My husband and I decided to get a little adventurous with our finances this year. Both of us moved into new positions at our jobs at the last three years or so and we’ve been able to put around a quarter of our total income in the bank. Now, with almost an entire year’s salary in the bank, we’re looking into investing. Richard wants to go with a more traditional approach, investing in certain companies and letting our money sit, but I’ve been looking into binary options as a way to invest. We’ve been going back and forth about how we should invest so we’re thinking about making it interesting.

Rick and I are thinking about making a friendly wager, giving ourselves each a decent sum of money to invest in each of our own ways. We’re going to invest in some traditional stocks and the winner between us gets to pick where we go next year on vacation. The wager will last for one year from the day we start. I’m hoping I’m right, because I could really use a trip to a tropical island this year. If Rick wins, I’m sure we’ll go out west or to the mountains again. Both of those are fun, but I’d really rather relax on a beach.

Why do I think I can win? Well, from what I’ve been seeing, binary options offer a chance for a person to take a little more risk but walk away with significantly more money than a standard investment. It’s actually a pretty interesting idea. Instead of buying a stock, you put money out there and you say “I think this stock will be at a certain level by the close of the trading day.” So, instead of letting money sit for weeks or month to earn a few percent, you invest a certain amount, say $100, and if that stock hits a certain mark by the designated time, your return is a much higher percentage. It’s almost like betting the spread in sports betting, which adds a level of excitement and challenge to investing.

All I know is that I think I can destroy Rick in our little wager and I can’t wait to be sitting in a bamboo chair listening to the sound of the ocean, getting some rays. Drinking a pina colada and living it up sounds like my idea of a perfect vacation, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to make it happen.

Thanks to a very fortunate series of events, I have the opportunity to travel for work this summer. I’ve wanted to leave the country and experience another culture for a long time, but things keep happening. Either someone else gets picked to go or something happens to project funding and I’m stuck out here in the good ol’ midwestern US of A like I have been for the past twenty nine years.

Well, somehow I managed to luck out and I’m off to Indonesia for three months this summer. I’ve been there for twelve weeks, but I’ll really only be working for about three. We are opening a new regional office in Bali and I just have to be there to oversee a few things. I basically have to work when no one else is working, which means I work weekends but throughout the week I am completely free.

I plan on using this time to travel to as many different places as I can. Indonesia has hundreds (if not thousands, I’m not really sure) of islands, most of which all have unique things to do such as resorts, nightclubs, restaurants, golf clubs, etc. How can I afford this? Well, my company pays for room & board + food and that works out to around $100 a day. I’ll have to pay for travel expenses but for the most part, everything should be covered.

Speaking of travel expenses, I didn’t realize that the islands are far enough I’ll really need to fly from island to island. I guess the fact that Indonesia stretches across more than 3,000 miles of ocean didn’t really register. I talked to my boss, who was over there for a month while the building was under construction, and he told me about an airline there called Citilink that he used to travel. I checked it out, and it actually looks like a pretty good deal.

Citilink is an airline that operates within Indonesia and specializes in island to island flights. He told me that their planes are pretty nice, and that the prices were very reasonable. I did a little research and it looks like they have terminals at fifteen different airports throughout Indonesia and very soon they’ll actually have three more destinations on their flight paths. They have flights going to most of the major tourist islands in Indonesia, and from what I’ve read and heard from my boss, it will be my best bet for travel in Indonesia.