‘You get a lot of bang for your buck here’

Wynter’s job and salary used to define a lot about who she was: “It was affording me the lifestyle that I had. I had a very comfortable lifestyle,” she says. “It was affording the travel that I love so much. And I could not envision a life outside of that.”

However, the job was “high burn” and sometimes entailed working 12-hour days and on the weekend. “You can’t even go on a vacation that you can now afford. That’s foolish,” Wynter says.

She struggled to take breaks from day to day. “It’d be little things like feeling guilty if I took too long of a lunch, even though I may have been working for 12 hours,” she says.

The first time Wynter moved abroad, to London, on a temporary work assignment, she enjoyed more work-life balance. The shift helped her gain perspective on the workaholic lifestyle she lived in the US

She started to question why she “was chasing money,” she says, rather than “creating memories.”

Wynter’s father passed away in 2018, right before he reached retirement age. Realizing her dad de ella never got to enjoy the fruits of his work years in retirement was a turning point for her.

“That’s what made it so real for me that I could not go and replicate and do the same thing,” she says. “I love life too much, right?”

Wynter began seeing a therapist to help her detach her identity from money and status. She also began “saving really aggressively” in order to take a career break. Wynter drastically reduced her expenses by moving into a studio apartment in Atlanta and buying a used car.

She saved $25,000 in her emergency fund, $50,000 for her career break, and $25,000 to start her own business during her time off.

Then Wynter quit her job to travel the world.

“This is the moment in my life when I’ve made the least amount of money,” Wynter says. “But this is the most — it’s the most freeing life that I’ve had. It’s joyful, just being able to just live freely on my own terms.”

Wynter initially made London her new home base. Then she relocated to Lisbon, Portugal in mid-2020, lured by the laid-back culture, food, weather, landscape and cost of living.

Wynter budgeted $50,000 for one year in London but relocating to Portugal has allowed her to extend her time off for an additional year. She also sold her car and freelanced for about six months when the pandemic first hit, to add her savings to her. Wynter plans to begin freelance consulting in March 2022.

Wynter pays about $1,250/month for a one-bedroom two-bathroom apartment in Lisbon’s city center. The apartment came fully furnished and features plenty of natural sunlight. She had been paying $1,800 for a studio apartment in Atlanta.

Wynter spends $100/month on private health insurance, with zero deductible and zero copays. By contrast, after she quit her job in the US, Wynter paid $750/month for health insurance through COBRA, a federal program that allows employees to temporarily continue their health plan after their job ends or their hours are reduced.

She later downgraded to a cheaper plan that cost her $250/month. But the plan was “very poor quality,” she says. “The coverage was so poor, it was pointless.”

Wynter moved abroad in large part for better, cheaper health-care: “I refuse to be like one medical slip up away from, you know, all my money going down the drain,” she says. “Like, all my hard work, you know, over something that I may not have been able to necessarily control.”