Gigi Gonzalez has a new rule for herself: She doesn’t work Fridays.

“Fridays are my errand day,” says Gonzalez, 36. “That’s when I go to the dentist. That’s when I take my dog to the groomer [or] when I get my nails done.”

For the rest of the workweek, Gonzalez keeps her schedule tight, working Monday through Thursday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

That wasn’t the case one year ago, when Gonzalez says she logged a more traditional 40 hours of work a week as her own boss running The First Gen Mentor, where she’s a financial educator, content creator and author.

It’s not that she’s landed a sudden windfall or considerably increased her rates. Rather, Gonzalez moved from Chicago to Valencia, Spain, with her husband in May 2025. Since then, her personal expenses have gone down enough to make a 16-hour workweek possible.

The move has transformed her work-life balance, her finances and her outlook on a long-term future abroad.

Gonzalez’s journey abroad kicked off in 2019. One day, she was discussing her financial services job at a high-school career day and advised students to study abroad if possible, something she regretted not doing herself.

After repeating her regret through seven different presentations that day, Gonzalez decided it wasn’t too late for her to live abroad as an adult. She says she spent the next two years saving about $20,000 with the goal of taking a year-long sabbatical from work.

The Covid-19 pandemic upended her plans, so in April 2021 Gonzalez says she used her savings to launch her own business, The First Gen Mentor, where she offers financial education to first-generation students and young professionals of color. A few years into being her own boss, Gonzalez realized she could do her job from around the world, and she revived her plan to move overseas.

After some research, she and her husband set their sights on Spain, where Gonzalez can apply for citizenship after two years of residency through her Mexican citizenship. (She currently holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Mexico, where her parents were born.)

Spanish was Gonzalez’s first language, so there wouldn’t be a major language barrier. Plus, Spain launched its digital nomad visa in late 2023, which allows foreign freelancers, remote workers and self-employed business owners to live in the country while earning money from overseas.

From July 2024 to April 2025, the couple saved over $20,000 to move abroad by selling their furniture and focusing on values-based spending. “It didn’t feel like deprivation; it felt like I was budgeting towards a greater purpose of moving abroad,” says Gonzalez, who is a financial advocate for Intuit.

She also limited her impulsive spending. That meant no new furniture, plants or clothes. “Basically, anything I couldn’t pack in three suitcases [wasn’t] going to make the cut,” she says.

Gonzalez got her digital nomad visa in April 2025 and added her husband as a dependent; he works in operations for an international company and secured a transfer to their Spanish subsidiary. Gonzalez’s visa gives her three years of residency, during which she says she plans to apply for citizenship in Spain.

Gonzalez says her cost of living in Spain is much lower than it was in the U.S., which means she can work less, typically 16 but sometimes up to 20 hours per week, and still live comfortably.

As a result, she says her sense of work-life balance has “completely transformed.” She can enjoy the luxury of a slow morning, starting with breakfast, exercise, self-care and lunch before logging on at 2 p.m. when her U.S.-based clients are starting their days.

Gonzalez says some early and aggressive investments are also paying off. During the pandemic, Gonzalez says she invested up to 35% of her income into her retirement accounts. It was enough to hit a number where she’ll be able to stop working and live off the distributions from her portfolio in retirement. Gonzalez currently has over $220,000 stashed for retirement.

“That means that I have enough in my investments now that I don’t have to add more money,” Gonzalez says, “and I can still retire at the traditional age of 65 without adding another dollar, just by letting compound interest do its magic.”

With her retirement income taken care of, Gonzalez says she only has to work enough now to support her everyday spending. “If one day I want to stop [running my business] and just go be a barista or a waitress, I can do that, because I just need to pay for my current expenses,” she says. “I don’t need to earn more to put towards retirement.”

Gonzalez hopes to stay in Spain long-term and says retirement is even more within reach given its lower expenses, especially around medical care. That being said, she says her newfound sense of work-life balance and a slower pace of living don’t make her dread working a few more decades.

“I’m not rushing to retire because I’m semi-retired,” she says.

Gonzalez says her personal expenses have gone down since moving abroad. Rent for her and her husband’s downtown Chicago apartment was $3,700 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit; meanwhile, in Valencia the couple pays 1,900 euros (roughly $2,200 USD) for a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom apartment.

Health insurance is another huge difference. In the U.S., Gonzalez says she and her husband paid more than $400 per month for employer-sponsored coverage with a high-deductible plan; in Valencia, their private health care is about $200 per month with no copays or deductibles.

“It’s really shocking as an American,” she says. “I don’t think twice about going to the doctor for something because there’s no copays; it’s already paid for.”

Not all of Gonzalez’s expenses are lower these days. Doing business in two countries is pricey.

Gonzalez says she employs a U.S.-based tax team to keep her LLC active and in compliance; her digital nomad visa also requires that she registers her business in Spain, so she has a Spanish tax team to help with that.

Given the added complexities of her business since moving, Gonzalez’s $350 monthly tax help has doubled to nearly $700 a month. “It was a big learning curve in the beginning, but I’ve adjusted,” she says.

Gonzalez says that when she told friends and family about her plans to move abroad, many of them didn’t realize how long she’d been planning for it.

“A lot of people see [others] living their best life in Europe, and then they look into the process, they get overwhelmed, and they don’t do it,” Gonzalez says. She recommends people really explore why they want to move abroad. Then, “create the systems and change their money mindset to be able to meet those goals.”

Gonzalez says her big moments of inspiration came from that high-school career day, but also when binging “House Hunters International” episodes or traveling abroad and wishing she could stay longer. It was enough motivation go keep her going through researching, saving up for and adjusting to her new life overseas.

“This is definitely one of the things for me, if I would have been on my deathbed, I would regret never experiencing life abroad,” she adds. “You get one life. Live it right.”

Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to $1.16 USD on March 9, 2026.

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While attending college at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, Suras Nayak knew he wanted to leave his hometown of Hyderabad, India, and travel the world.

“When I was growing up, I always had this idea somewhere behind my head that I always wanted to move abroad, but I was a little bit influenced by the Western media. I watch a lot of Hollywood movies … so I was always influenced and liked the idea of moving to a different country, living there, experiencing how things are like there,” he tells CNBC Make It.

Nayak gained his first experience living abroad when he participated in an exchange program that sent him to China for 45 days as a teenager. And almost a decade later, Nayak got a chance to live abroad when he moved to Dublin, Ireland, in March 2025 to work as a software development engineer at Amazon, where his compensation comes to a projected 122,428 euros (US $144,000) a year.

Growing up, Nayak’s dad was also a software engineer. He introduced Nayak to the field and helped him understand coding and programming, Nayak says.

Nayak landed a six-month internship at Amazon during his senior year of college and joined the company full time upon graduating in 2020, where he received compensation of around 6.8 million Indian rupees (US $75,000) a year. He was working out of Amazon’s Bengaluru office, which is about an hour-long flight south from his hometown.

After a year at Amazon, Nayak learned that if he completed at least two years at the company and reached a certain level on his software engineer track, he could interview for opportunities in another country. He immediately started looking for other positions at Amazon, eventually landing in Dublin.

Nayak looked for open positions in Amazon offices in the U.K., Germany and Ireland, but narrowed it down to the latter because he knew the tech sector was growing there, he says. Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft all have headquarters in Ireland, according to IT Brew.

“I was so happy when I came to know that I got this opportunity,” Nayak says about landing the position in Dublin. “I immediately went to my parents and I told them and it was such a nice moment. They were all so happy for me, especially my dad, because my dad always supports me in all of this stuff.”

It took about six to eight weeks for Nayak to secure a visa to live and work in Ireland, with Amazon covering all costs, he says.

When Nayak arrived in Ireland, Amazon provided him with temporary housing and hired an agency to help him find a house. The company even helped him ship his possessions from India to Ireland.

“I did a lot of exploring during my first month,” he says. “I was very excited and I was very happy. As I was exploring, I realized that I made the right decision to move here.”

The biggest thing Nayak says he had to adjust to after moving was the weather; he was used to India’s sunny days, long summers and short winters. He also had to get used to Dublin’s cost of living. Compared with Hyderabad, Dublin is very expensive, especially for rent and groceries, Nayak says.

“When I was in India, I did not think about budgeting a lot because I always used to spend less there,” he says. Now, he says he has to set a budget for himself.

Nayak splits a three-bedroom house with two fellow Amazon employees. The total rent is 4,000 euros a month (US $4,725) and Nayak pays 1,450 euros (US $1,713), according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Here’s a look at the rest of his estimated share of monthly expenses. All amounts have been rounded.

• GitHub Copilot: 9 euros (US $11)
• Revolut Premium Plan: 9 euros (US $11)
• Wi-Fi: 15 euros (US $18)
• Phone bill: 15 euros (US $18)
• OpenAI for personal use: 24 euros (US $28)
• Streaming services, including Netflix and Disney+: 25 euros (US $30)
• Transportation via public buses: 30 euros (US $35)
• Electricity and gas: 50 euros (US $59)
• Shopping for clothes and the latest technology: 100 to 150 euros (US $118 to $177)
• Groceries: 150 to 200 euros (US $177 to $236)
• Dining out: 400 to 500 euros (US $472 to $591)

“One thing that I spend more on here is eating out, which I used to not do often back in India,” Nayak says. “I used to either eat at home or eat at the office.”

When he first moved to Ireland, Nayak says he found it hard to connect with people, since in India he was so used to having friends everywhere.

“I never had to actively go out and look for people or connections, but I realized that if you can push yourself and if you go out, you can make good friends. It’s just about making the effort,” he says.

Nayak says he used an app called Meetup to attend various events, which helped him meet people from all over the world.

“The people in Dublin are really friendly. I always get good vibes from people here. I feel quite settled here,” he says. “I have made some good friends and I am really liking my stay here, my time here and even working here.”

In 2023, Nayak bought a three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment in Hyderabad as an investment property. The property is worth about 16 million Indian rupees (US $180,000) and he says he plans to eventually rent it out.

“I wanted to make a big investment. Real estate made the most sense to me because in India, real estate is always a booming and growing business,” he says.

However, Nayak doesn’t plan to move back to India for at least another 10 to 15 years, when he feels he has enough money in the bank. He says he would feel comfortable with a net worth of 400,000 to 500,000 euros, but his long-term goal is to reach 1 million euros (US $1.17 million) before moving back.

For now, he plans to stay in Ireland foreseeable future, he says. He enjoys being able to go to a park and just sit and read a book or enjoy the scenery. He also loves how easy it is to travel around.

“My quality of life has improved. Now that I am in Ireland, I have gotten used to certain ways of life that I am really enjoying, which I would not have been able to get if I were back in India,” he says.

Over the past year, Nayak says he has been able to travel just like he dreamed of in college, including taking road trips around Ireland and visiting the U.K. with his parents last year.

“I have always been a little bit of a travel enthusiast, and being in Ireland, I am just exploring all of it whenever I can,” he says.

Conversions were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to $1.18 USD and 1 Indian rupee to $0.01 USD on March 2, 2026. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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Anyone who’s spent time around Gen Z — or watched news stories about them — has heard the stereotypes: They are more anxious, fragile, and coddled than previous generations. 

As a developmental psychologist at Harvard, I study the experience of growing up across generations and I’ve heard every variation on this theme. To be sure, Gen Z is struggling: Research shows that they’re more likely to report mental health challenges and face greater obstacles to job security than previous generations. 

But I’ve also documented how narratives about generational differences can be wildly exaggerated. While conducting research with my co-author Nancy Hill, we studied interviews with college students from the class of 1975. We then re-interviewed those participants, now in their seventies. What we discovered stunned us. 

Fifty years later, they remembered triumphal narratives of their experiences navigating college and career. They told stories about the certainty they felt in their choice of profession. They described how they navigated obstacles with confidence and recalled the warmth of friendship and community they felt when they struggled. But listening to the tapes, it turns out that, at the time, they felt just as uncertain and lonely as students today. 

This gap between our memory of lived events and reality is a predictable human phenomenon. According to the peak-end rule, we recall the most emotionally intense moments and the endings of experiences, while the messy middle fades.

Forgetting the messy middle — the hard, confusing parts of our experiences — isn’t a problem in itself. It becomes an issue when we leave out the parts young people most need to hear. Each time we tell these incomplete stories, we risk building barriers, leaving them thinking: I guess I’m the only one struggling. Everyone else had it figured out.

There’s a better way to help when we’re talking with young people. Try these four things: 

It’s tempting to say: “Why can’t they just figure it out? I did!” 

Instead, ask yourself: How did I feel the first time I met a roadblock — before I had it all figured out? What was it like to fail for the first time? The first heartbreak or rejection letter lands harder when you don’t have the lived experience to put it into a broader context.

By tapping into the emotion of those experiences, you can enter the conversation with empathy instead of judgement.

Don’t assume that your outcome or your uncertainties mirror those of the Gen Zer you’re talking to. Ask questions before you jump in with advice. Probe for emotional details of what they are going through by asking: “What are you most worried about?” 

Help them identify the emotions behind those concerns, like embarrassment over failure, fear of the future, or grief over the loss of what they had hoped for. 

Then give them the space to process those feelings. Each of those emotions calls for a very different kind of response, and you can meet them where they are by allowing them to frame the conversation.  

It’s tempting to tell stories about the past when we want to help inspire young people. But we can also connect with them based on our current experiences. Rather than telling a story from when you were their age, lean into stories about the present day.

Share a more recent challenge at home or work that relates to what they’re experiencing and how you’re thinking about solving it. It’s helpful for them to see the emotion of a puzzle still in process and to know that you can relate to what they’re going through. 

If you do have a good example to share from the past, you can overcome the peak-end framing so that it can genuinely help. 

Before sharing your own story about the class you barely passed in college or the job you had your heart set on that didn’t work out, take some time to think back and tap back into the emotions you felt. 

Lead with that part of the experience to connect with what young people are feeling in the moment. You can still tell them how everything worked out in the end, if that’s the case, but make sure your story doesn’t make the answer seem quick and easy — since it’s unlikely to have been either. 

By sharing a more authentic version of our own stories, we’re far more likely to build connections with young people and help them develop the skills they need to overcome obstacles on their own journeys. In fact, that’s the part young people most need to hear when they’re struggling and doing the hard work of trying to figure things out.

Alexis Redding is a developmental psychologist and leading expert on young adulthood. She is faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she runs the Transition to Adulthood Lab and is the Faculty Director of the Mental Health in Higher Education program. She is coauthor of ”The End of Adolescence″ and the editor of ”Mental Health in College.”

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Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, announced on March 5 on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the company would start repurchasing shares of its own stock.

For Berkshire, this is a relative rarity — the company hasn’t bought back shares since the second quarter of 2024. But for companies like Berkshire, a financially mature conglomerate worth more than $1 trillion and with plenty of excess cash, the move has become increasingly common.

In 2025, companies in the S&P 500 spent about $1 trillion buying their own shares, according to estimates from investment research firm Morningstar, up from a record $942 billion in 2024. Last year was also the fifth straight year in which companies spent more on buybacks than on cash dividends, Morningstar reports.

Buyback programs, like dividends, are touted by companies as a way to return cash to shareholders, and, under the right circumstances, can be viewed by investors as a positive sign for the stock, says Rob Leiphart, a certified financial planner and vice president of financial planning at RV Capital Management.

Investors should do some research, however, before buying on buyback news, he adds, since some companies purchase shares as a way to make short-term numbers look better.

“It is a form of financial engineering,” Leiphart says.

Say you’re a company with plenty of free cash flow — money that’s left over after making all the necessary expenditures to maintain the business. How do you use that cash to create value for shareholders? Maybe you plunk the money into research and development or use it to acquire another firm.

For many large, financially mature firms, the answer is to give some money back to the people who own your stock. One classic way to do this is to pay a dividend, a regular (often quarterly) cash distribution to shareholders.

Over the past half-decade, though, companies have been more inclined to spend their money on buybacks. Last year, Apple announced a $100 billion share repurchase program, and Alphabet authorized $70 billion in buybacks. Both companies also pay a modest dividend.

Under buyback programs, instead of making cash distributions, companies repurchase their own shares on the open market. While not as tangible as having cash in hand, reducing the number of shares effectively means that each share an investor owns is a bigger piece of the overall pie. And because corporate earnings are expressed as earnings “per share,” taking shares off the market can make the stock look more attractive to other potential investors.

The latter feature can incentivize corporate executives to initiate buybacks to create a short-term bump, rather than making moves that will benefit shareholders over the long term, says Leiphart.

Companies that issue a lot of compensation in the form of stock options may also use buybacks to keep the value of those shares from diluting, Leiphart says.

So what should investors make of it when a company announces a buyback program? As long as the company isn’t taking on debt to fund a buyback, it’s a generally positive sign for a company’s financial health, says David Sekera, chief U.S. market strategist at Morningstar.

“It’s just the way that management is letting the marketplace know that they are generating excess free cash flow above what the internal needs are for the company,” he says. “And in fact, probably even generating more free cash flow than what they necessarily need to spend on growth to be able to maintain their long-term guidance targets.”

When it comes to buybacks — like all investing — the goal is to buy low and sell high, Sekera says. If a company buys shares when they’re trading below their true value, it’s a boon to shareholders. If they buy when they’re overpriced, “it’s value-destructive,” he says.

“Management teams seem to perpetually think that their stock is undervalued,” he adds.

Abel’s announcement came with the context that Berkshire rebuys shares “at any time we believe the repurchase price is below our intrinsic value, conservatively determined.”

It’s one of many reasons why financial pros would caution against buying any stock on the sole basis of a buyback announcement. It’s also smart to speak with a trusted financial professional before making any changes to your portfolio.

Overall, it’s important to consider any buyback program in the context of your overall outlook for the underlying business, says Leiphart.

“Do they have a market leading product? Do they maintain that leadership with that product? Has the corporate brass been there for some period of time and good leadership is in place that has had success and will continue to have success hopefully in the future?” he says. “Along with those considerations, [a buyback is] maybe one thing that you add as an ingredient when you put it all together.”

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If you’re raising a teenager today, it can feel like every parenting decision carries enormous stakes.

Parents are bombarded with alarming headlines about adolescent mental health: rising anxiety, loneliness and depression. Social media, smartphones and academic pressure are often cited as the causes. Every week seems to bring a new explanation for why teens are struggling.

The message many parents absorb is simple: Don’t make things worse.

After hearing that often enough, many parents start to worry that one wrong move could make things worse. They try not to push too hard or enforce too many rules, fearing that doing so might add to their kids’ stress.

But in the process, something important can get lost. In today’s parenting culture, many parents have quietly grown afraid to claim their authority.

We see this tension every day. As clinical psychologists who have spent decades working with parents and adolescents — and as parents of teens ourselves — we have a front-row seat to how uncertain many parents feel about claiming authority as part of their job.

One of the most stabilizing forces in a teenager’s life is knowing that the system around them has structure — and that capable adults are holding it.

When parents provide that structure, teens feel something psychologists sometimes call “containment”: the sense that big emotions and messy moments are held inside something steady and reliable. Without it, all that intensity can start to feel exposed. It’s like an egg without a protective shell.

That matters because adolescence is a time when feelings get bigger before self-control fully catches up. Teens feel things intensely and react quickly. They care a great deal about friendship, belonging, status and independence.

This means that big emotions are part of adolescence. Teens are supposed to push limits and argue about rules. They may slam doors or act like your boundary is the most unreasonable thing that has ever happened to them.

Big feelings often lead to big behaviors. A parent’s job is to stay steady inside them. Here are a few ways that can look in real life:

• Stay calm. This means remembering: I’m the grown-up here. Your teen may be turbulent, but you don’t have to be. Sometimes it helps to pause, take a breath and remind yourself: I’m the pilot, not the turbulence.
• Validate the feeling while holding the limit. You can say, “I know you’re really upset, but answer is still no.” Two things can be true at the same time: Your teen’s feelings are real, and your boundary still stands.
• Say less. When teens escalate, more words often add more chaos. Resist the urge to explain, defend or lecture. A simple “I hear you” or “You’re really mad” can go further than a long explanation.
• Give space when space helps. Sometimes the steadiest thing you can do is step back. You might say, “I’m here when you’re ready to talk,” and then give them room. Giving space can help everyone settle.

A lot of confusion today comes from how we think about autonomy.

Autonomy means gradually learning to make decisions within the safety of a clear, steady structure.

Teens push for autonomy. Parents hold the boundaries that make it possible. Inside those boundaries, teens test limits, negotiate responsibility and learn to tolerate frustration — experiences that build judgment and resilience over time.

Without that structure, teens aren’t really practicing independence. They’re just unmoored. And deep down, even when they push against limits, most teens feel safer when a parent is willing to hold the line with calm and care.

Every family’s structure looks different. It might include where phones live after 9:30 at night, what “I’ll be home later” really means, or whether a party requires a parent present.

It also includes the norms that shape family life, like how people treat one another, how conflict is handled and what accountability looks like.

Remember, structure gives teenagers something to grow inside of — a shell that holds things together while something stronger and more independent forms within.

Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, mom of three, and the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting company and next-generation movement. Through her bestselling book, “Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be,” TED Talk and podcast, she has built a community of millions of parents who turn to her for practical, sturdy and compassionate advice.

Dr. Sheryl Ziegler is a licensed clinical psychologist with over two decades of experience working with children and families in private practice. She is the author of “Mommy Burnout: How to Reclaim Your Life and Raise Healthier Children in the Process,” and the forthcoming book, ”The Crucial Years: The Essential Guide to Mental Health and Modern Puberty in Middle Childhood.”

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