Despite working “every hour under the sun” – Chris as a personal trainer and Tamira as a swimming teacher – they could not keep up with the cost of living in the UK.
“We went down to one car, we got rid of Sky TV, we didn’t go on holiday but the bills kept going up and up,” says Tamira.
“We only ate together as a family once a month because we didn’t get time. We were just working to make ends meet.”
It was during Covid that they first talked about selling up and travelling the world.
“We had a chance to breathe and we realised we didn’t want to go back to the life we were living,” Chris says.
The couple put their house up for sale in 2022 but it took longer to sell than they anticipated and they nearly backed out of the plan. When it finally sold in May 2023, they drove straight to Heathrow.
“Our last night in the house, we were all on the floor because we had sold all our furniture,” says Chris.
“We didn’t have the money to book our flights until we got the cash from the house, so we went to a hotel near Heathrow and booked flights to Kuala Lumpur [Malaysia].
“It was a huge risk. We thought it might not work and we might want to go home, but we’ve never looked back.”