Goodbye 2025, hello 2026! 🎆 It definitely took me by surprise when I realized I hadn’t made a single update all year. I honestly almost forgot the steps to creating a new post. That said, I won’t make excuses, I truly just didn’t have much to write or update about this year. Still, I know future-me would regret it if I didn’t at least attempt to summarize my 2025, especially if I ever want to look back. So… here I…
Goodbye 2024, hello 2025! 🎆 After my last Mid-Year check in post, I took a hiatus from the blog feeling like I didn’t have anything particularly newsworthy to share. However, in reflecting back on my 2024, I realized I had quite a fun, busy year! As always, I tried to find a common theme to define my year and this time, it was an easy choice: 2024 was definitely the year of exploration. It was an exploration in travel but…
Goodbye 2023, hello 2024! As I started writing this post, I struggled to find a defining theme for this year. It truly felt like a big extension of my 2022. I continued with travel revenge and overall just enjoyed my 30’s not being completely broke like I was in my 20’s. If I’m being kind to myself, I would mark this year a success with the accomplishment of fully paying off my student loans. More realistically though, I really have…
After two years of pandemic, 2022 marked the year of a new start. It marked a turn as I restarted international travel. It also marked the turn of a decade for me as I entered my 30s. But it was so much more than that. It was a start to a new mentality, one that I aspired to have ever since learning about FIRE as reflected in some of these highlights of 2022. A Stressful Start The first quarter of…
Goodbye 2021, hello 2022! As I look back on the past year and contemplated the theme of 2021, I realized that The Year of Waiting was the most fitting. I started 2021 with excitement as I do every year, anticipating the year that would come with every ounce of optimism. Unfortunately most of the waiting ended up in disappointment, but that’s just life sometimes. A Diminishing Excitement At the start of 2021, I was most excited to get the newly…
Welcome to my 2020 Year in Review! 2020 flew by like nothing. It seemed like it was just yesterday that I was excited to see 2020 roll around. A new decade, a new start. Well, as we all know, that didn’t pan out quite as planned. Instead, a pandemic struck and before we knew it, we were just waiting for 2020 to finish to get to 2021. With that said, I wouldn’t say 2020 was a complete disaster. While many…
2020 is here! And I’m finally ready to go over my 2019 year in review after quite a bit of procrastination. I felt like so many things, yet at the same time nothing happened in 2019. It was really hard to generalize my 2019 into any specific theme, but I did finally settle on one. If I am putting it nicely, 2019 was definitely the Year of Self-Care. To put it bluntly, I can also rename this as the Year…
I cannot believe how fast 2018 flew by. As I look back on my 2018, I figured why not document the highlights. It’ll be great to look back on this years later to read a quick recap of my personal, financial, and work life in 2018. Before I begin, I like to start by looking back at the goals I made at the beginning of 2018. I started 2018 with $129,149 in student loan debt and in January wrote a list…