From hospitality and healthcare in The Hague to a life of freedom in Costa Rica

If you see us today, you see a life in Costa Rica. Lots of time outdoors, work that runs through the internet, and the space to travel and spend time with our family.

A different life came first. A life of long working weeks, hospitality businesses and a job in healthcare. With a burn-out, a bankruptcy and roughly 300,000 euros of debt.

Our story is about starting over. About discovering that the experience you already have can be valuable outside the work you know. And about building, step by step, an income that gives you more choice in how and where you live.

Today we help others explore those possibilities for themselves and get to work on them. But our wish to live more freely began much earlier.

Before there were children, restaurants and fixed commitments, our life revolved largely around travelling.

We would work for a few months in hospitality, earn some money and leave again. Discover other countries. Decide along the way where we wanted to go next. We travelled the world together and loved having the space to fill our own days.

For Dirk this was familiar. At eighteen he had already set off alone with an Interrail pass, with no plan, all the way to Turkey. At twenty-one he travelled alone to Southeast Asia. Curiosity and wanting to discover things for himself were part of him from an early age.

Together with Muriël he dreamed of a life in which that could carry on. Even once children came along.

Back in the Netherlands, things took a different direction. With our daughter on the way, we settled down. A house, jobs and responsibility. From the people around us came something many will recognise: now it was time to get serious.

We built a life the way it was supposed to be done. Our travel plans and dreams moved to "later" more and more often.

Muriël went to work in healthcare and social work. For more than twenty years she worked with people. She listened, guided and helped others move forward. Helping people was important to her, and it still is.

Dirk became a hospitality entrepreneur in The Hague. With businesses like De Lapsang and Het Heden, he built his life as an entrepreneur. He worked hard, sometimes seventy to eighty hours a week. There were periods when he spent more time in his restaurants than at home with the family.

Having our own business brought responsibility, but left little room. The businesses demanded his presence. The income was tied to the restaurants, and the work never stopped.

Meanwhile Muriël combined her work in healthcare with family life. The pressure kept growing. The freedom we had once enjoyed so much had faded far into the background of our daily lives.

In 2013 Dirk bought a restaurant. In 2014 it went wrong. He lost the restaurant, and roughly 300,000 euros of debt remained.

In that same period Muriël ended up in a burn-out. She could no longer keep doing the work she had given so much of herself to in the same way. She too had to take a fresh look at her future.

We had a family, bills to pay and a heavy financial burden. Money had to be earned. At the same time it became clear that carrying on as before was not a sustainable direction.

So we went looking.

What possibilities were there outside hospitality and healthcare? How could we use our experience in a different way? Could we create an income that depended less on our physical presence in one place?

That search led us to online business in 2014.

We started with no technical head start. Muriël still describes her beginning with one simple detail: she typed with two fingers.

Still, we set out to learn. About creating content, reaching people and building trust. About affiliate marketing: recommending other people's products or services and receiving a commission when a customer comes from it. And about developing and offering our own knowledge and coaching.

We learned how a website, an email list and a clear follow-up can help you stay in touch with interested people. How to understand what people are struggling with and create a fitting offer for them.

It took time to learn these skills and practise them. But results came that changed our daily life.

In 2015 we were able to replace Muriël's healthcare salary with our online income. She no longer had to go back to the working environment where she had got stuck. She took her experience of helping people with her into a new way of working.

In 2016 Dirk sold his last restaurant. The debts were paid off.

There was room to rebuild our life. The online business we had built could also continue outside the Netherlands.

In 2017 we went on holiday to Costa Rica. We got to know the country, the nature and the outdoor life. The question of what it would be like to live somewhere else became more concrete.

An important part of the preparation was already done: we had learned how to earn an income online.

In August 2018 we emigrated to Costa Rica with our family. Our children were thirteen and eight at the time.

We built a home, bought our own plot of land in 2019 and kept developing our business. Costa Rica became the place from which we worked, watched our children grow up and shaped a different daily life.

Life there also consisted of ordinary and sometimes complicated things. Schools, healthcare, housing, transport, cultural differences and new contacts. Our experience of emigrating is about more than the tropical view. We also know the questions and choices behind a move like that.

The income that could come with us gave us the room to take that step.

In the years that followed, and especially during and after the coronavirus period, we received more and more questions from the Netherlands.

How had we changed our life? How did we emigrate? What did we live on? And how could someone start for themselves?

In those conversations the same question kept coming back: how do you organise an income when you want to live somewhere else?

For us that was the most important lesson from our own journey. The online skills we had developed before leaving made our choice possible. We began sharing that experience more and more in videos, trainings, coaching and live meetings.

Over the years we have helped hundreds of people work towards more income, financial room or location freedom. People with different backgrounds and different wishes.

Among our participants are families who moved to Costa Rica, one of whom later moved on to Peru. Three families have since moved to Paraguay. Other participants live in Spain, France and Turkey, among other places.

For others the change is closer to home: an extra source of income, more financial room or a business of their own alongside their existing job. Everyone has their own starting point and their own idea of freedom.

In our coaching, we start with the person. What do you know? What experience do you have? Where do your interests lie? And who could be helped by that?

From there we build a fitting earning model. That could be your own product or training, a service, a paid community or recommending a relevant affiliate product.

The foundation is always the same: understand who you help, offer something valuable and learn how to reach those people. Then you build the tools that let interested people find you and get to know you better.

Dirk brings his entrepreneurial experience and practical knowledge of online marketing, content and systems. Muriël brings her many years of experience in guidance, connection and personal development. She recognises how uncertain it can feel to learn something new, and she helps people see possibilities and take steps.

Together we connect the practical side of business with the person who has to do it.

Over the years we developed and launched several trainings and coaching programmes. In April 2026 we brought our knowledge and experience together under one roof: De Praktijk.

De Praktijk is our Dutch-language community. There we help Dutch-speaking people turn their knowledge, experience, skills or interests into a location-independent online earning model.

De Praktijk is a place to learn and to build. It offers trainings, assignments, live guidance and a community of people who are also taking steps.

Participants work on a clear direction, an audience and an offer. They learn to set up a system with, for example, a website, a funnel and email. And they learn how to reach the right people with content and other forms of visibility.

Personal development is part of it. Learning a new skill can also raise doubts. We know that uncertainty from our own beginning, and we combine our explanations with guidance on carrying things out.

De Praktijk has become our shared life's work. It is where everything we have learned, applied and passed on comes together. This is what we keep building on.

In 2025 Dirk travelled around the world for eight weeks with our son Nick. They flew to Madrid, travelled on to Thailand and went to Nepal. There they walked the Manaslu trek together, with the Larke Pass at more than five thousand metres.

Thailand followed again, and then Tokyo. When it turned out that Nick's sister was in Costa Rica, they decided to fly home via Los Angeles.

The whole trip was made of one-way tickets. Choosing the next destination each time, with room to change plans along the way.

For Dirk, much of the value of what we have built lies right there: being able to spend eight weeks on the road with his son and have experiences together that stay with you.

We also follow our daughter in her own life. We meet in different places around the world. Our home base is in Costa Rica, while work, travel and family can move across borders.

Muriël finds that space in daily life too. In time for her family, the beach, nature and horses. As a volunteer horse-riding guide at the Indiana Horse Project, she combines her love of horses with her commitment to people.

Our freedom takes shape in choices like these. In time we can spend together, work that suits us and the ability to decide for ourselves where we live.

Helping people, taking responsibility and doing what you preach are the foundation of how we want to do business. We believe our work has to be valuable to the people who put it into practice.

That is why we share our experiences openly, explain things clearly and guide people while they build. We know the gap between longing for a different life and taking a first step.

Our own path ran through travel, hospitality, healthcare, financial setbacks and learning all over again. It brought us to Costa Rica and to the work we do together today.

With De Praktijk we help others discover their own possibilities and act on them. So that more people can build an income that leaves room for the life they want to live.