About Me…

Chief planner, spreadsheet enthusiast, and the reason my family has a passport.

Let Me Tell You How This Works in Our House

My husband's idea of trip planning is binge watching YouTube videos about far off places and loudly announcing that he wants to go there. My idea of trip planning is actually making it happen. I do the research, build the budget, figure out the schools, sort the logistics, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I convince everyone it is a great idea. He shows up, has the time of his life, and takes full credit at dinner parties. It is a beautiful system.

I have been the one behind the curtain on every adventure we have ever taken. Back in university, we took our eldest daughter abroad for the first time. I planned that too. Then we came home, did the responsible thing for a long time, teaching jobs, a house, kids, the whole picture, and the wanderlust got quietly filed away under someday.

Then life did what life sometimes does. It reminded us, in a way we could not ignore, that someday is not actually a plan. So I started planning for real.

Three Years of Planning. A Credit Card. And Absolute Faith.

We spent three years building toward Costa Rica. My husband paid into a leave program through his job. I worked online. We sorted health insurance, which felt especially important given that we were leaving during a global pandemic in July 2021 when half the world was still figuring out if travel was even a thing anymore. People thought we were a little bit unhinged. We thought we were right on time.

We showed up in Costa Rica with 24 hours booked in a hotel, a rental car, and a sort of idea of where we wanted to live. My philosophy was simple: as long as I had a credit card, what could go wrong?

As it turned out, almost nothing went according to the original plan. The place we thought we would live changed. School looked completely different than we imagined. We figured it out as we went, homeschooling at first because of Covid, and then local options fell into place in ways we never could have arranged from home. The plan got us there. What happened next was even better.

That full year, with our daughters aged five and ten, including extended stays in Nicaragua and El Salvador, became the best thing we have ever done for our family. Not because it was perfect. Because it was real.

We Are Genuinely Just Like You

We are teachers. We have real jobs, a real mortgage, and real kids who have opinions about everything. We are not trust fund travelers or location independent entrepreneurs living on a beach. We are a regular family who decided this mattered enough to figure out, and then figured it out. Twice. And this July, we are off to France for a year, because apparently once you start, it is very hard to stop.

I built The Pivot Life because every time I told our story, someone leaned in and said I want to do that but I have no idea how. And I realized that the thing I had been doing naturally for years, researching, strategizing, building the framework and then trusting the rest, was actually something people needed help with.

So here I am. Not a visa expert, not an immigration lawyer, not a travel agent. Just the woman who has planned multiple international adventures for a real family with real constraints, watched almost none of it go exactly to plan, and had the absolute time of her life anyway.

What I Actually Do

I help families like yours get out of the research spiral and into an actual plan. I help you figure out what matters most, what to tackle first, who to talk to, and how to think through the big decisions so that the whole thing starts to feel possible instead of overwhelming.

You do not need to have it all figured out. You just need a solid enough foundation to take the next step. I am very good at helping you find that.

You have already made the boldest decision.

Let's figure out the rest together.

pivotlifestudios.com