{"id":26061,"date":"2019-08-26T13:11:35","date_gmt":"2019-08-26T17:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/?p=26061"},"modified":"2019-10-22T17:37:32","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T21:37:32","slug":"from-brooklyn-to-asia-with-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/from-brooklyn-to-asia-with-love\/","title":{"rendered":"From Brooklyn to Asia with Love"},"content":{"rendered":"
>> Back to September 2019<\/a><\/div>\n

\"CNote<\/a>When I was 30 years, 8 months and 1 day old I got my first passport. I was so excited to finally be able to travel the world and share stories of all the things I had seen. But my journey to global euphoria was slow and not quite steady.<\/p>\n

Growing up as a little girl, in the mid 70\u2019s, in Brooklyn, NY I had no idea that we were part of what you would now classify as low to middle income. Our community was rich and full. We loved and respected each other, our neighbors and our friends. We never talked about money but somehow we managed to \u201cmanage.\u201d\u00a0At the early age of 11, I experienced what not having money meant. It was a more superficial experience for me but my experience, nonetheless. It was the fall season and families were gearing up for Back to School. I remember so vividly, not being able to go back to school shopping because we didn\u2019t have money \u201cfor that.\u201d We had just enough to pay the bills. (If only my adult self could have told my 11-year-old self that, that was what really mattered, I probably would have been less traumatized.) <\/em>My mom was a single parent and I was the youngest of three. We spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and they seemed \u201cfinancially stable.\u201d My grandfather was a decorated war veteran and policeman and my grandmother was a stay-at-home mom of five. My grandparents did a lot of traveling and I always admired that. I never gave thought to how they afforded it. Perhaps they managed their money well, perhaps they didn\u2019t. I suspect they fell somewhere in between<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until I was in high school that I started to really learn and appreciate the value of money, the evil it possessed and the joy it could bring.\u00a0My family had moved to Florida and I began spending more time around teenagers who were doing things like traveling abroad and they seemed to have such worldly experiences. As I was nearing the end of my high school years, students were completing final semesters abroad and preparing to \u201cgo away\u201d to college. I couldn\u2019t travel abroad, and I didn\u2019t go away to college. Instead, I received a local university experience where I had to work part time and often take courses at night. While I have a college education, it came at a price that is truly unconscionable – student loan debt. My mother is an excellent researcher, and she helped me identify grants that were available, however they weren\u2019t enough and when it came to academic debt we were a bit na\u00efve. Academic debt, left unmanaged and un-understood, is a terrible joke that lenders play on uneducated families who just want to get into college.\u00a0As my student loan debt grew, I began to further understand the real concept of the evil that lurked within the walls of academic debt. Part of me felt like, it didn\u2019t matter the cost of the loan, all that mattered was that I needed to graduate and I didn\u2019t want to give society another reason to say NO. My skin color did that all by itself. I didn\u2019t grow up seeing a lot of examples of the person I wanted to be, and I was determined to be a college graduate.<\/p>\n

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