Who am I ?

Hi, I'm Robin Adams, a New Zealander married to a Frenchy living in France. I made the choice to change radically my lifestyle in 2018 after much long and deep reflection and consideration.

I discovered that my adventure to change my lifestyle interested a lot of people around me and I would like to share the application and process to help other people find the solution and courage to make the same change in their lives.


I would love to help you with your lifestyle change!

The trigger factor

Passing the 40 year mark, I started to question whether I wanted to continue my career as I had done up until that point. I had the growing desire for a change towards independence and to work differently in the second half of my professional life. I had often dreamed of setting up my own business. I wanted also to look for ways to spend more time with my family, to invest more time in being in nature and in passion for sport.

I needed to find alternative solutions to live a happier and simpler life.

Getting started and discovering the evolution process

Being a structured engineer, I decided to build an application to support my thinking and over time this application was evolved to allow me and Sylvie to analyze all financial aspects of our financial lives. We were able to see if it was indeed possible to ‘live differently’.


Our initial simulations were scary and indicated that any change of lifestyle was not possible. There was a strong impression that sticking to the current lifestyle was our best plan. Little by little however, many ideas and solutions were tested, excluded or included in the lifestyle change plan and eventually an acceptable plan was finalized.


The plan had been evolved and digested and ripened over a long period of time, and tested in all aspects, as such the initial fear of jumping into an unknown void had diminished to a point where excitement had taken over knowing that it was possible to make the desired lifestyle change that we dreamed of.

Managing the risks

As we are super cautious in nature, we tried to test all possible scenarios that they could think of.
To name a few:

  • If our investments failed?
  • If one of them got sick or worse?
  • The impact of skyrocketing fuel costs due to global warming?
  • Possible increased tax rates to support the worlds aging populations?
  • If our plans to generate income didn’t work out?

Building confidence in the lifestyle change plan

This testing process over a long period also had a strong fear calming effect on us. As each scenario was tested and either discarded as not having a major impact, or taken into account and planned for, confidence grew in our plan.


We knew that it was not possible to plan for every eventual outcome in the future, but we did discover that it was possible to project towards a future with a certain confidence around the most important impacting factors, knowing that we had a Plan B, or even a Plan C if needed.


We were able to build a lifestyle change plan that was more and more solid, and we become more and more confident in our ability to be able to actually change our lifestyle.

Feedback from peers

Even if the fear was now pretty much under control, it still existed and we needed some trusted feedback so we started to share with our closest, friends and family members.


During this feedback seeking period, the surprising feedback we got, was not on the content of our analyses, but on the actual application built to do the analysis and simulations. Over and over again, strong expressions of interests were made along the lines ‘I would like to use that App’ or ‘I know a lot of people who would pay for that value you have created’.


Our initial reaction to this feedback was to ignore it and to not consider it too seriously, but again over time that little voice at that back of the mind urged deeper investigation.


We started to investigate if it was possible to create a business around our lifestyle change App.

Alignment with world trends

During those investigations it didn't take long to see that there are many trends in today's world that show that there are and will be more and more people looking to change their lifestyles:

  • According to La SlowLife, 78% of people look to change their lifestyle at some stage during their career (but not many take the steps to actually make a change)
  • The digitization of the working world that will force many people to re-think their careers
  • The Slowlife trend - how can I reduce the pressure of life on my and my family so that I can benefits more what is important to me (family, passions, nature, etc)
  • Moving away from today's society high consumption model. Looking to live simpler with less and contribute to protect our planet
  • Millenial generation having different lifestyle expectations from society
  • The FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early)

Desire to help others

The realization was that many others will be looking to take the same steps towards lifestyle changes that we were looking to do ourselves. At this point we decided to centre our lifestyle change around the project to launch the ‘EFILYM’ application.


We had the idea to inspire and help as many others as possible to find the courage and confidence to go beyond the desire to make a change in their lifestyle and to actually do it - Just like we finally did!