The summer holidays have been a mixed blessing for expat teachers the last two years. The summers are (as so many in corporate jobs have long suspected) a huge perk for teachers. It really is as great as you think it is! Getting paid a substantial amount of money to spend the summer doing very little is great. Traveling is a genuine option, especially if you live in a place well connected to others. However, travel has obviously not been an option for the past two years. This is exacerbated by long quarantine periods in the place you’re traveling to and on your return.

This is where teaching differs from some other forms of work in that its recruitment is very seasonal. Let’s say you need to jump on a plane for an emergency and your school decides to terminate your contract. You may be waiting at least 6 months for recruitment season to roll around to be able to pick up work (and even then potentially not start work for several months after that). This is obviously an untenable predicament to be in if you are dependent on your salary as your only income.

Watching the fluidity of the quarantine rules mess with my colleagues the last month or so has been the strongest affirmation of JL Collin’s F-U Money concept I have yet experienced. Some have not seen their families in two years and are very emotional about it. That said, school policies in several organisations have had to be pretty clear – if you travel in the knowledge that you will not get back in time to start the new year you are potentially risking your employment. Certainly this was the case a while back where several teachers from schools in Asia found themselves unable to return when flights were cancelled.

While I have some sympathy with my colleagues (I’m not an arse!), I found it interesting how many told each other they would just quit if they couldn’t get their week or two with family. I admire the sentiment… but saw through it. None of them can really walk away from the remuneration that international school teaching offers. They certainly do not have the cash to support themselves for 6 months to a year.

Andrew Hallam’s writing on “expatitis” rings true for me. Turning up in a new country can be disorientating and a large pay check can very rapidly distort your perspective regarding lifestyle. Shortbread and I watched in genuine amazement just how far our peers lifestyles inflated over the years. Phrases like “I deserve it” became lexical norms. Saving is often something people do literally because they can’t spend all the cash they are earning (although many have no real difficulty in this regard). The number of people who proclaimed they deserved staycations was ludicrous to us – paying rent on two places in the same city for the same night?? This has come crashing down for many who have no long term financial plan due to the pandemic.

It hit me that breaking free of financial dependence on a salary is so much more than not having to work. It’s about genuine freedom. The golden handcuffs of international school teaching are very real. Watching people get so upset over not being able to return home for fear of losing the salary is humbling. What could be achieved if they had F-U Money? It certainly makes me double down on my belief that conscious living and FIRE are the most important things to achieve for us.

For us it boils down to a simple choice: make efforts and occasional sacrifices now and over the next few years to be able to break free of salary dependency for the rest of our lives… or be gilded slaves working until we’re either not allowed to work anymore (we have colleagues who have run into this issue) or we die. It’s obvious to us which is the better option.