End of Year Reflections - 2025
Almost a month and a half late with my yearly updates, but here I am, wishing everyone a happy new year!
The urge to share my updates in all its nutsy-boltsy glory was brewing for long, but I hadn’t found the time to put it all together and publish a lengthy post. I’ve occasionally been publishing random, impulsively written posts on my Journal whenever the writing bug bites me during rare moments of inspiration, but the main publication hasn't seen a post in a full year.
I set aside an entire day today to do nothing but pour my heart out and share everything I could possibly share, in as much detail as I can. It could very well be that I might disappear again for a while.
So, here’s a roundup of what went down in 2025.
Work And Life
I’m moving abroad again! If all goes as planned, I’ll find myself in Germany by the middle of this year.
As of January 2026, I’ve joined a startup in Munich, Germany. I had been looking for openings in Germany for a while on LinkedIn. I got 4 interview calls in total from about 150 applications. I interviewed with them in parallel, and once I got an offer from my current employer, I didn’t bother with the other in-progress loops and withdrew from the process. I’ll keep my current company confidential for now, while the other three were for C++ developer roles at SonarSource, Exasol and TinyBird, in case anyone’s interested in exploring software dev opportunities in Germany.
I’m currently working for my employer remotely from Bangalore as a freelancer. The deal is that I work remotely for 3 months - which can be thought of as my probation period - after which, if they’re happy with me, they’d initiate my relocation to Munich.
Considering what I wanted in terms of work profile, scale of the company and location, this is as close as I can get to my ideal situation - location being the primary motivator, everything else secondary. Germany had been enticing me for a long time, Munich in particular. Germany because of the opportunity to lead a peaceful life in a functioning society with good amount of domestically remote software jobs, to immerse myself in the difficult but stimulating challenge of learning a new language, and a faster path to residency and citizenship without drama. Munich was my preferred destination in particular for the nature lover in me, with the city promising abundant opportunities for outdoor recreation and mountain getaways. Munich also seems to me like an in-between city in terms of being multicultural, that isn’t as cosmopolitan as Berlin to the point where it doesn’t feel like Germany, or as conservative as some of the more right-wing regions of Germany where you don’t feel welcome.
The job I’ve found is just a means to my end-goal, but I’ve been fortunate enough to find a role where I’ll get to work on lots of new exciting stuff. I’m glad that I’m not staring at yet another flavor of the same 9-5 grind all over again - the same old shit with just a new label of a different company name. The grind of monotonous work obligations is what I strive to escape.
I worked for Microsoft in Bangalore for one and half years. Although my passion for the craft of software development remains intact, this was enough time for me to realize that I’m sort of done with BigTech - giant Fortune 50/100/500 monstrosities where you become a cog in the big, bloated corporate machinery, and slowly watch your soul slip away as you get swept up in meetings, 1:1s with managers and skips, daily standups, emails and pings, dev oncalls, appraisal cycles, town-halls and all-hands, being part of hiring events and interview panels, with some real software development squeezed into the little focus time you have left as you find yourself stretched thin.
Despite my distaste for corporate life in principle, I did find my time at Microsoft pleasant though. The work in Azure Storage was stimulating, and my coworkers were fun. I actually never set foot into the office except to collect my laptop and join a couple team-lunches over the course of my 1.5 years. I immensely valued being fully remote, because on the one hand, the commute was two hours one-way, and on the other hand, working in an office building is something I can no longer withstand. I haven’t worked inside an office since 2020 when COVID forced us all out, and I haven’t missed the office since. With news circulating around that Microsoft will be mandating Return-To-Office sometime during this year, that’s a bullet I’ve dodged now.
I believe I brought value to my role and delivered at work, and my manager came to depend on me to get things done. So he was disappointed when I announced that I’m leaving. I’m a little repulsed with myself too, because I feel that I just milked Microsoft to my own advantage and used it as leverage to achieve my larger goal of moving abroad. I carry the guilt of having used Microsoft as a stepping stone to design this FIRE-adjacent lifestyle vision I always had in mind. But I console myself that it’s all business at the end of the day where nobody owes anybody anything other than contractually defined obligations, and that I did not slack off at my job.
I could have explored internal transfer opportunities within Microsoft, but I really wanted to get out of BigTech MegaCorps and into more smaller-profile jobs that feel light on the shoulders, where the golden handcuffs don’t feel so tight. In the one month I’ve been with my current company, it feels like I’ve hit the sweet spot between a high-octane, perform-or-perish American startup, and a slave-away-and-burn-out Indian startup. People here come in to work at 9, do justice to their work, and leave at 5, unplugging until the next day. I just have one other guy as my immediate team mate who works remotely from Brazil, and we both don’t have a manager to report to. The Brazil dev will help me ramp up and will be the sole judge who will assess the quality of my work and decide whether I’m worthy of bringing onboard to Munich.
The tech stack is entirely new to me and is a breath of fresh air. Having worked all these years on monolithic monsters written in C and C++ that ran on bare metal, I will now be working in Golang and Python on micro-services running on top of AWS. C++ and systems programming will now be like an ex-wife that I’ll always have feelings for, while Go and Python are now my hot new girlfriends, kicking up some mojo in my life.
Thoughts On Moving Abroad
While the prospect of moving to Germany excites me, I also have significant apprehension about what might be in store. The whole reason we are moving is only because I’m not finding living conditions and quality-of-life in Bangalore acceptable. If I have to point my finger at the top 3 reasons why I want to leave, it would be air pollution, poor public infrastructure and road safety. These are the reasons which actually pose everyday danger to life and long-term health for yourself and your loved-ones. I could list another 25 reasons that cause regular annoyances, frustrations and inconveniences for why I want to leave, but the above three life-endangering ones would be my top picks.
People have asked me online and offline - “Bruh, didn’t you already know you’d face these issues in Bangalore before you decided to return from the US? Duh!” This question stumped me in the beginning. I knew about India’s systemic issues before I decided to return back voluntarily, but I had no satisfactory answer to that question.
Over time, I gradually realized why I took the decision to return despite being fully aware of what was in store. I realized that I wasn’t returning to India so much as I was escaping my grind in the United States. Work was beginning to lose purpose and meaning, having to juggle work while parenting our then newborn son was brutally exhausting, and because of having reached the milestone of one million USD, that number was beginning to play psychological tricks with our minds and tempting us with the option to move to India and take a long break from the hustle and grind, which felt very tantalizing. And so, escape the US we did.
That brings me to our second big move - to Germany. Since history repeats itself, I can already tell that this isn’t about moving to Germany so much as it is about escaping India. I’m sick and tired of how broken everything is and how you are completely on your own in terms of making private arrangements to shield yourself from the dysfunctional system, since the government won’t do shit for you. You are solely responsible for arranging respectable housing with clean water and backup electricity, private transportation, private healthcare, private education for your kids, private recreation and entertainment, build your own social-security for old-age, the list goes on. I don't deny that the privileged class and the high-earners can easily afford all these expenses without breaking a sweat. I know I can, but I can’t get over my anger and disgust over the fact that this is how the system functions here.
To live well in India, you have to count on your own pocket money because public services are non-existent or unusable. On top of having to spend your own money for living a life of dignity, don’t forget the hefty tax-money you are paying to get barely anything back in return for it.
I will stop my rant here, I’ve ranted enough over the years - and that brings me to what might be in store for me and my family in Germany. I’m fully aware it won’t all be fun and games, far from it. I worry that it can get lonely there, the language barrier will be a challenge until we pick up German well enough which won't happen fast, winters can be long and depressing, German bureaucracy and paperwork are notoriously tedious, and while my introverted-self might find the reserved society a delight, my wife and kids might fail to adapt to the new environment. There’s a real possibility that the whole cycle might repeat, and we might realize we aren’t cut out for Germany either. If we get to that point, then I’ll really be at a loss about what to do next. This is very likely my last big move, and if this fails, the only option left is to return back to India, or return back to the US, both of which I’m not keen on. Returning to the US is nearly impossible anyway, and even if some employer - despite abundant supply of local talent - found me to be the perfect stroke of genius and agreed to sponsor my $100K H-1B, I wouldn’t dare getting anywhere close to the immigration crackdown currently unfolding in the country - both illegal and legal.
More than anything, I have enormous guilt about leaving my old dad behind. My father is 79 years old and lives alone in our native town. He is as healthy and energetic as a 55 year old, has a very active social life, drives his car himself, and currently has no physical or cognitive health issues. But it breaks my heart to leave my aging old man to fend for himself as he enters his eighties. Leaving my dad behind is the biggest burden I’ll carry on my conscience when the time to leave comes. I wasn’t around when my mother passed away 15 years back. God forbid, if I’m not around for my dad when it’s his time, I don’t know how I’ll carry that scar with me the rest of my life.
Sometimes, with time, the answers simply come to you. I’ll see if in two years, I’ll have the answer about what to do with my dad situation. What I do know for now is that the answer shouldn’t involve assisted senior living facilities. Absolute geographical freedom that lets me shuttle between, and reside in India or Germany when required, for as long as is required, without any restriction, is a position I want to get to as quickly as I can.
For now, I choose to cop out and not think about my father’s mortality, and will forge ahead with my plan to move abroad. Bangalore is the only home I know, and I have no motivation to explore other cities in India, tier-2 towns, or toying with the idea of the smoothly-marketed farmhouse lifestyle in the outskirts of the city. I’m not falling for those Instagram farmhouse reels that sell the idea of a slow-paced life amid nature.
Just like it took me 2 years to realize that I can’t go on living in India, I’ll be giving ourselves 2 years in Munich to make an informed decision on whether Germany could be our long term home. I’ll keep an open mind, and the hardships we’ll undoubtedly face during the initial days shouldn’t pressure us into a rushed conclusion. Only after 2 years, will we be in a position to determine if we’ve arrived at the Promised Land, or if our pursuit of happiness remains elusive.
Finances
2025 was yet another great year for the US markets, returning 17% gains on average to investors.
As you can see, the stock market bull run has continued for nearly a decade now, except for the drop in 2022. Our US stock investments across taxable and retirement accounts crossed the 2 million mark in 2025. This puts me somewhere on a spectrum where there are people in BigTech that would laugh at what might seem like a pittance to them, and there are others that would find this jaw-dropping. I know better than to participate in dick-measuring contests. To me, this is more money than I know what to do with, because sports-cars, cocaine and supermodel escorts don’t exactly figure on my wishlist.
The Munich startup I’ve joined has offered me a yearly salary of €85,000. For a very expensive city like Munich, and for my years of experience, that’s not what you'd call top-of-the-line pay, not even close. With taxes, rent and living expenses eating away at my paycheck, I won’t exactly be padding my bank account. They sure got me for a discount, and I for one know that it’s currently not much of a Buyer’s Market out there.
But that’s the whole point, as I mentioned before. Just like Walter in Breaking Bad ran a car wash as a Front to launder drug money, my job is only a Front for me to achieve my more discreet personal lifestyle goals that I can’t announce openly.
I like to think of it like Einstein’s patent office job. Before he exploded onto the scene, Albert Einstein worked an easy job as an obscure patent office clerk, where he found himself with large amounts of free time that enabled him to work on his science, which then led to his groundbreaking theories of relativity. I want something similar with my remote-friendly job, which gives me large amounts of free time to do my own thing. And since I’m smarter than Einstein, I won’t be wasting away my free time developing the Unified Field Theory that Einstein left unfinished. I’ll instead use my free time to enjoy nice afternoon trail-runs, patio brunches with my wife while the kids are away at school, sunny blue-sky days spent writing at the park, or some other cheesy romantically-cringe activity.
If I start to feel the pinch of a lower salary to be really painful, I’ll simply switch to a higher paying job once I’ve found my footing, settled in and comfortable in a year or two. If need be, I’ll draw down $20-25K from my US holdings every year during the first couple years for discretionary spending, in case my modest coastFIRE paycheck alone won’t cut it. I’d like to put that FI money to use and not die leaving millions in the bank.
This finally brings me to the topic of money and mortality, a.k.a estate planning. This is the one topic where I’m currently overwhelmed and lost. The nagging insecurity of not having a solid estate plan in place is slowly beginning to eat into my peace of mind. Assuming that money in the US stock market doubles every 10 years, and the fact that I’m now 40, I’m looking at at-least 3 more doublings over a natural lifespan, which means I’ll leave behind somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 20 million dollars. Maybe more, maybe far less, but big enough nevertheless to warrant some solid planning. I’ve read in passing that the US estate tax is in the range of 40% for non-residents, and therefore I need to seriously look into efficient tax planning. If we end up living in Germany long-term, that will trigger various Germany tax rules such as the dreaded exit tax, which will add another layer of complication in the tax equation.
I’m badly in need of a trustworthy professional to help me navigate cross-border tax and estate planning. But again, I’ll cop out for now and park this concern until we’ve lived in Germany for 2 years, only after which I’ll have clarity over the possible future course of our lives.
Closing Notes
And so goes my continued quest for greener pastures. I can’t quite tell if all these career plays and relocationary moves would be memories I’d look back upon fondly when I’m 85, or if these are a series of dumb moves where I’m pointlessly delaying putting down roots and starting to live out the rest of my life, backed by stability and certainty.
I’ve been in conversations where people that are well settled-in have said - “I’m not going anywhere..” in various contexts. I always feel the sting of jealousy in those moments, wistfully thinking - “Here’s a person that has an established home-base with strong local ties and deeply entrenched roots, and then there’s me, someone who’s never present, never grateful for his current situation, always looking to escape the present and run towards the unknown, forever on a quest for lasting happiness and perfection, which probably doesn’t exist.”
This year, I’ll make one more - probably my last - attempt to get to the stage where I can smile with conviction and finally say - “This is home. I’m not going anywhere..”
Here’s to hoping that I get there.
Congrats on the offer and all the best for your second major move. I feel like I am in a similar stage as you, perhaps a couple of years behind. Moved to Hyderabad in late 2025 after 10 years in the US, currently working in Big Tech through an internal transfer from the US. Had low expectations for India, but it's definitely a struggle to find that balance to keep going. Similar net worth and US-heavy portfolio as you. I'm currently exploring estate tax planning options as well, eg Irish domicile ETFs and so on.
Enjoy the new experience with your family!
Good luck with the move. I appreciate your writing. It has definitely played a part in our discussions.