I moved to Portugal from the US. My work-life balance is way better and I never work past 6 p.m.

• Kaitlin Wichmann is an American expat living and working in Lisbon, Portugal.
• Wichmann, a freelance digital marketer, moved to Lisbon from Kansas City, Kansas, in 2022.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kaitlin Wichmann, an American expat living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. Insider has verified her clients with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to Lisbon in 2022 from my hometown of Kansas City, Kansas.

I'd been traveling for a while and was already looking for a place to settle down. When I arrived in Lisbon, I just had a gut feeling that I was meant to stay longer.

Moving here was pretty simple, and it felt like an easy transition. Getting a visa then was slightly harder for me than it is now because I was applying when some travel restrictions were still in place. In the end, I had to hire someone to help me open a bank account before I flew over.

My quality of life is higher here because I feel safe and the city is affordable — the weather is great, too, which is important.

Being self-employed as a freelance digital marketer has allowed me to be more flexible with where and how I work.

I normally work out of coworking spaces around the city, and I use an app called Croissant to book them. It's great because it gives me the opportunity to be surrounded by other people but still be able to work on my own thing. It's nice to have some flexibility and not have to go to the same place every day.

There's more of a work-life balance in Lisbon — even the focus on taking breaks is different. When we go for lunch, we take about two hours. Sometimes it's even longer, and people will go out for an espresso or something like that.

When I lived in the US, most of my coworkers didn't even take lunch, or if we did, we'd take a working lunch. Back home, the mindset is that if you receive an email, you should reply right away. It's very different here, and while that's mostly positive, it can take longer when you're trying to get something done. In Lisbon, everyone goes outside to the park after work, which is also very different.

Right now, all my clients are American, but I just signed a contract with a Portuguese agency, so I'm hoping to have some local clients soon. When I'm interviewing with a potential client or agency, I'm always upfront about living in Lisbon and working Portuguese hours. Over here, the latest I'll ever work is 6 p.m.

It's important for me to set these boundaries. Obviously, it's easier for me because I'm self-employed — a lot of my friends work for American companies, and it's much harder to set those boundaries there.

Sometimes I think I might lose work because of my attitude, but I also think it's worth it because I want to work with the type of people who respect my boundaries.