If you HAD to leave the U.S.… could you?

On our live call this weekend, I asked everyone one simple question:

“If you had to leave the United States tomorrow, could you?”

I watched the chat fill up. No. No. Not yet. No.

And then I asked the harder one: why not?

The answers came in fast, and they were all the same handful of words. Money. Work. Kids. Family. No remote income. Don’t have the money to stay.

Not one person said “the visa.” Not one person said “the paperwork.” Because that is not the real wall. I help people move to Europe legally for a living, and I promise you, the visa is the easy part. We have a proven process for that.

The thing that actually keeps you stuck is money. More specifically, it’s where your money comes from. If your income is tied to one job, in one city, in one country, then you are not free. You are on a leash, and the leash just happens to be long enough to feel comfortable.

I know, because I spent ten years on that leash.

For a decade, I was planted in New York and New Jersey. I had a good job in New York City, I was commuting, I was making real money. And I felt suffocated. I felt trapped, because I believed I had to physically be there for the team and the business I was building.

Then COVID hit. The company I worked for was making five million dollars a week. Five million. A week. And they furloughed me anyway.

That was the moment something snapped into place for me. I said, never again. Never again am I going to depend on a location-bound job. Never again am I going to let someone in an office decide whether I get to eat.

So I took my unemployment checks and I invested every spare hour into one question: what does it actually take to build income that isn’t tied to a place? I launched my first online business, and it made twenty thousand dollars in its first week. That was my ticket out. I moved to Mexico in 2021. I built a fully remote real estate business that did half a million dollars in its first year. I did that for three years, and then I built LuxNomads into what it is now, a company approaching eight figures in revenue.

When my partner Paul and I moved to Spain, I was “only” making a six figure income. Our rent in Mallorca was going to be $2,700 a month, which is expensive for Spain, but it was cheaper than the $4,000 we were paying in the US. It made sense on paper, so we went.

But I didn’t sit there worrying about whether six figures was “enough” to move. I focused on something else entirely. I focused on bringing the skill with me. Because the money you make the day you land is not the money you’ll make three months later, or a year later. I went from a six figure income when I arrived to a business worth almost ten million dollars, not because I saved up the perfect nest egg first, but because I carried the skill of building remote income across the ocean with me.

That is the whole thing. That is the unlock.

I opened up the room and just talked to people about where they really were, and honestly, it told the whole story.

There was Lu, who started a YouTube channel a month ago documenting her journey to move abroad. She’s posting every day, getting over the fear of the camera, building the muscle. But she’s posting just to post, with nowhere to send people. That is a beautiful start and a dangerous place to stay, because posting into the void leads to burnout every single time. Her documentation could become a real business. She just needs somewhere to lead people to.

There was Grace, who has too many ideas. Bookkeeping, real estate, a brand on Instagram. She isn’t short on ambition, she’s drowning in options, stuck in the planning phase, never launching. She doesn’t need another idea. She needs to hone the ones she has down to one.

There was Andrea, who spent almost twenty years in hospitality and is sick of a salary cap and working for people who aren’t great at their jobs. She’s already built the brand strategy for a client-experience course. She has the vision. She just hasn’t set up the tech or brought traffic to it yet.

And there was Robin, who I could talk about all day. HR consultant, incredible cook, caregiver for her father, author of a book called Peaceful Pivots, 129 people already on her email list. She’s made money five different ways in her life and she’s terrified that makes her “all over the place.” It doesn’t. It makes her a real entrepreneur. Robin doesn’t have a niche problem. Robin is the niche.

Four different women, four different starting points, and the exact same thing standing between them and the life they want. Not talent. Not work ethic. Not even the visa. Just the skill of turning what they already know into income that travels.

Someone on the call asked me, “how do I figure out a niche I can actually make lucrative long term?” And I told her what I’ll tell you.

Stop thinking in niches. You are the niche. Robin is not in the “HR niche.” She’s in the Robin niche. When she’s teaching someone how to go from unemployed to their dream job one month, and hosting a $99 cookout in Bali the next, that is not scattered. That is a person her people trust, showing up as herself. The people who follow you don’t follow the category. They follow you.

This is why the business I teach starts with what I call your Ikigai, the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what people will pay good money for. When you build from there, you build something you actually want to keep doing. I did real estate and insurance because it was good money, and by the end it was soul sucking. Building LuxNomads, my Ikigai business, gives me joy every single day. That difference is everything.

Here is the part that makes people’s eyes go wide.

We are living in the most unfair advantage in human history. Before social media, businesses spent seventy to a hundred thousand dollars a year just on marketing. My marketing budget is basically zero. It’s me and a little bit of tech. You can post one video on a free app and the algorithm will hand it to the exact people looking for what you have.

But content is not the business. Content is the invitation. The business is your email list.

Fifty percent of LuxNomads’ revenue, and we do about six figures a month, comes from email. Not Instagram. Email. Instagram has no idea what I’m doing half the time, but the people on my list do. When I need to move quickly, one email gets it done. Your email list is your digital asset, and an automated email funnel is the machine that turns a stranger into a subscriber into a buyer while you sleep.

And you don’t need a million followers to make it work. You need a thousand true fans. A thousand people who will buy what you put out because they trust you. A thousand people buying a $299 offer is $299,000. You do not need to go viral. You need to go deep with the right people.

I’ll tell you the real reason I care about this so much.

My mom stayed in a marriage she hated for years, because she didn’t have the money to leave. That is what a lack of financial freedom does. It traps you with people and in places that don’t align with who you are. I decided a long time ago that I would never let money be the thing that keeps me stuck, and I would never watch the women in my community stay stuck either.

Freedom is knowing that all you need to make money is Wi-Fi, your laptop, and your phone. Freedom is being able to leave. And the beautiful bonus is that once you build remote, and even passive, income, you actually qualify for the digital nomad visas, the passive income visas, and the investor visas that let you build a portfolio of residencies and passports. The income doesn’t just fund the life. It unlocks the paperwork too.

If you read all of this and felt something click, that feeling is the point.

I’m running the Remote Business Builder Challenge, six weeks to take you from a swirl of ideas in your head to one real remote offer, live online, that people can actually find and pay for. We build your Ikigai, your lead magnet, your email funnel, your content, and we launch together. My promise is simple: if you show up, do the work, and haven’t launched by week six, I’ll personally coach you until you do.

The visa is the easy part. This is the skill that makes all of it real.

👉 Join the Remote Business Builder Challenge here

I’ll see you inside. The best is yet to come.

xx, Michelle 🤍