Starting an Expat Life at a Grandpa Age*

This is another blog that will become (I hope) a partial chapter of a book I’m writing (sort of) about what it’s like to embark on a whole new journey at the age of 40. Previous chapters have been published on this blog, including here and here and here. It’s a tough slog, I have to say. My aim is to get to at least 70,000 words. To be a real book, you need at least 70,000 words. As I write this, I’m at about 17,000 words – less than a quarter of the way there. So we’ll see how it goes. This partial chapter has been especially challenging. I keep starting it over, and am still not sure it hits the right notes. It’s the first part of a narrative detailing my experience moving overseas at nearly 60 years old. The focus is on the mindset I had to adopt when the idea of moving abroad was first broached. At some point, I’ll write more about the experience of adapting to life overseas. But not right now…

I’ll never forget the moment I knew we’d be moving to London, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t want to.

The moment occurred during a long drive north from our home in Charlotte, N.C., to New England. Summer of 2017. We were on a family road trip – first Boston, then south to New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York City. Roughly 900 miles one way, then roughly 900 back. A total of 1,800-odd miles, or 2,900 kilometers. Plenty of time for family conversation.

The topic came up in the car, somewhere in southern Virginia, early on in the journey north. It was mentioned that there might be a job opportunity in London. It wasn’t a new job, just a different assignment with the company that brought in most of our income.

My first thought (which I didn’t share) was, No. No no no no no.

We had a comfortable home in Charlotte, a comfortable life, two young daughters in school. I was an older Dad. I’d seen and done enough, moved around plenty. I had a nice routine going on in our city. I figured we were settled in.

I also knew, then and there, that we would be moving to London. I would offer some token resistance, but I knew, I knew….

I knew we would pick up and haul across the ocean to a new city, a new country, a different continent. I didn’t say as much on that long drive. Instead, I said, “I’m not saying no. I’m just saying, let’s think it over. Let’s weigh our options.”

But I knew….

About five months later – January 4, 2018, dead of winter – we were on the flight to London, bags packed, boxes shipped, house in Charlotte empty, ready to rent out.

*****

There was every reason not to move to London, at least from where I stood.

It was an expensive city in another country, across the ocean. We would have to adapt to new customs, new rules, different weather, a new culture, a different way of motoring (left side of the road, not right!).

As non-citizen expats, we would have to adhere to certain limitations you don’t face as citizens. We would be leaving family and friends and comfort behind, and embarking on an uncertain journey.

Most importantly, our daughters would be dropped into a new school system, right in the middle of the school year, with classmates who had different accents, and might look at our daughters as odd curiosities. I cannot tell you how many nightmares I had about that.

There were only two good reasons to move to London: 1) It was a great career opportunity, and 2) It was a great life opportunity. You couldn’t put a value on it. You couldn’t assess it in the normal way, checking off the little “pros” and “cons” boxes.

You just had to surrender to the call of the unknown, embrace the adventure, close your eyes and leap off the cliff. Because you knew, deep down, that this was a one-in-a-million shot – and saying “no” meant spending the rest of your life wondering why you didn’t say yes.

That’s how I knew we’d be moving there.

—–

I was 58 years old when we made the decision to move to London, and 59 when we made the actual move. That doesn’t necessarily qualify as “old” (I guess). But it ain’t exactly the flower of youth, either. And anyway, it’s not like I was yearning for a big change of scenery, a Major Life Decision. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I’d already lived a pretty full and busy life by then. I’d seen a lot, done a lot, lived many different places, know many different people, and logged just enough years to appreciate the wonders of the world without being in awe of them.

At that stage of my life, I was as content as I’d ever been in five-plus decades of breathing oxygen on the planet Earth. I’d finally – finally – settled into a certain equilibrium after too many years of extreme highs and extreme lows. I saw no reason to disrupt the state of Zen I felt I’d found in terms of place, family, career, etc.

It’s important to understand that I was not opposed to moving overseas. In fact, living abroad was something I figured I’d get around to one day. You could even call it a goal I’d had since I was old enough to set goals. Whether I ever got around to it was wholly dependent on my ability to marry my ambition with a workable plan. This was not necessarily a strong suit during my younger days. Ambition, I didn’t lack. A plan, I lacked.

I certainly saw value in moving to another country for a few years. It gives you a chance to live outside your comfort zone, test your boundaries, explore your limits. There is much to be said about experiencing different cultures and lifestyles.

Experiencing a foreign culture was especially important for a guy of my vintage, late 50s. Up to that point, I hadn’t spent a ton of time overseas. I didn’t even step foot outside the United States until I was nearly 45 years old, when my wife and I honeymooned in the Caribbean, which included a stop in the Bahamas. I never even made it to bordering countries like Mexico and Canada, despite living really close to each during my years in Los Angeles and New York City.

On the plus side, we did eventually journey to France, the Bahamas (again), Panama and England. So, that’s five international trips to four countries in nearly six decades of living. Which put me pretty close to average.

According to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, about three-quarters of Americans (76%) have visited at least one other country. Roughly one in four (26%) have been to five or more countries. A similar percentage have not traveled internationally at all.

Based on my experience, I qualified as a “casual” international traveler, having set foot in up to four other countries. This put me in the same category as about half of Americans. I guess I wasn’t willing to settle for average, though. I still didn’t believe I’d seen enough of the world, so I figured living overseas for a spell was a good life goal.

The key was timing. When would be the ideal time? At age 59, with young children to raise? Or later, after they’d finished college – which put me close to age 75.

Hmmmmm…….

*****

I sometimes wonder how I might have dealt with living overseas as a younger lad, in my 20s, fresh out of college. I’m guessing it would have either been an amazing experience, or I would have crashed and burned pretty quickly.

I certainly would have brought an open mind, no money, enough cluelessness to fill half a city block, but very little fear. That’s the beauty of youth. You don’t have enough life experience to understand all that can and will go wrong when you plop yourself into a completely new situation way across the ocean. Your guard isn’t up; your radar is not engaged. You just dive right in with eyes wide open, driven by adventure and adrenaline.

I was big on adrenaline in my younger days, which was both a blessing and a curse. I could barrel into pretty much any situation without thinking too much about the circumstances. This can lead you on a path to enlightenment – or disaster.

In my 20s, I could have worked and lived just about anywhere, no matter how crappy or low-rent. I could have endured grueling work, lousy pay, cheap apartments, noisy neighbors, and crowded spaces. I could have endured a long, grueling commute every morning, closed down the after-hour joints at night, then repeated the process the next day.

I probably could have endured some of that in my 30s, and even early 40s.

But in my 50s? My late 50s?

Whew boy. No way.

By the time I became a family man in my late 40s/early 50s, I figured the move abroad would happen later, after the kids were grown. I didn’t expect it to happen when one daughter was 8 years old, and the other had just turned six.

But once we made the commitment to move, I took immediate action, got busy planning. Planning, planning, planning. This is where moving overseas at an advanced age turned out to be an advantage. Because by then, I had already moved house more than 20 times in my adult life. Twenty times in about 35 years. That’s just a whole lot of moves. What you end up learning is what to do right, which mistakes to avoid, where your main focus should be, and what not to waste time on.

I’d become a lot more thorough and efficient through the years – which was a good thing, because there was just a ton of stuff that needed to be done thoroughly and efficiently before we picked up from our home in Charlotte and bounced overseas to the United Kingdom.

The main planning involved logistics – hiring movers, scheduling flights, lining up temporary quarters until we found a home. Most of that responsibility fell to my wife, whose job started the ball rolling in the first place.

We had a huge advantage in this area, though: Her employer footed most of the relocation bill, and offered various resources for finding the right place to live, near good schools, and convenient to transit. She and they did a bang-up job on that front.

As for me: My main duties involved getting our home in Charlotte ready to be rented out. Our original plans were to spend only a couple of years in London, then return to our Charlotte home after the stint in London was done. Rather than have the house sit empty, we decided to rent it out for a couple of years.

My duties were to find a rental management company, contact the utilities, get the house ready to rent out, line up yard and maintenance/repair crews, all that.

It took a lot of planning and calling, and meeting and calling, and planning and meeting and planning and calling and calling and calling and planning. Eventually, I came up with a decent plan to rent the house out and have it in good shape when we returned a couple of years later.

Except…..

We didn’t return to that house, or Charlotte, a couple of years later. As I write this chapter – nearly nine years after the move to London – we still haven’t returned. We don’t even own that house anymore. We sold it a couple of years ago, although we still own a house in a nearby suburb of Charlotte (the first one we owned in the area. We got lucky with real estate. Pro tip – invest in real estate).

Our plans changed while we were in London. It was partly a result of COVID-19, and partly to do with the fact that life plans can change. And usually do.

Had I known ahead of time how drastically our plans would change, would I have agreed to move to London? I often think about that. The short answer is, I don’t know. The true answer is, I probably would have. Because the experience we had living overseas cannot be measured in any practical form. That was the beauty of it. Every moment living there was totally different from any moments we would have known had we never made the move. That in itself was a blessing you cannot put a value on.

Well, we ended up spending five-and-a-half years in London. And when we moved back to the States, it wasn’t to Charlotte, but to northern New Jersey, so we could be near New York City.

This was another lesson I learned along the way. Life doesn’t always follow the script you lay out.

And how boring would life be if it did?

*Well, most grandpas, anyway. I won’t be an actual grandpa till I’m 80 or so, with a little luck….

Image: From the London archives, taken by me, just 50 yards or so from our home in Bermondsey, hard by the Thames. I got very lucky with the fowl.