Around half a million people left the UK to live abroad last year, and it’s not just retirees. A survey by the British Council has found that 72 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds would consider living and working overseas – with cold weather, the high cost of living, extortionate childcare costs, a lack of work-life balance and even poor romantic prospects among their motivations for leaving. The i Paper’s Expat Files follows Brits who have taken the leap and settled elsewhere, detailing the ups and downs of their journeys.
Roxie Broun, 42, moved to Kuta, Lombok – an island in eastern Indonesia – with her husband, Doug, 36, and their two children, aged eight and 10, in March 2025. Roxie tells Hannah Bentley about giving up her career, navigating the uncertainty of renting abroad, and embracing a slower pace of life in the sunshine.
We almost moved to Cornwall. After the pandemic, we realised there was more to life than Seaford, the small town near Brighton where we’d been living, so we put our house on the market and even paid a deposit on a new-build there. But finding a buyer took longer than expected. By the time we found one, our mortgage offer on the Cornwall house had expired, and the new rates were so high that moving there no longer made financial sense. But we still had a buyer for our house, so we thought: why not go abroad and travel for a while before deciding what to do next?
