Laid off Google techie lives in Thailand, flies to Singapore once a week to work for 3 hours

The techie-turned-digital marketeer said he realised he was financially independent after Google laid him off in February 2024.

Before February 2024, Shao Chun Chen used to work more than 40 hours a week at his Google office in Singapore. Then, he was laid off. Now, he lives in Thailand and works only three hours a week as an adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore. The 39-year-old takes a flight to Singapore every week and says that his job sustains his and his family’s life in Thailand.

"[We are] earning in dollars, spending in baht,” Chen told CNBC Make It. He earns about $2,000 to $4,000 Singapore dollars (around Rs 1.33 lakh to Rs 2.6 lakh) per month teaching a weekly three-hour digital marketing class. This money, Chen said, is enough to cover his travels and all of his and his wife’s living expenses in Thailand.

“I’m gaming the system,” Chen told the publication. “Three hours of working in Singapore can sustain my entire expenditure in Thailand.”

The techie-turned-digital marketeer said he realised he was financially independent after Google laid him off in February 2024. He had worked at the tech giant for about a decade and invested almost half of his paycheck. So when he was unexpectedly laid off, he checked his portfolio to realise that he no longer needed to rely on a paycheck for a long time.

According to CNBC Make It, Chen's portfolio was worth about $2 million (about Rs 17 crore). He used the 4 percent rule--a favoured rule in retirement planning--as a guideline and withdrew about $80,000 (about Rs 69 lakh) from his portfolio each subsequent year.

Since, in theory, his portfolio could support him for at least 30 years, so Chen decided to give himself the opportunity to lead a different kind of life instead of jumping into another corporate role. Now, apart from his role as an adjunct lecturer, he also makes money by making educational content on YouTube and from his coaching business, through which he makes about $500 (about Rs 43,000) an hour.

Since moving to Thailand with his wife in November, Chen said his lifestyle and quality of life have become “so much better.”

“I no longer feel the need to ... be on that hamster wheel or to always be producing.[Here] I make breakfast for my wife, and in my previous life, I didn’t even have that privilege. [I was] just rushing,” he added.