Sometimes you don’t realise how busy your life has become until you finally stop.
For us, moving abroad wasn’t originally about chasing luxury, becoming digital nomads or escaping everything we knew. It started much earlier—with a feeling that the life we were living in the UK was no longer the life we wanted to continue building.
We were running businesses, raising our family and constantly moving from one responsibility to the next. In 2020, we were seriously considering moving to Tenerife. Then lockdown happened in 2021, and something changed.
We realised we had spent years building businesses, paying bills and keeping everything moving, but somewhere along the way, life had become exhausting.
We needed a reset.
Starting Again From Ground Zero
The decision to leave the UK wasn’t as simple as booking flights and starting over.
We had a family, possessions, businesses and a lifetime of things we had accumulated. Thailand was one option we considered, but the practical reality of moving our personal belongings halfway around the world felt overwhelming.
We eventually started looking closer to Europe and discovered Bulgaria.
People often ask us: “Why Bulgaria?”
The honest answer is that we didn’t initially choose Bulgaria because we thought it was going to be our forever destination.
We chose it because we needed somewhere where we could slow down, breathe and figure out what came next.
And that’s an important lesson if you’re considering moving abroad yourself.
You don’t necessarily need to know exactly where you’ll end up. You just need to know what you’re trying to change.
For us, that meant more freedom, less pressure and the opportunity to build something different as a family.
Finding Our Place
Finding our Bulgarian home wasn’t straightforward.
We searched, travelled, viewed properties and eventually found ourselves dealing with the realities of buying property abroad—including coming dangerously close to being scammed.
But eventually, we found our house.
And something unexpected happened.
For the first time in a long time, we felt settled.
Having our own place gave us the breathing room we needed to reset properly. We weren’t constantly trying to figure everything out at once.
We could start again from ground zero.
And then something happened that we probably should have expected.
We started thinking about business again.
You Can’t Always Leave Your Ambition Behind
We’ve been involved in business for most of our lives. From start-ups to established businesses and across different industries, building things is simply part of who we are.
So once we had settled into Bulgaria, we naturally started looking for our next opportunity.
The problem was that the particular industry we wanted to enter wasn’t really established in the way we needed it to be.
For almost two years, we explored possibilities, researched opportunities and tried to work out how we could legitimately build something new.
But sometimes a place can be perfect for one chapter of your life and not necessarily the next.
As our children got older, our priorities started changing too. Our son was becoming increasingly entrepreneurial himself and wanted the opportunity to explore his own ideas and ambitions.
That made us look beyond Bulgaria.
Looking Further Afield
That’s when Türkiye entered the conversation.
We began looking at what life could look like somewhere with different opportunities, a different business environment and a lifestyle that appealed to the whole family.
And this time, we weren’t simply asking:
“Where can we live?”
We were asking:
“Where can we build the life we actually want?”
That is a very different question.
If you’re thinking about moving abroad, our biggest piece of advice is to work backwards.
Don’t start with the country.
Start with the lifestyle.
Think about your family, income, education, business opportunities, cost of living, community, climate and the experiences you want your children to have.
Then look for the place that fits those priorities.
Our journey from the UK to Bulgaria—and now exploring what comes next in Türkiye—has taught us that moving abroad isn’t necessarily about finding a perfect destination.
It’s about creating the space to reset, reassess and rebuild.
Sometimes you have to get back to ground zero before you can decide where you really want to go next.