In 2019, just after her 30th birthday, Aleese Lightyear left a career in reality TV production behind to teach English as a second language in China.

At the time, Lightyear was earning around $100,000 a year, working eight months out of the year.

“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,” Lightyear tells CNBC Make It. “I was tired of working 70 hours a week for ten years. Being in my 20s, I felt like a 50-year-old woman.”

It was a quick Google search that helped Lightyear decide to leave life as she knew it in New York City, for something very different.

She searched “How do I make money and travel the world?” and the result at the very top of the list was all about teaching English abroad. She then spoke with a coworker who had taught in South Korea, and started learning as much as she could about what it would take to teach overseas with no experience.

For the rest of that year, she took on various odd jobs to supplement her income. As a freelancer, Lightyear had no retirement savings, benefits, or health insurance.

“On paper [it] sounds great, but New York City is one of the world’s most expensive cities, so that $100,000 went extremely fast,” Lightyear says. “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.”

After completing a 13-week program to get a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certification, Lightyear moved to Beijing.

She lived in the Chinese capital for four years, working as a teacher, before relocating to Chengdu in 2023, where she currently teaches English essay writing at a university. Lightyear works 18 hours a week, four days a week and has a yearly salary of about $30,000 USD.

″$30,000 a year is poverty in America but in China, I’m living large,” she says.

Some of the benefits and perks of Lightyear’s job include free health insurance, a travel stipend, a flight allowance, two months of paid summer and winter vacation, and a rent stipend.

Lightyear took a pay cut when she left her teaching job in Beijing, but doesn’t regret it because life in the Chinese capital started to feel too similar to her time in New York City.

“I didn’t move all the way across the world to work as much as I did in New York,” she says. “My current work-life balance is a dream. I’m able to have time to do so many different hobbies, to take the time to actually learn the language and to do whatever I want when I want, and that feels amazing. I just feel so lucky and happy to be able to have so much time to myself.”

In Chengdu, Lightyear lives in a pre-furnished three-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a balcony and laundry room. Because of the rent stipend , Lightyear pays only $278 for her accommodations.

She also spends about $15 a month for her Internet, cell phone and Wi-Fi, $75 a month on groceries, $50 a month on electricity and $150 a month on eating out — roughly $568 a month in expenses. That doesn’t include her water and gas bill, which Lightyear says she still hasn’t had to pay for because her landlord prepaid for those utilities before she moved into the apartment.

Lightyear also works as a content creator and has an active YouTube channel. That supplemental income allows her to save up to $1,000 a month.

“I haven’t saved enough money to buy a house in the U.S. but I have saved enough money to pay off a lot of my student loans and I think I’ve saved enough money to buy a little casita on the beach in Mexico,” she says. “Fingers crossed that is the plan.”

Lightyear recently renewed her lease and plans to stay in Chengdu for at least another year or so. After that, the 35-year-old American plans to return home to Michigan, where she will decide where to settle next.

While Lightyear knows she’s ready to leave China, she doesn’t know if there is another country she could move to that will give her the same thrill.

“I just think China is the hardest country to live and travel in as a non-Chinese person, so I know that anything other than this will be so much easier, but I fear that I might find that boring,” she says. “In China, I can challenge myself every day and I know that in another country, after a while, those challenges leave.”

Conversions from Chinese Yuan to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 Chinese Yuan to 0.14 USD on July 3, 2025. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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