I Moved to Dublin, Ireland

Last updated on February 9th, 2022 at 04:25 pm

The hardest part of selling a home and moving a family of 5 overseas wasn’t the machinations or logistical Jenga:

• “What about your house?” Sold it to my brother
• “What about the kids?” Enrolled in daycare
• “What about work? Taxes?” The work situation was negotiated at the hiring phase. Taxes were… confusing. And expensive. I bought an hour from a tax consultant, so now it’s less confusing (still expensive though)

The hardest part was answering: why move in the first place? 

Arming yourself with a blisteringly powerful why can make the goal a foregone conclusion; the rest is details. It reminds me of the last line from the movie, A Most Violent Year. The protagonist thwarts his competitors from putting him out of business, then says to a police officer:

“The result is never in question for me. Just what path do you take to get there?”

It also helps I’ve done this a few different times now.

However, answering why isn’t easy. It’s mental gymnastics to untangle your needs, wants, fears. and emotions from one another, and then draw a straight line from “You Are Here” to “Where You Want To Be.”

To get a better answer, it can help to ask a better question. Instead of asking “Why?” you can ask:

“What am I optimizing for? What am I willing to trade to get it?”

For my family, for this move: we decided to optimize for adventure. In exchange, we were willing to trade financial security. 

Moving to Dublin was an unambiguously expensive tradeoff:

• From a $2,400/month mortgage on a 3bd 2ba house –> to $2,600/month on a 2bd 2ba apartment rental
• Paying taxes in both the US and Ireland
• Earning only $0.85 on the dollar due to currency exchange rates

In your 20s, this is a poor tradeoff. You should focus on optimizing for financial security. There’s no universal definition for financial security, so unofficially: you earn enough to cover your monthly nut (food, clothing, housing) with enough leftover for minor ($2,000 or less) unexpected expenses.

Depending on your circumstances, financial security could sound like a god-given right or a pipe dream. One data point: a 2019 study found that 21% of Americans considered themselves to be financially unhealthy, whatever that means.

Nevertheless, there are multiple paths to achieve financial security. You can, as Scott Galloway puts it, pursue a path to a meaningful career:

“Most successful people, however, burn a great deal of fuel in their twenties and thirties to ascend through a resistant inner space and make the jump to lightspeed. They cover greater ground in their forties and fifties thanks to the velocity established in their first 20 professional years.”

Another path: don’t buy anything and save. Do that for a decade, you’ll reach financial security. Today it’s called FIRE but I called it being a first-generation immigrant.

I was obsessed with financial security by the time I was 14. I owned a copy of “Personal Finance for Dummies” (surprisingly good)! On a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper, I tracked every sweaty $20 bill earned boxing take-out orders, and every dollar stuffed into red envelopes and handed to me. Even when I took risks, like moving out to LA to break into entertainment, the first thing I did was line up a paycheck. It didn’t matter how meager the pay, or how shitty the job. Financial security was a must.

There are countless paths between these two. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, as long as you optimize for financial security first.

Once you’ve achieved financial security, then you’ve reached an interesting crossroads. You can ask yourself: “what should I optimize for next?” Some options:

• Relationships (your current family or finding a partner )
• Hobbies (the quintessential Bushwick beer brewing aficionado comes to mind)
• Health (a Peloton is the new mid-life crisis purchase)
• Career switch (find something you like better. I switched into tech in my 30s – anyone can do it)

All good choices. Or maybe you love the game of making money, and you decide to keep on with that. That’s fine, as long as it’s a conscious decision (more on that below).

Amy and I decided to optimize for adventure. After a few years living in Albany, we realized we weren’t ready for suburban life. Living in Dublin was something we’ve talked about for a decade. It’d be great to do before the kids reached middle school. The timing was right.

While we’re not optimizing for financial security, there’s little YOLO’ing going on here. Financial independence is still the goal, and my plan is to reach that in the next 5 years. I track our finances every day through Tiller. I scan grocery prices like a lioness in the savanna, evaluating where my most efficient meal might be lurking (though between spending Euros and the metric system, I honestly don’t have a clue).

The most important takeaway: what you value evolves over time. Be wary of over-optimizing for one vector and never investing in another. Money vs. relationships is a classic example. If you don’t stop and think about “what do I want to optimize?” it’s easy to get stuck in the hamster wheel of doggedly pursuing financial security when you’ve already reached the point of diminishing returns.

Venture too far and you’ll become the wealthiest single tax-payer with an uber-optimized mega backdoor IRA living in low-CoL rural America, wondering: “What was it all for?”

Sources:

• Photo credit: Normal People, like an Irish Dawson’s Creek but more beautifully shot
• https://finhealthnetwork.org/research/u-s-financial-health-pulse-2019-trends-report/
• https://www.profgalloway.com/advice-to-grads-be-warriors-not-wokesters/