Hi all! It’s been a while since I poked my ugly mug here!
Today I come with a whole host of updates and the usual rants now that I’ve just crossed the three year mark of FIRE - which, by the way, is ending!
Below’s my last FI update two years back, which mostly revolved around financial chatter. This year’s update will be more introspective.
The Insatiable Desire For Greener Pastures Continues To Burn
If you’re an Indian expat living abroad, you could be one, or you definitely know people that are these types - those that constantly talk about returning back to India someday, but never do.
I’m one of those, the only difference is that I can’t stop talking about moving back abroad. As some long time readers might know, I have struggled to adjust to life in India/Bangalore during these three years after leaving behind my 10+ years of life in the United States. I have way too many “first-world problems” that I have to put up with here and I can’t see myself and my family getting to lead a peaceful, varied and outdoorsy lifestyle here.
Don’t get me wrong, life has been comfortable. Down the lane, I’ll probably pat myself in the back that the timing of our return was perfect - to come back and take a long break from working during the early child-raising years, which are among the most demanding years of your life.
The amount of help and support we’ve got from extended family, maids, cook and nannies has been invaluable during this stage of our lives. These three years within the protective walls of my gated community have been so comfortable that I can whistle the song “Comfortably Numb” all day.
And that’s where it ends. Beyond the walls of my apartment community, the anarchy of this unwalkable big-city is overwhelming. The crowds, traffic, air and noise pollution, trash-ridden streets, encroached sidewalks, and the absolute madness of reckless driving that endangers your and your family’s life, the list goes on.
Over this period of time, my wife and I have come to the conclusion that our primary motivators to return back to India - family and FIRE - DO NOT make up for the many other areas that rob us of our peace and happiness.
Most people that return back to India from abroad are happier for it, but I unfortunately belong in the minority. If you’re tired of my harping, check this post out for a more balanced take on the topic. And for a very positive “everything’s so awesome I pinch myself everyday” picture, you might enjoy Hemant’s writings. Besides these, there’s always Reddit.
I, on the contrary, find myself slouched over my laptop, browsing Google Maps and staring longingly at breath-taking pictures of national parks around Munich, or the sandy beaches of Sydney. Greener pastures beckon me in my dreams.
Our old folks are healthy and independent enough that they don’t need us around for physical support at least for the next 6-8 years, which gives us the opportunity to take flight again and seek out life experiences in far-off lands.
I’ve gotten the ball rolling to move back abroad, which brings me to the next topic..
Job Search
After a couple months of intense leetcoding and related studies, starting March this year, I began my job hunt and started applying over LinkedIn to software developer jobs mainly in Germany, Netherlands, Canada and Australia. These were direct applications, I never sought referrals.
Three weeks down the line and 70-80+ applications later, I had no calls and quite a few resume rejects. This partly has to do with my niche profile. I have been a firmware developer all my working career that wrote device drivers in the C programming language. Looking back, this was one of the worst career mistakes I’ve made. For someone with no particular inclination toward firmware, nor a background in hardware (I’m a Computer Science guy, not Electrical/Computer Engineering), I should have moved out of firmware within a year or two into more challenging dev work where I’d have gained valuable experience in cloud-native technologies that power modern large-scale distributed applications. But I coasted at my firmware job because I was distracted and having way too much fun traveling and soaking up the US national parks, while voraciously consuming FIRE blogs.
A lack of experience in contemporary technologies and frameworks, coupled with a resume-gap of three years possibly played a role in my not getting interview calls early on, which was discouraging.
I eventually got to interview with Snowflake and Amazon, both in Germany. I didn’t perform all that well with Snowflake, so that didn’t pan out. Amazon went quite well except for the round with the bar-raiser. The Amazon recruiter later on during the interview feedback discussion told me that while the four team members that interviewed me (including the hiring manager) expressed the intent to hire, the bar raiser voted against hiring because I couldn’t optimally solve her silly binary tree problem. It also appears that she took offence to my concerning question about Amazon’s work-life balance. What with the bar-raiser being bestowed upon with veto powers, the eventual outcome was negative.
Although Amazon’s Cloud Linux OS work never excited me - it felt more like operational IT-support work with little development - I was still willing to suck it up and go because living in Dresden/Germany, with its numerous parks and historical sights, and proximity to pristine German countryside, sounded fantastic. Add to that the opportunity to immerse myself in the German culture and language, I was ready to pack my bags. Too bad it didn’t work out.
With the job market abroad not looking very bright, at least for me, I did not want to continue searching indefinitely with no clear end in sight. I fell back to my plan-B, which was to target Tier-1 companies in Bangalore with the possibility to transfer abroad internally.
I’ve just landed an offer from Microsoft Bangalore within the Azure Storage team and will be starting soon.
And so comes to an end to my FIRE-life. Until we meet again, ol’ buddy.. I promise you’ll see me again, and much sooner too, not when I turn 65!
I’m currently living through mixed emotions - on the one hand, I’m super excited to be getting to work on large-scale, data-intensive distributed systems that’ll finally help me get rid of the curse of my firmware profile that has haunted me for too long. On the other hand, I’m sad that my dreamlike freedom of FIRE is coming to an end and the hustle-and-grind of worklife is about to restart. I’ll soon have a manager whose expectations I have to meet at the very least, and exceed at best. Who could be happy about that?
I also feel remorse that I should have tried for jobs abroad a little longer and that I spooked out and fell back to my plan-B a little too soon. I now have to stay put in Bangalore for a year or more before I take another shot at moving abroad.
The pay is good, however. That’s one area where the tech scene in India has dramatically changed for the better. Product companies and well-funded startups in India now offer attractive salaries. A shiny office and interesting work, great compensation, good social circle and a nice home could very well be all you need for your pursuit of happiness to come to a conclusion. I’ll get to test this out soon. Maybe I had a little too much free time to moan, groan and complain about the abysmal public conditions in India. Now that I won’t have as much free time anymore, maybe I’ll hit that “happy-and-distracted” trance-like state of existence and might drop the idea of moving abroad altogether. It remains to be seen!
To uphold the spirit of this blog and share with you as much low-level details of my life as I’m comfortable sharing, here’s the compensation Microsoft’s been offering for the level I’m joining at. I’m presenting it as a tiny range as opposed to exact numbers to maintain some degree of privacy.
Level : L63 - L64 (Senior Software Engineer)
Base Salary : Rs. 45L - 47L
Signing Bonus : Rs 7L - 9L
RSU : $160K - $170K (vesting over 4 years)
Performance linked annual bonus : Upto 30% (but usually 15%) of base salary.
FIRE Related Finances
Over the course of our three years of existence in Bangalore where we had absolutely no cash-flow, we managed to meet our expenses purely out of the Rs. 30L that we set aside before returning to India. A paid off house and not having had to buy a car helped us stay within this budget. In addition to that, I had a little bit of money that came in because I canceled my LIC policies and one other real estate site booking that was stuck in perpetual bureaucratic stalemate.
I haven’t had to sell my US stock investments yet. Despite the US stock market having remained essentially flat when you look at VTSAX’s performance over the last three years, I took no reactionary measures. Now with the market hovering near all time highs, my portfolio is again in the green. This only reinforces my outlook that the path to slow and steady wealth accumulation for passive investors like me is simple index fund investing and just riding out the market churn while doing nothing.
We’re quite close to having our India FIRE funds run out soon and I’d have had to tap into our US funds anytime now. But with my job starting in a couple weeks, I no longer have to stir up my US investments.
Wrapping Up
I’m gonna miss these three years of absolute freedom. I have no regrets despite not having accomplished anything brag-worthy or having barely done any traveling during these three years, thanks to our very young son and recently arrived daughter keeping us tied down. It was just us milling around in our home, spending time with our kids, kicking back and relaxing, peppered with some mild software-studies on my part.
Now that I’m getting back to work, I wanna make sure that I don’t lose sight of what I want out of life. I’ll exercise caution against digging myself too deep into the rabbit-hole of a cushy job that I then won’t be able to crawl out of, even if I wanted to. The option to FIRE again, next time in a better location and not in the middle of a raging Indian metro, is an aspiration that I’ll strive to keep alive.
Talk soon,
- Dog
Very interesting update. Curious why you didn't choose to apply for jobs in the US? There's obviously the Visa issue tying you to an employer, but you could possibly FIRE at LCOL locations and work less hours or non profit.
I was going through all your post on FIRE sequentially starting with your move from US to India, 1 year update and then came to this. I will be honest I wasn't expecting you would be ending your FIRE journey. But anyways people learn as they move and we have to adapt to changes. Happy that things are working out for you as you want them.
I am in similar boat as you were in 2021. I am also planning for my FIRE journey and want to move back to India. Will keep your experience in mind during my journey. Thanks for sharing it.
1 thing I would like to know is could you share your FIRE plan. How much was your corpus. How much was your expected monthly expenses calculated in your plan, what was your expected inflation rate and ROI rate in your calculation.
Is traveling the world for few more years only the reason for you getting back in the corporate world? Could you not do that being on FIRE?