Saturday, October 13, 2012

Beginning of the End

Over five years ago, my wife and I packed up and moved the family from our home in Cincinnati to Bangkok, Thailand.  I gave up a great and lucrative job as an IT consultant with BMW Finance so that she could help run the family business.

Our original plan was to stay here for only two years, so we didn't sell our house.  Unlike a lot of expat families, we didn't ship our belongings here; we brought what would fit in ten suitcases.  The things that we didn't bring we borrowed from Tim's brother Top.

Two years turned to three, and then again to four.  At the end of the fourth year, I was all but certain that we would move after year five, but again we had to delay for another year.  Now our timeline is certain, all the pieces are in place so that we can go at the end of this school year (June 2013).

We would have definitely done some things differently had we planned on staying as long as we did.  When we moved in 2007, the housing market had not descended into crisis, and we could probably have sold our house fairly easily.  It might also have made more sense to ship more of our things from the U.S., if we knew that we could get five or six years of use from them here instead of only two.  That is always the way of it though.  All of us would change some decisions if we knew how things would play out.

Now that we have decided to move back, we were faced with a new challenge.  Should we move back to Cincinnati, where we own a home and my family lives, or should we take the opportunity to start over?


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