She spent much of her time in South America, learning Spanish, exploring the great outdoors and getting familiar with Latin American culture for eight months.

“I didn’t want to spend my 20s hanging out in a cubicle,” she said.

She decided to head out at that stage in her life because she was passionate about traveling and she did not have that many financial responsibilities.

Traveling full-time made her more resourceful and better at problem solving, she said. And, when she returned to Singapore in September last year, prospective employers were intrigued.

“A lot of them were very wistful and said they wish they had done it when they were younger,” she said.

She found a job in a hedge fund after three months.

On top of that, she now runs a blog on the side. Called Koala Travels The World, she collaborates with tourism boards and writes guides to countries such as Bolivia, Swaziland and Uruguay.

Here are her best tips for going on a long traveling trip.

1. Set a savings goal

Most fresh college graduates get excited about their first paycheck and spend it on brunch, taxis, shopping or parties. But Chua knew she wanted to be able to travel full-time and started saving from her very first paycheck.

In Singapore, it’s also common for young people to live with their families, so she was able to save on rent by staying with her parents.

However, she emphasized that part of saving was about doing a lot of research.

She read many travel blogs about the experiences of full-time travelers and used that research to set a budget of about $50 a day for her big trip.

2. Break up a big goal into smaller ones

Chua put her project management skills and finance-savvy into travel budgeting.

First, she charted her spending to figure out exactly what she was spending money on. She then decided on her budget, and made small savings goals for each quarter.

After that, she broke that down further into months to make her mini-goals easier to achieve.

It wasn’t easy for her: It took four years to save about 50,000 Singapore dollars ($36,000).

“It was definitely a challenge to save that,” she said. But, she added, if you have a goal that you’re working towards, then it’s easier to find motivation to work toward that goal.

3. Make your spending work for you

Travel hacking has become popular, especially in the United States. It’s essentially accumulating points on credit cards and turning miles into free, or very cheap, flights.

Chua said it has been “a bit difficult” to travel hack in Singapore compared with the United States, but it’s still possible.

Once again, she researched the best credit cards for her needs, and spread her spending across three cards.

With that, she racked up enough points to fly around the world twice.

She cautioned, however, that people need to be very familiar with the cards’ billing cycles so as not to end up paying more in late fees.

4. Be flexible about your travel plans, but not your budget

Chua said that she was pretty easygoing with her travel plans — stopping in unexpected places to see friends and extending stays when she found places that she liked.

“Don’t overplan — that takes away the whole fun of travel,” she said.

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Aaron P. Bernstein | Reuters

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington,  July 25, 2018.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Tokyo on Saturday for talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other officials ahead of his fourth visit to North Korea for denuclearization talks with its leader Kim Jong Un.

Despite Kim’s pledge to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, Japan, Washington’s key ally in Asia, still considers North Korea to be a “dire threat,” and is pushing ahead with plans to bolster its ballistic missile defenses with Aegis Ashore batteries that can target warheads in space.

Speaking to a pool reporter en route to Tokyo, Pompeo said his aim in Pyongyang was “to make sure we understand what each side is truly trying to achieve.” He also said he hoped to be able to agree a “general date and location” for a second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim following their first meeting in Singapore in June.

Pompeo’s last visit to North Korea failed to make progress with Pyongyang denouncing him for making “gangster-like demands.”

Recently, he angered North Korea by insisting that international sanctions must remain in place until it gives up its nuclear weapons. On Wednesday, he said there was unanimous support for this at last week’s U.N. General Assembly, even if Russia and China “had some ideas about how we might begin to think about a time when it would be appropriate to reduce them.”

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U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross signaled on Friday that Washington may flex its muscle with additional trading partners in order to exert pressure on China to open its markets, saying that a “poison pill” provision in the recently completed pact with Canada and Mexico could be replicated.

Ross said in an interview that the provision was “another move to try to close loopholes” in trade deals that have served to “legitimize” China’s trade, intellectual property and industrial subsidy practices.

The United States is now in the early stages of talks with Japan and the European Union to lower tariff and regulatory barriers and try to reduce large U.S. trade deficits in autos and other goods.

If the EU and Japan signed on to provisions similar to the one in the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it would signal that they are fully aligned with Washington in trying to increase pressure on China, the world’s No. 2 economy, for major economic policy changes.

The provision in USMCA, which is expected to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, effectively gives Washington a veto over Canada and Mexico’s other free trade partners to ensure that they are governed by market principles and lack the state dominance that is at the core of President Donald Trump’s tariff war against China.

Under the provision, if any of the three countries in the USMCA enters a trade deal with a “non-market country,” the other two are free to quit in six months and form their own bilateral trade deal.

“It’s logical, it’s a kind of a poison pill,” Ross said.

Ross, asked if the provision would be repeated in future trade deals, said: “We shall see. It certainly helps that we got it with Mexico and with Canada, independently of whether we get it with anyone else.”

He added that with a precedent now set, it will be easier for the provision to be added to other trade deals. “People can come to understand that this is one of your prerequisites to make a deal,” he said.

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