I have made this move, and helped other people make it

I am Ezekiel Contreras-Forrest. I grew up in San Francisco, raised by my grandparents in the Mission, and I did not come from money that made travel easy. Every country I have been to, I paid for myself. That number is past forty now, and most of the time I was not on vacation. I was working out whether a place could hold a life.

I studied Science, Technology and Society at Stanford, which is a formal way of saying I spent four years learning how systems and incentives shape what people can actually do. That turns out to be the useful lens for this work. Moving abroad is rarely blocked by motivation. It is blocked by a visa rule, a lease cycle, a tax residency date, or a bank that will not open an account for you.

These days I live and work across Southeast Asia, mostly the Philippines and Malaysia. I run businesses from here. I know what rent costs because I pay it, what the internet is like because I depend on it, and which of the things people worry about turn out to matter.

I started consulting because the same conversation kept happening. Someone would tell me they were done with where they were, that they had been reading about this for a year, and that they still had no idea what the first move was. That gap is closeable in an hour or two of focused work. So I made it something you can book.