ABOUT TALES OFF ROAD
“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”
Randy Komisar
“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”
Randy Komisar
We left behind storybook careers and safe jobs as a medical doctor and a financial professional in January 2018 to start traveling around the world with our two preschool kids. Are we travel bugs? Not really.
But why would we do it then and throw away our careers, leading positions and give up everything we had? Safety and prosperity.
We realized that those careers, those prestigious jobs come at a very, very high price!
Sure, we made good money but at the expense of time, health and relationships especially with regard to our two young kids. Spending eleven hours in day care so that mom and dad can pursue their careers to pay the bills for a lifestyle that could also be much lower and still feel comfy did not make sense to us.
There was no balance at all between earning money, staying healthy and having enough time to actually enjoy life and kids. Something had to change: Either one of us had to quit or we both work 50%. Try working 50% in a leading position in the financial industry. Good luck.
After 17 years in finance and 13 years stitching together people in the emergency room, night shifts and weekend work, living a life on the fast lane, and too much daily boring routine we were ready for a break anyway.
Our kids were still pre-school at the time. So, we took this once in a life-time opportunity and both quit our jobs and started traveling around the world. Ready for a reboot and thinking it all over again.
If we wouldn’t have had kids, if our jobs wouldn’t have become so boring, we probably wouldn’t have realized that something is deeply wrong in our lifes and actually a ticking time bomb to be quiet honest. Maybe we are just an everyday example of what’s going wr(on)g in our career driven society in general.
Work, consume, work harder, consume more, work even harder, consume even more and still feel kind of broke – mentally and in some cases financially as well. Sounds familiar?
Dissatisfaction with the traditional way of career thinking and career path, working our asses off until we suddenly die of a heart attack. Kids suffering early on in their lives because mom and dad are too busy keeping up with the Joneses in a never ending rat-race. Sounds familiar?
We are now on our personal mission to change all that for us, bring our life into order in a sense that we find a reasonable balance between health, time and money. If any one of these items gains the upper hand, life gets out of balance. It is the dose that makes the poison, right?
If we focus on free-time or health only we may end up financially broke. If we focus on money only, we’re lacking health and free-time.
Money is the universal tool that enables us to live – or should we better say buy – the life we want to live.
Money has become the ultimate medium of exchange, the ultimate store of value and store of future happiness to “buy a better life” later. We spend so much energy acquiring money in the best years of our lives in order to enjoy the fruits of it when we retire. Hopefully we make it until our mid-sixties and cross fingers the pension system did not blow up until then!
Randy Komisar put it straight:
“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”
Money is an essential tool, but useless without enough time to enjoy its fruits and to live the desired life in the first place. Money could always be regenerated but time is a non-renewable resource. Once passed its gone forever. Kids need our attention the most when they are young. That time will never come back.
On the other hand, having all the time in the world is worthless without the health to enjoy it. We need to put much more focus on preventing illness rather than working overtime for decades and spend the accumulated money to cure the diseases of that same unhealthy lifestyle.
So, put into order of importance we aim at balancing and maximizing HEALTH, TIME and MONEY.
May our background in finance and health help us on our quest. And not only us, we hope it also helps you as we share our successes and failures with you along the way.
As traveling around the world with our kids is our recent life chapter, we currently share our mission from this perspective.
Do you have questions, ideas, requests or want to share your personal story? We are happy about every comment and will gladly answer your questions!
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Yours,
Prisca and Florian
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