but it’s also something almost nobody ever does.
Don’t we have like multiple people in this forum who have repatriated themselves?
JT and fossilkid are two that come to mind, and I think one could argue for putting an asterisk on both of those. Who else?
I don’t know how I forgot Ikioi, he definitely counts. SUB is a bit different as he seems to have been moving from place to place (kind of like fossil) rather than settling down somewhere. But maybe CR is that place for him. I didn’t know about Mimosa.
afaik Johnny is the only one who’s done it because of recent events. Everybody else had left their home countries long before.
miliboo too. Although iirc he ran away from the UK, not the US.
It’s neither here nor there, but I once got offered a sports PR job in Guangzhou working for the Asian Games for two or three years, but decided against it. The guy offering the job and trying to convince me to take it used a hilarious approach. He was a devout Christian and he told me that God was telling him I was supposed to take the job. He also told me that Chinese women loved American men and I’d have an easy time “having fun” despite not speaking the language, and reminded me that I’d be making like 2-3 times the average income there and would be rich. Ah yes, God, sex, and money, the classic sales pitch of the full of shit evangelical!
If I recall correctly, this was like $10-12K USD per year, so I was like, “Yeah sure, I’d be ‘rich’ while I was there, but I’d be saving like a couple grand a year, so I’d be broke when I came home anyway.” The other big negative was that there was no program set up for the English speaking employees to learn Chinese, or to integrate at all and meet locals. It was all like “You’ll hang out with the other English speakers, your work will be in English, but when you go out to bars or whatever the local women will throw themselves at you.”
I’m sure that sales pitch worked for some people. I would have been intrigued if the sales pitch was more centered around learning some of the language and the culture.
Best part was that I met the guy hiring through interviewing for another job. They were making me jump through ridiculous hoops and one of them was like getting one of a handful of seemingly random people to respond to an e-mail I sent and give me a recommendation (lol sports media industry), and this guy was one of them. He responded, gave me a recommendation, then tried to woo me over to Guangzhou.
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I am curious how many of these people have children? Moving abroad without kids is way less complicated.
Just a subtle 80% increase in mortgage payment for the same house in 2 years.
Not many have kids. That definitely makes it harder.
4.33% 30yr fixed in 2019 seems sus. Am I crazy? I thought rates were lower than that then.
Had 3.5% on new home in 2019
Refinanced to 2.25% in 2021.
Off the top of my head, SuperUber moved to the Czech Republic and 勢 moved to Japan. A bunch of 22 dudes repatriated to Mexico back in the day IIRC. None of them seem to regret their decisions.
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Yeah, goofy mentioned SUB. He is a bit of a different case as he seems to have moved around quite a bit without actually settling somewhere. That’s a bit different from Ikioi, who I think is the perfect example, but I think it still qualifies for the purposes of the discussion.
Nah. I’m pretty settled in the Czech Republic. Don’t really see a reason to leave.
That said, I wouldn’t say I moved out of America for political reasons. Just seemed that my prospects for an enjoyable life there were more depressing than my prospects elsewhere.
I didn’t realize that you picked it as your settling down place. Where else have you lived? My memory is a bit fuzzy.
I was definitely more nomadic in my 20s and initially intended to return to America eventually.
South Korea - 1 year
China - 2.5 years
Spain - 3+ years
United Kingdom - 2+ years
But up and moving all the time kind of drains you and you’re often starting from square one whenever you do it.
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Why is CR better than those places for you?
For me the top 3 (UK, SK, Spain) are very close. 4th would be CR and 5th would be China.
For South Korea and China, it was that living visa-to-visa is a very unstable way to live a life. To not know if you will be able to live in a country for more than a year really hampers growth and development both personally and professionally. It’s no way to live a healthy life even if that life was quite profitable for me at the time.
For Spain, I felt that I had hit a wall in terms of professional progress. I wanted to get a Master’s which is what led me to the UK.
Honestly, Czech Republic fell into my lap. A salaried job with two months of paid vacation was handed to me on a silver platter. All I had to do was live in a beautiful city to get it. From there, I picked up other work along the way that has allowed me to expand professionally into other fields related to my career.
Now, I have no reason to leave.
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Not due to airports, it’s just close enough to the border apparently.
ETA: grunching so not sure if this was already posted or not but here’s my source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/mapping-who-lives-in-border-patrol-s-100-mile-zone
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Bump
Re-titling because more than one applies now.
I’m about to relocate across the country from blue state to blue state but now is feeling like the time to relocate across the ocean.
You have until Jan 2025 until things get really terrible when the Republican majority takes over.