While that title is totally true, I’m not here to brag. Rather, I want to share my story in hopes that it might inspire others.
After graduating from Grinnell College in 2005, I (my name is Brian Stoffel, and that's me in the pic above) spent the next five years teaching at KIPP DC, an inner-city charter school in the nation's capital. What the school has accomplished is amazing—my first year, we were the top performing school in DC even though over 80% of our students received free or reduced-price lunches.
But the hours were long. School went from 7:30 AM until 5 PM, there was school on Saturdays, and summer school was mandatory. The school bought phones for teachers so that students could call at any time for help—with homework or otherwise.
Long story short: my first two years were typical for a new teacher—I was pretty terrible. But by Years 3 and 4, I was in the swing of things and accomplishing really great stuff. By the time Year 5 started, however, I knew it would be the last. In short, I burned out.
How a simple question changed everything
During Year 5, my girlfriend (now wife) and I had a meeting with a financial planner. I’ll never forget the first question Paige—our planner—asked us:
What is it you guys really WANT in life that you don’t have?
We were completely stumped. We weren’t expecting a question like this. It cut right to our core.
After a lot of deliberation, we came up with a simple answer: time.
We were lucky if we saw each other for more than one waking hour per day during the week, and we mostly slept on the weekends. The year before, we took a road trip on our abbreviated summer vacation and loved the freedom that it provided us.
The obvious solution: Move to Costa Rica!!!
Ok, so it wasn’t that obvious. The reality was that my wife—Ali—and I were exhausted. The thought of changing careers was too much for us at the time, but there’s no way we could afford to live in DC without working—nor did we really want to.
I had just read Timothy Ferriss’s The 4 Hour Work Week, and was fascinated with the idea of a mini-retirement. “You know, we don’t have to live in the country,” Ali said as we discussed our options. After batting the idea around for a little bit, we decided to take the plunge.
After we settled on Costa Rica, we wondered: “How the hell do we find a place to live?” Geniuses that we are, we checked out Craiglist, sent an e-mail to the first house we saw listed (it was only $350 per month!!!), and told them we’d be there once we were done teaching.
What the hell have we just done?!?!
It turns out that the house we picked was in a pretty remote neighborhood in the rural mountain town of Atenas, Costa Rica. Our first night there, I had a panic attack thinking about the fact that we knew NO ONE for thousands of miles, and our return ticket wasn't for another six months.
My wife thrived (she's a bit of an introvert) with the time to focus on her artwork. I struggled. But then, about one month into our move, everything changed.
The only friend we'd made--a gringa named Tina--introduced us to a tiny organic coffee farm in the area that was doing crazy things: they'd abandoned chemicals (obviously, as they were organic), but they had also decided to more or less give the farm back to nature. Outside of spreading compost and occasionally pruning the coffee trees--they let whatever decided to start growing on the farm continue growing. This meant that their yields fell considerably, but their diversity was through the roof.
I could go on and on about the farm--but that's a for a different article. The bottom line is this: we fell in love with the farm, and the woman (Tina) who introduced it to us. We decided that we wanted to make this farm and this community a part of our life.
But there were two problems with our current situation:
- As non-residents, we couldn't legally get jobs in Costa Rica.
- I still wanted to spend a good chunk of every year back in the Midwest, which is where I grew up.
We had no idea how to make this arrangement work, but then life threw us a bone. I saw an opening to be a writer for an online company that I was very familiar with. Although it would require a 6 month training period, upon successful completion of the program, graduates could contribute from anywhere in the world.
Where we are 6 years later
That all occurred back in 2011. Today, we (including our 3 year old daughter) spend 6 months of the year in Wisconsin, and 6 months of the year in Costa Rica. In fact, we are in the process of building our own home on that very farm we fell in love with six years ago.
(construction starting on our house)
There are a few lessons we've learned that are paramount if you want to ever try something similar in your own life.
1. Define and accept the worst case scenario.
We often let fear dictate our decisions. If we really think about what the downside to a risk is--the worst possible scenario--we see that our "risks" aren't that dangerous at all. In our case, if a medical emergency bankrupted us, we'd likely need to live with my parents until the next school year began. We were fine with that.
2. Start practicing minimalism
There's a lot of truth to the pithy saying that "our possessions end up owning us." When we moved we sold everything: clothes, cars, furniture. It gave us the cash we needed for some wiggle room. We felt freer. And it wasn't hard to buy back what we sold second-hand.
3. Find your "Enough" and live below your means
Maybe this should be #1, because it's probably the most important. Due to a combination of parental contributions and scholarships, we had a manageable student debt load. But that alone wasn't enough.
We were adults for six years, and found our "Enough"...and stopped spending after that. For the six years we taught, I'd wager we put away over 35% of our combined income. We spent time together and with friends--that was enough for us, and it gave us an incredible amount of freedom.
4. Be ok with a little ridicule
There were lots of people who thought we were crazy. We didn't waver in the face of it. If you're afraid of what others think, this isn't for you.
5. Don't wait for all your ducks to be in a row...JUST DO IT!
We had no sustainable plans when we moved to Costa Rica...no idea of how we'd make ends meet if we wanted to stay. But we figured it out. If we had waited until everything was just so, we never would have left.
More importantly, we realized that almost every American who had happily moved down there was in the same place. They didn't have a plan either. But they loved it, and they just forced themselves to find a way.
If you have questions...or stories of your own...chime in below!