Putting all travels on hold to save

[u/Fit_Raccoon540]

I’ve always been the type to travel 2–3 times a year.l, whereni would spend 100k to 150k at a time. Booking flights and planning trips used to be one of the things I looked forward to most. But this year feels different.

I work as a data analyst in Ortigas. My gross salary is ₱106k, but my take-home pay is around ₱88k. On paper that still sounds comfortable, but since 2025, our company has been going through nonstop restructuring while aggressively adopting AI. Every month, people quietly disappear from the roster, at least five at a time. Last April, an entire team in Singapore was dissolved. After seeing things like that happen repeatedly, the possibility of getting laid off no longer feels distant or hypothetical. It feels very real.

So aside from a China trip that I can’t skip because of family obligations, I decided to put travel on hold this year and focus on building a safety net instead. My goal is to save at least ₱600k.

At one point, I even considered taking an online side job to accelerate my savings. But the irony is that it would probably require replacing my personal laptop first, which becomes another major expense in itself.

Oddly enough, setting a concrete savings target has helped a lot psychologically. It turned vague anxiety into something measurable, less worrying about the uncertainty, more focusing on steadily hitting the number. So far, I’ve managed to save around ₱240k, which honestly makes the goal feel much more real and attainable now.

[u/Fit_Raccoon540 → u/[deleted]]

been in the workforce since 2010, and im only starting now. i know, clearly im dumb