Today marks my pre-official pre-retirement day as my contract with my employer has finally come to end this month. The reason to declare it as pre-official is because it’s not the end of the month yet but since I’m taking leave at the last week of the month, my relationship with my employer ends earlier than the official day. Besides, since I don’t have plan to find a new job yet, I am generally pre-retired, a better term for jobless. I like to describe it as a temporary retirement to ‘test’ retirement life before saving enough money for real retirement. This is pretty similar to test marriages, where couples try unofficial married life before committing to a huge mistake.

Pre-retirement won’t cause any huge mistake except draining your savings account. I will talk about how to survive pre-retirement in my next post.

“Where are you heading to?”, “What is your plan?”, these are the common questions I received ever since I declared the intention to end my contract with my employer. “Not bored without working?”, “How to maintain your current lifestyle without any income?”, these are the responses I received when I told them about my jobless plan. “Your husband allows you to not work?” This is the repeated question from one of my colleagues who strongly believes a wife should contribute to the family wealth.

Temporary unemployment triggers so much concern from people around me and what concerns them the most are MONEY, LIFESTYLE and WEALTH. As if these are the only 3 elements that determine one’s happiness. Pretty sad, isn’t it? I can’t think of any reason a person who has been working for almost 10 years doesn’t deserve to have a break, complete freedom from the rat race.  Nonetheless, we shouldn’t take a break without any preparation. If our saving account has only 1000 bucks and we have credit card debts, a housing loan and car loan to pay off, being jobless is a short cut to bankruptcy. But if we have already planned ahead with enough emergency funds for us to survive as long as we are jobless, we could take this opportunity to pursue our dreams. The dreams that we might not have time to achieve when we are trapped in the rat race.

My dreams can be summarized as follows:

Dream No. 1 ~ Travel to the places where bringing along small kids isn’t a good option. For instance, Tibet, Nepal, Egypt, etc. Well, I don’t wanna bring my 3 year old kid climbing Himalaya Mountain or ridding in a cage-like jeep to watch beasts in South Africa. Since I do not have kids yet and I intend to bring my kids to every place that I gonna visit in the future, I would like to visit less developed but highly adventurous places before I become a mummy. If traveling to these places is not possible in near future, I would hope to get to travel to other places that do not require long planning.

Dream No. 2 ~ To find an opportunity to make money with as much as freedom I can have. This will allow me to take care of my kids full time and to travel whenever I like, while making money at the same time. Well, I do not have a kid yet but it’s a perfect timing to start the plan now.

Dream No. 3 ~ To fully enjoy the freedom that I have now by spending my time well with my family and friends.

Dream No. 4 ~ To reorganize my daily lifestyle to live a healthy and happy life.

Dream No. 5 ~ To uncover my true self.

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Dream No. 1 can actually be achieved later when my future kids grow up. But I don’t wanna wait for so many years. Nobody knows what gonna happen in the next minute. Disaster like earth quake in Japan can just happen anytime without prediction. So I shouldn’t procrastinate in executing my plan.

Here I’m going to list down my desired travel destinations:~

Places that I might be able to visit in near future:

• Taiwan
• Hong Kong and Macau
• Cambodia
• US

Adventurous places:

• Tibet
• Nipal
• Bhutan
• Galapagos Island
• Palau Island
• Egypt
• South Africa

Beautiful and mysterious places:

• Greece
• Israel
• Russia
• Maldives
• Stonehenge
• Nasca Lines
• Easter Island
• Machu Picchu
• Bora Bora
• Iguazu Falls

The list will definitely grow longer whenever I discover a new interesting place. It’s a lifelong dream that I will never retire from traveling around the world. In order to be able to travel freely, my Dream No. 2 was conceived.

My mind has never stopped thinking about alternate ways to make money besides working as an employee. I have been investing quite aggressively in stock market mainly inspired by Warren Buffett. I am looking for opportunity to do some properties investment as well. But all these do not guarantee me the constant income without risk. Unless I’m as smart as Warren Buffett then maybe I do not need any backup plan. Unfortunately I’m not, so I also thought about franchising, owning a boutique, etc. While exploring the opportunities, this blog becomes my key asset to achieve my Dream No. 2. I started blogging solely out of interest. I initially owned a personal blog and I especially love blogging about my vacation trips. Later on when I explored more and more high quality travel blogs online, they inspired me to transform my personal blog into a travel blog. Some renown travel bloggers even encourage travel lovers to earn money from blogging to pay off the travel expenses. This is such a wonderful idea when one can make a living by doing what they love.

One may ask out of a billion blogs in the world wide web, what’s the probability of my blog standing out and to succeed? My answer would be “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to worship probability.” I strongly believe in the quote from Thomas Edison, “I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Thanks Thomas, you gave me a very strong excuse to never admit my failure (kidding :-p). So YES, I will be working from 9 to 5 on my blog during my pre-retirement period. And NO, it’s completely different from my 9 to 5 employee working life, because it was never 9 to 5, it was either 9 to 7 or 9 to 9 depend on the project deadlines. Besides, blogging is my interest, traveling is my passion, working as an employee is neither my interest nor my passion.

Dream No. 3, to fully enjoy the freedom that I have now by spending my time well with my family and friends. So am I not spending time well with my family and friends now? Yes, I am not. Why? Because I worked from 9 to 6 (lucky hours), I cooked simple dinner, sometimes I didn’t cook and dined out. The moment I was completely free for the day would be 8:30 p.m.. Instead of spending the night time with my family or friends, I worked on my personal laptop maintaining my blog. There are so much to learn about blogging that I just couldn’t find enough time to learn them all.

Family should always be my priority. We can lose the whole world but never our families. I will always remind myself to spend precious time with my family and friends to compensate for time lost in the past.

Dream No. 4, to reorganize my daily lifestyle to live a healthy and happy life. I’m going to make myself a time table on how to manage my time well during my pre-retirement. For example, to include exercising  and cooking good food in my daily activities. Well, I don’t expect myself to be discipline enough to follow strictly on the timetable. I never did, in fact. Ever since my primary school time I had already created uncountable timetables for myself. They were like bible to me, good to have but never been read. Nonetheless, I still believe timetable is a good guideline to have to keep myself motivated and disciplined.

Dream No. 5,  I should have at least uncovered my true self after a long break and after executing the plans to achieve my dreams, right? Maybe I will really enjoy my new lifestyle, or maybe I just want my working life back. I wouldn’t know until experiencing the change. I will blog about my true self again 3 months from now.

I’m feeling happy and motivated now after writing this post. If I failed to practice what I preach here, I would say “I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. Nah.. no… I will never let myself fail, so neither will you.

If you’re doing your best, you won’t have any time to worry about failure.

~ Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.