Working in a foreign country

Today’s post is on a topic that is dear to my heart, moving to a new country for work.  Since leaving London I have worked in three different countries and four different cities.  It’s been exciting and has helped keep life feeling fresh and interesting.  I recommend it to anyone who gets the chance.  Not everyone enjoys the experience, but you never know until you try.  I will try to stay clear of the mundane and obvious and instead focus on some of the stuff that you don’t get told before you move abroad.  Most of these I learnt through making mistakes.

The biggest principle that I have learnt and relearnt is that it is impossible to recreate the exact same life you had in one country in a completely different country.  This was less an issue for me when I moved from London to Hong Kong.  I was looking for a complete change, and I was happy to completely immerse myself in a new life that was only expected and contracted to last a year.  My then girlfriend (now wife) and I threw ourselves into every new experience.  From exploring every corner of the territory, taking up new sports like dragon boating and outrigger canoeing, hiking over trails and drinking in the dive bars of Lan Kwai Fong and Wan Chai.  I happily jumped on the crazily driven local minivans to get to and from work and learnt the required Cantonese to get the drivers to stop in the right place.  Life was fun precisely because everything was new and because I embraced change.

City number two was where we first neglected the principle.  The first six months in Singapore left us feeling homesick, not for London, but for the excitement of Hong Kong.  The two cities are great commercial rivals in the region and have a similar population size.  Despite these similarities they are very different.  Singapore is geographically much smaller, has a very different political outlook, and Singaporeans have different aspirations.  When I asked colleagues what area I should live to have a similar experience to Hong Kong, they looked blank and told me there was no equivalent.  We found that all the ways we had spent our weekends in Hong Kong couldn’t simply be translated across to our lives in Singapore.  We were initially in denial and frequently travelled back to Hong Kong for long weekends.  About a year after moving to Singapore I was approached by a recruitment consultant about a new job that was located in Hong Kong.  At the beginning of the process this was an exciting prospect for us.  The recruitment process took a long time to complete during which time the hiring company had reorganized its Asian presence.  When the job was finally offered, the location had changed to Singapore.  When my wife and I considered this briefly, we realized we were happy with the result and acknowledged that we had changed too, and Singapore was now very much our home.  We had created a different life for ourselves in Singapore.  

Our move to Miami was a similar experience.  Singapore and Miami are very different on almost every level.  We started running our playbook for trying to make friends and establishing a life in the city, but soon realized that these weren’t going to be effective.  Once again, we had to focus on the opportunities there rather than trying to recreate what we had in our previous lives in Asia.

I’ve reflected on this frequently as I have looked back at our global adventure.  I have very few regrets and I wouldn’t change much if I had the chance.  Miami was the city that we found hardest to adjust to and create that sense of community and belonging.  Yet, when the pandemic hit, I don’t think there is anywhere on our journey (London, Hong Kong, Singapore or New York) where I would have felt safer.  This is not a political point.  It’s just the first place we had the opportunity to buy rather than rent and it also happened to be the first house with a garden we had lived in together.  This afforded us more personal space than anywhere we had lived before or since.  When the music stopped, we were in the best place for us. 

When creating a new life in a new place, the easiest path is to make the most of the local opportunities.  A good place to start is working out what the place is famous for and then to try that out.  The worst that can happen is that you establish what you don’t like doing.  The best that can happen is that you grow and become a different person to the one that left their home city.  This advice is intentionally broad and includes languages, sport, dancing, theatre, music and local festivals and vendors.  Do I wish we had learned to salsa dance in Miami, of course I do.  Do I regret the two years I spent trying to learn Spanish, not at all, although I wish I had been better at it (and this is no reflection on my excellent teacher).

Trying out new things that aren’t particularly connected to the city you are in, but where the opportunity has arisen, is also a great strategy to help adapt to a new place.  It may also connect or lead you to a place you want to live in the future.  My favorite hobby is photography and I picked this up in Singapore.  I learnt most of what I know from online training with American professionals and applied it to my travel around Asia.  As discussed in my post on networking, Sam found her passion for Pilates in Miami and now teaches in New York studios (which is the city where it all began).  It would be reasonable to counter that you don’t need to leave home to try something new, particularly if the place you live is not known for this activity.  My answer is that choosing to live abroad can provide a hefty push to get you out of your comfort zone and old familiar routines.  You win twice, firstly by connecting with other people in your new city and secondly by learning something that you wouldn’t have found time for if you hadn’t been driven by the need to expand your social circle.

My other tips are a little more straight forward.  I had never been to Hong Kong before I arrived there on a Sunday night in mid-November.  I headed straight to work on the Monday morning with jetlag that caused me to fall asleep in the office later that afternoon.  My assumption was that the weather would be warm all year round.   It was warm until January when Hong Kong experienced the coldest winter in 15 years.  Having left all our warm clothes in the UK, we had to buy replacements to cover us for 3 months before the temperatures soared again.  Given that our next home was in Singapore, where the temperature is hot all year round, we didn’t get the best value out of those new clothes.

Take with a pinch of salt any online calculator that calculates disposable income after tax and other expenses as it is almost impossible to estimate and compare cost of living between two cities.  In Singapore the cost of rent, driving and alcohol are prohibitively expensive.  Yet, the ratio of salary to cost of living and the very low taxes resulted in me feeling more economically comfortable than I do today with a higher salary in New York.  My advice is to negotiate for the maximum salary you can before you leave.  Avoid taking a pay cut based on a lower cost of living as those negotiating with you have even less idea what your actual cost of living will be.  For the first-year lock into a rental unit in a safe area that gives you most of what you need but isn’t at the top end of a theoretical budget.  If you are anything like me, you will screw up the calculation of how much rent you can afford.  By leaving some budget headroom in your biggest expense you can hopefully reorganize the rest of your budget as needed and not live paycheck to paycheck.  Also know that if you get your rent expense in the right ballpark, everything else usually falls into place.

You will need cash on hand when you move to a new country.  It is not unreasonable for you to ask an employer for a relocation allowance to cover these expenses.  When I moved from Singapore to Miami I neither asked nor received an allowance.  What no one told me in advance was that you can’t be paid in the US until you have a social security number and you can’t apply for a social security number until 2 weeks after you arrive.  My final salary in Singapore was withheld to pay my exit tax bill and I effectively went 6 weeks without drawing a salary.  When you combine this with not having a credit score in America which meant that I had to put down extra security deposits to secure my accommodation, additional deposits for all the utilities and a large deposit on a car, I was eating through my savings at an alarming rate.  At that time, I was keeping quite a lot of my savings in the UK, but the impact of the Brexit vote on FX rates meant that I was losing money every time I needed to transfer money to the US.  I will always remember the first paycheck in US.  The relief of finally being paid was tempered by the fact that none of the online calculators had included deductions for social security, healthcare and 401k.  All my budget planning had been wrong, and it took me over a year to reorganize my spending to something that felt more comfortable.

Let me end on a more philosophical note.  It’s a cliché, but as a race, there is much more that unites us than divides us.  By living overseas, you realize that the big challenges that we face are universal and the smaller everyday grievances look even smaller and insignificant the further you step away from them.  By living in a different country, you get to experience and understand a place in a way that isn’t available to tourists, but you will never know a place in the same way as the locals and shouldn’t pretend you do. Cities come as a package deal shaped by their geography, culture, politics, and history.  Parts of the package will be amazing and parts frustrating and, quite often parts will be completely contradictory.  That is usually the charm of a city and what makes moving abroad a fun challenge.  Take Singapore as an example.   Landing at Changi airport is one of the most enjoyable experiences in aviation and one where you will usually be through security, reunited with your bag and in a taxi to your destination in less time than it takes a plane to taxi to the gate in Miami.  But in the same airport I frequently waited for an hour to order a Starbucks coffee with the line snaking back through the terminal.  I can’t explain this discrepancy, but I can happily live without Starbucks.

As always, let me know your thoughts.  Next week the blog is on strategies for working with difficult people.