My story
Hola! I'm Camila
I'm a Latina (Chile) living in Melbourne, also a graphic designer.
I finished my studies and travelled to Australia nearly 6 years ago to study English, get some professional experience, travel around the country and come back home to Chile (that was the plan).
I met my partner, so things changed and I decided to stay. I extended my student visa while I was babysitting and waitressing. When COVID hit, we lost our jobs, and we were running out of money, but instead of saving we actually opened a cafe (the rent was very cheap due to the pandemic, that's why we took the deal). It was just both of us, me learning to make coffee by myself and my partner in the kitchen. After the lockdown finished we got staff because we started to get VERY busy, we were doing amazing, so that's when I decided to look for a job as the food industry wasn't my thing.
Got the job pretty quickly (my first professional job as a graphic designer ever) but got redundant after 4 months due to "COVID", and I could not find anything else, had like 10 interviews but nothing was moving forward.
One day the company called me back to work as a casual 2 days a week (thank god I am getting SOME money!), after a few months they put me on hold, and again started to look for jobs but nothing, and guess what! they called me back, AGAIN! after a couple of months (I know sounds like a terribly toxic boyfriend/girlfriend relationship but I really needed the money because our business started to be really affected by the economy. For some reason, we crazy people decided to open a plant and home decor business, which I was going to manage because I was casual in my graphic design job and working only 2 days, and my partner was running the cafe. Adding to this we were selling random things on MarketPlace to get extra money. We were actually trying different things to succeed, hopefully one will work.
Our cafe
Our shop
I know! we are crazy about plants
Ok, so the shop did terribly from the start, we knew we did a mistake and the cafe sales were down 60-70%, in that moment I decided to quit my job and put my energy into our business but the economy was so bad we were not making any money so we decided to sell both businesses.
Took us 2 weeks to sell the shop but the cafe took us 1 year, 1 year struggling to make money. The economy was so bad that even some customers would be sharing an OJ between TWO PEOPLE! we could not handle it and our lives were getting worse, our relationship wasn't good, and we were fighting every single day. For us, at that moment the best option was to go back to a 9-5 job, be safe, get our money every fortnightly, have weekends off and more time for ourselves, I know sounds weird we were craving that life so much.
Right now my partner and I have our own jobs so we can save enough money until our online businesses kick off.
So while all this was happening we got engaged, and after going through all this we asked ourselves, do we really want to live in Australia? we don't have any family here (my partner is from India), we made amazing friends but if we wanted to start our own family we definitely would need family support, so we decided to move to Chile next year.
Right now we are keeping our jobs, we are getting married in Chile in March and we are aiming to move for good at the end of 2024.
In my spare time, I work on myself and my online business which will give me the freedom I want and enjoy the life I WANT.
If you crave a life of freedom where you don't need to think about money as a problem join me on this journey so we can find the life we crave so much. Have more time, more money, spread more love, and all the good things will happen, just manifest it.
Follow my journey
