 Welcome back to the channel. Today is story day. We are going to just dive right into my story because I feel like in 2024 we're starting out. This is one of the first videos and like so many people are new. I have been doing this channel for about four years now and like let's just share my story. Like how did I get here? You know, what's kind of my background? I just felt like telling the story today. So here we go. If you don't know us, we are a family of six that have moved from the US to New Zealand and have been here for almost nine years now. Today I just thought I'd share a little story. Where did I come from? How did we end up doing this? You know, what do I do for a living? All those kinds of things. So let's just dive right in. I was born in Albany, New York, but I mainly grew up in Wisconsin and so I live there for most of my childhood and then I eventually went to university and I studied marketing and I got my master's in communication and I've been teaching at the university level since then really. I love that. I also started having kids. I've had four kids, two girls and two boys. I had them all in the US and then eventually we had, we're big travelers at doing things. We love the outdoors. We love the backpacking, but we one day was like, well, we're gonna travel around the whole United States and then we decided, you know, we've kind of seen everything. I mean, we haven't been every single spot, but like most of it and we're like, why don't we think about international? So this was 2013 and we looked at moving overseas and New Zealand, just so you know, is not an easy country to get into and in fact with an American passport and it may be different if you're from different countries. I'm not sure, but I can just share my experience and yeah. So we came in 2013. Our intention was two years. We wanted to give our kids an international experience. We wanted to have an international experience and we just wanted to see how other people do things. What do you do and how do you do it? Honestly, you guys, I didn't expect to love it so much. Loved it here. It's just amazing. But things happened and really to my, I really didn't want to, but we moved back to the US after two years because that was the plan. My husband's father had passed and there's just, we hadn't been home and so we went back. We reintegrated into society in the US and to be honest, I struggled. I struggled a lot actually. It's hard when you've gone somewhere and it just, it feels like you and you feel like you thrive there and then, you know, you go back to me. It felt like a step backwards. It wasn't and there's really great things about the US. I'm not like trying to put it down, but like for me, maybe it wasn't the best and plus it's freezing half of the year there. So that's not great. So anyway, we moved back and then we ended up coming back two years later because we're crazy and my husband got kind of this amazing job offer and situation kind of arose and we just really felt led to go there to come back here. And that time actually was much harder because we had already integrated back. We had done the move back and forth. Didn't want to do the moving again. We actually struggled quite a bit to move back because we had some teenage at the time and just we're feeling nervous about that and just so many things. Our mentality was quite different because when we moved back we were coming permanently, right? And so with the, well, at least, you know, for at least as long as it made sense and just a much more long term without, you know, any end date and we just were like, you know, it's just different when you're trying to actually set up community and schools and everything was a lot different than just coming for kind of a two year long holiday. Yeah. So that's kind of our story about how it's so now we've been in New Zealand for we're going on seven years and we are applied for citizenship and yeah. So it's good. Learned a lot. Learned a lot more about the country, obviously. Being here a lot longer, understanding the culture a lot better, having the function here and thrive here. So if you guys are considering a move to New Zealand, seriously, message me, go onto my website kiwiamericans.com. I'll have some links in the description, but I'm here to help you. I've been helping people for three years now move here from mainly the US, but it's not limited to the US and I have kind of a whole process in place. I have a free 50 minute course. Take that. So that's just like where you start like, so you know where to start everything you need to know and just kind of put it all out there for you guys. So check that out if you're planning on doing that. So that's kind of my story about coming to New Zealand. I have a lot I could share with you about that. And that's what this really, this whole channel is about, where I kind of share our journey and learnings that we have coming here. So if you have any questions or want to know more, let me know. Okay, so the second part of this video, I just want to kind of dive in more on a personal side and kind of, you know, who I am and kind of my personal growth over the last couple of years. Okay, let's dive into my story. But before we do that, I forgot to put on here. This is I always forget these things. So I have an American cookbook. So I've taken the best American recipes and adapted them to New Zealand Australian ingredients. So if you have an American friend here, you're an American coming here or art here. This book is for you. Link is in the description. I also just want to highlight one more thing because I'm just so excited about it. And I love you guys. And I'm hoping to give you guys an exclusive on this, but I hope you like it. It's very exclusive. It's my husband created a game. It's called adventure trek and is coming out next month. And yeah, we've got a lot of interest from distributors here in New Zealand and the US. And it's really cool. So if you're interested in this, I'm not going to talk more about that. Let me know. It's adventure trek life.com. If you want to check it out and get more details on the game, but I'm just excited about it. I just want to support my husband and his new creation. So so that's fun. But let's talk a little bit about me. I'm in my forties and like I said, I've had a marketing degree and then communication and teaching and I love teaching. Like there's nothing more rewarding than teaching. People go into it not for the money, right? Because it's not good money, especially in the US. Oh my gosh, you guys, I got paid so much more in New Zealand. It's not even funny. Okay. So yeah, so I've had four kids. I have two that have left home and my youngest is 12 and I have a 15 year old. And so, yeah, I'm about to enter like complete teenage world. So that's fun. You know, you know, when you have four kids, it's pretty full on. So I've always worked, but I've worked part time teaching. When I came to New Zealand, New Zealand, they don't have a lot of people here. And so your skills, what, if you're very average, say in your home country, you're probably above average here because they don't have a lot of people with certain skills anyway. And so you're able, I mean, I was able to do a lot of jobs. I don't think I'd be able to do in the US and I enjoy that. So I've been teaching and writing courses for tertiary institutes here in New Zealand. And I enjoy that. I currently run a digital marketing company, which I also enjoy. And that's interesting because I was at marketing. So like learning marketing in the 90 late 90s, early 2000s, nothing applies anymore. Like some of the principles, maybe, but like, I had to relearn. So I started my like digital business in 2015. So when I moved back to the US, so we came to New Zealand, I had a great time. I homeschooled some of my kids. I was just, you know, in the culture I taught here, I just wanted to just suck it all in with the two years that I was coming. And then when I went home, I was like, all my kids were finally in school for the first time. And now I'm ready to do something different. And I decided digital is the future. And so I wrote a goal for myself. And my goal was very vague. It was to be successful online. And the reason why I chose that goal was because I knew there was so much I didn't know, and that I needed to be able to pivot. And for me to say, I'm going to have be a successful, you know, creator, I'm going to be a successful affiliate marketer like I didn't want to limit myself. So I just had online success. And so since then I started an Amazon.com business and I'm still running seven years later. And it's probably my most profitable business, which makes sense because it's been running the longest. I've had lots of small businesses. So if you don't know, I've run a home improvement company for three years. I had a first short run of a skincare line, an organic skincare line before I moved back here in 2008, 17, 18. I have obviously YouTube channel and influencer. I'm like, I'm on the whole creator world. I've been creating for almost five years now. And I just do a lot. Like I just do a lot of different things. I'm always into it and I love it. And so it's interesting because I learned marketing, but I had to relearn everything in 2015 because now it's digital. Like everything is different. I have to tell you guys, like I get really frustrated when I'm trying to write, help these universities write digital courses. You know, you're welcome for the ones that I'm trying to write because you need to have people that are digital creators or understand the digital economy of writing these courses because you can't base it on old marketing principles. And so that's, you know, that's what I've been trying to do. I, you know, we get lots of arguments, but that's a different story. Look, how about if we all agree to disagree? So I, you know, I'm thinking what is 2024 look for me? I have so many ideas, you guys. I love New Zealand. We'll continue to talk about that. I have partnered with a immigration company and we're kind of working out those details. So I will get back to you on that. It's going to be good. And I'm here for you. Like you could meet with me. I highly recommend just joining my membership. It's only $39 a month. And the membership is there because moving to New Zealand isn't just like take this course and you know how to do it in the membership. It has all the trainings. It has access to me. It has other people that are moving. It's kind of like all the support that you need and everything you need to know in one place at a very reasonable price. So that's there. If you're moving here, I am here for that because I really believe that you as a person do nothing but grow exponentially when you move abroad. I think that you should all move abroad. It doesn't have to be New Zealand. Go to Australia, go to Europe, go to South America, wherever you want to go. Like do it because the amount of personal growth you will have is second to none. When you become aware, you guys, I mean seriously, like I'm in my 40s, you know, I'm not like perfect and amazing at these videos, but I've had a lot of success. And it's so easy and it costs nothing. I mean, I shouldn't use the word easy. I wouldn't say it's easy. It's easy in the sense of like the actual physical work that you have to do, but it takes time. You have to have patience. That's the hardest part, the patience and the consistency. So if you guys are not in the digital economy, you need to be doing a video on that as well, but like it's so great because like I live in New Zealand and I couldn't move to Europe. I could move to South America. I could move to the States. I could move wherever, but my job wouldn't change and my life wouldn't change. And so it's an amazing feeling where you can set up your own life and do that. So I quit my job. So I was working full-time at a tertiary institute here in New Zealand and I quit 2022, 2022 early on. And so it hasn't been that long and I've been running my businesses on its own and they're doing pretty well. You know, it's interesting because business, you know, it's never exactly where you want it to be and you have all these goals and don't listen to the people out there. Don't listen like in three months, you can make 10k a month. Don't know. No. Those people are doing that because they've been building and they've built businesses and failed, created something and failed. All their learning has now added up to them being successful at 10,000 a month. Okay, so it's not that easy. So don't fall for that. But like I think we need to adjust our expectation. Like it's amazing out there that the digital economy allows you to make enough, right? Like what do you really need? Like figure out like what really is about... So this is what I did this year. Like I was frustrated that I wasn't as far as I wanted to be. And I was like, you know what? Maybe I just need to be thankful for where I'm at. Like I make good money for really the time and effort that I put in. I don't even put that much time in it. I have good processes in place and I love it. Like when I go and I do contract work because I do contract work as well. And I do that and it's like, you know, it really feels like work. Whereas in the digital economy, you can create whatever job you want to do around whatever interest you want to do. And it's like out there. You just have to put the time in and you got to put the effort in and you have to actually have to learn it. And let me tell you that does nothing but help you. And now we have AI and it's amazing. So anyway, so that's my story. So I really didn't know that I was entrepreneurship until we started our home improvement company in 2004. And I was just helping them out. Like I was just going to be like, you know, doing admin and just doing some marketing for them. But then it just turned into like, I love this. And that's how I don't like, let me tell you guys, I would never have started a YouTube channel. Like I don't even watch YouTube. And I certainly don't want to edit videos. Shout out to Ethan who edits my videos because I hate it. And he's the best if you're looking for somebody. You just have to put the process in place. You got to try things. I only did it because people were begging me to do it. And my community was begging me. And so I did it and I tried it and it's the best, best ever. So, so get out there, try new things in 2024. I hope that story gives you some insight as to who I am and how I got here. And, you know, if you're interested in this kind of content. So in 2024, I'm gonna be talking about New Zealand. I'm going to be talking about the digital economy. I'm going to be talking about anything and everything that's associated with me traveling. I do lots of traveling. Last year, I spent three weeks in Europe. You know what? I haven't even done a video on that. You know what guys? I'm just going to be really, really honest. I traveled in Europe in three weeks in June and I haven't even looked at the pictures. My life is so busy. It's so fast. And it's so great. It's summer here in New Zealand. So I'm going to get out here and enjoy the day. Please comment below if you want one of these or want something about this or just want to need help moving here. I'm here for you or just questions you have or things you'd like to see on this channel this year. I'm here for it. See ya.