Here’s one very real way to retire next year

Before she was a travel writer, Steenie’s life wasn’t so exciting. Fifteen years ago, she was working 50 hours per week typing invoices and taking calls from disgruntled customers in the English Midlands. She also answered to a boss she describes as “the original Scrooge.”

Then her husband lost his job. And they thought, “Why not move away? Try a completely different lifestyle?” So they sold what possessions they had and bought a bargain-priced country cottage in the west of Ireland.

Soon after moving into their new cottage, Steenie found an ancient manual typewriter in the garden shed. The same day, she came across an ad in the Sunday newspaper that said something like “You Too Can Have a Career As a Writer.” It got her thinking.

She decided to bash out a humorous article about her search for a home in Ireland. She wrote about her travails looking for a home for $10,000. She included anecdotes about real estate agents taking her and her husband to see hovels with tin roofs and no bathroom facilities.

It was the first thing she’d written since leaving high school. She didn’t have a clue about how to present an article. Her effort featured single-spaced typing, thickly whited-out passages covering all of the errors she made, and a dog-eared left corner to hold the pages together.

Despite her lack of knowledge, the property editor of an English daily newspaper called The Independent published it. The paper paid Steenie $180—not a ton of money, but it was very gratifying nonetheless.

Better still, the editor asked Steenie to write a follow-up essay on the kind of homes that were on sale in western Ireland. She told me it was an easy piece to write. “I simply visited local real estate agents and asked what they had for sale.”

She thought, “Surely this is the end of it. How many people could be interested in reading articles about buying Irish cottages?” In fact, she got offers from three more English newspapers: The Guardian, The Daily Express, and London’s Evening Standard.

Then she came across a monthly publication called International Living in the States. She sent a note to the editor, who wrote back saying that she had been looking for a freelance writer in Ireland. Steenie had struck pay dirt!

Fifteen years later, Steenie is a highly paid, well-respected and well-known travel writer. She’s written hundreds of stories for International Living and others—about not only Ireland but also destinations as far-flung as Malaysia and Mexico.

These days, editors of travel magazines actually pay her expenses as she travels the globe reporting on their behalf…