn’t make heads or tails of it once received),  there was only one key to the places we were staying so it forced us in many cases to travel together, also transportation wasn’t figured out prior to the trip, so we wasted a ton of time trying to get transportation. At one point we couldn’t even get a rental car. 

 I take responsibility in this, I assumed because I had no experience traveling internationally and they did, that things would be great, and that a plan would be set in motion.  You don’t have to have travel abroad to plan things accordingly. Lesson learned. 

My next trip is to the islands, this one is with family. Lodging and transportation are already arranged. The good thing is, if I want to go off and do things on my own I can. I’m actually planning my days and the things I want to do and see. I found a local driver, at a reasonable cost through a travel group, identified things I want to see and made a list. I’ll be mapping things out, so I can get a clear picture of how long it will take to commute to significant sites and estimate costs. 

Now it’s time to tackle my finances. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the person that I was working with,  my biggest contract, is no longer with the organization, so I’m not sure where things are. I have a call tomorrow to touch bases with the TPA who got me the gig. Fingers crossed because I was relying on this to pay off student loan number three(3), now I’m going to pause the extra payments until I get definite answers and a feel of how things will go. 

Because of this, I decided to pay June and July’s mortgage, HOA, and  COBRA. Though I have a great deal of savings, I don’t like to touch it, and I only want to in case of a real emergency like no money coming in, and since I have the money to pay these things (I received my last contract payment before I left), I am. You never know. 

The good news is, a former client reached out to me to work on a project for a few weeks. We are scheduled to chat some time this week. This should bring in about $2-4k a month. I’ll throw a little at the student loan but I won’t be as aggressive. I’m just thankful for income. It seems like God is always one step ahead of me. 

That’s it so far, I’ll update my expenses and share over the next few days.