Florence Poirel was earning about $390,000 a year in Zurich, Switzerland, as a senior program manager at Google when she decided to walk away in 2024.
The now-37-year-old wasn’t unhappy with her job. “By the time I left Google, I was absolutely not in a position of burnout,” she tells CNBC Make It . “The team was pleasant. The work was pleasant enough as well.”
What pushed her instead was clarity. “I realized how much quality time with the people I love is the most important,” she says.
That included her partner, Jan, a fellow Googler who is 17 years her senior. After meeting him in 2017, she realized she had to rethink traditional retirement . “I could not just wait for retirement to enjoy my time with him because he would be much older at that time,” she says.
Poirel had always been a diligent saver, but the realization inspired her to start following the FIRE movement — short for “financial independence, retire early” — which emphasizes saving and investing aggressively to leave the workforce early.
“That’s when it hit me that I didn’t need to keep on climbing that ladder. I had reached the point when it was just enough — and I was happy and free to do something else,” she says.
By January 2024, she had saved up about $1.5 million, and in April of that year, she and Jan quit their jobs. Poirel calls her break a “mini-retirement ” — setting aside enough cash to cover 18 months — although she has no firm plans for when, or if, she’ll return to full-time work.
“I’m not particularly antsy about going back to employment,” she says. “I thought that would be by now, but I really enjoy the daily life that we’ve created in this mini retirement.”
Following her own path Poirel’s willingness to make big changes isn’t new. In 2013, she was in a marketing job in Belgium she didn’t like. On the way home after a long week, she told a colleague she felt unfulfilled, and he replied with the French phrase “qui ne tente rien n’a rien” — he who risks nothing has nothing.
The words stayed with her throughout that weekend. Poirel says she realized she needed the “courage to do something different” to be happy.
The following Monday, she quit. She decided to move to Dublin, Ireland — a tech hub in Europe — with no job and no connections. Soon after arriving, she landed a contract role at Google earning about $60,000, working in content safety and moderation, which began her career at the company.
Poirel’s risk paid off. She spent more than a decade at Google, rising steadily through new teams and promotions. In 2017, she transferred from Dublin to Zurich, where she moved into project management and eventually senior leadership roles, raising her salary to $390,000 by 2024.
Once Poirel had reached her goal of $1.5 million in savings in January 2024, it was just a matter of deciding when to make the leap. For someone who describes herself as “risk-averse” when it comes to money, it wasn’t easy to walk away from her high-paying job.
“Saying no to this kind of income can be daunting, for sure,” Poirel says.
But she hasn’t looked back. In mini-retirement, she spends her days swimming in Lake Zurich, providing career coaching for women and traveling abroad with Jan. “I thought I would get bored very easily. But now, it’s been a year and a half and I still haven’t [had] a time of boredom,” she says.
While she might return to work, it will be on her terms, whether that’s working part-time or only doing what she finds fulfilling. Either way, she feels fortunate that she saved enough money to make that choice.
“Life is too short and life is beautiful and it’s too sad to spend most of that time spending it at work when we can spend it in beautiful nature with friends, family, loved ones, and doing things that make us truly happy,” she says.
All amounts are in U.S. dollars, converted from Swiss francs at the OANDA exchange rate of 1 CHF to 1.22 USD on May 31, 2025.
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