I’ve ended my book with my long-time life rule: “Your life, your rules.” The longer version is: “Your life is a game, it’s up to you to define its rules.” The living proof of this life rule, if need be, is Sarah… to whom I leave the keyboard right away.
What if you could live in perpetual summer? What if you could live 6 months in your home country, and 6 months in your preferred country in the world?
Sarah’s background
Hey MP, and hey dear reader of MP’s blog 👋
I’m Sarah, from Zurich (and many other places in the world haha). I love traveling, languages, and art. Yet… I don’t like being told what to do or when to do it. So I couldn’t really embrace the commonly accepted ideas of 9-5, and 20 days a year of holidays…
I mean, most of those days would have to be used up by visiting my family, who live in different countries! So, a secure 9-5 job with limited holidays really just didn’t fit my life vision.
I also love to paint, but didn’t want to live the life of the struggling artist.
I also don’t like being cold, but do like living in Switzerland.
In the light of these parameters, I decided to find an alternative way. Like many things in life, the solution didn’t become apparent straight away, but the path revealed itself over time.
If I had found the textbook back then, it would have said something along the lines:
- Go to art school
- Run your own business that has nothing to do with art
- And switch hemispheres every six months
But… this textbook never existed… so I created it, step by step, by living it.
Let’s travel around the world… just for one year…
So, back in the early 2000s, I quit my 9-5 job to go traveling around the world for a year.
This travel idea should have come with a warning: life will never be the same afterwards.
After 3 months of traveling, I met my husband-to-be in Asia, halfway between our homes, mine being Switzerland and his New Zealand. How lucky that is, that we are from two of the most picturesque places on the planet, although both have quite miserable winters in my humble opinion. But both have very pleasant summers, conveniently at different times of the year.
When I met Steve, he had already been traveling for 2 years, which was certainly a new concept to me.
“Oh”, I thought, “you can travel for more than a whole year, and still have enough money to live off.”
This was probably one of the first moments when my perception shifted and I realized that traveling is actually cheaper than living at home, if you do it right!
I also started to realize that just because everyone else does something a certain way, it doesn’t mean you should do that either. In fact, it is probably a good reason not to do it!
Refill travel funds needed…
We decided to make a go of things in Switzerland as it seemed a good place to refill our travel funds. My husband Steve got into teaching English in Zurich as it seemed the only thing he was qualified to do with a Master’s degree in Political Science, apart from digging up roads.
And after a couple of half-hearted attempts at working for someone else, I started my own business and became my husband’s boss – the poor man! I found the students and he taught them. This was the birth of nativespeakers.ch GmbH, our language school in Zurich, which started by teaching English, but branched out into French, German and Italian. The school is still going strong 20 years later!
After three years of Steve cycling around Zurich from client to client teaching them English, he came home one icy dark winter’s evening and said: “I can’t do this any longer. I haven’t seen the sun for 3 months!”
This was when we decided to do something differently.
“I haven’t seen the sun for 3 months. This needs to change.”
We thought, well, how about we go to New Zealand over winter and sublet our flat in Zurich in the meantime?
Everyone around us was very skeptical, because hey, this was 2005 and no-one sublet their flats back then, and there was certainly no talk of any digital nomads or remote working in those days.
I think we were the pioneers of the digital nomad movement!
Steve managed to persuade a couple of students to take online lessons with him, but most didn’t like the sound of it.
So I found another New Zealander in Zurich to teach his students while we went away, and a friend to pick up the phone, and this was how nativespeakers.ch grew from the one-man show it was, into a school that now employs quite a large number of people.
I didn’t know how I was going to earn my money in New Zealand, but one of Steve’s colleagues had asked him if he could do a translation and he said: “Yes, but my wife would do a better job.” I had never done a translation in my life, but managed it successfully, and that is what I did when I was in New Zealand.
If there isn’t a path, then you just have to be brave enough to make one yourself.
Over the years it turned into a successful translation agency.
If there isn’t a path, then you just have to be brave enough to make one yourself.
This model was good for a few years, because it led to a perpetual cycle of summers!
The perfect, balanced life
We didn’t earn heaps of cash, but we were free to move around as we pleased and freedom was worth everything to us.
We would stay in Switzerland for the warm months, and then migrate to New Zealand for the warm months there. We would have a trip somewhere along the way between our two bases. This was good, because basically everywhere is on the way from Zurich to Wellington!
Our friends and family first thought we would only do this for a short while, but they have now come to the conclusion only to start messaging us about when we are going to be back once the weather has turned.
It always makes me smile when we get a message saying:
“It’s warm again; are you back yet?”
A neighbor recently said that he knows winter is about to drop like a stone when he sees us going down the street holding hands in the shape of a V like migratory birds!
An unexpected inspiration in… Namibia!
Our plans are generally quite fluid, but the seeds of ideas are sown with confidence and often come to fruition even if it is with a delay.
For example, I was traveling in Namibia and was sharing the drive with a fellow traveler and he was telling me about how every year he spent 3 months in Germany, 3 months in Mallorca, where he had family, 3 months in Australia, where he had friends, and 3 months traveling through Africa each year.
When I asked him how long he had been doing it for, he said: “Oh, about 20 years!”
When I asked him when he would stop, he said: “When I’ve had enough!”
What a brilliant idea I thought back then!
I don’t even remember the guy’s name, but his story really stuck with me. The only thing I didn’t like about his plan was the fact that he had contracted malaria and this flared up every year, so I decided to cut countries with malaria risk out of the equation. There are many risks I am willing to take, but this isn’t one of them. I saw him with a flare-up of malaria and I decided this was not part of my life vision.
Yet, his story was the inspiration for our next life stage!
Experimenting, and crafting our ideal life
Rather than the 6 months here and 6 months there, a new plan was emerging.
How could we roll more travel into the year, but still keep the two bases and the business on track?
Having a base is brilliant because it gives stability. Otherwise, I think you could easily get a bit lost. We have many relationships in both homes which are very important to us, and we have been able to maintain them for decades. We also make sure to visit our families regularly when we travel around the world, so as not to lose touch.
So, what we did is that we started extending our periods between Switzerland and New Zealand, such as when we spent a few months in India setting up a new website for nativespeakers.ch whilst keeping the cheeky monkeys at bay while in my “office”.
And then… the game changer!
And then COVID hit and things changed.
One change was that traveling wasn’t a thing any longer. Well, that was a hard one to swallow. So, to make the most of a global pandemic and travel bans we bought a campervan in New Zealand, and traveled round in it for 9 months until the border opened up to Australia. Then we shipped it over there to continue our van trip.
Along with COVID came the change in the openness to online lessons, so now Steve didn’t have to convince students to take online lessons. They preferred them!
Hence, we plugged our modem into the van, and off we went with Steve teaching from his desk in the front of our van. From the New Zealand Alps to the outback in Australia, it was another day in the office for him.
And the students love it! They love to hear where he is, what it’s like and where to next. It seems a bit like being able to travel vicariously through Steve while at the same time improving their English skills.
Afterwards, we shipped our van over to Europe, and are now on a big trip there with plans to head to Morocco over winter, so come and join in on the fun!
MP disclaimer MP: I never took a lesson with Steve myself, yet he must be good to still be in business after 19 years!
Stop marveling — just be brave enough
Everyone marvels about how we can afford to travel so much, but the bottom line is we save money by traveling. The irony of it is that we get to do what we love and, consequently, it minimizes our expenses, a double benefit!
The love of freedom and the love of travel are certainly the key drivers to our lifestyle. We have never been driven by the pursuit of money and this has afforded us many freedoms. We don’t earn huge incomes, but always have enough to do what we want to do and certainly never feel like we are missing out. We met traveling and are travelers at heart, so it works for us. I truly believe that if you want to do something, you should just go and try it out.
The path will show itself to you. You just have to be brave enough to go, and do it, and trust it will be fine.
Trusting oneself, life, and others
I feel we have been very blessed and haven’t had to struggle to get where we are, but maybe that is just my outlook.
There is a lot to be said for being grateful for what you have, rather than thinking about what you don’t have. Things always seem to fall into place, or maybe it is just the fact that we both are quite trusting of life in general and that things will work out, so they do, and if they don’t, we just make the best out of it.
For example, a friend of ours said: “You really know how to make the most out of a global pandemic” when we bought our van! But the only thing we did was to decide to make our own luck in life, and go, and do it.
Lots of people say they are envious of our lifestyle, which we have proved works, but nobody actually goes and does it.
Negative points for most, not for us! Except one.
There are lots of things that wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of tea.
I imagine one of the things that most people would struggle with is the lack of security that comes with a steady income.
Another thing many wouldn’t like is having someone sleeping in your bed and living in your home when you are not in it. On the whole we have had excellent experiences and our faith in people has been upheld. However, always looking for tenants to take over our homes for 6 months at both ends means that we have to look for tenants twice a year, which is a hassle and often we don’t find anyone until the last moment.
Everyone around us seems to find it incomprehensible how we can be so relaxed about not knowing whether we have someone or not when there is only a week or so before our departure. We are just used to it and say to ourselves: “Well, you only need one person!”, and it has always worked out so far. So why shouldn’t it work this time again? It always has, and it is probably about 30 or 40 tenants we have found over the years! We only chose one bad egg, who was a crook flying under the radar, but even that all turned out ok in the end.
Another clear negative point (to us as well) in our lifestyle choice is the fact that our life admin is doubled because we live in two places, so we have to do everything double, including tax returns. This is a drag, but for us, it is definitely worth the hassle.
Last but not least, another major disadvantage is that I don’t get any Christmas cards anymore. My sister explained kindly to me that it is because no-one really knows where we live in December!
Some notes on subletting around the globe
Subletting in Switzerland is a legal right of every tenant, which is a dream for us and our transient lifestyle. We have been able to keep the same base in Switzerland for over 20 years. This gives us stability and allows us to slip back into our life really easily when we get back.
These days we barely bother putting anything into our locked cupboard because we know that everything we lock away, we will have to get out again in 6 months. When we left just before COVID hit, Steve couldn’t even be bothered taking his clothes out of the wardrobe to make space for the tenant, who was only going to stay for 3 months. Because we ended up being away for such a long time due to COVID, the poor tenant had no space in the wardrobe for ages!
In New Zealand tenants have fewer rights and subletting is a rare luxury, which we managed to negotiate for a number of years. Yet, one day in New Zealand, our luck ran out in terms of subletting our flat. So, it meant we were going to lose our base there.
That was a very difficult moment, because we didn’t really know what to do and knew we weren’t going to be able to find another flat to rent and sublet. So we had to find another solution, which involved either selling all our stuff and then staying in Airbnbs when we returned, or trying to buy a house and turning it into an Airbnb!
Luckily, we managed to find a house to buy, and now have a solid base again in New Zealand.
Live in the present moment
Our lifestyle changes quite quickly, and I find it interesting that when we see our friends or family, they always ask us if we are looking forward to our upcoming travels, or to returning to Switzerland, or to returning to New Zealand. And we just generally say: “We haven’t really given it much thought because it seems a million miles away in our world. We have to live in the moment and where we are and enjoy that day. Otherwise we would never be anywhere really!”
Minimalist and intentional
Living on the road is fantastic.
It’s great that we can see the world and still earn a living.
Every day is different and exciting.
Every day there is new visual input for my artist’s eyes.
But there are disadvantages of living in a van. I just don’t mind the disadvantages as much as I would mind having a regular daily routine, and living in a cold climate each year.
In a van, you have to live a very basic life and learn to appreciate all the things you normally take for granted. You start really appreciating it if hot water comes out of a tap or you use a flush toilet!
I think all this equates to appreciating life more and realizing that you don’t actually need that much to live a very content life. Needing less is another way of freeing yourself from the ties of having to earn a lot of money.
What’s next for the never-ending-summer couple?
I am an artist and artists always find creative ways of doing things, which is why I think I have ended up with the unusual life we have.
I never wanted to be the starving-artist cliché. I have spent many hours of my life dedicated to painting, art school and going to galleries. I do my art and when it sells, that is great, but if it doesn’t, I have other income streams to fall back on. This also allows me to create art that I want to do rather than doing what sells, and again this is the ultimate freedom as an artist. So again, freedom is the main driver.
I would like to continue with our unusual lifestyle as long as we can, and am interested to see where our path takes us. I mean, I’m up to only 72 countries, and Steve 91; we still have a huge part of the world to discover haha!
I hope it inspires others to be brave enough to forge their own unique paths.
Just go for it!
Notes from MP about Sarah’s story
Wow!
That story resonated deeply on some levels…
Follow the crowd… not!
It reminded me of 2013 when Sarah wrote: “I also started to realize that just because everyone else does something a certain way, it doesn’t mean you should do that too. In fact, it is probably a good reason not to do it!”
The second I read that sentence, a vivid memory came back.
It was in December 2013. I was at a coffee shop in Romandie. It was dark outside, yet illuminated with all the Christmas lighting of that little town’s central square.
I was telling an acquaintance of mine about my idea to embrace this financial independence journey.
His reply was somewhat scathing: “Nah, don’t bother with this dream. I tried it myself when I was your age, it’s not possible to sustain a frugal lifestyle for more than 1 or 2 months.”
And here I am in 2025, with close to 2 million CHF in the bank!
So yes, it was probably a good idea not to follow his advice!
Growth mindset vs. fixed mindset
The more I read about Sarah’s story, the more I told myself: “This couple has a strong growth mindset!”
For instance, when they said this: “Things always seem to fall into place, or maybe it is just the fact that we both are quite trusting of life in general and that things will work out, so they do, and if they don’t, we just make the best out of it. […] We just decided to make our own luck in life and go and do it.”
My analysis is: more than trusting in life, they remain open to any situation that is thrown to them, and transform it into an opportunity. I’m that type of person, or at least I work to increase this flexibility muscle, but they seem to master it quite well. Inspiring!
Living in the moment
That’s maybe where I’ve the biggest room for progress: “We have to live in the moment and where we are and enjoy that day, otherwise we would never be anywhere really!”
It reminded me of one of my articles from 2018: Stop racing, start living.
A recurring reminder worth it every single time.
Sarah is a Mustachian!
On top of being digital nomads before the movement started, I wonder the same about them being Mustachian before everyone else when I read:
Needing less is another way of freeing yourself from the ties of having to earn a lot of money.
What I like even more about their story is that they crafted their perfect, balanced life, all while being on their journey towards FI.
Their story also reminded me of this list we built with Mrs. MP.
It’s a list of countries we would like to explore depending on the season of the year:
- June to August: Switzerland
- September to December: Caribbean Islands, French Polynesia, South Africa, Hawaii
- January to March: Scandinavia or Canada (a “true” winter)
- April to May: Balearic Islands, Corsica, Morroco
(note from Sarah: I think you’re missing New Zealand from your list, aren’t you? hehe)
I’m going to share Sarah’s story with Mrs. MP right now (with the addition of New Zealand in December!), to make our future life even more tangible!
And thanks again Sarah (and Steve).
And you, what inspired you in Sarah’s story?
