Life Update: Settling into the Netherlands, Growing TBC 2.0, and Maybe Planning a Wedding
It’s September 2025 when I publish this. But the first draft of this post starts in July 2025, and I'm at the Hong Kong International Airport, waiting for my flight back to Amsterdam after spending 2 weeks with my family (and 1 Sunday watching one of my favorite college friends get married). 2 days before, I just signed the contract to start my new role as soon as I get back.
Sitting here in the airport as I leave Asia for Europe for the last time in my 20s feels like the best time to start reflecting on the last 2 years since I wrote a Life Update. The next time I’m back in Asia, I’ll be 30 and hopefully with new goals to hit in life.
Building a Great Career, Building a Great Life
My biggest takeaway, which is so obvious after drafting all this out: building up a great career means having a great life.
“Great” means something different to everyone, but for me, I’ve achieved a version of it that even today, still surprises me. I credit that to how much more structured my thinking has become through The Bumpy Career. Coaching students through career (and life) problems really cemented the way I approach my own choices and I can’t thank them enough for that.
The same principles I teach them have helped me make decisions I feel fully aligned with. I don’t really wrestle with “what ifs,” because so far, things have worked out better than even my best-case scenarios. And I think that’s the best possible feeling to have as I close out my 20s: knowing I will not look back and wish I’d done any part of it differently.
Every decision I made was the right one for who I was becoming, and it shows. My life now feels like the natural reward for choosing well, again and again.
What This Update Covers
This time, I’m covering a little bit of everything: career, relationships, personal growth, adventures, and what’s next.
After my last Life Update, people brought it up in coffee chats and consults saying, “I read all that, and I have questions about it all so can you tell me more.” So here we are. I’ll write a bit more so there’s more for you to ask me about.
I've organized from the lightest to the heaviest parts of my life. So onto section 1.
Adventures / Travel
Proudest achievement by far: I brought my mom to Europe for 5 weeks, and she didn't pay a single bit of it.
Flights, hotels, tours, and food I covered. (Except when the restaurant was cash only, then those moments I looked at her with wide eyes that said "please help" because I stopped carrying cash years ago. But I also want to preface that she only had that cash because I give her Euros every time I come home. So that money still came from me technically.)
We went to Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Milan, Munich, Paris, and Salzburg plus all the surrounding towns of each city.
We took a wrong turn and climbed up 5 flights of Montmartre stairs, which made her want to hit me. (😂) We took a boat across Lake Como in May's blazing heat and looked at all the celebrities' villas. We visited the filming locations for the Sound of Music, her all-time favorite movie. We ate tacos every day in Barcelona, because apparently my siblings don't like eating tacos, so she hadn't had any in a while. (No to tapas, yes to tacos.)
A small snapshot of everything she posted online about the trip. She made 12 photo dumps, I really need to get on her level with posting.
And I missed my dad throughout it all. He would have loved doing all this too. (He's not dead, he just refuses to get on the plane to Europe.)
There was a moment where we were overlooking Barcelona from a viewing point, and my mom suddenly says "This will be the last time I ever see Barcelona." Of course I'm shocked to hear that, it's not like I can't afford to bring her here again if she wants to, we just have to plan for it.
But she then explains that there's so many other places in Europe and that she hopes to see, so there's no time or resources to go back to the same places again and again. We have to prioritize efficiently because she is getting older. That is a fact.
I hate this fact.
I look at my little siblings and see the same thing I saw in Barcelona with my mom: time moving forward. My little gremlins who are now (semi-)competent young adults. To me, they'll always be the ones I tortured by cutting the potatoes and ginger into the same shape so every bite of giniling would be a surprise.
I need to go home more often. I need to take them to see more of the world. I think about that a lot more nowadays.
Outside of that 5 week trip, this 2025 I also did:
- 15 days across Switzerland and Paris with my partner's family,
- 15 days in Manila to see friends and my family (I hadn't been in the Philippines since January 2024),
- 6 days in Split, Croatia with 10 friends
- 6 days in London to see it for the first time and to eat at restaurants that I’d saved years ago
- 4 days in Paris to go see Blackpink and eat at 4 restaurants on my must-try list
- 3 days in Dusseldorf, Germany to go eat the best Japanese food in the European continent
And there’s still a few more travel days pending. (Plus there's still everything I did in 2024, and late 2023, which at this point, I'm not going to even bother listing down.)
I would never have had this much vacation leave if I still worked in the Philippines. I didn’t even know this was a benefit of working in the Netherlands. (Though I do know that I have more leaves than the minimum required by law as well.)
Would you believe me if I said I hate being on planes? 😩 Almost no one does. But my hatred of sitting in one has only intensified with every flight. When they build teleportation, know that I'll be one of the first to sign up even if there's a chance of disintegration.
Still, travel feels different now. Less about ticking destinations off a list, more about savoring moments with people I love. It’s a shift from quantity to quality. And I think that’s the theme across my whole life this year.
(How wonderful it is, that this is the lightest part of my life right now. )
Outside Ollivanders Wands at the Warner Bros Studio outside London
Sitting by the clinamen (artwork by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot) at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris
Walking along the Hvar island pier in Croatia
Personal Growth
I'm going to be 30 this year. So I decided to start paying more attention to how I look and present myself.
For me, that means:
learning my colors (via color analysis in Seoul hehe highly recommend it especially if you get the full lists including what type of clothes to wear) and then slowly changing my closet,
accepting that this is probably my permanent body type and dressing for it (though I still wish I looked like 19-year-old me — how could I think I was fat back then???), and
actually spending money to improve how I look (I even set aside money for laser eye surgery, but the doctors themselves said it’s not advisable, so back to square one).
It’s a small mindset shift, but a grounding one.
I never used to think much about my appearance, partly because I’ve always looked young. But a mentor’s feedback in 2024 stuck with me: I needed to work on developing executive presence. And part of that comes from how I look.
The aim isn't to look older. I still get asked for ID everywhere and that's not going to change anytime soon.
But I’m realizing that a little intention goes a long way. I could’ve looked much better in photos these past few years if I had just paid more attention. The amount of trial and error I had to go through would have been a lot less painful as well.
And I think this focus on externals and perception and small incremental shifts led to a bigger internal realization too.
In 2024, when I finished Phase 1 of renovating my apartment, I noticed that I’ve “run out” of clear endpoint goals. I’ve moved abroad, earned an MBA, built a career I love (that also pays me well), bought an apartment, and created a side hustle that brings me meaning and purpose. The only milestone left on my original list is marriage (and we're working on that).
Maintenance alone doesn’t excite me. So I’ve been searching again for goals that feel risky, energizing, and worth celebrating once achieved. That desire has reshaped how I think about what’s next.
Should I pursue a PhD, launch a new consulting venture, or even start something wildly different like a restaurant? I don’t know yet. But what I do know is I feel most alive when there’s a goal pulling me forward.
Quality over quantity in more ways than one. Maybe that’s what my 30s will be about: not chasing the obvious milestones, but experimenting with new ones.
My Career / The Bumpy Career
Where to start, where to start?
Every year I tell myself "I will take The Bumpy Career more seriously and grow it into something bigger." And every year, I run into the same trap of doing the exact same things as last year, and expecting different results.
If you’ve ever worked with me, you know this is the exact cycle I coach students to break out of. So for 2025, I decided to practice what I preach.
Using everything I’ve learned from strategy and execution in my day job (skills I never expected to pick up lol), I rethought how I approach TBC. I treated it like one of my work projects: running strategy sessions, wargaming scenarios, mapping outcomes. And for the first time in a long time, those fuzzy “someday ideas” in my head started to take real shape.
Most people treat their side hustle like a hobby. They work on it when they feel inspired, then wonder why it's not growing. I treat TBC like a strategy project. That's the difference between staying stuck at the same revenue for years and actually scaling.
TBC has always grown alongside me. At first it was about internships and first jobs, then about landing the next role and negotiating pay. Now it’s evolved again.
Out of all this strategy work came a full framework for how I want to guide confused high-achievers: not just the Job Hunting Accelerator, but also 2 new programs I’ve been testing behind the scenes for years: Masters Abroad Accelerator (which is all about landing a masters abroad) and Career Growth Accelerator (which is all about getting on the promotion path).
2025 is the year I’m finally formalizing and launching them.
It feels ambitious, but I’m at my best when my to-do list is 3 km long. (That's why I was so productive last 2024; renovating an apartment and being busy at work was electrifying.) And honestly, the most exciting part isn’t even the programs themselves: it’s seeing clearly, for the first time, the shape of The Bumpy Career’s future.
Turning 30 this year makes it feel even more full circle: I started TBC and the earliest version of the Job Hunting Accelerator (then called Resume Consultation) at 20, and now I’m building the signature programs that can carry it into the next decade.
It feels less like “just coaching” and more like building something bigger than me.
Meanwhile, in my corporate career, I’ve leaned into a more balanced, go-with-the-flow approach. That’s very intentional; it's a direct reaction to how I managed my career back in the Philippines, which was Not Good.
My biggest change comes from me finally building a real mentor network.
Sidestory: How I Built My Mentor Network (And why you probably need one too)
None of this (the promotion, the international move, the career clarity) happens in a vacuum. I didn’t wake up one day and reach enlightenment on what I should do next. Behind every major decision I've made in the last decade, there's been a mentor or sponsor who helped me see possibilities I couldn't see on my own.
Biggest misconception I see everyone else make is thinking mentors are people you formally ask, "Will you be my mentor?" and then meet quarterly for coffee where they get life advice. That's not how it works. At least, not how it's worked for me.
I have different mentors for different topics, seasons, and questions in my life. To name a few are:
Someone who's 10 years ahead of me in corporate (and was my professor in college) who helps me see where my career could go
Someone who is my age but made the international move 3 years before I did and validated (plus challenged) my assumptions on it all
Someone in my company 5 levels above me and who sponsors me in rooms I'm not in yet
Someone completely outside my field (both corporate and TBC) who asks the uncomfortable questions about whether I'm optimizing for the right things
How did I find them? Definitely not by messaging them out of nowhere with, "I need you to be my mentor." Instead I started with "I have a specific question/problem, and I know this person has solved it before. I should reach out for help."
Then I did something most people don't do. I made it easy for them to help me.
I came prepared. I asked specific questions. I shared what I'd already tried. I followed up with what I decided and how it went. I added value back when I could.
One example: After someone gave advice that helped me negotiate a significant salary increase, I sent them a thank you note weeks later detailing the exact outcome. That person then remembered me for the next opportunity. That's how a one-time conversation becomes a relationship.
The maintenance part is where most people fail. Most people treat mentors like vending machines; they put in one conversation and expect a career to come out. Then they wonder why no one wants to help them.
They reach out once, get great advice, then disappear. Or worse, they only reach out again only when they need something. (This is also why I now have 1-time consult calls lol.)
Because I’ve been on both sides, being both the mentee and mentor, I built my system for staying in touch to not feel forced or transactional. I hate traditional networking; it makes me feel slimy and is just not something I’d naturally do. But my system works because it's genuine.
I'm not spelling it out here though, because it's one of the most valuable things I teach in consultations. After all, how many people are out here teaching you how to find a mentor?
Here's what I will say: if you're serious about building a career that doesn't plateau, you need people who can see your blind spots, open doors, and challenge your assumptions. And those people don't magically appear just because you work hard at your job. Nobody’s going to suddenly spot you and say “I’m going to mentor you now.” You have to be intentional about finding and keeping these mentors.
So if you want help identifying who your mentors should be and how to actually approach them (with scripts that work), let’s talk. The students I've coached on this have gone from "I don't have anyone to talk to" to having 3 active mentors within 2 months. It's one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career, especially while you’re in the early stages of it.
Enough about mentoring, back to talking about making career decisions.
This time, I gave myself space with a 3-month sabbatical (aka The Traveling Months lol), then stepped into a new role right after. I kept my options open, leaned on mentors and sponsors, and trusted the right opportunity would land when I was ready. And it did.
The role itself stretches me in ways I didn’t predict. It’s not marketing the way most of us know it: campaigns, social media, creatives, etc. It’s marketing in the sense of cross-border projects, stakeholder wrangling, and translating strategy into execution across cultures and teams. (And it’s a promotion so who am I to complain.)
A lot of my day-to-day is about making order out of chaos then communicating that to others, and it’s a skill I developed over the years through TBC and working in the Philippines that I didn’t know I’d value this much.
The funny thing is realizing that the 2 sides of my career fuel each other.
The strategy skills I built at work feed into how I run The Bumpy Career, while the 1-on-1 coaching sharpens my ability to problem solve with and challenge my senior stakeholders. It’s a loop I’m grateful for as I don't think many people get to experience this.
Looking back, the contrast is absurd: in my 20s, I worried about “falling behind.” Now, I can say with confidence that both my career and The Bumpy Career have taken winding paths to get here but both ended up far ahead of any benchmark I dreamed of.
That perspective shift is a gift in itself. Quality over quantity. I have exceeded the expectations I didn’t even dare say out loud to anyone else, from what I was hoping to make at this age to the kind of visibility I’d be getting at work.
Sidestory: How I Decided to Move Abroad (My framework, not just my story)
I don’t think I can ever fully explain what it feels like to leave behind everyone and everything I knew, for a country I never even dreamed of visiting. It’s hard to even verbalize why I left without going into the macroeconomic state of the Philippines at the time (gearing up for the 2022 elections) and even now (🤡), and how all that played into my predictions of salary growth potential.
But I can explain how I made the decision to do it.
Because here's the thing: my move wasn't a leap of blind faith and hoping for the best. It was a well-researched and extremely calculated bet. Specifically, I was betting years of my life and my entire life savings, so I really could not afford to be wrong.
Here's why I needed that framework. It’s a bit embarrassing to say now but when I first started researching, I was drawn to MBA programs in Italy because I romanticized the idea of pivoting into fashion marketing. It felt exciting and different and very cool.
But when I forced myself to build out the financial model and career scorecard, the facts and figures didn’t make sense. Fashion marketing roles in Italy for foreigners pay ~40% less than what I was targeting, the job market in that industry is brutal for non-natives, and the visa situation post-graduation was a nightmare. I would have spent €40k+ on a degree that would have forced me back to the Philippines within a year; not because I failed, but because the path was never viable to begin with.
The framework caught what my emotions couldn't. I was optimizing for 'what sounds cool' instead of 'what actually moves me toward my goals.' That's the difference between a decision and a daydream.
To give me the best possible chance, I built what is now the Masters Abroad Accelerator framework so that my decision feels clear, even when everything was scary.
TBC Framework for evaluating any major life decision
When I coach students who are considering moving abroad (or any other major career pivots), I use the same decision architecture I used for myself (and my partner) in 2021. It has 4 components:
1. The Weighted Scorecard
I never make big decisions based on gut feel or a single factor. Instead, I build a scorecard where every variable that matters to me gets evaluated and weighted.
For moving abroad, my categories were:
Financial (minimum salary I can expect, salary growth trajectory, cost of living, tax benefits, ROI on investment)
Career (companies that had headquarters there, value of my current experience there, network expansion)
Lifestyle (work-life balance, vacation days, healthcare, ease of living without a car)
Difference from Philippines (how many time zones away, flight costs and frequency, is there a Filipino restaurant nearby that I could buy food from)
Risk (visa stability, economic outlook, chances of a disaster happening like a war breaking out nearby)
Each category got a weight based on what mattered most to me at that life stage.
For example, at 25 and foreseeing I’d have no income for a year, "flight costs and frequency" was painful but not a major factor in my decision-making. At 30 with a job that pays me in Euros, that isn’t even a factor anymore (but vacation days suddenly became a major one).
2. The Financial Model
This is where most people mess up. They look at "average salary for Job in Country" and think "wow, that's high!" without adjusting for cost of living, taxes, or the fact that they're starting from zero (and I mean no existing furniture, no network to borrow from in case you get scammed, and no idea how to navigate that country’s banking bureaucracy).
I built a financial model that assumed worst-case scenarios: highest recorded exchange rate, unexpected costs, slower job hunting timeline, etc.
If the decision still made sense in the worst case, I was good to go.
3. The Research Deadline
This is also where most people mess up. They research for 2 years and still don't apply anywhere because they're waiting for perfect information. Perfect information doesn't exist. Structured decision-making does. Most people will get stuck in research mode forever because they're afraid they're missing some critical piece of information. So they never decide.
Knowing that, I gave myself 1 month to put together all my initial research. That forced me to prioritize on what information is actually decision-relevant vs. what was just interesting to know. What could I research online vs. what requires speaking to someone who’s experienced it? What can I figure out later vs. what do I need to know now?
The deadline gave me enough time to be thorough but not enough to spiral.
4. The Pressure Test
This is the part most people never experience simply because they don't have someone to do it with. I had my partner challenge every assumption in my model.
"What if the job market is worse than we think? What if we hate the weather there? What if your salary projections are off by 20%?"
If you don't have a thinking partner like that, you need someone external who can pressure-test your logic without a personal stake in the outcome.
These four components gave me the structure I needed to make a €60k+ decision without spiraling or having a nervous breakdown. But here's what it won't do on its own:
It won't tell you how to weigh your scorecard based on your specific values. (Or to be honest about what you actually value.) It won't tell you which schools to apply to or how to evaluate scholarship offers. It won't tell you what questions to ask during recruitment calls to get real answers instead of marketing speak. It won't tell you how to build the financial model with the right assumptions for your situation.
That all comes from the personalized part—where you need someone who's done it before to walk you through your specific context. If you're considering a move abroad (or any major career pivot) and you want to build out your decision framework together, let's talk about it.
My past students tell me all the time that having someone help them structure their thinking and challenge their assumptions, instead of giving them generic advice like “just do it” or worse, “just pray over it” is what finally got them unstuck from analysis paralysis and into action.
P.S. By the time I publish this in September 2025, I've coached 77+ students through this exact decision. Some moved abroad. Some didn't. But all of them made the decision with clarity instead of regret. And that's what really matters.
But frameworks can only take you so far. They help you the decision, but they don't make the emotional weight any lighter. And that weight feels like a ton of bricks on my chest, which is what I want to talk about next.
I always joke that I moved abroad partly to go see concerts, because before I left Manila, I only watched 1 (iKON @ MOA Arena) and now I just go watch whoever I like, whenever and wherever I like.
Snaps from videos I took of Olivia Rodrigo in Amsterdam, Blackpink in Paris, and Paramore as the opener for Taylor Swift in Amsterdam.
Relationships / Community / Family
So you know how strange this whole move feels to me. Now add on how strange it feels for me to see my friends’ lives unfold mostly through Instagram and once-a-year catch-ups. (Though when I think about it harder, back then we were all working like crazy anyway, so I only saw them maybe twice as much as I do now.)
Still, it feels different. Distance changes the texture of relationships. Even stranger is meeting the person they’re marrying only after the wedding invite arrives.
So I won’t even try to explain all those feelings.
What I will say is this: the hardest part of living in the Netherlands is the distance from my family.
It takes me 24 hours to go home, door-to-door. I know I made this move for selfish reasons, and these are the natural consequences. But there isn’t a day I don’t wish for the alternate life, where I’m the heir to some massive family business that can sustain us for generations, freeing me to fulfill my dream of being a loving, devoted stay-at-home daughter.
That’s not the reality though, so here I am, seeking employment in the first world. And sometimes the cost of that choice feels heavier than the benefits.
And yet, in the middle of that heaviness, I’ve learned to build community differently. Not out of convenience, but out of intention.
I’ve learned I like to throw dinner parties, or call over friends for casual meals. I like tagging along on errands, from dropping parcels, grocery shopping, all the “nothing” things that feel like everything when you do them together. I like concerts after work, late-night ice cream in the summer, 5km neighborhood walks that don’t feel like 5km because we’re yapping away.
I’ve also discovered the million little things I don’t like doing. And strangely enough, I find that even more rewarding. Testing my limits and drawing lines has made me feel more grounded than constantly chasing novelty.
If community here has taught me to enjoy the present, my relationship has pushed me to plan for the future. We hit the 8-year mark this year, congratulations to us. Apparently that's the point when both sets of parents start asking if we’ll get married or just stay boyfriend-girlfriend forever, European-style.
I threw the question back at him. I’m modern, but not so progressive that I’d propose (lol). He’s smart and funny, so of course he comes back with a counter-offer: parallel planning. He’ll handle the proposal, but can we also start wedding planning so we don’t miss the window?
So here we are: officially in wedding planning mode. The race is on for who makes the Top 250 of our lives and subsequently, our wedding guest list. (Friends, consider this your gentle reminder to show up around us so we don’t forget you when the invites go out.)
[November 2025 Update: He proposed and it exceeded all expectations. Go Greg!]
But through it all, family is still the anchor back home. That question: “what’s the trigger for us to move back one day?” used to feel abstract. Now it feels closer, more real, even if the answer is still open-ended. Do we wait for aging parents? For kid/s of our own? For the right career or business opportunity? None of it has a clear answer yet.
Maybe that’s the point of this season of life: sitting with the uncertainty, approaching it differently. Building here while keeping ties there. Planning a wedding while quietly asking where we’ll truly put down roots. Wondering if “quality over quantity” is enough, or whether we need to redefine what those words mean for us now.
There’s no neat, tidy ending. No chapter close. Just the next day and the day after that.
Highlights & Milestones that didn't tie nicely into the themes
• Buying, renovating, and then settling into our apartment in the Netherlands. I can't stand the idea of living in a white, minimalist home and am doubly pleased my partner felt the same. The downside: we can’t take ID pictures at home anymore because there’s no white wall left.
• Finally figuring out the right workout rhythm for me (aka climbing stairs while reading a book) after years of false starts. Still allergic to stretching and yoga and anything that involves a ball, but at least I can do 7 flights now without feeling like throwing up.
• Alternating between career improvement books and Goodreads’ Best Romance nominees, so I’m finishing more than 12 books a year. Turns out reading about other people’s messy love lives is very soothing in between learning about how to better manage my (and my students’) careers.
• Keeping up the yearly friends’ trip tradition, this time to Split, Croatia. Previously Basel, Switzerland and Liège, Belgium. Still proving my theory right: boring cities solo = magical with the right people.
• The Bumpy Career turned 10. What started as a blog post during my internship days now has students from around the world. (And I mean around the world, from Australia, UK, Canada to Dubai, Vietnam, and Nigeria.) It feels surreal.
• Reaching the point where I don’t need Google Lens in Dutch groceries or restaurants. I can identify most ingredients by name already which sounds like a tiny win, but to me it's like planting a flag on a new planet. Feel free to ask me anytime to find the chicken liver at the Dutch grocery store for you.
• Discovering I’m terrible at building furniture, but my partner is basically Bob the Builder. He built everything in the house: lamps, bedframes, even the sofa. My role: buy it and deal with the delivery guys. His role: assemble it all with me standing an appropriate distance away. (The 1 time I helped, I did it wrong and he told me to put the screwdriver down.)
These milestones don’t sound flashy on paper, but they’re meaningful to me. And that’s reason enough to celebrate and throw a party.
My Chinese friend heard me once say I miss calamansi pie, so for my birthday, she decided to make it from scratch. It’s a near perfect match to Manam’s calamansi pie.
Do not let anyone ever tell you that renovating an apartment is easy. It is hard enough on its own, but it’s even harder when all the suppliers speak 1 language and your contractor speaks another language and you don’t speak any of those languages. Do not attempt this!!
And I got engaged! In Bath, UK which is the setting of my favorite Jane Austen novel.
What's Next
Honestly I don't know. I didn't expect to make it this far and get this much done. So I'm going to just put audacious goals here that I'll hopefully work towards in the next 2 years until the next Life Update.
Here’s a snippet at what’s on the 2027 vision board: ambitious, slightly ridiculous, but all things that would make me proud to look back on.
• Write a book on first-principles career strategy.
• Plan and pull off a wedding that feels true to us. (Bonus points if it’s still talked about 5 years later).
• Do a long-haul trip to somewhere I’ve always written off as “too far”. (Probably South America. Or Antarctica. Or both?)
• Get the Dutch passport and finally understand at least half of what people are saying around me. (What trips me up is that they have accents per city. How do you develop an accent per city???)
• Grow TBC to be equal to my current salary. (Fighting words, I know. I’m damn good at salary negotiating and this number has never stayed stagnant so the race is on.)
And one thing I hope to never achieve: running a marathon. I’ll happily cheer my friends on from the midway mark (there’s too many people at the finish line), but that's it. Not every goal needs to be about suffering.
Most of these goals require things I've never done before. Which means I'll probably need to learn from people who have. If you're at that stage too, figuring out what's next and how to get there, let's talk.
✨ That’s where I’m at in September 2025. By the time I write the next Life Update, I’ll probably be married.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with my chaos.
And if you want my tailored advice on pulling off your own version of this (or clarity on your next career move), you can book a 1-hour call with me here.