"You're crazy!" exlaimed our family friend passionately. I had just shared with her that we decided to stay in Finland for the year. We had originally come to Finland for just a 6 week vacation/school visit in late July with suitcases full with summer clothes and (luckily) 2 out of our 3 kids' string instruments as carry-ons. In week 4 of the trip we had made the sudden decision to stay for the school year if we could pull it off. To our friend it was insanity; their own family had moved from California to Finland the year prior and spent months carefully planning the move. To her, you couldn't make such a rash decision and you could definitely never execute on within a few weeks.
Yes, perhaps it was crazy but the opportunity presented itself to us on a silver platter and somehow all the planets aligned to make it happen. I'm originally from Finland but I've lived abroad since my high school graduation in 1988 (and my family had spent 4 years in Canada earlier). My American husband Joel had been to Finland many times during our courtship and marriage - our 6 week vacation was his 10th visit since 2001. He knew Finland and Finnish culture fairly well and loved many things about it. There were also many things he didn't like and he'd always said he'd never want to live in Finland. Because of that, when we came to Finland late July 2020 I took it for what it was: a 6 week escape from the boredom of Covid lockdown and online school back in San Jose, CA. We came to see my aging relatives and also for our 3 kids to visit a Finnish school, in-person, for 3 weeks to learn more about Finland, Finnish culture and the language. We had the opportunity to stay for a longer than normal visit because we were all going to school/working remotely. Given all our lives were virtual, we figured it didn't really matter where we were physically.
As planned, about 3 weeks into our 6 week visit Joel went home to San Jose, California to tend to our house and dog. It was August 17, shortly after schools had started in both Finland and US. (Our kids attended the Finnish school during the day and they were also trying to hang on to their US online school in the evenings despite the 10 hour time difference!) Before leaving Joel had seen how quickly the kids were adjusting to the school in Finland. He was impressed with our relative freedom from Covid thanks to Finland's good management of the pandemic and in general the independence, e.g. biking to school alone, kids in Finland enjoyed.
When Joel got back to California, he was in for quite a surprise. We'd had several years with fairly common, and often devastating, late summer forest fires in Northern California. This time they were raging close to the San Francisco Bay area. In fact, the fires and the related air quality in August 2020 were particularly bad: on his first morning at home, Joel woke up to sky that was completely orange from ashes! Quite a scary and surreal sight. (If you want to get a sense of the odd, sci-fi like feeling that day, check out this drone footage of San Francisco appropriately set to music from the movie Blade Runner.)
Joel called to see how I and the kids were doing back in Finland. We were great! Life for us in our Espoo, Finland, AirBnb was pretty normal in terms of Covid. We wore masks to the stores but were able to enjoy summer activities and socialize with friends and family - in somewhat limited groups and mostly outdoors - and still having fun. The kids were also doing well with their visit to the Finnish elementary school. (And it had become obvious their San Jose classmates were not going to return to school in October as the school district had initially suggested.) Meanwhile Joel felt isolated and lonely in his lockdown in our San Jose home, unable to see friends, missing his family and now faced with eerie wildfire skies. During our phone chat about the differences in the two countries' realities, as well as he upcoming presidential election, he asked the question: "Why would you and the kids even come back this school year!?"
That question kind of shook us up and once said out loud, staying longer seemed like an obvious option to consider. Given Joel had been firmly against ever living in Finland the thought had honestly never occured to me. But it had been my long-standing dream to one day own a small second home in Finland. We'd even talked about it a bit before Joel had gone back to the States because of my mother; We'd seen my mom during our trip and it was obvious she was dealing with serious memory deterioration. We guessed it was Alzheimer's but it hadn't been diagnosed as such yet. Given my worries about my mother's health, we were interested in possibly finding a place in Finland I could stay at when coming back to visit her. We hadn't done anything about this dream though other than superficially checking out local real estate listings to get a sense of the price-range.
Joel's questions got us thinking: What would it take to ride out Covid for the school year in Finland? Really it boiled down to 3 urgent problems: work, where to live in Finland, and what to do about our house and dog back in San Jose. Of course finances and timing were huge underlying issues to all three problems. Some of the other challenges seemed like problems we could take care of later e.g. paperwork related to Joel being able to stay in Finland (rest of us were dual citizens and thus automatically able to stay) and getting the kids registered in a school. By the way, when I say "urgent" I really mean it: The kids and I had tickets to fly back on 9/6 which was 2.5 weeks from when we first started talking about staying!
First we had to think about our jobs and livelihood: My full-time job in marketing analytics in a medical technology company and Joel's part-time graphic design job for a San Francisco newspaper. We expected Joel's manager to be supportive since he did all his design work independently delivering against specific deadlines. We were right and she blessed Joel's stay. My work was a mixture of meetings, collaboration and independent work but everyone in our marketing department had been working remotely for half a year already. It seemed to me that my physical location should no longer matter. Also so far, during the 6 week trip, working remotely had worked out well other than few technical glitches. Still, when I reached out to my boss I was nervous - to my relief he agreed to it too. (Later we found out HR and the legal department didn't think working from a different country was equivalent to staying in the US. They ended up converting me to a temporary Finland employee which for them presented extra cost and hassle and for me meant a significantly lower salary due to regional pay differences!)
We would also need a place to live in Finland. The AirBnb we were in was great but not big enough to be a viable solution for a year long stay - not to mention it was already booked after our stay. I started looking at both renting and buying. We were interested in staying close to where we were (Tapiola, Espoo) so that the kids would at least know someone: their best friends who'd moved from US to Finland the prior year and second cousins they had in the area. I quickly learnt it would be near impossible to find a large, decent and affordable furnished rental anywhere in Espoo (or Helsinki itself). Also renting is ultimately financially less attractive option than investing in equity. We decided to focus on buying a place with a plan to convert it to a rental or an AirBnb when we returned to the US.
To buy a house, you need to (a) find one and (b) figure out how to pay for it - in our case do this within a few weeks! I started looking immediately with key criteria being low cost and move-in readiness. I checked out one candidate that would have needed major renovation, which we thought we could take on after the school year. Luckily that house got scooped up and I came upon another viable and ultimately much better candidate. It was a duplex, in a community of 14 similar duplexes, that effectively looked like a US townhouse. It had 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living/dining room, a kitchen and of course a sauna within 100.5 m2 (1082 sq ft) as well as a big fence in backyard. The owner had lived mostly abroad and at some point fairly recently she'd renovated inside: the house was definitely move-in ready. The duplex was in a peaceful suburb called Mankkaa next to Tapiola. (I later found out Mankkaa is an excellent area close to numerous recreational opportunities and nature.) I had a friend come look at the place with me to get a 2nd opinion while Joel got to see it through videos and pictures. Everyone liked the duplex so we decided to go for it!
Simultaneously I'd been working on financing. I had reached out to a bank in Finland to figure out what it would take to get a mortgage. I got a pre-approval fairly quickly; maybe because I already had an account at the bank. We didn't really have time to ask for competing bids but that didn't seem like an issue given the incredibly low (from US perspective) mortgage rate of 0.8% (!) the bank offered. With interest that low, there definitely was no point in renting if only we could come up with the down payment. We were lucky to be to able to scrape that together between much appreciated support from family and sales of my company stock.
Having found a place, the next challenge was timing. We had to move at an absolutely dizzying pace! Joel has asked his big question about staying on Wednesday 8/19. By Saturday 8/22 I had ruled out rentals and house candidate #1 and inquired about the Mankkaa duplex which I then went to see on Monday 8/24. We made a verbal offer on Wednesday 8/26 and by Friday 8/28 we'd managed to negotiate both the price and possession date. Assuming I'd be able to sell the stock, transfer the downpayment, get final loan approval and sign the contract on time, the seller was willing to move out in just over a week on 9/7. That would be just one day past our planned flight back home!
I still don't quite know how we pulled it off... We had to jump through several hoops, in exactly the right sequence with really tight timing. We arranged to sign the contract, which in Finland happens at the bank instead of a title office as in US, and get possession of the house Monday 9/7. We were supposed to clear out of the AirBnb 9/6 but the owners were able to extend our stay one day to the contract signing day. We then waited on tenterhooks to see if we could transfer the downpayment funds fast enough for the timing to stick or whether we'd have to move to a hotel or another AirBnb temporarily. Well, somehow we were really lucky - and worked hard sending copies of paperwork, talking on the phone back to the US etc - and it all worked out! (And I now recommend TransferWise for fast and painless international money transfers...) Monday 9/7 will go down in history as one of my busiest days ever. In the morning I packed up the AirBnb and tried to clean it (while dealing with 3 kids). That of course took longer than expected. We had planned to go to IKEA to pick up sheets, towels, dishes, cutlery and pots and pans to get started in our new home that night. (Luckily the seller had agreed to leave a loft bed/matress, sell us the master bedroom bed/mattress and lend us her dining table set so we'd be able to sleep in the new house right away.) By the time we made it to IKEA, I only had one hour before we'd have to leave for the bank. I quickly bought the kids lunch and planted them in the cafeteria while I ran around IKEA like a crazed woman and picked up all the necessities! Thank goodness all IKEAs in the world have the same floorplan and they've been that way for decades - I knew where to find everything.
We got to the bank on time for our 2pm appointment. It was just me and the seller's real estate agent. The seller didn't even come: she'd given proxy signing rights to her real estate agent. There are no buyer side agents in Finland. The bank had set aside a meeting room for us and the real estate agent presented me with 3 copies of the same sparsely written 2 page document (a copy for me, the bank and the seller). The contract required only one signature per copy from each of us! Then once the contract was signed, the bank offical showed up, picked up the contract and went off to do a bit of paperwork while the real estate agent and I drank coffee and chatted. Then the bank official came back and I signed one more paper - for the mortgage - and we were done! I was handed the contract and the house keys. All together this took less than 20 minutes! Absolutely mindblowing. Anyone who has bought a house in the US knows how different of a experience that is. You literally have to spend over an hour at the title office reading a stack of indecipherable legalese and then initialing and signing tens of documents and in the process probably giving away your first born and who knows what else.
So there we were, only 2.5 weeks after first talking about staying in Finland, walking into a house we'd just bought with our IKEA bags... After a bit of house cleaning, picking up our remaining stuff from the AirBnb, going out to for a celebratory dinner at Japanese restaurant and making the beds we were ready to fall asleep. We were completely exhausted but very happy about our new 2nd home and the adventure ahead! Yet we still had one more big problem to solve: what to do about our San Jose home and dog. More about that in the next blog...
Hozzászólások