I didn't realize how unhappy I was and how much that manifested itself in my body.
In traveling, I saw how other countries and societies treated work; how in
America we are so focused on what you do and how that defines who you
are. It's hard to describe how much happier I am now.
Now, I intentionally build a life that I love.
I'm Roshida and I'm 42.
I retired to Mexico City from the United States.
Before I retired. I was a consumer auto finance lawyer.
My last salary was about $200,000 a year.
I grew up middle class with parents who didn't talk to me a lot about money.
Being good at saving money came from years of being reckless with money.
Before I went to law school in that time.
I was really checked to check after college was the first time where I really understood how expensive it
is to be an adult.
I was working as a receptionist and I realized I couldn't afford myself, so
I knew I needed to do something else to be able to live the life I wanted to live.
And that thing was law school.
I went to law school at the University of Virginia.
By the time I left law school, I had about two hundred thousand dollars worth of
student loan debt between undergrad and law school.
I was talking to a friend who invested in real estate, and I realized
that I could pick up houses pretty cheaply in Ohio.
I purchased my investment property for seventeen thousand and sold it for around seventy five and my own
home I purchased for eighty four and sold for around one twenty five.
I got to tell you, I hated, hated, hated flipping houses.
And that's when I learned that what might work really well for another person from a financial perspective
isn't going to work for everybody.
The investing strategy that's worked best for me has simply been investing in mutual funds.
So I'm very much in the stock market, hands off, give it to a brokerage firm, invest it in one
of their mutual funds, set it and forget it.
So after I was laid off in two thousand nine, it really hit me how much debt kind of controlled
me in that, like, I had to go to work, I had to find a job because I had to pay off this debt.
And so when I got another job, my main focus with my money became paying
off my debt. What I did was I really stayed focused.
I paid one thing at a time, stayed focused on it, and I didn't get distracted by shiny things.
As I earned more money, I just put it all towards my debt.
I lived what you might describe as a FIRE lifestyle without actually knowing that FIRE
existed. Once I got in the habit of squirreling money away towards my debt and like pushing it
aside, then I just got in the habit of like pushing that same amount of money aside every month.
And as it grew, as my income grew, I just pushed a larger amount of money to the side.
So at first it was to my debts and then it was towards...
When there was no debt left, it went to my investments.
Without the layoff, I would still be there, and even with the layoff, I was second guessing my
decision to go travel.
I don't think I would have gone to take a career break if I didn't have the therapist I did.
She was like, if you don't go now, you're never going to go.
I traveled to 44 cities and I think twenty three countries in my
one year of my career break.
But in that time I came to Mexico City, I think three times in that year.
It was the only city that I repeated, and I just really loved how I felt when I was here.
I love the energy of the city.
My plan after my career break was to go right back and find a job.
I'd be in a better mood and I'd go back to a different job and things would be fine.
But traveling and seeing that the way we work ourselves to death in America is not common around the
world made me realize that I could have a different life if I made the choice to have a different life.
I always say that I accidentally retired.
I paid off all my debt, I saved money and then when I realized I didn't want to work again, I did the math.
I looked at my investments and I had about half a million dollars saved and invested,
and I knew I was going to get another hundred and fifty
thousand in stocks from a company I used to work for.
I knew I had about six hundred and sixty thousand because I knew
I didn't want to go back to work.
That was enough. It was enough for me to live comfortably in Mexico City or another country for a
while.
If I was in the U.S., would I have decided that was enough.
Probably not.
America doesn't really tell us when enough is enough.
People who want to retire, they have to, on their own, decide how much money they
need in order to retire, where you want to retire, what your lifestyle is going to be, what your expenses
are. But that's all part of doing the math that I described earlier.
In a typical month, I spend about twenty three hundred dollars to live in Mexico City.
While the cost of living in Mexico is cheaper than the U.S., the cost of living in Mexico City is higher than
a lot of Mexico. So it's-- it's a cheaper city to live in, but it's not necessarily a cheap city to live in.
One of the things I love to do in Mexico City is exploring the neighborhoods.
They're usually really great places to hang out with my friends and to see kind of like, look in on what the
neighborhood is doing.
And I have a couple of favorite dessert places in town, including some gelato shops that I
love. This is good, Joe!
I do have a temporary visa.
I have a visa for one year as a residency visa.
I came down initially on a tourist visa and I rented my apartment, was on a tourist visa and I did
everything was on a tourist visa.
But I knew I wanted to stay here, and I didn't want to keep making trips back to the states to stay here.
So I got my temporary residence visa and I will renew it.
And then in four years, I can get my permanent visa.
Welcome back, my name's Roshida, and you're here watching, Shida's on the Loose.
Today, we're talking about life in Mexico City and all the things I love about it.
Strangers, mostly women, were reaching out to me and saying, Oh, like you took a career break.
I want to do that, too. Can you tell me more about it?
I was helping everyone who came along, and eventually I realized that this could
be a business. And so I became a career break coach.
I help women who want to take career breaks, leave jobs that don't deserve them behind and go travel the
world or move abroad and just do what makes them happy.
So I'm helping other women and specifically black women realize goals that they didn't even know they
had. A lot of times I hear from women who were like, "I've always wanted to live abroad, but I didn't think
it was possible." And so a lot of my time is spent showing people the possibilities
and talking to them about what their life could look like if they made the leap too.
The income, but I'm getting from this, prevents me from having to withdraw anything from my investments, so I
very rarely touch my investments, so they're continuing to grow.
A lot of people think that retirement means you're not working at all, and if you are working, you're not
really retired. I consider myself retired because I only do work I love, and I only do it
when I want to. I don't work more than four days a week.
I take weeks off at a time.
I've taken months off and I will again and I just do the work I want to do when I want to do it.
I was the best version of myself when I traveled in that I was open, I was not
stressed, I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to do.
The only person who can make demands on me was myself.
When I had the opportunity to rebuild my life from scratch, making every decision I wanted to make,
I made the decisions that made me happy and I can't imagine from now into the future
ever making decisions that that don't bring you this joy.
I'm very open to what's next.
So it's Mexico for me right now.
I can see myself in other places for months at a time.
I don't know that Mexico is it forever.
I'm open to whatever comes my way, but for right now it's definitely Mexico City.