When Adriel Sanders first visited Paris in 2017, she immediately felt at home, she says.
“It instantly clicked. I was like, ‘This is your home. This is where you’re supposed to be in the world and this is where you will always be. I knew I had to move to Paris,” Sanders tells CNBC Make It.
Sanders returned to Paris several times while continuing to work as a general counsel for a publicly traded company in Washington, D.C. At the time, she was earning $286,656 a year and lived in a studio apartment where she paid approximately $3,000 a month in rent, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
“I didn’t enjoy the work and the expectation to work all the time and I will probably be one of the only attorneys who says it, but I don’t think it’s that intellectually stimulating,” Sanders says. “I was deeply and truly miserable at the very depths of my little heart and little soul. I knew that it was not sustainable.”
Sanders says she felt like Paris was home the moment she first visited.
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Three years after that initial trip to Paris, Sanders quit her job, broke her lease and started the process of obtaining a French visa. She landed in the city the day before France closed its borders due to the covid-19 pandemic.
“The slowness of the world meant that France sped up. We were all operating from the same level of confusion, so the good thing is that I was confused by what was happening, but so was everyone else,” Sanders says. “I arrived the day before the lockdown, so there was no one and it was a complete dystopia.”
When Sanders first moved, she lived in a few short-term rentals before signing a lease for a one-bedroom apartment. She paid 1,550 euros or $1,815 USD and lived in it for two years. Since moving out of that apartment, Sanders has been living in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment where she pays $2,540 USD a month in rent.
Since Sanders signed a lease for what is called an “unfurnished apartment,” it meant that she had to spend money buying her own kitchen cabinets, stove and washing machine. She estimates that she spent about $5,000 on the kitchen and close to another $10,000 to make the place really feel like home.
When Sanders first moved in, the rent was $2,319. It has since increased to $2,540.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
In addition to rent, Sanders spends, on average, about 933 euros or $1,093 USD on expenses, which include household bills like cable, internet, renter’s insurance, dry cleaning, electricity and gas, private health insurance, groceries, and a Navigo transportation card.
She also has an annual subscription to the Louvre, which costs 95 euros a year and a second museum card that can add an extra 50-100 euros a year to her expenses. Sanders also pays 1,069.20 euros, or approximately $1,252, annually to a guarantor service, which allows her to continue renting in France.
Now that Sanders has been living in her apartment for over three years, she plans to revisit her search for a home to buy. She started looking two years ago, but stopped after touring many places that she felt were overpriced.
“With the advice of friends who have recently purchased in Paris, I am determined again. Finding the right place will be a grind, but I am tired of renting in Paris,” Sanders says. I desperately need more space and I want to get a dog.”
When Sanders rented her two-bedroom apartment she spent about $5,000 getting it ready for use.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
While Sanders wants to set down roots in Paris, she also hopes to eventually buy a home in the countryside too.
“I don’t think it would be nice to put a dog like a golden retriever in central Paris, where he doesn’t have a backyard, so that is my dream,” she says.
Living in France has also inspired Sanders to finally pursue her real dreams of starting her own fashion brand, Adriel Felise. Sanders says she’s taking $200,000 from her business account and $70,000 from her personal savings and putting that towards her new business venture. That money and her income from content creation is helping fund her dreams.
“I love fashion and I’m so happy that I can now just say that and be upfront about it because for so long it was treated as something that made me less serious,” she says.
Sanders is self-funding the production of her initial samples and prototypes, but hopes to raise at least $2 million and have her 10-piece collection ready for launch in 2026.
Sanders doesn’t plan on moving back to the United States.
Jai Nima Idowu of JADO Images
When Sanders was working as a lawyer, she used to take walks around her office building and dream about starting a fashion line, and now seeing it come to life still doesn’t feel real.
“There’s still a part of me that strives and pushes for more so I don’t know if I’m fully ready to say I’m proud but I feel like I’m actually happy, which I wasn’t for so long and that’s huge for me,” she says.
“My goal and desire is to inspire women — particularly black and brown women — to just pursue their dreams and goals. When they do it does not matter. The most important thing is that they be bold, move wisely, and just go for it.”
Since Sanders has been in France for about five years now, she says she doesn’t think she’ll ever go back to living in the United States.
“I can’t live there. I can’t function like that. I can’t go back to corporate America and holding my tongue every five seconds every day,” she says. “I wish I had had the courage to move sooner. I wish I had the courage to do it after my first semester of law school to either drop out or enroll in business school and do something different that would have given me more options.”
Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to 1.17 USD on July 23, 2025. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.
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