How I retired at 38 to live in Bali – 5 Money Concepts that helped me get there faster

Hi, I’m Jean. At the age of 38 years old, I retired and moved with my husband to the island of our dreams, Bali. Our passive income covers the relatively modest living costs here, so we don’t need to work a 9-5 or any kind of salaried employment, but we keep busy with stuff that’s meaningful to us. Surf, painting, music, Bali dogs, making videos … For the friends who have been with us from some time back, you’ll know my back story but for those who don’t… once upon a time I was an unhappy Big Law corporate lawyer and after almost 7 years I quit and got off that hamster wheel.

If you wanna check out the details behind that here it is.

So many of you have been curious about how did I go from then to our present life in Bali. There are so many misconceptions, like people thinking I quit law and to replace my lawyer’s income I did YouTube – that’s absolutely not the case – and people thinking that between me quitting and us ending up here in Bali, being able to live simply but comfortably without working, was a quick and easy transition – again, no it took us years to get here. The early retirement formula is generic, isn’t it? Make more money than you spend, then grow your wealth to hit the target retirement income you need. In my case, we didn’t actually make big money, but because our target retirement income goal is so modest, with planning and discipline, we still managed to make it happen within a matter of about 4 years.

So how did I make money? Well, after I quit, I didn’t have significant savings and I needed to replace my lost income.

My dream was to live on a beach somewhere, surfing, so I quit my big law job. But all my official livelihood skills, law, compliance, blah blah has zero relevance to my new direction. So, to get to my dream life, I moved somewhere cheap to live – Vietnam, and I started re-skilling myself.

I spent a couple of months training, took exams and got certified as a surf instructor. The day after I got my cert, I walked down the beach where all the surf schools were, and – I remember this so clearly – 26 rejections later, I got my first job as an in house surf instructor at a nice resort. Yay – my first new alternative income stream in my new life! So of course, the pay is peanuts compared to my lawyer’s salary, but fortunately the living costs in Vietnam was so affordable that it was still easy to live comfortably.

I spent the next 5 years traveling Asia, surfing, teaching, and picking up more skills and certifications.

Yoga, zumba, personal training… I taught language classes. I did freelance remote legal and compliance work assignments. I worked part time as a guest relations manager at a high end resort. Along the way, I started 4 businesses. I sold bean bags, I sold luxury Brazilian swimwear, I started a yoga studio….

Heck, in between when I had to return to Singapore for some time for personal reasons I even went back to a corporate stint for a while. Finally, after I met and married Vitaly, we started the 4th business together, a boutique surf school in Vietnam that did quite well. The starting years were slow going but with time, momentum really picked up. What about spending and expenditure? From the moment I quit the law, I knew I had a long road ahead, so I reduced my expenditure to only basics and essentials & switched into full on savings mode.

If you’ve tried it, it’s just so immediately clear that society’s just been peddling us the wrong message all our lives – things clearly don’t bring happiness, it is great experiences that make for a good life. Ain’t nobody got time for fancy clothes and branded things when there was good surf and adventures to be had.

And living light and minimally means spending very little, which means any extra money can be saved, and put to investment. Vitaly’s and my happiest times was always when we spent summers in Bali surfing, so then it became our dream to live in Bali permanently. But it was hard to abandon an already profitable business in Vietnam and we didn’t want to have to take up 9-5 jobs to be in Bali.

We aren’t ready now as rookies to start new businesses in Bali that would require deeper capital injections with the uncertainty of return as well.

So then it seemed the answer is to try to get enough passive income so we can start life here without much risk. We knew from experience that our monthly living costs in Bali would be about 1,500 to 2000 dollars – if you wanna check that out in more detail go here. So $2000 became the target to hit. With that in mind, we committed to saving and building wealth in a variety of ways.

We’re no financial wizards, but we both have a conservative stocks portfolio – mine is mostly US growth stocks, some cryptocurrency – I personally find that very volatile so its only a very small fraction of my holdings, and finally, rental property. It came as a surprise to us ourselves, but within about 4 years we actually reached our goal for passive income. Maybe that’s not surprising to you, given how modest our goal was, but for me it was a total surprise! At the same time, the pandemic meant that our business in Vietnam had came to a halt, so there wasn’t anything holding us back anymore from acting on our dream and moving to Bali so… here we are! With all that said, if you were to take something away from our story, I hope it would be the following realizations about money and retirement.

First, if you want to do something similar, I think the most important thing is to first have a specific and realistic plan and understand the money you need to achieve that. Having a specific target gives you a number to work backwards from and this was absolutely crucial in us reaching this target within only a matter of years, as opposed to grinding away indefinitely, chasing an undefined point in the future. We’ve all have been so groomed by society to have this guilt complex about not working, we feel bad if we’re not constantly striving, but if you don’t set an actual reachable point, you might never move from the striving part to the part where you actually retire and enjoy life. Second is to understand that the power of each of your daily little actions and choices compounds to something amazing over time, and to use that in building your wealth to achieve your dreams.

So living a minimalist lifestyle comes pretty easily to me and Vitaly – we’ve built our lives around activities we love as opposed to accumulating things which we can’t carry around with us anyway whenever we travel.

We’re easily contented with great food and comfortable lodgings, even if it isn’t posh or luxurious. And we’re quiet introverted people, so we usually live away from cities, which also means we’re not constantly being bombarded with advertisements and temptations of “You only live once!” and “buy that so you can be happier”. I know it can be challenging, especially if you live in fast paced urban settings and you’re a big fan of social media. There’s always pressure to spend.

Temptation is always there to impress others with your success or …. keep up with the Joneses, or grab that takeout because you don’t have the time to cook your own meals. But the next time you’re reaching for an overpriced Starbucks latte, or more clothes you don’t need, or that branded watch to add to your collection, you might wanna pause to consider whether the instant gratification of those purchases is worth you delaying reaching your dream life by another couple of hours, or days, perhaps even years? This is the eternal struggle right? Constantly having to choose between instant gratification vs attaining FIRE – financial independence early retirement.

Third is to make good money by working smart for sufficient value. This whole model only really works if you are able to generate income sufficiently in excess of your expenditure so you can save and invest and accumulate and compound quickly enough. If your sole income stream is working a low hourly wage job its going to take a long time before you get anywhere. I personally believe that we all need to create multiple income streams in today’s world, if only to hedge against job loss. And whatever you choose to do, work hard but work smart too.

Make sure its something in demand by others, do it well, and get paid well for it. When we ran our business, we actually charged more money than our competitors, but we provided far better quality, and people were always happy to come to us. Instead of just being a yoga instructor teaching classes, I created a brand and registered a yoga business myself, which meant I could harness other instructors and canvass for big events and projects etc.

And bring in revenue on a bigger scale. You get the idea.

Fourth is to educate yourself on financial management. I never learnt about managing money and growing wealth whilst I was lawyering away, cos I was too busy and my fat paycheck every month made me think I don’t need to grow my wealth in other ways, cos heck, I make good money! But then that means once I quit my job, my only income stream, my salary, was lost and there was nothing else other than that.

Not great. We all need to know about money.

How to make it, how to manage it advantageously, how to grow it. Even if you love your job and want to work at it forever, there’s no telling one day you may lose it. So we all need to know this, and its shocking that they don’t teach this at school and you have to learn it yourself on your own initiative. Books are great as a starting point to learn about managing money and growing wealth. Financial news, world current affairs and stock market developments affect your investment portfolio so you must react accordingly, or at least it’ll just help you avoid scams out there.

There’s many amazing Youtube channels out there that discuss personal finances and investments which I myself keep up with and find really useful…. I’ll leave some of the books and Youtube channels on finance which I like down in the description below, if you’re interested to check them out.

Knowledge is power, in this case, the power to help you reach your dream of retirement faster. Five is that our story in particular couldn’t have been possible without the advantages of what they call geoarbitrage, or international arbitrage, the concept very clearly summarized in the following quote by Tim Ferriss’ – Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees.” This wasn’t an intentional part of our retirement plan but it certainly was a huge advantage in speeding up our journey to reach financial freedom.

But arbitrage is simply the concept of taking advantage of different prices in different markets – it doesn’t necessarily mean you must uproot your entire life to live overseas if you don’t want to. It could be as simple as simply changing neighborhood in the same city or moving from city to suburbs to lower rent & grocery costs, sometimes even local taxes.

I hope my story has given you some food for thought and hopefully some inspiration regarding your own personal hopes and dreams. All of us are so different, and we all have our own dreams and amazing life visions to pursue. I hope what I shared today can help you a little more in getting there.

And remember that, whichever chapter of your life story you’re in currently, don’t forget to enjoy the journey whilst you’re working your way towards your goals. Thank you so much for watching and for all your support. If you liked this video do subscribe to join our community and stay tuned for more of my thoughts on life in bali, early retirement and more. Speak to you next Saturday, bye!.