Charlie and Jade have spent the past 11 months steering three children through nine countries, sleeping almost exclusively in five-star hotels, villas and beachfront bungalows.
Neither of them has done a day’s work since they left.
The couple, both 36 and from Chatham in Kent, deregistered their children from school last summer and set off with Maisie, 16, Tommy, nine, and Isabelle, five.
The timing wasn’t random.
Maisie had just sat her GCSEs, which meant she could pick up an online A-level course from a sun lounger while her younger siblings followed the curriculum through homeschooling apps.
The maths behind the no-jobs bit
Before the trip, Charlie worked as a property developer and Jade as a dancer.
Those careers are now on ice.
“We don’t have jobs,” Charlie told CreatorZine.
He says the family lives off rental income from investment properties, topped up with savings.
The budget, according to Charlie, was £150,000 for 13 months.
He says they’re on target to land back in the UK without blowing it, despite spending more than they would at home.
Eating out two or three times a day will do that.
So will choosing the nicest room in town, which the family did deliberately and often.
“You get so much more for your money in Asia,” he said, adding that most of their five-star stays cost a fraction of a London hotel.
He reckons the whole thing could be done for less than half their budget. They just didn’t fancy it.
“It’s nice to come home, walking through a nice entrance lobby, up to your room that’s had your bed made up while you’ve been out all day.”
Nine countries and one very easy deregistration
The route so far covers Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
They’re currently back in Indonesia, with Japan next, before flying home at the end of August.
Pulling the kids out of school turned out to be the simplest part of the whole operation.
Charlie says the process was easy, there was no backlash, and the head teachers told them what a great opportunity it would be.
The children are already registered to return in September, with Tommy going back to his old class, Maisie starting college and Isabelle beginning year one.
Friends and family backed the plan too, which perhaps says something about how the couple travelled before.
“We’ve always travelled, every half term, easter and summer holidays,” Charlie said.
“So this was going to be the same, just longer.”
The luggage, the bickering, the takeaway days
It hasn’t all been infinity pools. Charlie says the hardest part is hauling a year’s worth of luggage between countries, including enough toys and books to keep a five-year-old and a nine-year-old occupied, plus clothes for every climate.
Then there’s the small matter of never being apart.
“Being together 24/7 definitely has its challenges and sometimes comes with bickering and the odd argument,” he admitted.
The fix is slow travel and the occasional day doing absolutely nothing beyond a film and a takeaway, so nobody burns out.
The kids have missed their friends at points, but Charlie says there’s rarely time to dwell on it between hikes, beach days, waterfall climbs, boat trips and snorkelling.
His pitch to everyone else is blunt.
“We shouldn’t get stuck in a routine of work and mundane life,” he said.
“There’s so much out there to see and we all have such a short time on earth.”
Why It Matters
The family documented the entire trip on social media, and Charlie says friends and family “feel like they have been along the journey with us”.
That’s the quiet engine of the worldschooling genre: audiences don’t just watch these trips, they co-travel them, and the quit-the-rat-race narrative remains one of the most reliably engaging formats in family content.
What sets this one apart is the receipts.
Most escape-the-9-to-5 content hides the funding model; Charlie’s willingness to name the £150,000 figure and the rental income behind it is exactly the transparency audiences increasingly demand before they’ll buy the dream.
The trip also lands amid a wider boom in worldschooling and home education among British families since the pandemic, with travel-first parenting now a recognisable content niche rather than a curiosity.
The family flies home next month, the kids go back to school in September, and Charlie says the next trip is already being sketched out.
“It’s crazy how quickly a year flies by.”
