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In her late 20s, Aleese Lightyear worked in reality TV production and lived in New York City, which she thought was her dream.
“At the height of my career in New York, I was probably making $100,000 a year [and] working eight months out of the year, which on paper sounds great, but New York City is one of the world’s most expensive cities, so that $100,000 went extremely fast,” Lightyear tells CNBC Make It.
“I was spending all of my money going out and buying clothes so that I could be trendy and feel like I was living in the ‘Sex and the City’ New York City dream.”
As her 30th birthday approached, Lightyear realized she was still working 70 to 80 hours a week, but didn’t have any retirement savings. And because she was a freelancer, she didn’t have benefits or health insurance.
Aleese Lightyear left New York City and moved to Beijing in 2019.
Alesse Lightyear
“I should have been saving for those things. I was living check to check, which sucked. My last few years living and working in New York City were some of the most stressful years of my life,” she says.
“I came up with this idea that I wanted to leave New York because I was tired of working 70 hours a week for ten years. Being in my 20s, I felt like a 50-year-old woman.”
One day, Lightyear woke up and searched, “How do I make money and travel the world?” The first result was about teaching English. After speaking with a coworker who had taught in South Korea, Lightyear began researching what it would entail to teach overseas with no prior experience.
“I kind of put that on pause because I just wasn’t sure if that was right for me. It took me about two years to make the decision that I wanted to become a teacher,” she says. “Google told me I just needed a TEFL certificate to teach English to foreign language learners, so I enrolled.”
Lightyear completed a 13-week program to earn her Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certification, initially setting her sights on South America. She quickly changed course, however, deciding that if she was going to leave her life in New York behind, she would go as far as possible.
“If I’m going to move all the way across the world, I better go to the furthest country that I know absolutely nothing about and have a full adventure, and China just seemed like pure adventure, fun, excitement, and great money,” Lightyear says.
“I’m someone who has traveled a lot but I’d never been to Asia before, so I didn’t really know what to expect and to be honest, my first few days were just a huge blur because there was so much culture shock.”
Lightyear spent years working in reality TV production in New York.