Stephanie Yoder

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

I’ve heard every misconception about solo female travellers you can imagine, so I’m here to set the record straight with nine myths and one truth about solo female travel.

We’re not doing anything for Thanksgiving this year, and I feel pretty great about it. Truthfully I’m a serial Thanksgiving skipper. When I lived in London I celebrated with a soggy turkey sandwich.

The only way to save a lot of money fast without going insane or giving up is to spend less and make more. It’s not glamorous, and it’s kind of hard but it gets the job done.

The bigger the risks and the scarier things seem, the greater the rewards.

When I was twenty-one years old, my mother told me that her twenties were the hardest decade of her life. This kind of puzzled me at the time.

As much as I love being self-employed, there are definitely some downsides. I miss those paid vacation days, and Christmas bonuses, but most importantly I really, really miss having health insurance.

I’d like to say the moral is that make-up is totally useless and I never wear it now. This would be a lie. A kind of judgmental lie.

I miss college, pulling all nighters in the library with Kim, and I definitely miss living in London and being so poor I struggled to make rent.

In 2009 I got really fed up with my 9-5 job and decided to quite and spend a year backpacking around Asia. It took a year of living with my Mom, saving every dime and basically driving everyone in my life crazy, but I finally actually did it.

Also, there are thousands of different dishes to try, and eating out is exponentially cheaper than trying to cook at home (if your apartment even had a kitchen, which it doesn’t).