When is the right time to make a life-changing decision? Ben and Claire share the financial and emotional journey that helped them realise waiting wasn’t making them more ready.

Why We Stopped Waiting

For two years, the idea sat on the table between us. One of us was ready from the very beginning, ready, honestly, at the drop of a hat. The other needed something more solid than enthusiasm before she could say yes.

That’s not a criticism. It’s the shape most families’ decisions actually take. Someone imagines first. Someone else has to be convinced not by the dream, but by the plan underneath it.

For a long time, our working assumption was that we’d wait. Wait until the children were a little older. Wait until we felt more financially stable. It seemed like the responsible thing to believe, that “later” was automatically safer than “now.” We never really tested that assumption. We just carried it.

The Financial Decision Behind Our Move

Then, at the beginning of this year, we sat down and actually looked at the numbers. And the numbers told us something different to what we’d assumed. Waiting wasn’t making us more ready. It was just delaying a decision we’d already, quietly, made.

For Claire, the shift wasn’t only emotional, it was financial too. She wasn’t looking for a leap of faith. She was looking for a floor she could stand on. What she needed was a starting pot of money we’d both feel comfortable walking away with, and a way of knowing that money wouldn’t simply run out while we were gone. We settled on £60,000 as that starting figure. Alongside it, we had, and still have, recurring income arriving daily, weekly and monthly through businesses Ben runs online, income that keeps coming in regardless of which country we’re standing in.

But the number was never the whole story for Claire. There was a separate, quieter boundary she had to work through, the prospect of leaving her family, and in particular her parents, who are heavily involved in our children’s lives back home. They see the children constantly. They help with childcare. Stepping away from that wasn’t a financial calculation; it was something closer to grief, worked through in advance. What eventually sat alongside the practical readiness was a simple, hard-won realisation of her own: that life is too short not to do this. The money made it possible. That second, quieter shift made it feel right.

Once those two things existed together, a real lump sum, and a real income that didn’t depend on either of us clocking in somewhere, the decision stopped being a hypothetical. It became a plan with a date on it.

How We Planned A Family Move Abroad

That’s the part we think gets missed in a lot of stories like ours. It wasn’t a single dramatic conversation, a “screw it, let’s go” moment. It was slower and quieter than that: a shared spreadsheet, a number that felt safe, a source of income that didn’t require either of us to be standing still to earn it. The romantic version of this story would have a single turning point. The honest version has an accountant’s version instead, and that’s actually the more useful story to tell.

Taking A Career Break From The NHS

Once we’d agreed we’re doing this, the next question wasn’t “should we?”, it was “how, practically, does this actually work for our jobs?” Claire has spent ten years as a Band 7 occupational therapist within the NHS, in a role she was good at and was well paid for. That kind of stability doesn’t get walked away from lightly, and it shouldn’t. So rather than resigning, she asked her management team about a career break, something the NHS allows for up to five years, at a manager’s discretion. She raised it in an informal conversation first, almost testing the water, and was genuinely surprised when they said yes there and then. The formal part came after: an online form, submitted through her managers, approved, and passed on to finance so her pay could be stopped from an agreed date. She was also required, as a condition of being granted the break, to interview for and train up someone to cover her role before she left. She then gave three months’ notice, and we set a departure date for the beginning of June.

For Ben, the shift looked different. He’s self-employed, and his work travels with him, it doesn’t depend on a desk, a rota, or anyone’s permission. That asymmetry between us, one career paused with a guaranteed door back open, one career that simply came along in a suitcase, became a quiet undercurrent to everything that followed. It’s something we’ll come back to, because it shapes how differently the two of us experience this whole journey.

How We Knew We Were Ready To Leave The UK

If there’s a universal question underneath our particular version of this story, it’s probably this: how do you actually know when you’re ready?

Our answer, in the end, wasn’t a feeling. It was a number, a policy, a form, and a date. Readiness, for us, wasn’t a leap. It was a series of decisions we could each actually stand behind, one of us needing the practical floor built first, the other needing the practical floor to exist before she could finally exhale.

What else is possible, once you stop assuming “later” is automatically safer than “now”?

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What assumptions have you never actually tested?
• What number would make you feel financially ready?
• Which practical step could you take this month?
• Are you waiting because you’re genuinely not ready, or because you’ve never checked?

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Related reading: The Real Numbers: What It Actually Cost Us to Leave the UK · Can You Take a Career Break From the NHS to Travel With Your Family? · The Cost of Different: What We Actually Gave Up