We’ve made some rather serious decisions over the past few days about the life that we’re going live together. Sure, living in the Philippines is easy, but truth be told, it’s almost impossible to make serious money around here. The same goes for the rest of Southeast Asia. So we’ve finally realized (or more accurately, agreed) that if we’re going to have a little nest egg to retire on in 20 years or so, we need to live in the West.
The easiest way would be to get married, of course. Then he can go back to the UK and find work, while I get the proper visas. With any luck, I’ll be in London in 6 months or less. But nothing ever sounds that easy (as if it would be easy to be away from him for months). For one thing, the world economy is in a bad state, so heaven only knows what sort of difficulties a returning British citizen might encounter back home. For another, The Fiance is completely averse to moving back to the UK anyway because Eastern Europeans who work for peanuts are taking the good jobs and all the benefits. We figured the UK would be a last resort.
Instead, we decided not to rely on just one place and weigh our options literally everywhere. Our best chance would be anywhere in the EU, and we’re leaning heavily towards the Netherlands (where my best friend, Kaye is). We also want to look into Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and maybe even the US (though I’m very skeptical about America, to be honest).
So it looks like we’re going to be busy, busy, busy within the next few weeks with assessments and point systems and what-have-yous. We’re also going to start working on the paperwork needed to get married (who knew there would be so many?!?!) so we can do it sometime in March. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the future, but I feel really good knowing that we’re doing something about it.
Wherever we go, I’m going to have to convince The Fiance to part with his gear for a while. It would be much too costly to ship everything out again – a hell of a lot more than the small fortune that we already paid to ship from Bangkok to Cebu. Maybe we can sell them all and just buy new stuff later when we’re more settled, or put everything in self storage – I don’t know yet.
One thing’s for certain: if we’re going to move, we have to be willing to leave a lot of things behind.
