Month: September 2017

Wait, The Money is Different Sizes in England?

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One of things that turns out to be way more complicated than you would think when planning to move to another country is banking. Before agreeing to go to England we did a lot of research on what it would take. One of the big challenges everyone flagged was getting a bank account. Apparently the Catch-22 is you need to be there to get a bank account in most circumstances. To be there you need money to live. That’s hard without a bank account. Most banks want a local address before you can open an account however most places you want to rent from want a bank account. See the challenge here?

Other things that I’m trying to be smart about is keeping our US presence while were gone.

Then of course there’s the whole thing of English money might not fit in my wallet since it’s different sizes. It’s never a good sign when the company that makes the wall that I own “Bellroy” has a specific line of wallet they market to the UK. That makes me feel like what I own now isn’t going to really work. I might get lucky and maybe everything will be NFC payment. It might be better than the US but that’s wishful thinking.

What of Our Stuff Gets to See England?

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For a few months we were not sure if this move was can actually happen. The waiting turned into now let’s hurry up and getting stuff done. One of the big things is figuring out how we are getting all of our stuff across the Atlantic. MC’s been doing a lot of purging as we are decluttering the apartment. That obviously will only go so far. Once we decide what we do want to take with us we need to find movers in the US and the UK as well as shipping container options.

This is one of the areas that still unknown to us. I need to find a company that I want to work with that is reasonably priced. I know it takes several weeks for stuff to move so we need to get a better understanding of our timeline before we sign any firm commitments. I foresee some more research in my near future on this topic.

The purging of stuff has been easy and difficult both at the same time. There are some things that were just not sure if we want to part with. Or one of us is not sure. Then there’s stuff that we both looked at go yeah that’s being donated somewhere. Then there’s things that we probably shouldn’t move but we kind of want to.

The kids beds for example a really nice and my mom got them for us. On the other hand it’s the perfect opportunity to upgrade the girls to bunkbeds that they want. Other furniture in the girls room is in decent condition and it probably will last so working to take it with us. Our dressers on the other hand are from IKEA. They are in great shape however I believe they were the ones that were recalled for safety hazards so I don’t think they’re going to make the cut on what we take with us. Our Tempur-Pedic bed, yes it’s coming with us. Man I like that bed.

Items like our coffee table I have waffled a lot about. It’s a fantastic table that I got when I was single. It’s got a hydraulic under it that lifts it to turn it into a dining room table. The challenge with it is its glass so the kids and scratched it a little. It also has sharp glass edges at the corners that I’ve cut myself on. Since T was born we have wrapped it in childproof patting. For that reason I thought we should probably not take it with us. After some back-and-forth we agreed that we will see us we can use it as a dining room table at least initially. It’s always good as a backup in case we have company as well. We do not plan on taking our dining room table even know it’s been an MC’s family while. The problem is since it’s been in her family while it’s pretty old. It barely made the move into our current apartment so shipping it halfway across the world isn’t going to really happen.

Our bar, yes it’s coming with us. I don’t know why I need to even talk about it. I did read somewhere that you can’t ship alcohol so at some point I will need to have a bunch of friends over and drink everything that we have. Refilling that with liquor in England feels like it’s going to be expensive.

My computer table. I awesome, awesome computer table. I wanted to go with us. MC made it clear in the past she just wanted to go. Final ruling is still unknown.

I thought a lot of the electronics could just get an adapter and work however one of my friends at the office said I need to be careful and check. My TV that is in perfect condition even though it’s four years old is TBD on if he can come with us. My computers should be fine with an adapter. Apparently our vacuum cannot come and likely our appliances too. I probably have about $300 in power strips that will also need to be given away since no be useless when we get there.

Now that I’m thinking about what stays and what goes not really sure about our couch. MC and I have actually had a conversation about it however I can’t remember what we said we were going to do. On one hand the couch a nemesis of mine. When it’s hot out and I sit on it some of the leather top layer has been known to come off on my clothing when I stand up. You would think I would have learned by now. You would think, but I haven’t. I personally do not want that couch to ruin clothing on two continents so I have the check if were taking it. The big easy chair that goes along with it is in better condition so we might take it however I don’t want the color of the chair to dictate what color the new couch is.

As I’m writing this I realize I need to make a list of big-ticket items that stay versus go.

Next Up Selling Our Apartment / Finding a New Place

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From starting the discussion to signing employment contracts with my company took about one half months. For now we have about 3 1/2 months until I am tentatively scheduled to start in London. For the past few weeks my wife and I have been working to clean up our apartment and de-clutter. We finally did that enough that we posted it with a realtor so we can begin the process of selling it. A few people have mentioned that I should just rent it out while were gone. Even if I thought that was a good idea ( I’m not sure that I do) my building does not allow that. The co-op we live in requires owner occupancy. From what we’ve gathered there is pretty low inventory and a generally high demand in our neighborhood for a two bedroom apartment of our size. Fingers crossed things go smoothly.

If selling an apartment in New York wasn’t enough at the same time we are trying to find a house to live in for when we get to London. Well not yet at that finding a house part of the journey. Were trying to find a few neighborhoods that meet our criteria to start looking for a house. Thankfully I work with a lot of really awesome folks in London already. Several have provided advice about where to live. Much of that advice has been in sync with each other. Funny enough some of that advice has been in contradiction with other advice. It’s funny trying to weed out my families priorities versus what others find important. All the information has been extremely helpful though because we’re learning where we don’t want to look and where we do want to look.

As of writing this post the realtor has just put up the links to our apartment. They look pretty fantastic if you ask me even though I am biased. The next step is to have people view the apartment and hopefully get some offers.

While the selling goes on in New York my wife and I need to plan a scouting trip to London to figure out what neighborhood we want to live in. Online research will only get us so far.

The Why & How’s of Our Overseas Move

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Now that it’s pretty public that we are moving overseas in early 2018 I can finally write publicly about it. I wanted to write about it for a while. I’ve journaled privately a little bit to collect my thoughts however I have not sat down to write any cohesive posts. There’s so much to talk about I’m not sure where to begin. The internal narrative in my head is saying start at the beginning. The question is not sure where to begin or what’s the beginning of the story.

I guess I can start by saying this move is the culmination of multiple events and actions on MCN my part that enabled us to have this wonderful opportunity. It started with MC and I talking about if we would even want to do something like this as far back as last August. We had talked about it when we were dating but it was more like if the opportunity ever happened would be considerate. In August we talked seriously about what that would mean for us if it was a possibility.

MC also worked to get her Irish citizenship. That was something that she talked about doing as far back as when we were dating. The process involved was simple but not easy. That’s why we never really worked on it. While MC had that process in motion and we were waiting for details from the Irish government an opportunity arose at work. Up until earlier in the year I had been managing a regional support group. There is very little international opportunity. A reorganization was announced in March. As part of that I moved into my current role. It was something I’d on a smaller scale in the past and enjoyed. Taking it on globally was a challenge and just different enough to what I was doing that I was eager for the change. The added benefit was that the role was a global one. That opened the door for the discussion about relocation. My manager was open to it and we made the case to our leadership. That took several months however in the end they were on board with it.

I have always felt doing something like this would be very interesting. I almost had an opportunity ages ago in 2000 but was literally days too late. The only other firm opportunity that came up was when I was at Datastream. That however was to go to France. I don’t speak French so I had reservations. I always felt that if an opportunity presented itself I’d be interested.

The how we are going boils down to MC having her citizenship that helped the use case with my company and my new role that I started in May. The why we are going is the experience. I think my dad said it when I was talking to him last week about this that how many Americans have an opportunity like this? I looked it up apparently it’s about 2 to 6 million out of how many hundreds of millions of Americans live overseas. I’ve grown to love believe that the most important thing in life is the experiences. To experience another culture while doing a job I enjoy greatly is a fantastic opportunity. Don’t get me wrong there are many downsides to this that I will go into in another post. Going and not liking it is one thing however having an opportunity like this passing up is something that I think I would always regret.

My Return to Facebook

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It was a nice long run. Since the beginning of 2017 through the middle of September I might have logged onto Facebook all of a handful of times. During that time I might not have posted anything. I don’t count blog posting since I write them and it auto magically gets posted to my twitter and Facebook feeds without me logging in.

This week all that changed. I started wading back into what sometimes feels like the cesspool of Facebook. Why after calling it “sometimes cesspool” like would I return? I did not really want to. My not using Facebook has taught me a few things. For one sharing photos to a limited number of people is challenging. I have an iPhone. My wife has an iPhone. My parents have an iPhone. My in-laws do not. If I want to share photo and use iCloud, I have to call them and let them know they should turn on their iPad to look for an update. That is a technology fail. Finding a tool or service that a large number of people use is hard. Getting people to start using the tool because you want to share information is challenging. Especially if that’s the only reason they’re going to use it is for you. Using Facebook I lower the barrier to use significantly since many people are using it already.

Facebook’s not quite secure however. Photos on Facebook aren’t out on the Internet for everyone to see however they are also not securely locked away that virtually no one sees. That basically became my trade-off. For the past nine months or so I haven’t really shared what’s going on and I was ok with that. I am not self-centered enough to assume that everyone that is a friend of mine on Facebook is missing photographs and updates about what’s going on in my life. There are some family and friends that are interested and are not set up technologically to connect in other ways. Those people I do miss the connection.

That brings us to why I’m back. During roughly the same time I was radio silent on Facebook a lot is been going on in the “real world”. When not posting on social media I could relatively easily meet up with someone for dinner or an afternoon to hang out to catch up. I could talk to someone in the family who talks to someone to pass on details of whats going on, etc. In the near future that will change a lot. Starting on or around new year we will be moving. There will be significantly more distance between close friends and family and where were going.

We are moving to London. Yes I said it correctly, London England. If you have read five paragraphs in to this blog post you earn the right to be one of the first (ok maybe twelveth) to know that were moving overseas.

I plan to write a lot more about our planning, reasons why were going, and the experience in the future. This post really is about my return to Facebook. Why I returned is directly related to our move overseas. The way I’ve been updating friends and family limited who got photos of my kids and what was going on in the world with us. Becoming more “normal and oversharing on Facebook will be away for those close to us to know what’s going on since will be thousands of miles further away.

I still have issues with Facebook’s facial recognition of photographs. Especially of my kids. On the other hand my wife does post photos so the exposure is already there. Commenting about what we are doing goes to my blog that is completely open on the Internet. I do that deliberately however I know I need to be mindful of what goes up there since there is no restrictions.

The other aspect reading about what other people are up to and having quick discussions with soon to be faraway people. The challenge is doing that while weeding through all the other stuff on Facebook. The other stuff being political commentary, news articles, etc. That’s what drove me away in the first place.

In the end that’s the price I I am willing to pay to have some more level of connection with those friends and family. Because of that Facebook wins. I am back. I might not be happy about it however I’m glad to have a medium where I can share what’s going on in our lives while we are 5000 or so miles away.

Messaging apps overload

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With my kids in school apparently that means more messaging apps I need to have on my phone. Last year things were simple. Both of my kids classes used WhatsApp. Each class had a group and we would chat with parents. It was pretty useful. I am not the hugest fan of WhatsApp since Facebook collect meta-data however it’s not terrible for that specific use case.

I personally use Telegram as my first choice of messaging app. I like the secure features as well as the ability to chat on multiple devices if I want. It’s not tethered to my phone. WhatsApp has a computer app but you need your phone nearby. I can’t use it on my iPad at all. Having just those two apps would’ve been manageable however the number of applications are use for Chad has proliferated.

There is messages for apple messages and SMS. And there are the two different chat apps I use at work. I also have signal since it supposed to be pretty secure some good like telegram however not many people use it so it just sits there. I still have Skype. I do not use Skype for texting really anymore however I do use it to make phone calls now and again.

The latest wrinkle is both girls are in new classes this year and each class has decided to use a different app for communicating with the parents. The benefit of at least one of them is that the teacher communicate back-and-forth with us now. Using WhatsApp that didn’t happen however it wasn’t a problem since we could simply email the teacher. I haven’t tried my other daughters app that was recommended. I got the notice to provide might details to get a login tonight. That’s pond me wanting to write about the now nine different messaging applications nuts on my phone.

On one hand getting up to the minute updates from school is useful. Also being able to send the teacher a last minute notice is pretty useful too. But nine apps? That’s getting a little much even for someone like myself who actually likes technology. I’m not even counting email applications in that number.