Meet Chris and Jas
Hey, ya’ll! Chris and Jas, here. It’s a pleasure to meet you. We’re a couple of US expats living our best lives in beautiful Costa Rica.
We are thrilled you made your way over to our corner of the internet. In our humble opinion, you can never have enough friends, fun, or adventure. And when it comes to blogging – you get a front seat ticket to all of these things!
Blogging not only allowed us to pick up and move from San Antonio, TX to Costa Rica in 2021, but it has become an avenue for us to meet interesting people, learn new things, and make money along the way.
We love teaching other bloggers how to find their dreams through blogging because if we can do it, well, so can you!
But we digress. Let us take a step back and tell you how we got here.
About Jasmine
I come from a big family of 6 siblings in Cleveland, OH where our parents always encouraged creativity. I majored in apparel merchandising in college which I enjoyed at the time.
But upon graduating college I realized that a career in fashion was not all I expected it to be. I had a degree in fashion and no idea what career I wanted to pursue.
Luckily, I did have something that gave me joy as a career choice, and that was writing. I did some freelance writing in college making a few bucks here and there for websites like Associated Content and Yahoo.com and thought if I could pursue a career where I could continue to be creative through writing I would be golden.
This is what led me to create my first blog, Miss Millennia Magazine, where I not only documented my experience with transitioning from college during a recession into adulthood, but also collecting stories from other millennials who had similar experiences.
I began dating Chris at the time, and he believed in me so much that he was my first and only investor in the blog. 🥰
My blog taught me so much about digital marketing, social media marketing, SEO and so many other things that it led me to a career in Digital Marketing – a career that allows me to pursue both my creativity and my analytical side.
Fast forward 10 years later and my blog has been my rock. It has not only taught me a ton, but it has been a regular source of income for me – and advanced me in my marketing career. My blog regularly brings in between $5,000-$10,000 every month.
And in my blogging success, I have found that the most rewarding part of it is sharing what I know about it. This is what led me to partner with Chris in creating Blogging Money Life to teach creators how to leave their day jobs so they can live life on their terms.
About Chris
Born and raised in the rural town of Monroeville, OH, I have always been an adventure seeker. Being from such a small town with not a lot to do, my friends and I had to create and seek our own thrills.
On top of my lust for adventure, I’ve always been inspired by trailblazers when it came to both life and career.
Coming from a family of travelers, I was well aware that the world is much bigger than my little town. Following in the footsteps of my world-traveling sisters, I decided to enlist in the Ohio National Guard while in college to fulfill my need for thrills and travel.
Between my college schedule and my national guard duties, I was pretty busy. But I also had to pay the bills. So I got a job as an assistant to a custom home builder.
Seeing how my then-boss moved through the business he started, I knew that I wanted to do what he did; build great homes while living life on my terms. He was young with a family and had a daily schedule that focused on not only his work but his family too. I found myself accompanying him to his children’s swim meets after checking in on his rentals and I loved this lifestyle.
I later learned that this idea of living life on your own terms and retiring earlier than the traditional age of 66 was a movement all on its own called F.I.R.E. ( Financial Independence Retire Early). This is what inspired me to learn more about real estate investing.
After meeting Jasmine, I soon realized we both had a drive for living life on our own terms. Before we could move on to the next chapter of our lives together, I was deployed to Afghanistan serving a combat tour from 2011-2012.
Our Story Begins
We met in college in 2009 and have been inseparable ever since. We moved from Ohio to Texas upon Jasmine’s graduation and Chris’ return home from Afghanistan.
Jasmine also shared an interest in the fire movement, and we joined a local real estate investment club which ignited our real estate investing journey.
In 2 short years, we acquired two distressed properties in up-and-coming neighborhoods and turned them into money-making rental properties.
But not all of our business ventures were successful. For example, in 2016, we started a private label company for french presses called El Gato Malo.
While the company lost money for us in the end, we learned a great deal about working with one another and how big a role branding plays in a company’s overall success.
While we sold our very last french press in 2018, we did not let this business failure prevent us from continuing our journey on our road to financial freedom.
Still, the adventure seekers, we got married in Mexico in 2017. And went on to have so many fun, memorable activities. But after the 2020 pandemic, we were again anxious for a change. So we decided to sell nearly everything we owned, including our investment properties, and move to Costa Rica.
If you want to know more about why we decided to move to Costa Rica, check out our video 10 Reasons Why We Decided To Move To Costa Rica From the US.
By this time, Jasmine was already helping other bloggers reach their blogging goals on Miss Millennia Magazine, but she wanted to talk more broadly about all the ways she and Chris have worked together to reach their business and life goals.
And our blog and YouTube channel, Blogging Money Life, was born to showcase more about earning income through nontraditional routes such as blogging and real estate and documenting what a blogging lifestyle looks like, such as our decision to move to Costa Rica.
We get so much joy from helping other people with unconventional aspirations. And to be honest, we started this blog as much for us as we did for creators like you. We like being that coach you need when you feel like quitting because we’ve been there, and we know what it feels like to want to give up. But, with that said, we also know how good it feels to realize the goals you’ve been working towards for a long time coming.
We know you have what you need to achieve the goals you set for yourself. We are confident you can do it.
Because if we can do it, well, so can you!
