diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index 54abbb56..2df91978 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -7,7 +7,8 @@ Authors@R: c(
     person("Aaron", "Lun", role = "ctb"),
     person("Mohamed Nadhir", "Djekidel", role = "ctb"),
     person("Yuhan", "Hao", role = "ctb"),
-    person("Dirk", "Eddelbuettel", role = "ctb")
+    person("Dirk", "Eddelbuettel", role = "ctb"),
+    person("Wouter", "van der Bijl", role = "ctb")
   )
 Description: An implementation of the Uniform Manifold Approximation and
     Projection dimensionality reduction by McInnes et al. (2018)
diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index 460d0b8a..15ab621b 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -9,6 +9,9 @@ been.
 continued to return the fuzzy graph in transposed form. Thank you
 [PedroMilanezAlmeida](https://github.com/PedroMilanezAlmeida) for 
 reopening the issue (<https://github.com/jlmelville/uwot/issues/118>).
+* Relative paths could not be used to save a model. Thank you
+[Wouter van der Bijl](https://github.com/Ax3man) for the bug report
+(<https://github.com/jlmelville/uwot/issues/131>) and the suggested fix.
 
 # uwot 0.2.2
 
diff --git a/R/uwot.R b/R/uwot.R
index 07eb462a..d8e56776 100644
--- a/R/uwot.R
+++ b/R/uwot.R
@@ -3956,9 +3956,9 @@ save_uwot <- function(model, file, unload = FALSE, verbose = FALSE) {
 
       # archive the files under the temp dir into the single target file
       # change directory so the archive only contains one directory
+      tmp_model_file <- abspath(file)
       tsmessage("Changing to ", mod_dir)
       setwd(mod_dir)
-      tmp_model_file <- abspath(file)
       tsmessage("Creating ", tmp_model_file)
 
       # #109: Windows 7 tar needs "--force-local" to avoid interpreting colon
diff --git a/tests/testthat/test_saveload.R b/tests/testthat/test_saveload.R
index dbe6d1c6..470f83ed 100644
--- a/tests/testthat/test_saveload.R
+++ b/tests/testthat/test_saveload.R
@@ -339,3 +339,42 @@ test_that("save-load nndescent", {
     unlink(mod_fname2)
   }
 })
+
+# 131: can't use a relative path for saving
+test_that("save-load relative path", {
+  set.seed(1337)
+  model <- umap(iris10,
+                n_neighbors = 4, n_epochs = 2, init = "spca",
+                metric = "euclidean", verbose = FALSE, n_threads = 0,
+                ret_model = TRUE
+  )
+  # remember to go back to the original working directory
+  old_wd <- getwd()
+  on.exit(setwd(old_wd), add = TRUE)
+
+  # move to a temp directory for this test
+  test_dir <- tempfile("test_relative_path_")
+  dir.create(test_dir)
+  setwd(test_dir)
+
+  # Test 1: relative path no sub-folders
+  rel_path <- "model.uwot"
+  model <- save_uwot(model, file = rel_path)
+  expect_true(file.exists(rel_path))
+
+  modelload <- load_uwot(file = rel_path)
+  set.seed(1337)
+  resload_trans <- umap_transform(iris10, modelload)
+  expect_ok_matrix(resload_trans)
+
+  # Test 2: Relative path within a sub-folder
+  dir.create("my_folder")
+  rel_sub_path <- file.path("my_folder", "model.uwot")
+  model <- save_uwot(model, file = rel_sub_path)
+  expect_true(file.exists(rel_sub_path))
+
+  modelload <- load_uwot(file = rel_sub_path)
+  set.seed(1337)
+  resload_trans <- umap_transform(iris10, modelload)
+  expect_ok_matrix(resload_trans)
+})