As daughter of a father* who had mismanaged money his entire life, I have been hell-bent on clearing my mortgage...on my house in Toronto. Therefore I did not put away any money towards savings for a future when I am retired. Now that I have cleared the mortgage, I realize two things.
1)I should have saved toward retirement as money saved early, would have grown into a lot as times passes. Saving late, the money does not grow much.
2) I should have travelled a lot more over the last several years...instead of postponing. Now that Covid has hit, I deeply regret that I did not see the places I wanted to see all my life...Italy, Japan, Cambodia's Angkor Wat, Nepal, Amsterdam, Iceland, New Zealand, etc. I should have visited Tibet before China swallowed it up. So many countries which were fun tourist destinations when I could financially afford to visit them have gone to shit due to war, civil war, terrorism, etc over the last few years and now off my list of places to visit. If I had not postponed, I would have had a lot more travel experience!
3) Since Covid, I have gained weight and now dreading the results of my annual checkup! (the test results come next week). I am now huffing and puffing after walking a few km ...before I could walk a lot more without feeling tired. My arthritic knee is troubling me more these days than a few years ago. If I had travelled earlier..more than I did, I would not be so regretful today! I actually had no excuse to postpone travelling. I had the money. I had to vacation time. I had good health. I had this great Canadian passport which enables a visa-free entry to several countries. Why was I so unnecessarily anxious about money?
*My dad constantly borrowed money to invest in agriculture(in dry Tumkur area of Karnataka, which has not received good rains for decades!) and 'sites' (small plots of land on which one can build a house) in remote outskirts of Bangalore (as they were 'cheap')...this lead to paying lakhs of rupees interest to banks and no profit when you sell the site...which no one wants to buy as it's in a remote area; no yield from the agricultural land due to lack of rains, difficulty getting good and honest labourers, cost of transporting the yield, etc.
Moral of the story: Do what you dream of ...TODAY. Don't postpone. Don't wait. Plan better than I did. Live today. You can do the ''things you dream of'' side-by-side with 'things you need to do'. You don't need to finish the things you NEED to do before embarking on doing things you enjoy. Sometimes, there is no end to things which are boring but need to be done. It goes on and on and on. New things which are important to do keep coming up again and again till you die! then you never have time to do what you like.
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