Repatriation: From Decision to Buying a House

Our decision to repatriate was not a surprise. Every year since 2006 we have discussed the opportunity to stay or go. Same company or different company. Same circumstances or different circumstances. Natalie firmly said STAY. Tom felt STAY on most days though you could catch him after a hard day at work and he would change to a GO. I could have gone either way. As a family we had agreed that me not working (at a paying job doing something I am actually skilled at) was something that needed to change. I tried starting my own consulting company, but quickly realized that planting the seed of "entrepreneur" in a generally risk-adverse individual required significant care and growing time. Alas, this spring indicated the maturing time for self-employment was going to be longer than required to justify us staying in China. So that eliminated the opportunity to consider any "local" packages. 


I know from talking to other families that this "stay or go" decision will typically be determined by how ingrained into the local lifestyle you have really become. So living in a villa with all the amenities, having an Ayi to help with everything, having an awesome educational experience for your children, all was outweighed by the desire to keep Tom employed. And once you know there is more than a 50% chance of repatriating, the scale shifts quickly to GO. You don't want to be that family that decides to STAY but then finds out two weeks before the end of the school that STAY = TERMINATED. So, we decided to GO. Natalie refused to speak about GO until a month or so before our move date. I built a Plan with all of the things that needed done. Then I made a Shanghai Bucket list with all the things I wanted to do/buy/see before I left. We told family. We told friends. We settled into the idea of returning to a place we knew and people we remembered.


After the Decision was made to GO, you quickly realize you need a place to live. the company would fly us back for a "look-see" trip so we could LOOK at houses and hopefully SEE one we could live in. If we had kept a house, this trip would be easy. But we didn't. So we had a clean whiteboard and decided to focus on finding a school for Natalie. Truth be told, she was the reason for the cohesion in the first place! The opportunity for her to experience life outside of the US, to have an international school experience, for her to spend time with me since I took a break from working, all of those things were a primary driver behind coming. So of course, we had a great responsibility to ensure that all of those benefits were not undone when we returned. So we picked a few school districts in the Dayton area that seemed the right fit. I am sure that every returning child offers a unique set of considerations. For Natalie, it is all about teacher and faculty attention, which partially translates to student to teacher ratios, but not exactly. The other consideration was finding a home which accommodate, at least partially, care after school. I plan on going back to work so we will have to figure out what she is going to do every day after school. And really, that was it. We don't have other demands such as test score achievement or academic success in general, though these two outcomes seem to support the first need in terms of teacher attention. All of this research was easily supported by my Plan as it was simply information in, decisions out. My kind of project.


So once settled on the school options, we started on the house search. Our second criteria for a home, was somewhere that allowed us to have/build a sense of community. Not so easy in Dayton area since it is basically all suburbs. But we used general guidelines such as distance to school, commute time, walkability scores, etc. to fine-tune our house search. This is not easy from thousands of miles away. Thank goodness for the internet! Don't misunderstand me, the internet did NOT lead us directly to the house we bought [or perhaps current tense is better here, so buying], but it did help us with the selection process. What houses are selling for, what do they look like, how long is it taking, does the neighborhood have lots of houses for sale and why. Using the internet we were able to build a short-list of homes that we wanted to look at further. We primarily used Zillow, though we also used local resources such as Trulia or the Dayton Area Board of Realtors. But I personally like the Zillow apps for the Android (kindle fire) and iPad. The only thing missing from all the apps and websites was a way to track houses and a ranking for them. We did that offline in a spreadsheet. When looking at a property on the internet, we would score the potential from 1-5 with 5 being the "Have to See". By the time of our look-see trip to the US, we had about 30 total homes scored from 5 to 3 we could give the Realtor. We had made comments about what was appealing about the property and the potential drawbacks. The Realtor was able to discern our needs (generally) from looking at the list. I think this made the whole process much more efficient and was really the only way we were able to find a house so quickly. Who knew the Plan was going to move along so nicely? I did have to add some detail around the actual arrival back home, such as buying a car, getting Natalie enrolled in school, public library cards, etc. The Plan was shaping up quite nicely!


We flew in on Saturday, looked at houses Sunday and Monday, re-looked at our favorites on Tuesday, and put an offer out on Wednesday. Then back to Shanghai to figure out what we just did! Everyone thinks that finding a house in such a short time is nearly impossible. But it wasn't that bad. I think it has to do with the way American's think of housing. But I won't digress here on that and instead will just summarize by stating that we did not feel the need to buy above or even at our means. We were not looking for a house we loved because we realize that a house is just a place to hang your 127 pictures and art pieces and a mantle for your 7 Buddha heads. As long as there is room for that new dining table and chairs I had made here, we are good! [Tom would require full disclosure on my part so I will state here that one house we really liked had to be eliminated due to the fact that my new table would NOT fit into the dining area. Though I consider this more a flaw of the house rather than my buying habits!]


So, we found the house. It turned out to be the first house we looked at. It was not even really on the market yet and so was never on our list. We didn't love it per se, but it met all our criteria, required little improvement and was "move-in" ready, was in a convenient location, and the price was right. Done. Oh, except that we found out the roof needed to be replaced. But we found out while at the airport waiting to leave. I'll not digress to share the whole story, but will summarize by saying we bought the house BUT will need to replace the roof in the next few years. Then there was the paperwork to buy a house. We had to close from Shanghai. Which meant going to the US Consulate to get some papers notarized. And at $50 a notarization for a total of $300, I realize that instead of going back to the US, I should have become a Notary Public and set up shop here. So we went the US Consulate, signed our mortgage papers, and overnight-ed them back to the Title Agency. The Title Agency then contacted us to let us know that, oops, they had missed one form to be notarized. So, they emailed them and we trekked back to the US Consulate, hoping we could just get the one paper signed and not the whole stack. Which they did. So another $50 and we were done. [We are currently waiting for the actual closing which will be the week of June 11.]  What about the Plan you ask? How did we adapt the schedule? Well, I actually started consider the result if we stopped using the Plan. How could I possibly think that I could identify all the things that had to be done to get three people out of China and back to the US?


By the time we returned from our home visit, the impact of our decision to repatriate had settled into my consciousness. It had really just hovered around my subconscious before, appearing only when discussing houses with Tom or talking to Natalie about public schools. The reality was frankly, a bit overwhelming. As ready as you might think you are to accept a major life change, it can gnaw at you while you are sleeping and impact your decision making ability for simple things, like where to eat dinner. You get caught up thinking things like "We should go try new places before we leave" or "This might be the last time we eat here." Then there were relatively simple activities I needed to do like find the Ayi a new family. But that has turned out to be one of the most complicated. And it's still not finished. Seeing that activity on my list every day and not seeing how I was ever going to successfully complete it left me dismayed. And so, I abandoned the Plan that I had determined would be my own personal salvation. I hadn't been able to keep it up to date anyway, instead of doing what I though I should be doing, I was busy doing things I had to do like deciding if replacing the house on the roof was important enough issue to abandon the house and buy another one. And trying to find replacements for Skipper and Gilligan (our two Terracotta Warriors) as they had deteriorated to the point of not being able to be packed and shipped. I guess my point is that there was not a whole lot of value in feeling good about checking activities off the plan. It just made me feel like there was a whole lot of other things I wasn't doing or even knew I should do. 


Which brings me to the conclusion that learning to adapt is the most useful skill we teach our children.  That concept brings some things full circle for me personally. A big part of the decision to come here was to give myself a break from the work stress that was resulting from the premise of my career being the most important thing in my life. It wasn't, it isn't. So I sat that career aside for a while, then I tried it again, and set is aside one more. And now I am prepared to try it yet again. Along the way I have had to adapt my own personal definition about what a career is and what role it plays next to Mother, Wife, Daughter, Sister, and Friend. I am not sure I have completely figured that out yet. However, recognizing it needs to adapt is a step in the right direction. We have a home in a community and we have friends and family awaiting our arrival. The home stage is set and we begin the new life in 11 days.