Husband got offered a new job in US

[Nunu90]

My DH has been offered a huge promotion in the US (Texas) and wants to relocate there. He says it would be temporary but I am aware that could change as it is a permanent position and he might not want to return to the UK if he likes it there.

I am currently pregnant (early) with our second child, and DS is almost 3. My job doesn't pay as much as his by any stretch, but I've finally started earning a decent wage and am moving up the ranks at work. I get good holidays, good maternity leave, we have a good network of family and friends around us and live in a beautiful countryside village. I love our life at the moment.

I feel we're at a complete stalemate. He is adamant we'd be making the biggest mistake of our lives if we do not go and 'at least try it out'. On the other hand, the thought of moving to Texas fills me with doom, and doesn't excite me at all. I hate the idea of uprooting my son from everyone and everything he knows, and sending him to school there. DH is adamant I can find a new job, but if all is well with this pregnancy, I'd be expected to move very soon after giving birth and can see I'd end up a SAHM ex-pat for a while.

He is paid well over here, and we are comfortable, but he is panicking about the cost of living here. He's convinced if we move to the US. we can return home with a chunk of our mortgage paid off (not selling the house).

I am just so worried and this decision is weighing heavily on me. Initially his company gave us two weeks to decide (!) and I said no. He was upset, and relayed this message to the person who offered him the job, who then insisted he wanted DH to do the job and that we can take 'more time' to think about it with visits, speaking to colleague's families, etc. I felt that his boss didn't get the answer that he wanted, so basically gave more time for me to be persuaded into something I said no to.

I have relayed my worries to DH about Texas specifically (laws on women's health care, gun laws, etc) and he thinks I am being very negative about it all and that I am 'creating issues'. He insists that 'everyone' has told him the area we'd move to is a very safe, gated neighbourhood. His US colleagues live in this area, and again, this concerns me that my only initial contact with new people will be through his work.

Am I being completely closed to a good opportunity, or am I being unreasonable? I feel a bit trapped and a bit coerced at the moment. I do not want to go but feel as though I am being left with little choice on the matter...

Yes, this one.
People in relatively senior (managerial?) position would absolutely not be shy to ask about the full package and details, there is absolutely no shame in it. £120k salary does assume that level of confidence in dealing with such trivial things.

I'm an expat and have lived in the Midwest for 20 years. Our children were all born here and I'm glad we moved. So I don't have any anti-US bias (unlike many, many people on MN.)

In your position I would not move. If your husband wants to try it - great. He can go for a year and see how he gets on. Revisit it then. It sounds as though your marriage may not be at optimum strength right now (no judgment, those early years with young kids are tough) and I personally wouldn't give up my job and uproot myself and a child from my support network.

Plenty of couples work and live apart for a while. Give it a try.

Are you the OP's not so DH?

Blimey, we wouldn’t relocate for 120k (or any number near that) package. I would politely suggest he addresses his ambition within the UK corporate sphere, 120k isn’t a particularly high salary in the grand scheme of things, if the US office isn’t going to up that considerably, I would definitely stay. A previous poster mentioned church being at the centre of most things Texan, that would be a massive deterrent for our family, too.

Completely agree. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

Not being allowed to remove the children applies to US-born children who have a US-citizen parent. It's not the same for ex-pats, where both the children's maternal and paternal families are in the UK and the children are fully English, and the parents are only here on work/trailing-spouse visas. They would not be considered "a US person" on those visas. And even if the rules are the same, the requirement not to remove doesn't kick in until a divorce is filed. If their relationship broke down to this extent, she would probably already be back in the UK with the kids, and it's very unlikely they would be divorcing in the US.

The kids thing could be relevant if they stayed in the US a long time and they both got green cards. Green cards come with a lot more responsibility than work/trailing-spouse visas, and they convert you into a "US person."

I think you've said it all when you described how you've already moved several times to fit in with your DH's career and this is now meant to be your forever home. He needs to honour that now. You've already compromised. Please don't uproot your happy life - the dog is important - to go to Texas. I'd be wanting more than what your husband is being offered to move there. Either he goes alone to see how it pans out, or can you seek to improve your life in the UK?

Just go, you can always come back if you don’t like it.

Exactly, thank you. I've read the entire thread and it seems @mikulkin is the only person saying the cost of living in the US is cheaper than in the UK.

@nixon1976

Pregnant women are NOT being turned away from emergency rooms

This took me literally 5 seconds to find:
https://apnews.com/article/pregnancy-emergency-care-abortion-supreme-court-roe-9ce6c87c8fc653c840654de1ae5f7a1c

Talk about misinformation on this thread. You're right about that if you meant that it's coming from yourself.

OP, you could be me - but I moved to Texas just over 20 years ago with a toddler and while pregnant. Baby number two was born in Memorial Hospital, Houston.
DH was a high earner and the move enabled us to effectively live rent free for 3 years. We rented out our London house and were given a housing allowance in Houston. Made the mistake of trying to save too much by not getting a house with a pool but that's another story.
it's a strange place, texas, the cities in particular. But parts of the state are beautiful. We holidayed in the Chisos Mountains and Davis Mountains and Big Bend and Hill Country. Gorgeous! And took advantage of our location to really explore the states as a family. Wonderful trip to the Pacific NW and also to Arizona springs to mind. It was a great adventure for all of us, and we made some great expat friends. As someone else said upthread, it's a vibrant expat scene in Houston.

But. Subsequent trips to the states have made me shudder. I think we had the best of it. It appears to be more dangerous and run down than it was back then (San Francisco in particular - I'm looking at you). I expect I'll be contradicted, and that's fine. Just my opinion.

Didn't affect the children's development at all. They returned to the uk with cute little texan accents with very long diphthongs. But that soon disappeared.

Interested to hear what you decide...

American here. The cost of good to very good health coverage for a family, purchased by a large employer is about $25k per year. It normally would not be included in the value of a compensation package as the employee doesn't get it directly and it's not taxable. Relocation costs also wouldn't be counted as they are corporate staffing costs and not taxable to the employee. Compensation would be salary and bonus.

It sounds like he’s focused on 400k being more than triple 120k and not even considered anything else. If CoL is same as UK then you might save but that depends on things like him getting free flights to the Uk twice a year being thrown in. Once you’ve moved, you don’t want him saying that you can’t fly back because it’s coming out of the family budget so better chucked at the mortgage.

There will be an expat forum somewhere with realistic costs and costs that you have not have thought about.

If he does go ahead then I would have your baby in the UK and fly out to see him since you’re on maternity leave but I’d be careful about making sure that the balance doesn’t make taking the kids back something that he’d be able to legally block. Once maternity leave is over then I think that you should return to your job. The kids will go to school in the blink of an eye and you will hopefully have built a strong foundation that allows you to keep making more money.

I'd chew glass before I moved to Texas, not even to Austin which is a small patch of blue in a very red state.

DH and I RV and if we have to go through Tx we go as fast as we can to spend as little time in Tx as we possibly can.

Don' worry about guns. Incredibly, most children go to school and are not shot

What an absolute arsehole thing to say.

The more I think about this, the more I worry that he is, at best, incompetent. At worst, purposefully deceiving you.

When we were dating, DH, who has previously worked as a performer, was approached by a director he used to work with to ask if he'd reprise the role he'd done before and come with them on a tour of Asia. I think they were struggling to find someone for the role, they knew him, etc.

As part of the initial conversation, they laid out the financial offering and benefits, including, for example, that as one of the leads he'd get his own room at a specific hotel chain or equivalent, and not have to share (which other cast members did), what insurance they would have in place, the travel arrangements (type of airline, class of ticket etc), the per diem fee they'd get and how it would be paid out etc. And this was for some shitty little show.

Your DH is supposedly going to a big job in another country and he knows none of this?

This is really excellent, balanced advice, OP.

I think you should tell him you can't possibly give him a final answer without full details of the package. In the meantime, get proper legal advice on the situation with the kids and whether you'd be able to work or not. If you say no, your marriage might not survive but then again, it might not survive you being stuck in a gated community all day long.

Food will seem cheap here compare to USA.

Something someone else said jumped out at me. He's asking you, a woman with a history of miscarriage, to go to a state where you won't get healthcare if you need it. It'd be like asking him, if he had a history of heart disease, to go to a place that will refuse to treat him if he has a cardiac event. Can you even agree to that? What if you get pregnant again while over there? Out of curiosity I looked up the nearest abortion provider to Houston, it's over 500 miles away.

Just randomly reading some of the replies, I have to say that some of them are WILDLY negative and throwing out some horrific and extremely unlikely scenarios. I know the US and living in Texas does not have to be awful. Life is what you make it. There are plenty of good things about the place and plenty of lovely people who are not racist MAGA gun-toting types. America is an incredible place. Try to ignore all the crazy scare-mongering and anti-American sentiment on here, OP.

The thing that annoys me about this situation is if you got some amazing job opportunity that would be great for you and offered much more than he is currently earning but required relocating, would he pack up and leave his job and everything he was used to for "the family"?

No he would not. All the arguments of it being "great for the family" then goes out the window. Because if it was you in his position he wouldn't give a shit about that, he'd only give a shit about his job and career.

It's all nonsense as far as I'm concerned. He's not doing it for the greater good of the family. He's just trying to steamroll you because he personally wants the promotion and ego boost.

I think it's rather selfish of him, especially because as you say women's health and rights over there are questionable and could negatively affect you or any daughter you have long term. He doesn't seem to care much about that either.

Have you/he been over there before or is this brand new to you both?

I've worked in TX (Houston) a lot over the years - including for months at time - and would rather poke myself in the eyes with rusty nails than move there.

I can't even imagine it as a SAHP.

£120k could be a technical specialist rather than managerial. Some of my DC’s friends are on that kind money in their mid / late twenties.