30 Aug The Number We Didn’t Tell Anyone
This post is part of The Second Leap: a series about choosing uncertainty on purpose, twice. In 2015 we quit our jobs in advertising and built a life that didn’t look like many others’. Now, nearly 12 years later, we’re doing it again – bigger leap, more at stake, a 3-year-old in tow. You can start from the beginning here or keep reading below.
Before we get into it, I have a fun fact: most people who want to quit their jobs never do. Not because they’re not brave enough, because they never actually do the maths. They keep the dream at a safe, fuzzy distance where it can stay perfect and unthreatening. The moment you put actual numbers on it, it becomes real…and real things can fail.
So here’s ours. The actual version.
When Stevo and I quit in 2015, we had around R140,000 in savings between us. In South Africa at the time, that was roughly six months of living costs, which felt like forever when we handed in our resignations (and felt like about 3 weeks once we were actually living on it).
Our plan, to the extent that we had one, was this: volunteer work in exchange for food and accommodation. As long as we could afford the flight to wherever we were going next, we could make it work. We told ourselves we could do without leisure drinks, floss, and other “modern luxuries”. As long as we were getting fed (sharing a single bed in the Arctic Circle with seventy howling huskies nearby) with our desire to create when we felt inspired…well…that would be enough.
We also told ourselves “we can always go back to our jobs.” We didn’t plan to, but it was there, always in our back pocket if we needed it.
What we did not do was anything particularly clever with that money. No separate accounts, no minimum income thresholds, no financial strategy of any kind, honestly. We had one account, a dwindling number, and an agreement not to look at it too often.
Those first months were a specific kind of financial anxiety that neither of us has ever fully described out loud. Checking the balance before buying groceries. Saying no to things (like floss, genuinely) because the number going down felt like a countdown. We didn’t tell our families how tight it actually was (we didn’t want to give anyone ammunition).
What saved us wasn’t a clever plan. It was luck, timing, and the internet.
9 months in, our Instagram and blog had quietly grown into something people were paying attention to. A client in LA found us and offered US$2,000 a month to shoot videos for them on our travels. It was the first money we’d seen come in since we’d left, and it changed everything – not just financially, but psychologically. We’d originally planned one year. That one client made us believe we could keep going.
I’m not going to pretend that’s a strategy you can replicate. It’s not. We got lucky with timing, early enough on Instagram that organic growth was still possible, with the right content at the right moment.
But here’s what I think the actual lesson is, underneath the luck: we left with just enough money to survive long enough for something to find us. The R140,000 wasn’t a financial plan. It was a window; enough time to be in motion, creating, visible, before we had to make a decision we didn’t want to make.
If you’re thinking about your own version of this, I’d ask: how long a window can you create? Not how much money do you need to succeed…how much do you need to stay in the game long enough for something to happen?
That’s a very different, and much more answerable, question.
This time around (the Australia leap) the numbers are more complicated. We have a studio with real clients and real revenue, we have Elodie (which adds a weight of responsibility that 2015-us genuinely couldn’t have imagined), we have a visa with a timeline we don’t entirely control, and we’re moving to one of the most expensive countries in the world.
We’re doing the maths again, from scratch. It’s uncomfortable in exactly the same way.
But at least this time we know the discomfort is temporary and the numbers are solvable. That took us about 2 years to learn the first time.
See you soon with the next post,
Chanel (and Stevo & Elodie)
If you haven’t already, read Part 1 in the series: We’ve done this before. It doesn’t get less terrifying.
And if you’re new here, you can read more about how How Far From Home started here, or follow along on Instagram @howfarfromhome where we’re sharing the second leap in real time.
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