We left the US for a better life in Europe - Shirley writes

Hi, I'm Shirley, and this is Wihdaily.

So I guess we’ll go all the way back to when I was born.

I am an American, but I was actually born in China.

I was raised on the west coast of the United States, and I moved to New York City when I was about 19.

My husband and I met while we were both working in New York City.

And after getting married, we decided to buy a house together, because we just thought that that was the next logical thing to do after settling down.

Because of our budget at the time, we had two options really:

One was to buy like a one-bedroom — at most a two-bedroom — apartment (or in New York City, they’re condos, because you don’t actually own the unit — so it’s like a condo).

So we were either able to get a small condo near New York City — not even in Manhattan, probably either in Queens or Brooklyn or even New Jersey — or our other option was to go a little bit outside of the city and find a house.

This was before the pandemic, thankfully, and there were a pretty good amount of houses for us to choose from.

And so we went around and took a look at a few houses.

We ultimately decided on a split-level ranch — and I’ll put a picture here for you guys to see what that looks like.

It was about 2,500 ft² because the previous owners had done renovations above the garage, so there was a little bit more extra living space.

At the time, the interest rate was, I think, 4.25%.

I think that’s what our interest rate was when we signed a 30-year loan.

Even though we had talked about maybe having kids or thinking about having kids, neither of us were really ready for that — so we held off on having kids and essentially, we were living the DINK life — the dual income, no kids life.

My husband worked, and I had a full-time job at a corporate company, and we were just living life.

Fast forward a few years, we decided that it was probably time for us to have kids because we were not getting any younger.

I’m currently in my late 30s already and my husband is in his 40s, and we thought that the window of us having kids was getting smaller and smaller.

So we decided to have a baby — and our firstborn, our son, was born during the pandemic.

It was so awesome that we had our house at the right time, because we were all locked in, and we were working from home, and I had my baby there as well.

So I was able to basically work until he was about 6 months, 7 months old, at home — while taking care of the baby.

My husband and I would switch off.

But when he turned about 7 months, it got to be a little bit too much because he started to crawl around and stuff like that,

so we ended up getting a nanny, and she came to our place 5 days a week during work hours while I worked from home.

And then during lunch breaks, I was able to see him and still spend some time with him.

Fast forward 2 and a half years — we decided to have another kid.

Because growing up, I did not have a sibling.

Since I was born in China, I was born during the era where you were only allowed to have one kid,

so I had no siblings growing up, and I knew that if I ever had kids, I would want them to have a sibling.

And so by then, we were no longer living the DINK life because we had two small kids to raise, and both of us had to work — because, well, we had a mortgage to pay.

If you follow Ramit Sethi, you’ll hear him say that buying a house might not be the best option, and you don’t want to end up being house poor — and that’s exactly what happened to us.

We were house poor and kids poor, basically.

New York State in America is one of the most expensive states to live in because you have to pay a lot of property taxes.

I think our property taxes were upwards of $10,000 a year — and part of that was what they call school tax.

You had to fund the local schools even though our kids were not even school age and they were not going to school — we still had to pay the taxes.

After our daughter was born, I had 6 months of maternity leave, which was nice.

In the U.S., you really don’t get a lot of time for mat leave — and I was lucky to get 6 months off.

Usually companies would give you like 12 weeks, or even sometimes less than that — so I was thankful to have 6 months.

At that time, my son was in daycare, and our daughter was sent to the nanny that looked after my son, and she was with her during work hours.

Even though my husband worked from home, he wasn’t able to look after both of our kids while still having to do work.

Because we lived away from the city, in order to get back into the city for work, I had a really, really long commute.

We’re talking about upwards of 2 hours driving one way because of traffic going in and out of Manhattan — so that was crazy.

Even though we had to be in the office like 2 to 3 times a week, it was still a lot — juggling two kids and having to commute.

So by that time, I had probably been working in corporate for about 10 years, and I was kind of tired of climbing the corporate ladder.

I realized that companies really don’t care much about you — all they care about is themselves.

There was a lot of tension in the house, we were tired all the time, we didn’t have family around to help us — and so that kind of got us thinking.

Even though both of us had a good salary, because of all the taxes and healthcare that we had to pay for, daycare that we had to pay for, mortgage — whatnot — the numbers just didn’t add up.

Now, if we had budgeted a little bit better and thought about what our plan was going to be for the next 5–10 years when we bought a house, it probably would have changed things a little bit.

Hindsight is 20/20 — but we didn’t do that.

Because my husband is Finnish, our kids — once they’re born — no matter where they’re born, they have Finnish citizenship by birthright,

so they automatically became Finnish citizens the moment they were born.

Even before we had kids, my husband and I would often visit Finland — that also cut into our finances a little bit because we usually would come to Finland during the summer and during Christmas.

So that’s like two trips to Europe — and that was not cheap.

We did our numbers, and things were just not adding up.

Even though we were able to get by, we were practically living paycheck to paycheck.

We were not happy with how much we had saved, and we were not happy with our investments — and so we started talking about maybe moving to Finland for a little bit.

There were a lot of late-night conversations about whether or not this was a good idea — the pros and cons, everything we’d have to do.

And so ultimately — since I’m sitting here in Finland talking to you about this — we made it to Finland.

My husband grew up in Turku, so his parents are still here, most of his friends are here — we are currently living in Turku.

There were multiple other factors that also played into our decision to move to Finland.

Once we decided that we were going to move to Finland, I put in my notice at my company, and we put our house up for sale.

We were able to sell our house after about 2–3 weeks, because the housing market was just so crazy at the time.

Interest rates were going up, and there weren’t a lot of houses available for sale, because most of the people that bought their houses earlier had a low interest rate — and they didn’t want to give that up.

Even if they had made money selling their house, they would have to go somewhere else to live and get a higher mortgage.

We got, I think, two offers within the first week or two of putting our house up for sale.

And so we closed on the house — or do you say that when you sell your house? I don’t know.

We signed the papers.

We had multiple garage sales and yard sales in order to get rid of most of our stuff.

I don’t know what percentage of things we sold, but we sold a lot of stuff.

We did hire a company to ship some of our belongings over to Finland.

I think we shipped a total of maybe 36 boxes or something like that.

We took eight suitcases with us on our flight to Finland.

We moved to Finland in November of 2023, so we’ve been here for just over a year.

Luckily, my husband’s job can really take him anywhere — he used to work from home, so now he still works from home.

Because we had visited Finland every year ever since we got married, I pretty much knew what to expect.

And after a year of living here, I am just really grateful for the opportunity to be in Finland.

And I’m very thankful for my husband’s family for taking me in.

My parents divorced when I was young.

I moved to the U.S. with my mom, and my dad stayed behind in China.

They divorced a few years after we arrived in the States, and my dad eventually started a new family.

I now have a half-brother, which I’ve never met — and he’s, I don’t know, like 30 years younger than me.

So he has his own family in China.

I don’t really keep in contact with him that much, except for a few phone calls here and there.

And my mom sadly passed away from cancer about 12 years ago — so I really don’t have any parents.

Even though I technically have a dad, I’m like an expat of an expat — because I left China for the U.S., and then I left the U.S. for Finland.

My husband had already started speaking to my son only in Finnish while we were still living in New York — so his Finnish is pretty good, like pretty fluent.

It may not be as good as some native speakers, because he also speaks English, but he can get by fine.

And I’ve recently started taking Finnish lessons — even though most people here do speak English, especially in the larger cities, you integrate better when you learn the language.

So I’m slowly learning Finnish — it’s very difficult, and I might make a video about that soon.

So I hope that answers some of your questions, and I’m happy to share my story with you guys.

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