AIBU, is this utterly insane?

[sunshinepunch]

Hi

Having a really hard time with heart or head decision.

Trying to keep things as short as possible but don't want to drip feed. I'm married, late 40's. My husband is also late 40's and we have twin boys aged 8.

We moved from Scotland to Victoria (Australia) five years ago when the boys were wee.

My husband works full time and I'm part time and the boys are at a local school they like. My husband works long hours in a senior office based job and enjoys it here. His role can be quite technical and isn't found in every office. I pick up very junior full time admin roles (temporary reception assistant/packing envelopes/filing/data entry etc). We've not owned property in Scotland but did manage to save £20,000 which we used for visas and to move out to Australia.

Right, now to my AIBU. I would really like to move back to Scotland next year but my husband doesn't really want to go. I am originally from New Zealand but lived in Scotland for 11 years. My husband is half English half Scottish but doesn't really have much family to speak of except for his mum and aunt (elderly in Scotland). My husband and I earn better money in Victoria but it is really expensive here. I feel like we could almost never get on the property ladder. We have a little bit of savings (about $11,000 AUD) that would be used to move back and initial settling back costs. As we still have about a year to go if we move, it's likely the savings will increase a little.

Ever since we've lived in Australia I have felt like a fish out of water and I really want to go back to Scotland, where my close friends are. I have no ties with New Zealand anymore. I miss everything about Scotland. I've tried and tried here in Australia but it just feels like it's all keeping up with the Jones's and everyone already have all the friends they need. I feel like I'm an outsider looking in on someone else's life. I volunteer, take any job I can and invite people to coffee dates/play dates but it's just a closed book. I miss my friends so much & their kids, who my boys used to play with. But it's more than that. Scotland is "home" to me. I adore everything about it. It's where I feel settled. I feel like five years is enough to know Australia is not home. We moved here initially for a bit of adventure and thought it would be a better life as a family. My husband thinks Australia has a higher standard of living than Scotland and thinks kids are kids longer here/have better lives. He's earning more here and enjoys it here. He's said he will move back however if I really really want to.

We would apply for jobs before leaving (hopefully lining up interviews) and work hard back in Scotland. We both always had jobs in Scotland, but I know things will take a while to get back to some sort of normality.

The biggest issue is that we don't have any assets. I'm really concerned that we may be moving back to what could be a huge backwards step. We'd like to get a mortgage one day but I'm conscious we're late 40's, no assets and would moving back to start again as such. I'm worried I'm could even move my family to possible poverty.

Is it insane to even consider this?? Are we too old to be considering "starting anew"? I'm an optimistic person (and we've always made things work, we work hard) but just feel so dejected and an outsider.

I'm so desperately unhappy here, but I have to think of what's right for me and my family's future.

Do I just push my feelings away, smile and pretend?

Help........

I'm Gona go against the grain here and say you should come back. There are stills school performing fine. What area would you be looking to move?
Australia is going the same way with regards to trans/woman's rights so I feel that's a bit of a red herring really.
What I do think though is you should spend the next few years saving like crazy then move the children when they'd be going into first year.

If you adored everything about Scotland why did you want to move to Australia? With respect op I get the feeling you always have itchy feet and can't settle.

Your lack of retirement funds/plans, in either country, is worrying. Aside from any pensions, how are you planning to pay for housing if you don't own and your savings are tiny?

Could you spend every spare moment doing online training over the next year to gain some qualifications so that you can look for a higher paying job? The employment situation in the UK is tough after Brexit and covid, more so for those without skills or qualifications.

i think it sounds like you might be one of the people that doesnt feel settled for long wherever. You say scotland is the only place that felt like home and yet it was you that wanted to move to australia, and you are from new zealand but dont want to go back there?
I dont think its fair to keep uprooting everyone. Maybe the issue is where youre living rather than australia itself?

Mustard is right, regardless of where you end up living you have made no financial plan for your future. If you definitely don’t want to be in Australia anymore then move back to the UK not necessarily Scotland. Line up jobs as far as possible before you go. Then you will be much closer to home to make a decision about Scotland. Regardless you need to buy a house and start paying it off rather than throwing money away on rent. I think if you are that unhappy after 5 years you should push to move home now or you are likely to end up spending the rest of your life in a place you don’t want to live.

And the school system here is a shambles unless you're one of the few who live in high end areas or pay private.

What stands out to me is that you are unhappy with your work. It sounds like you’ve had a series of temporary, low paid jobs that you don’t find interesting or challenging . As an adult work can be an important place to connect with other people.

Can you look at some retraining or short courses to boost you up the career path? If it doesn’t make you happier where you are, at least it would increase your earning potential back home.

We live in Scotland, my children are at a state school and I’m undecided-leaning-no on independence, and it’s… fine, really. I don’t recognise it as the utter wasteland of ruined public services and impossibly polarised culture that several other Mumsnetters do. So I wouldn’t base your opinion about moving on narratives of it all going to rack and ruin.

Have you scoped out a scenario what you’d actually be able to afford in Scotland, re: where you could live, what school your kids would go to, what sort of tradeoffs you’d be making in terms of location/jobs/being near friends?

When are you planning to retire? If you manage to build up a deposit in 5 years (I’m not sure if that’s feasible) then you will be 55 when you start a mortgage. I suspect an mortgage provider won’t let you have mortgage past 70 so you will only be able to get a 15 year mortgage. I’m not sure the numbers are going to add up unless you both have high earning potential.

A friend of mine watch the show wanted down under and eventually went - she likes it but nothing like she expected - obviously they concentrate on all the positives. She misses her friends and family and virtual isn't the same at all. So expensive and time consuming to visit - parents are now getting older and cannot check in on them at all - I think it's the guilt of upping and leaving them that adds to her pain.

Tell him how you feel OP - you only get one life

@skirk64 I hear what you're saying but I didn't find Scotland and insular a decade ago, we moved five years. I accept that it must have changed a long more than I think in the last five years however. I will press my friends a bit more as they haven't really said much on this. I think the pandemic has been too overbearing. I had thought about moving States yes. Darwin is way too (being nice here backwaterish) and far too hot. Tasmania I would consider except the UV is off the scale (skin cancer is rife being closer to the hole in the ozone layer) and my husband won't live there anyway - too small an island he says. I have thought about WA. I have visited Perth a few times over the past five years and lived there for ten months before I moved to Scotland. I really don't think I could live in Perth again and my husband doesn't want to but if we sat down and worked it out financially I would think about it. I found it to be really really insular and lots of 'bogans'. It is a beautiful city however. Property prices aren't super cheap (unless you want to live over an hour away) but you're right, they are cheaper than NSW and VIC. Thanks for your input.

@MeanMrMustardSeed I am concerned too. We both have private pensions in the UK and also superannuation in Australia. Not hundreds of thousands but decent. We also have shares, again not hundreds of thousands but again, ok. I suppose I should have actually said this when I said we don't have assets - they are an asset just not housing or accessible cash. I will sit down and work things out - thanks for your good advice . Good idea to work back the way as such and work out how to do it.

@Narwhalsh I do love the cold :-) I have heard a few things that indy ref, brexit and SNP have changed the country. I will be asking direct questions to my friends on this as they hadn't mentioned it. Perhaps we're in a echo chamber. I don't think any country escapes not being insular... you should try living here... they wrote the book! ;-)

@Whinge I hear what you're saying. Things will be different. My boys have memories but not great ones. My friends and I are very supportive of each other and have kept in close contact since I left the country. I know we won't slot back in, but I do know we'll see each other and the kids will play - and I'm always open to new friendships too.

@Bluntness100 yes it seems this is a common theme and good advice. Waiting a bit - at the very least it will be a year anyway. I am just worried the longer we wait the harder it is to get jobs (then being in 50's)

I think you’re having a “grass is greener” memory of being younger, I’m not sure it has anything to do with Scotland. I wonder if you might have some low level depression, if you have spent the last few years feeling low level not great?

I would say, don’t leave it too long to move back. You still have friends and connections. We moved just 200 miles back to where I grew up after nine years away. My parents by then had sadly just died, it was quite a rural place and I found all my friends had since moved away. The youngest of our three children was just 3 weeks old and I no longer fitted in. I was so lonely and had given up my job to move. There was so little in the way of clubs and activities for the children and we missed our previous life. Within a year we had moved back. Lots of family support from Dh’s family and we have been happy ever since.

If you leave it too long your children will regard Australia as home or you may find in later years that they want to return there. You have a good few years to make a decision and since your dh would be amenable, go for it.

@Aprilx I hear what you're saying. I suppose we were great savers on our salaries - we were proud of that £20,000. There were many moments were we thought should we stay and use that as a housing deposit and in the end, moving to Australia won. I had work lined up (it was only a project role that lasted a year but it was full time and better pay) so I suppose we thought we would be earning straight away and my husband secured a job in a month of landing so thought we would build on that. We hadn't reckoned on Australia being so expensive (it jumped MASSIVELY since I had left 11 years earlier) and housing having sky rocketed so much. I felt we carried out good research but perhaps not enough. Totally agreed it is hard to know where is 'best' once you start emigrating once... I have tried as much as I can over the past five years to make the best of it here but feel my mental health is on the tipping point... do you mind me asking where you lived here and what brought you back?

@Vursayles thank you for your comments

@HoldontoOneMoreDay love that song :-) at the moment first time home buyers need $100,000 to get on the property ladder. That fills me with dread, I just don't know how we would save that with it being so expensive here. I think, unless things have drastically changed, and with properties being cheaper in Scotland, you would need less of a deposit? I may be wrong here - must do more research. We both really want to own a home. We want to give the boys the security and know we'll have to work hard to pay it of. It will be a priority. The comments about education in Scotland scare me - I really need to look into this more. We are all British citizens so no visa worries there. We had planned to have a holiday back but the pandemic stopped that. I do feel though if we were moving, I would rather put that money into savings than use it for a holiday. Thanks for your input.

Mumsnet is often quite ‘anti-Scottish’ to be honest OP so it might be difficult to get unbiased advice here. If you had phrased it ‘move back to the UK’ you may have got a more balanced view (although probably a lot of comments about whether you could afford to live in London, so you can’t really win!). I think it’s a very good idea to talk to your real life friends who actually live here and whether they feel genuinely affected in their day to day lives by the doom and gloom that’s reported by the English news outlets. But I do agree with PP that you should also look at your long term finances / retirement plan and try to work out which country would make it easier to achieve your goals. Family and friends are so important too. For what it’s worth, of the people I know who moved to Australia, almost all have eventually come home saying it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (funnily enough that is also true of the people I know who moved to London) 😂
Of course it depends on the area you move to (true in all countries). Why don’t you tell us what your husband does and we might be able to suggest the best areas where he might find work?

I think you should spend less time chatting with your friends in Scotland and more time creating a rewarding social life for yourself in Australia!

@sunshinepunch my brother lived in Oz for a few years so I have heard all about the Aussie ‘welcome’ We aren’t native to Scotland either (been here about 13 years) and I work in a very international sector but my husband who works local government is still seen as ‘the English guy’. The ongoing independence stuff is definitely worrying for us and frankly our future here.

Don’t forget cold AND dark-the winters really do make it hard to do anything outside because of the lack of daylight even if the weather is on your side! In terms of lifestyle and bringing up kiddies, I can only see huge pluses for Aussie lifestyle (but then I’m extremely jaded with being (stuck) in Scotland so not totally unbiased )

@Bluntness100 we thought it would be a bit of an adventure, a good life for the boys and reckoned on the higher salaries, not realising how expensive Australia had gotten over the 11 years I lived in Scotland and not realising how much property prices had skyrocketed. People always go on about how great the sun is here but it's super hot in summer and the UV is really dangerous. I used to take the boys out more outdoors in Scotland!

@Horehound thanks for your input. We don't know the area yet, pretty wide open. I've made it a mission of mine now to research really super well on property prices and schools. Thanks for your good advice about savings.

General - One thing I hadn't mentioned, don't mean to drip feed but try not to think about it too much - my husband's ex ran up huge debts in his name and it took years to clear it - think payday loan after payday loan etc. and then she disappeared back to Canada. We were on a bit of a backfoot for years - yes I know we should have saved more but after that was paid off we spent a year treating ourselves as had nothing for years. That's why we only saved £20,000.

@cushioncovers bit of an adventure, a good life for the boys and reckoned on the higher salaries. See answer to blunt above

@PragmaticWench I agree it's worrying. We were hoping, as we are really experienced and can almost live anywhere, we would find work not too long after arriving. We're really proactive with contacting agencies and applying for roles from afar - we would test things out and start re-establishing employment contacts a couple of months before leaving. Not an absolute guarantee but helps. We obviously wouldn't be able to get a mortgage without some extra savings and both working.

@Branleuse you raise some good points there, it's not fair to keep uprooting. I've written above why we left. I thought it would be 'better' but didn't realise how hard it would be mentally here. I haven't lived in NZ since I was very young. I have no family or close friends there, no ties. If I could turn back time I would not have left, it's been so incredibly hard for me here. I try to not have regrets, as we have had some good times here as a family, but I do wish we hadn't left. The old not know what you've got springs to mind. I've lived in Australia before, just not as a family unit and when it was much much less expensive to live here. Australia is right for millions, just not right for me.

@osbertthesyrianhamster thanks for your input

Ok, off to collect the boys from after school crafts, will respond more when back. Thanks everyone, great advice and lots of food for thought.

I didn't mean to be harsh, OP. But as someone who's lived most of her life moving from one country to another, mostly because my parents worked with international organisations, I had to learn that it's best to "bloom where you are planted"; making the most of being in a new country, a new culture and often a new language. It's hard to leave good friends behind but it's necessary to make new ones wherever you're living. As long as your heart and mind remain in Scotland, you'll never find happiness in Australia.

You do sound unhappy, and life is too short for that. I'd suggest give Australia a little longer, to allow you to save more, then return, before the boys are off to high school.

Is there opportunity for you to work online? Lots of roles in the UK are now online/WFH because of covid-19, and I am making the assumption that you're PT to fit around school for your sons? FT hours worked flexibly would mean more money banked to bring with you.
I was going to ask about your citizenship, but you answered that in your last post.

As someone upthread mentioned- do you think you just have wanderlust, and would actually be unhappy back in Scotland after a few years have passed? I'm wondering if a third country might be a possibility? (You may have had your fill of adventure now though! NZ doesn't call to you? Brits are nuts for NZ usually )

You do mention wanting to put down roots though, and having roots/feeling rootless affects us all in different ways. Do you think it is something that will affect your sons when they're older? If so (and that depends on their personalities, could be one would, one wouldn't) that should influence your decision. At the end of the day, there's only ten years of their childhoods left, then they'll be off doing their own exploring. Only you would know whether Scotland or Australia would be a better springboard for them.

I must say I'm surprised to see so many posts dissing Scotland. Most threads on here seem to eulogise it as if it were an earthly paradise. Obviously there is even more astroturfing on MN than I realised.
FWIW, the MNers I "know" in Scotland like it, and don't want to leave, and that's people pro and against independent Scotland.
My brother lives in Aberdeen, and is v happy there, but as other posters have alluded to, life is easier when you have money, even if you're using state schools, healthcare etc, and this applies in Australia or England.

I'm not understanding the comments about "well you can't have liked it that much if you left it"
Yes, because if you like somewhere you have to stay forever and ever and not want to be open to new experiences... Mhmm right.

And I agree with others that it's a bit weird to see so many people dissing Scotland as if it's some hellhole. It's not. It's lovely.
Are all these posters naysaying it, living in Scotland, and if so and it's so bad, why are you not living in Oz?! ;)

I don’t think YABU to be thinking about this and it sounds like you’ve made a really decent effort to make a life there and for one reason or another it just isn’t working for you.

However, I do think you should sit it out for a while and wait until the impact of Brexit becomes clearer, the pandemic situation improves and keep your eye on politics on Scotland and consider how independence of that happens would affect you.

You should make a trip back first, when you can obviously, and perhaps plan to visit schools, catch up with friends in similar situations to yourself, check out the housing market where you can afford to live etc. The rest of your family are happy so it’s really on you to research the move back properly - perhaps make a 2 year plan and set yourself some goals and that will give you a focus. Keep your DH involved too and gauge his opinion throughout so he didn’t feel like a “done deal” is handed to him further down the line.

Wherever you go, there you are...