Day: August 10, 2025

• Cheryl Orlov, 55, loved living in California but longed to explore new cultures, food, and people.
• In 2023, Orlov moved to Albania after discovering the country through a travel podcast.
• In Albania, she feels more relaxed, pays less for housing, and has never been happier.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Cheryl Orlov, a 55-year-old from Los Angeles who moved to Albania in 2023. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I spent 23 years living in the Los Angeles area, where my home was two miles from Redondo Beach. I owned a furniture company for 32 years, built from the ground up, and worked very hard to create a comfortable lifestyle for myself.

I had a full life in Los Angeles. I built a good community of friends and was very active, especially in endurance sports. I’m a lover of traveling and experiencing different cultures, and I’ve always said that the city is a great place to live if you can’t travel the whole world.

While I was happy living in Los Angeles, I still had an aching wanderlust.

I used to travel abroad one to two times a year and was satisfied for a while. But back in 2016, I went to Africa for a charity trip. I visited Uganda, Morocco, and South Africa, and during my visit, something in me switched: I was ready to move abroad, I just had to figure out how.

A few things stood in my way. I owned a couple of properties and had a full time business. But as the years passed — it took about seven — I started unloading my properties. I downsized my home, and I even began to dissolve my business, all for the dream of leaving the US.

I found out about Albania on a podcast

In April 2022, I was listening to an expat podcast, and a blogger being interviewed said to check out Albania. I’ve been to all seven continents and almost 50 countries, and Albania wasn’t even on my radar back then.

I started doing a lot of research. I watched videos on YouTube and even interviewed female solo travelers about their experiences in Albania. And in September 2022, my friend and I took a scouting trip there.

During my scouting trip, I hired a driver who took us from city to city. We wound up in Tirana, the capital of Albania. Initially, I did not want to live there based on what I had read online, but when I was physically there, I knew right away that this was my place.

Albania’s culture and history are so rich — it’s mind-blowing. Historically, it has strong influences from the Ottoman Empire. The country broke free from communism in the 1990s and is still developing.

Albania is very similar to California topographically. Although it’s a small country, it features the Albanian Alps and coastlines along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas.

I love the people of Albania; their hospitality is unmatched. They make you feel like you’re right at home and like your family.

I feel safe and comfortable where I live

After the scouting trip, I flew back to the US and started making arrangements to move. I sold almost everything I owned and continued dissolving my business.

I didn’t need to apply for a visa to visit Albania because Americans are allowed to stay for up to one year without one. After that, if we leave the country for 90 days, the one-year period resets when we return.

I found an apartment in Tirana, the capital city, by word of mouth on a Facebook group. An American had raved about the landlord, who had lived in America for six years.

I was moving my whole life to an unfamiliar place, so it was important to be in a good and safe area, in a building where people spoke English, and where I liked the landlord.

In September 2023, I moved to Tirana. I live in the city, but in a quiet neighborhood where a lot of Albanians live — immigrants and expats tend to live closer to the city center.

The building I live in is a five-unit villa where each level has its own apartment. I live on the ground level and have a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. I have a good relationship with my landlord, and I wouldn’t say that’s the norm here, but I pay €400 ($466) a month.

My other bills are pretty affordable, too. I usually spend €20 to €30 ($23-$35) a week on food at the local market, and going out to dinner typically costs between €15 and €20 ($17-$23). Taking the bus costs about $0.50, and taxis are usually around €5.

I’ve never felt more like myself

Learning Albanian is tough, but one of the biggest challenges to living here is how often expats come and go. I’ve noticed that people usually stay for a year or two, then move on.

The impermanence is difficult for me — it’s just hard to keep saying goodbye. When I was in California, I didn’t have to worry about that as much. So, it’s something I’ve had to adjust to.

I don’t know if Albania will be my forever place, but still, I’m really happy here. I didn’t realize how stressed I was in America until I moved to Tirana.

While living here, I’m traveling more. From Albania, I can easily fly anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia — right now, I’m in Malaysia. I’ve been experiencing so many different cultures, and while that’s not for everyone, I feel like a more complete person.

Earlier this year, I finished dissolving the business. I’m not worried about being unemployed abroad, because I’ve been saving and building up my retirement since my 30s. While I don’t want to retire, I’m financially in a position to do so if I choose.

I do go back to the US from time to time to visit my friends and my family — my relationships are really important to me — but I don’t ever see myself moving back full-time.

I definitely wanted to leave the US earlier, but I believe everything happens for a reason. I wouldn’t do anything differently. I believe it’s never too late to start traveling or move to somewhere new.

• When recruiter Kathy Lavinder posts open roles on job boards, she gets a “tsunami” of résumés.
• She recruits for niche fields, and estimates that 80% of the applicants she gets aren’t qualified.
• The number of résumés she gets highlights how hard the job search has become for some.

Veteran recruiter Kathy Lavinder now thinks twice before posting jobs.

She’s spent 25 years finding candidates for a narrow niche: corporate security, intelligence, and investigative roles — jobs that require very specific skills. Most people aren’t qualified to do them.

That doesn’t stop them from applying.

A few years ago, Lavinder might have gotten a couple of hundred résumés for a role. Now, almost any job she puts up gets more than that, and sometimes more than 500, she told Business Insider.

“It has been getting worse every single time I post something,” she said. “It used to be I’d get a robust response, and now I get a tsunami.”

The reasons aren’t hard to spot. The job market has cooled, especially for desk jobs, and many people’s searches are taking longer. On top of that, artificial intelligence tools can churn out custom résumés — and catapult them to employers — in seconds.

The trouble with ‘security’

Lavinder, the founder and executive director of SI Placement, also faces a challenge that’s specific to her industry: the word security itself.

She recruits for physical security roles — the kind where people protect corporate facilities, often in person. That’s distinct from cybersecurity. Yet you wouldn’t know it from her inbox.

When Lavinder posts a job, she’ll put in all caps that it’s NOT a cyber role. Yet, she said, she still gets flooded with IT résumés.

“I mean, I’m shouting at them: ‘This is not a cyber role,'” she said.

That mismatch is one reason Lavinder estimates that when she goes public with a job, about 80% of the applicants she gets aren’t qualified. As the number of résumés she gets has shot higher in recent years, she said, the effort required to slog through them often isn’t worth it.

“I really don’t like to use hyperbole, but I feel like I’m drowning sometimes in candidates that really aren’t responsive to the job post,” Lavinder said, referring to the number of people who aren’t suited for a position.

Résumé FOMO

Not posting jobs publicly helps her avoid the flood — but it comes with its own risk: missing the ideal candidate.

That person might not be job-hunting but instead “keeping their head down” at their current job, she said.

“They might love this opportunity,” Lavinder said. “They’re the ones who are going to miss out.”

She still occasionally posts open roles because she worries she’ll overlook someone good. Lavinder has joked with colleagues that going public with a job post is an act of “temporary insanity.”

She’ll then predict that, “by tomorrow, I will be complaining to you about the deluge, and I will pull it down.”

Unlike in years past, when Lavinder wants to fill a role today, she’ll often contact people individually through texts, emails, LinkedIn messages, or by picking up the phone. The more bespoke approach is a return to how she used to do recruiting, she said.

“It’s like throwing me back a decade or more in terms of my process,” Lavinder said. “Is this progress?”

‘It’s not Taylor Swift’

Lavinder uses platforms like LinkedIn to maintain ties with those in the fields she recruits for. She often posts career advice and about workplace trends. That can be fruitful, Lavinder said, because she has some 37,000 followers on LinkedIn.

“It’s not, you know, a million. It’s not Taylor Swift,” she said. But, “it’s a substantial population and a precise niche.”

Many of them are interested in the unique industries she traverses, Lavinder said. Yet even though she would like to share more about specific roles with her amassed network of industry insiders, Lavinder often hesitates.

“I think they would appreciate if I could occasionally pull back the curtain and actually tell them what I’m working on,” she said. “Instead, I’m pulling the curtain shut more and more.”

Do you have a story to share about your job search? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.

• After over a decade, Edward Wardrip is leaving documentary editing to attend UCLA Law School.
• Documentary and reality TV workers lack union protections, unlike many other film industry sectors.
• Wardrip aims to advocate for gig economy workers’ rights, including healthcare and fair pay.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Edward Wardrip, who worked as a documentary editor for over a decade. He’s planning to attend UCLA Law School to become a labor attorney. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I graduated from college in 2012, which was shortly after the financial crash, but when things were starting to pick up again.

I loved working in documentary. I mostly worked on PBS-style historical documentaries. That’s always been my favorite. It always felt like I was in school, still learning.

My first two mentors were both incredibly talented editors who lived solid, middle-class lives in New York. I was inspired by that.

I think the industry has changed. It was more plausible to have a middle-class life 10 years ago than it is now. But despite documentary and reality TV production increasing over the years, many workers feel like they haven’t reaped the benefits.

I spent the last couple of years fighting to unionize our section of the industry, which has been left behind by other film and TV unions.

Now, at 34 years old, I’m going to law school to learn how to fight for workers like myself.

Movie and TV unions are strong — but documentaries and reality TV are left out

The movie and TV industry is known for its strong unions. But it’s less common for documentary and reality TV projects to have a unionized crew.

People who work on documentaries are seldom given the same protections as those in other parts of the industry. We work long hours and don’t always get overtime pay or healthcare, which is getting more expensive.

It’s upsetting to open a streaming app, see your documentary or a friend’s documentary on the homepage, and know that none of the people who worked on it got healthcare.

The industry unions haven’t always adapted to the gig economy nature of documentary work. Even as documentary filmmaking and reality TV production have expanded dramatically, we rarely have a seat at the bargaining table with traditional unions.

A group of us in the Alliance of Documentary Editors formed an organizing committee. We found the traditional model of flipping one show at a time didn’t work for us. Documentaries are not multiple seasons. By the time you spend months organizing and negotiating a union contract for a documentary crew, it’s over. You’re on to the next thing.

We found out about the non-majority union model, which we thought made more sense for the fast-paced film and TV industry of this era. The organizing campaign is still ongoing. Many documentary filmmakers work on both big projects and small, independent projects. And we wanted to find a way to ensure everyone could have healthcare all the time, not just on the giant studio productions.

It was time for a change

I’ve worked only one union job, for 17 months in 2015 and 2016: “Spielberg,” an HBO documentary about Steven Spielberg. The healthcare was incredible. If there was an issue, you called the union and it was fixed. The claims above say that there is no healthcare for people in documentary films

That was the last documentary union job I’ve seen listed anywhere. I haven’t heard of anyone I know working another one since.

By 2024, my documentary film work was getting really, really scarce. I mean, it was very dead for a lot of people. I had to completely eat through my retirement savings just to stay afloat.

That’s the reality of freelance life. No one’s putting anything into a retirement check for me. I was doing it all myself.

At 34, I looked around and thought, “This doesn’t feel worth it to me anymore.” I felt like I was on a dead-end road and I was never going to be able to retire. And I was still young enough that I could do something else.

But organizing a union energized me. I was passionate about labor law.

I just started studying at night and on the weekends for the LSAT. I did an online class with a bunch of 22-year-olds.

I got a 174 on the LSAT, which is the 98th percentile. UCLA gave me the best offer. And since I already live in Los Angeles, I could keep my apartment and stay relatively close to my relatives in California.

There’s a whole class of people in our economy who are doing what we have not typically considered union work.

I want to work and fight for Amazon workers, Whole Foods employees, Uber drivers, YouTube content moderators — you name it.

Our jobs have really changed, and the gig economy has changed, and there’s this huge group of people who deserve healthcare and who are not getting it. I want to fight for them.

• For Love & Money is a column from Business Insider answering your relationship and money questions.
• This week, a reader wonders whether they should rent their daughter’s house after a rocky past.
• Our columnist suggests having an open and honest conversation rather than assuming the worst.
• Have a question for our columnist? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

Dear For Love & Money,

In the past couple of years, I’ve gone through some rough patches with my health, work, and housing. After being displaced from my apartment due to a fire, my daughter allowed me to move in with her and my 5-year-old grandson. I watched my grandson after school the entire 2023-2024 academic year.

In the summer of 2024, my daughter told me she was moving into an apartment and wanted to sell her house. She knew I’d applied for Social Security disability benefits, but wouldn’t allow me to live in her house while waiting to get approved. I became homeless for six months, during which time she never contacted me.

At the end of 2024, I was approved for my disability benefits, and my daughter said I could rent her house for $800 a month. Am I wrong for renting her house?

Sincerely,

Abandoned Parent

Dear Abandoned,

I want to start by answering your question about whether you’re wrong for renting from your daughter. Simply put, no.

Accepting your daughter’s generosity and renting from her isn’t wrong. A little relational compromise is better than sleeping in your car. But it’s clear that your question goes beyond the logistical issue of renting from your daughter and gets at deeper interpersonal tensions that may have started long before she kicked you out.

I don’t know your daughter, and I don’t know why she made the decisions she did. From the tone of your letter, it seems that the part that stung the most for you wasn’t her decision to only allow you to live with her as long as you could contribute something, but her silence in the interim. The only way to clear things up between the two of you is to talk to her about it.

On the surface, your daughter kicking you out while you waited for your Social Security to come through looks heartless, but I’d encourage you to look deeper. Focus less on how her choice impacted you, and more on what motivated that choice. A daughter who gave you a place to stay when you had nowhere else to go and is now renewing that offer isn’t heartless. Perhaps there’s something else going on.

She may have been experiencing shame or embarrassment that her circumstances forced her to make such a hard choice. Maybe you inadvertently did something to upset her, and she needed those six months to process and move forward. Perhaps she was dealing with personal issues such as a custody battle, financial troubles, or a bad relationship, and because she recognized how much you were struggling, she didn’t want to burden you with it. Maybe she holds deep-seated feelings of hurt or anger from your past interactions or how you raised her, which she’s still struggling with.

This is all wild speculation on my part since I have no idea why your daughter let you be homeless for six months without speaking to you, but it doesn’t seem like you do either, and the only way to find out is by having an open and vulnerable conversation with her, without being defensive.

If you confront her with accusations of abandonment and all the ways she hurt you, you are unlikely to get clarity or comfort. Instead, get curious about what is going on in her life, and ask her how you can help.

There is an order we often expect from life: caring for our kids for 18 years, enjoying the next few decades as friends and equals, and then, as age and circumstance take away our independence, being cared for by our children. There is nothing wrong with this script; in fact, the mutual care and loving service it outlines is beautiful. But as you reach the chapter where your child takes care of you, it’s important to remember that they will always be your child, and you will always be their parent.

When our lives become as tumultuous and stressful as it sounds like yours has been, it’s natural that we turn our energy inward and focus solely on our survival. For the people in our lives who rely on us, however, this can feel like abandonment. Ensuring they don’t feel this way requires us to stay attuned to their lives, even as we struggle with our own.

Your daughter may be standing on her own two feet just fine, but having her parent care enough to check in and offer their support in whatever way they can will always have the same impact as a warm hug. Watching your grandson after school was an excellent way you did this. Offer to renew this care while you pay rent, not as a barter with your daughter, but as a way to demonstrate that she can always count on your love.

Try not to assume the worst of your daughter. Try not to assume anything at all. Instead, focus on what she needs from you and the health of your relationship.

Whether your daughter eventually decides to sell the house and leave you on your own again or not, you can still maintain your relationship with her. By remembering that’s the most important thing, you can ensure that no matter what life throws at either of you, you’ll always have one another to carry you through.

Rooting for you,

For Love & Money

Looking for advice on how your savings, debt, or another financial challenge is affecting your relationships? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.