SAIRA HAYATI MOVED TO MALAYSIA: THE KENT MORTGAGE BROKER WHO DID THE MATHS, LEFT ENGLAND AND BOUGHT A FIVE-BEDROOM HOME IN MELAKA OUTRIGHT
Cover: Saira Hayati (photo: Saira Hayati / sairahayati.com); A Famosa (Porta de Santiago), Melaka, 13 January 2014 (Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons). Background: the Melaka riverfront at night, 2009 (photo: McKay Savage, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons), darkened.
She spent 25 years in British property and money. Then she worked out what her life cost, and moved more than 10,000 km to change the answer.
This is not a story about Ipoh. It is a story about what Ipoh already has.
You have paid for a plate of kai si hor fun and a glass of white coffee in Ipoh Old Town, and barely looked at the change.
Somewhere in Kent, in the south of England, a mother of five once looked at numbers like that and decided to move her whole life to Malaysia.
Who is Saira Hayati? Saira Hayati is a British property and finance content creator, born in Gravesend, Kent, England, a former estate agent and mortgage-brokerage director who runs the "Make Money Make Sense" channels and moved to Melaka, Malaysia, in 2024, where, by her own account, she bought a five-bedroom home outright. She has no known family tie to Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia.
In short: a Kent mortgage broker did the sums on her own life, and the sums said Malaysia.
THE TEA GIRL AT THE FRANKING MACHINE
Saira grew up, she has said in a podcast interview, in Strood, in the Medway towns of Kent, the third of her parents' children. Her mother had come to Britain from Pakistan, from a family of Afghan origin, and became a businesswoman in her own right.
Saira started working at 14: agency jobs, shifts at a supermarket, and picking strawberries and raspberries at a farm she and her friends cycled to.
Her first office job was at an insurance broker in Gravesend. She was, in her own words, the tea girl, and she ran the franking machine for the post. Premiums were still worked out by hand, from a points table in a book.
Remember that detail. The girl who did the post would one day be telling hundreds of thousands of people what to do with their money.
350 PROPERTIES, THEN 2008
From insurance she moved into estate agency, then into mortgages at Barclays, then into business for herself. With a friend, she opened her own estate agency. After they sold it, she opened a mortgage brokerage.
Her website lists the firms: Orange Property Services for sales, lettings and property management, and Mansion Mortgages, a brokerage in Gravesend. She describes herself as CII-qualified, with a financial planning background.
By 2008, she was a director of a property management agency, looking after a professional portfolio of 350 properties, and had around ten properties of her own.
Then the credit crunch hit.
She has described the fear of falling into negative equity, and having to "tighten the purse strings" on her family's finances. That included, she says, taking her children out of private school.
It is the setback that shaped everything after it. She says she has lived through four major recessions, and that 2008 taught her to prepare for the next downturn before it arrives.
But the next turn in her story did not come from a bank. It came from her own children.
"PEOPLE ARE CHARGING THOUSANDS FOR WHAT YOU KNOW"
By now her children were old enough to work in her office. They told her she was not really on social media, only on Facebook. And they told her something else: there were people online charging thousands of pounds for courses on the things she already knew.
"Tell me more," she remembers saying. Not out of greed, she insists, but out of shock. She had worked in a regulated industry all her life. Who were these people, unregulated, handing out money advice?
So, by 2021, she was posting it herself.
It worked. Her verified Instagram account, @sairahayati_, now shows hundreds of thousands of followers, and her website puts her total following at more than 845,000.
She is frank that she likes the numbers. "To me, that's an achievement," she said in one long interview. What she says she loves most is a stranger telling her a post helped them.
And one post kept coming back to the same subject: what life in Britain really costs.
THE SUM THAT POINTED TO MELAKA
Saira had always run holidays like a spreadsheet. Years earlier, she says, she bought a small apartment in Turkey for her family because the sums worked out cheaper than paying for two or three holidays a year.
By then, her 22-year marriage had ended. She wanted somewhere hot, where she could work remotely and focus on her faith: a Muslim country with sunshine, good food, beaches and the sea. Someone suggested Malaysia. She went, and says she fell in love straight away.
She chose Melaka for the price, and because it was a quiet town. She bought in a new-build estate with a pool, a gym and a shop.
Her own figures, as she has shared them with the British press:
- In Kent, her mortgage was £1,400 a month for a four-bedroom detached house.
- In Melaka, she bought a 3,700 sq ft, five-bedroom, six-bathroom home outright for £165,000, helped by a good exchange rate in December 2023.
- Her monthly household budget in England, she estimates, was about £3,612 to £3,929. In Malaysia, about £1,788 to £1,874.
- A two-hour massage, she says, costs her £20. She has one every week.
"The problem is in England no matter how much you earn it's not enough," she said.
She also reportedly sold properties from her personal portfolio before leaving, and put more than £100,000 into gold held in a vault in Singapore, as a safety net for her family.
She did go back to England for a time, on a visit. In her own words, on a podcast recorded during that stay, the reason was family. Her mother, who had had heart surgery five years earlier, had gone back into hospital with similar symptoms. Saira also had some financial affairs in England that needed sorting out.
She called it a return visit. When the interviewer asked her to choose, London or Malaysia, she answered in one word: "Malaysia." And Malaysia is where she lives today.
By October 2026, she was telling British reporters that she lives in Melaka with her youngest child, a daughter, has remarried, and saves, by her estimate, about £2,141 a month. Her older children still live and work in England, and she says she is working to rebuild her time with them.
WHAT IPOH ALREADY HAS
Saira Hayati chose Melaka, not Ipoh. But read her shopping list again: a quiet town, a home with a pool, good food, sunshine and friendly people, at a fraction of what life costs in England.
Every family in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, will recognise that list. Many of us were born into it.
She flew halfway round the world for the life we take for granted. The question is not whether that life is good. It is what we do with it.
THE MILLIONAIRE LESSON
As the founder of Ipoh – The City of Millionaires, here is what I want every student, parent and young entrepreneur to take from Saira Hayati.
She did not get free by earning more. She got free by knowing her numbers. The 2008 crash taught her to build a safety net first, and her own children showed her that what she already knew was worth sharing.
Know your numbers. Build your safety net. Then share what you know.
Would you ever move for a lower cost of living, or is Ipoh already that place for you? Tell us
She did the maths on her own life, and the answer was a long way from home. Their story started elsewhere. The next one could start in Ipoh.
This story is part of Lessons for Ipoh, our City of Millionaires heritage series. At Rochford's International School in Ipoh, we believe history, character and critical thinking are best learned through real stories, including the stories of our own city.
Stories in this series are shared for informational and educational purposes. Where accounts differ or rest on legend, press retellings or a person's own claims, we say so. We respect all races, religions and cultures, and we do not represent or endorse any political party or movement.
