A Chapter in My Late Start Retirement Journey
Before my H-1B visa was approved, I was working remotely from Germany for nearly half a year. Then the call came from headquarters: it was time to move to the United States. Our visas — mine, my wife’s, our two children’s — had been approved.
We packed what we could into six pieces of luggage and eight checked bags, left the rest of our belongings with friends in Germany, and boarded a plane toward a life we hadn’t fully imagined yet.
Not long after I started working in America, the 2008 recession hit.
A Pattern I Didn’t Recognize Yet
Our company felt the impact later than most industries, which gave us a strange kind of breathing room. When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in response to the financial crisis, mortgage rates fell along with them — and that’s how I ended up buying my first home in America, at a relatively low rate.
I want to be honest about something: I understood almost nothing about interest rates, real estate, or macroeconomics at the time. I bought a house because we needed one, not because I understood the forces that had made it affordable. It’s only looking back now that I realize what kind of moment I was actually standing in.
At first, the subprime mortgage crisis felt like something happening to other people. I read about layoffs at other companies, watched the headlines, and thought: not us. Not yet.
It didn’t take long before I was wrong. Our revenue slowed. The layoffs came for us too.
This Wasn’t My First Storm
Here’s the part that still catches me off guard when I think about it: this wasn’t the first time I’d watched an economy collapse around me right as I was starting something new.
In 1996, I finished my Ph.D. and started my first job. One year later, the Asian financial crisis struck South Korea. Businesses collapsed. Companies merged or disappeared entirely. Unemployed workers filled the streets.
A few years after that, I moved to Germany for a research position — and shortly after I arrived, the dot-com bubble burst, slowing economies worldwide. Germany, still absorbing the costs of reunification and the structural growing pains of adopting the euro, was struggling so badly that people had started calling it “the sick man of Europe.” Unemployment climbed to somewhere between 10 and 13 percent.
And then I came to America — and met my third recession.
Three continents. Three fresh starts. Three economic storms, each one arriving almost exactly when I did.
I don’t know what to make of that pattern, even now. Maybe it says something about timing, or maybe it says nothing at all — maybe recessions are simply common enough that anyone who moves around the world a few times is bound to walk into one eventually. What I do know is that I didn’t find a way through, exactly. I don’t remember choosing to survive any of it. Each time, the storm simply passed, and I looked up to find myself still standing — almost by accident. If anything, I think I moved through those years in a kind of fog, too unsettled by everything around me to fully register what was actually happening.
The Part That Wasn’t So Easy
But I want to be honest about something else: immigrant life in America didn’t start smoothly for me, and buying that first house had a lot to do with it.
When the company-wide pay cut came — a 10% reduction across the board — it landed on a mortgage payment I had calculated tightly against my original salary. There wasn’t much room to absorb a cut like that. For a while, things were hard. I remember the mortgage payment booklet the bank sent us, thick with coupons, sitting on the table looking heavier than it had any right to look.
I’ll save the full story of that first house for another post — it deserves its own telling. For now, I’ll just say this: I’ve been in my second home for more than ten years now, and I’ve learned to appreciate stability in a way I didn’t know how to back then.
Three recessions in three countries taught me that storms arrive whether or not you’re ready for them. What they didn’t teach me — not yet, not for a long time — was how to prepare for the ones I couldn’t see coming.
That part of the story is still being written.