Hello all,
My boyfriend and I are in an awkward situation regarding our careers as we are both currently severely underemployed. We are wanting to move abroad to South America and, based on our credentials, will both be well qualified for a variety of top paying positions. In fact, I have multiple job offers standing and we have several other sources of income, some completely passive, in the works. We plan to stay with his family for the first several months while securing these positions, meaning that our living expenses will be almost nothing at the beginning, and have already priced apartments in our dream neighborhood that will be very affordable once we're working. Conservatively speaking, we are on par to make 5x-7x what a typical well-paid professional earns. This is all very exciting and we cannot wait to start this new chapter in our lives... HOWEVER...
We are currently dealing with about $35,000 in credit card debt and an $8,000 personal loan. We have a plan to pay $2000-3000 towards this debt monthly in order to get rid of it completely. If we were to move abroad now, we would probably be able to make those targets but due to the unfavorable exchange rate, nearly all of our income will go towards paying debts back home (80-90%). Although we expect our living expenses to be low, I am afraid that the pressure to earn so much and send it home will negatively affect us as we try to start up our businesses. Earning in pesos and paying debt off in dollars is not a good combination.
For now we made the difficult decision to stay in the US and work our butts off to pay these debts ASAP. My parents have a rental house they are allowing us to stay in for free, so our housing expenses are very low (about $350/month). Our overall living expenses are $1500/month and the minimum payments add up to $1000, so anything over that goes directly towards extra debt payoff.
The issue is that I am going to be extremely hard pressed to find a job in my field of expertise or that pays enough for me to meet our income goals. I was a teacher for the past 6 years but due to medical reasons I had to leave mid-year and now my provisional license has expired and I have been told that I will not be able to teach again in Ohio due to leaving mid-year. I have explored every other teaching opportunity in my city including tutoring companies and have actually been hired then immediately fired because I was overqualified. So outside of education, I am applying for jobs daily but they either don't pay enough for me to be able to meet our weekly take-home income goal of $500-600 each, or I get passed over because I don't have enough experience for 'entry-level' jobs in other industries. From my boyfriend's side, although very well qualified in many low-paying sectors, it took him nearly a year to get his last stable job (it was only an 8-month contract). The rest of the time he works as a waiter and has very irregular income. Additionally, although he agreed to stay and pay the debt off, he is really un-enthused to job hunt as he (we) are both sick of living here and want to move now. His sister is several physically disabled, unable to communicate, and has been having some health problems recently, so he is experiencing a lot of depression from being away from her. It is so frustrating to feel obligated to stay here longer, especially with these job search difficulties, while both wanting to be closer to his family and having many work/income opportunities there.
In the end, the purpose of this post is the following: we going to stick with applying to as many jobs as we can for now, but how long should we wait to find well paying jobs here rather than taking the risk and moving abroad where we have many sources of projected income? Our living expenses here are much higher in general so although we can make more money here it also costs us more. We have until the end of October to live off our emergency fund then we are completely out of money. It will be a stroke of luck for both of us to find well-paying positions here within that time frame (or else working 60+ hours a week at lower-paying ones which we can't really do since we have pets at home to care for).
Sorry for the extremely long post but I do not have anyone un-biased to discuss this with in person and I value everyone's Mustachian perspective. If you have read this far I am curious to know how you would handle this situation???
