About Us
AJ & I met in 2010. One of our shared passions has always been travel and we took our first oversees trip together to Portugal in 2011. On our final day before returning to the UK, I remember moaning about having to go back to work. I didn’t want to go at all. I didn’t realise how important my next question would be. “What if we didn’t go back?”
Ever the researcher, that question led me to Google and YouTube. AJ was born in Jamaica so living in another country was natural to him, he never had any intention of settling in the UK anyway. I was always iinterested in moving abroad but I honestly thought I’d missed the boat. Living abroad was for Gap Year students and I had left uni years ago. During my research, I came across the term ‘Digital Nomad’ and it blew my mind. I had no idea that people were quitting their jobs to travel the world full-time.
I was so unhappy at work. I worked in education for over 10 years. A career in Youth Work I initially loved quickly turned sour when the pressure of targets and politics took over. I spent 90 minutes sat in traffic to get to work and would sit in my car and cry before I went in. Only a 5 minute call to AJ would calm me down so I could walk through the doors.
It was unhealthy to continue this way. I loved everything I was finding about becoming a Digital Nomad but there were two glaring problems I thought preventing us from moving forward. We had amassed almost £20,000 in debt and our income wasn’t even covering our expenses. I was also only a few years away from turning 30 and was worried that soon we’d have a baby and surely it’s not possible to live abroad with a child.
AJ has always been the high flying kite and I was the string pulling us back down to reality. When I told him about everything I’d found out, he said “let’s do it. If we have a baby, we’ll make it work”. I thought he was crazy but thought what’s the worse that could happen when I was already sick and tired of being sick and tired.
So in 2015 we went to work on clearing our debts. We were extremely frugal and drastically reduced our outgoings. We started side hustles to make extra income and in only 2 years we were debt free.
In 2016, I shared with a girlfriend that I didn’t know how yet but I declared that I would quit my job in 2017. I found out I was pregnant a few months later allowing me to take maternity leave in March 2017 and I’ve never taken another job since.
In March 2017, we gave ourselves one more year to officially leave London in March 2018. In that year we saved £15,000, Taji was born in June 2017, we sold almost all of our belongings and said our goodbyes to our families. We left London on Monday 26th March on a flight to Malaga, Spain. We had only some savings, a 1-month intensive TEFL course for AJ and no idea of what would entail over the coming years. We were excited, nervous and felt pretty much every emotion you could think of.
It’s been 6 years since we embakred on the journey of a lifetime. We have 5-6 income streams at any one time that has allowed us to live in 14 countries across 5 continents. When the pandemic hit we didn’t completely stop travelling, we slowed down though and we started to explore the idea of choosing one country to call home. That would turn out to be Playa Del Carmen, Mexico for the last 2.5 years where we welcomed Amal in 2022, our little JaMexican baby boy. We became permenant Mexican citizens and now we’re currently preparing for the next chapter of journey and creating the community that we have realised is necessary when living the path less travelled. Who know’s what that will be but if I’ve learned anything over the last 6 years it’s that I now know for sure that anything we dream of is possible with just an idea, a plan and the work to make it happen.
