I spent the last weeks pondering an important decision for me and my family. My initial thought was that I could chronicle what was happening here on the blog: great engaging content! The Kardashians built an empire sharing their boring ass lives, it has to work, innit? Everyone is a sucker for a bit of a reality show but here there might be relatable value as well; instead of showing you how to manage your life between private jets and events, the chance you might have to decide to move to another country with your family is not as remote.
But
I still hold the faint hope that if one day this blog might generate negative value for whatever reason, I could deny it has been me writing it. We live in a weird world. The simple existence of “rules” does not mean they would be applied to everyone in the same way. Have you ever read a financial regulator Rulebook? It is fuzzier than an ancient Greek oracle prediction. Think about the concept of a jury, ain’t about a fact but how that alleged fact is interpreted by random people that before changing your life forever binged watched…The Kardashians. From a risk management point of view, I should have stop writing years ago. I mean, I might be able to do this Kosher…but it would be so boring to write that there would be no purpose, at least for me.
How tenuous is it to argue I am not the only one in the world called @nprotasoni? Jesus, the other day FB suggested me in the ‘people you may know’ an anonymous Italian YouTuber…with name and surname.
So I will be vague in the description of the facts. Hopefully it will work out; if not…I will have at least new content material? This decision absorbed all my attention for the last two weeks, so it is either this, or no post.
The job market is not transparent at all
Little unrequested career advice: keep your LinkedIn profile updated. Well, first of all, create a LinkedIn profile if you do not have one. I just finished reading this post by Jack Raines about LinkedIn and I get it, it is a pretty awful place to spend time on. But maintaining your cv up to date there costs a few hours (depending on how curated you want it to be) and does not mean you have to interact with the timeline, and related cringe-ness, at all. It is kind of a free option, maybe head hunters will contact you, plus a free Rolodex, since your contacts change jobs and it would be otherwise impossible to keep track of who is where doing what.
A smart friend once suggested me to do ‘training interviews’ and I found it really good advice. No, I am not talking about mock interviews with your friends on Discord but applying to real jobs. Even if you are not looking for another job, you meet people in your field, you understand how other firms do things and, like a comedian, can rehearse your story while discovering which bits work and which don’t. Now that you can do them from home (or your office) it is even easier and less time-consuming. And crucially, it is the only way to understand how much other companies would pay you.
The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t
It is illuminating to understand where your real threshold is. I changed quite a number of jobs and now I know that my honeymoon phase typically lasts three months; after that, I start to complain. Because I love to complain. I somehow always landed jobs that I liked and, equally important, that had a reasonable work-life balance. The worst situation I have been in was most likely when my job at the time required me to live in a vineyard, like if “A Good Year” with Russell Crowe was written by a Swiss guy under acid and I had to play that part.
I love London but I love even more the part of London where I live. I was going to write we got lucky to find our apartment but that’s only 10% of the story (before buying, I and my wife rented an apartment in the same building because, believe it or not, the RE agent put the wrong picture on the ad). I had to build a relationship with a lender, line up the equity portion, research the market and finally have a good negotiating strategy to bring us where we are. But now I am probably the only non-millionaire in London that can walk in less than 40 minutes to his office…and the office is just behind the Bank of England; or work from home and have enough space to do it comfortably.
How much do I value it? When confronted with a real choice: a lot. Definitely more than I would expect.
A decision that has nothing to do with a spreadsheet
If the only tool you have is Excel, you tend to see every problem as a…cell? A formula? A table? Anyway, I spend so much of my life on Excel (and I do not know how to use it as much as I should, given the time I dedicate to it) that I thought I could frame any decision as a function spitting out a P&L figure; will I have more money after this decision? Yes -> let’s go.
It is a very simple framework but it served me well. As long as I was alone. Turns out that having a family introduces more complications than f**k, how much does a spot at the nursery cost?!?
Did you know that in London, just under two-thirds of people identify with an ethnic minority group, whereas under one in 10 identify this way in the North East of the UK? Census results came out the other day and this line perfectly explains why most of the time loving London also means f**k UK. My daughter is growing up in an environment where she sees no color. If I read her a story about a bearded black dude, she says “that’s you, daddy”. If she sees a tiny brown baby, that’s her brova (brother with an East London accent). Walking in the street, she never points at anyone because everyone is weird. When everything is weird, the food, the languages, the people, nothing is weird. The barrier between familiar and unfamiliar becomes really blurred; therefore there is no space for her to grow a sense of what feels right and what feels wrong. She is equally free to do whatever she wants wherever she is; most of the time, she is actually encouraged by strangers to lean into whatever she’s up to at the point of the day.
There are a few places in the world where you can have a similar experience. If you remove those locations where you risk getting shot while being at school, you are left with fewer options than a ring on Gerald Green’s hand.
One day, when I was living in Luxembourg, I saw the 6ish-year-old son of a colleague switching seamlessly between three languages in the span of fewer than 10 minutes. He was surrounded by a group of adults and he was changing language based on who was talking to him. I thought it was simply amazing. Now, I and my wife will face the opposite problem: our sons will have to learn the FOURTH language at school (on top of the three we speak at home), and one that neither of us speaks or have any interest in learning. Be careful what you wish for…I guess? 😉
Being able to live without a car can be quantified on a spreadsheet, but not every aspect of it. In September I spent a week back in my hometown and one evening I drove to Milan to visit my brother. It took me 35 minutes to drive there and 20 to find a parking spot. It is convenient to have a personal driver that saves you the stress of driving through traffic but I forgot the added, great bonus of just jumping out of the car once you reached your destination. (Going back to the kid’s innocence, my niece is amazed that her grandparents have a “personal” parking spot and do not have to play the game of finding one).
Mini Budget
When the short-lived Lizzy Truss government issued their infamous mini-budget, I wrote a post describing why I thought capping the income tax rate at 40% was actually not a bad idea. I guess now I have the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is…or more accurately, to keep my money and put it wherever I want. While my gross salary will increase by less than 30%, the net one will grow by 55%; ah, this is before considering the current government tax raises that will take place next year. Taxes might not be a decision driver but they matter.
Especially when what you get back is donuts. Here is where I had to realize I do not just live in London, I live in England. A broken country. The NHS, the local healthcare system, is a joke. I have private insurance but that works fantastic when you have something planned; ain’t no private coverage when you end up in A&E, and that’s where the Russian roulette is played. Do I want to take that risk for my family? To be clear, this is not an issue related to doctors and nurses: there is so much you can do when your budget is cut year after year (luckily they (did not) get those funds promised during the Brexit campaign). Last year, we started to research schools for our daughter and the prospects were equally depressing. And no, private here is not an option.
In 2023, income taxes for the average employed person will be higher in England than in France. If you consider that in France you can work one year and spend the next two being paid by the state to do whatever you want, including living OUTSIDE France, the trade-off is not worth it anymore.
Then there is the gift that keeps on giving that is Brexit. Both my sons were born here and yet in the eye of the Government they are immigrants who came here, which means I had to register them (even if I had a birth certificate issued by Camden Town) by providing things like a utility bill in their name. Makes sense, innit? Getting their passports was another nightmare…and so on…and on…every step there is a nonsense hurdle to climb.
We are family
Despite all the mess that is the UK these days, it is undeniable that there are more and more interesting jobs here than anywhere else in Europe. The opportunity I have has to be discounted by the fact that my wife’s career prospects are diminishing at the same time. The rise of fully remote jobs helps but only on the ‘can I get an interesting job’ part of the equation, not on the ‘do I get a salary that reflects my skills’ part.
I recently read some articles about banks moving traders out of London to other European cities. Truth is, the only happy side in this transaction is the bank that can reduce the banker’s salary in the process; Milan is not the place to be. Definitely not Frankfurt. Every possible location is a step back compared to London, unless you have idiosyncratic reasons like you have family members in that city. The number of hours Ocado, Amazon and Deliveroo ‘gave me back’ in the last 5 years is probably equivalent to the added life expectancy for someone that stops smoking. Yes, London is not the only place where you can have Prime or food delivery, but it is unique because you have every one of them.
Plus, the positive side of living in a broken country is that if I want to aggressively cut expenses in whatever area of my budget, I can do it. Utilities, food, transportation…accommodation? Yep: I can go stay with my parents for a couple of weeks, or on holiday, put the apartment on Airbnb and boom, free money (well, not exactly free because re-arranging the apartment is not an easy, quick task).
Given that we are kind of on topic, I also did some research on how much is going to cost me if we leave and I will have to rent our place. The taxation (again!) part is a mess, passive income my a**. Going through the motions is illuminating because I realized (not that I had to) that the lefty argument of “let’s punish the landlords so that we will have lower rents” is what actually drives rents up. There can be no tenants without landlords, by definition. Obviously, you do not want a power imbalance where the landlord has all the benefits but you cannot expect to have a functioning system when landlords have no incentives to be one. People rent properties because they expect to make a profit, there is no ‘landlord’ category on Etsy, a community that curates apartments for others just for the pleasure of the act. But I think this concept will be archived in the same closet with “I know there is day and night and I am still expecting to use electricity when is dark outside but let’s just use solar panels” or “I want basic income for everyone but no inflation” or “SBF is the new Bridge Jones, a well-meaning but slightly incompetent character”.
Irreversible decision
The aspect that really consumed us was the fact that, for the first time in our lives, this felt like an irreversible decision. If I pass, the chances I will be offered the same opportunity in the future are really really slim. At the same time if we leave London, we are done for good: after Brexit, we will need to find a company that sponsors one of us to come back.
Or not! Do your bloody homework before spending some sleepless nights torn by doubts. Turns out that if you have settled status, as I do, you can leave the country for 5 years and be free to come back whenever you want. Considering how things are going, I would bet that in 5 years’ time they would have reversed that part of Brexit (without explicitly admitting it, obviously. Already right now, less than two years after Boris got Brexit done, if you are a skilled worker you can get a specific visa).
So I and wife spent like a week debating, internally and with each other, what we wanted to do. We arrived to the point where each morning I was asking her “so, are you now a Yes or a No?”. In the meantime, I was spending days and nights auto-convincing myself that the decision that was winning at that point was the right one: recapping all the pros and binning all the cons and then switching everything backward the day after. I was like a UK Government on steroids, a Marvel Boris Johnson with the U-Turn superpower: we are leaving ’cause it is great…actually we are staying ’cause it is great…ah no, we are leaving. It was is exhausting.
How can it feel so crazy at the same time that fact that I am thinking of leaving and the fact that I am NOT thinking of leaving?
Well, for sure when I thought about this post it did not develop the way it did.
What I am reading now:
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