Leigh William
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Leigh William, 50, about her experience moving from the US to a coastal town in Germany after her cancer diagnosis. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
We lived in Atlanta for almost seven years.
When we moved there, I bought a house for $270,000 in a really beautiful, lush, green suburb. I worked on that house everyday for four years gutting the heck out of it. We ended up spending about $50,000 plus hard labor and sold it for $550,000.
We made a really substantial profit off of that house, and turned around and bought another house in Atlanta for $570,000.
Our mortgage payment has always been between $1,500 and $1,800 a month, and usually it's been either a 15- or 20-year mortgage. But we've always tried to roll one profit from a house into the next mortgage.
It was a 6,800-square-foot, typical American McMansion in the south. The house had anything and everything you could ever ask for and a whole lot that you never wanted.
We had six bedrooms, three stories, a movie room, a gym, two living rooms, and two kitchens. It was really obnoxious, but it was that we're going to work hard and achieve all these goals. And then you get there and you're like, what the hell was that for?
I had a really severe illness having been diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2015, and life was just kind of turbulent, and we were tired of feeling the turbulence.
For me, the life that we had built there was a feeling of "We did it." We were living the American dream. And all of that crumbled because of the health diagnosis.
My husband made good money, we both have graduate degrees, we're educated. I worked, he worked. We had excellent insurance. And even at that, that diagnosis nearly cost us everything.
We left Atlanta in 2017.
We had to sell everything. We sold the house, sold the cars, sold almost all of our furniture, and we left for Germany with the smallest container that you can put on a ship.
I appreciate the ability to be free enough to not worry about my healthcare. I didn't have that in my 20s. I absolutely have that now. My healthcare is not tied to employment. If my employer decides that they don't like me or they don't like my performance, I'm not going to have to lose my healthcare because of that. Or if they cut their budget, I'm not going to lose my healthcare.
A lot of people think Germany has socialized medicine. Please make it clear to the world that Germany is not a socialized country. We sell BMW and Porsche. We are capitalists. But our insurance system is very structured — everyone must have insurance, but you still pay for it. I pay 300 or 400 euros ($322 or $429) per month for the entire family. I don't have a deductible. I choose which doctor I go to if I need to see somebody. That's security, and it gives me peace of mind.
We initially went to Bamberg, Germany, where my husband's from, and spent about six weeks there.
We had a landing spot, which was with his family, because Germans have multi-generational homes. But we knew that we didn't want to stay there long-term because we had always lived in big cities and we had lived all over the world.
We ended up looking at Berlin as a very viable option because Berlin is a lot like New York. There's diversity, there's history and culture, and a lot goes into the idea of maintaining that. We ended up there, but knew that we didn't want to be in Berlin forever, because it's entirely too fast.
Leigh William
My oldest two kids were finishing high school, so we were at an International Baccalaureate school where a lot of the diplomats and people who are coming and going live. Once they graduated and went to university, we moved to what we call our retirement community. It's not a retirement community, but our dream home. It's in Timmendorfer Strand, and we are directly at the Baltic Sea, about an hour north of Hamburg. It looks like the Caribbean, except it's cold, and if I get in the boat and sail, I sail north to Copenhagen.
When we left Berlin, we got back to buying instead of renting, which is really not common in Germany. Most people rent.
We have a mortgage now, but we have it by choice, not by necessity. We could have just paid for the house that we're in now, but our interest rate is 0.125%. And for 0.125%, we were like, you're basically giving us money.
We set our mortgage up to be at that $1,500 to $1,800 range that we've always felt comfortable with. And it's a 10-year mortgage. We're working towards paying it off at double the rate.
Our house now is probably 1,100 square feet, about a fifth or sixth of the size of our house in Atlanta. We completely gutted this house and made it what we wanted it to be. It was originally two holiday apartments stacked on top of each other directly at the beach.
It is a four-story house. On the lowest level are two bedrooms. The next level is the main level.
The main floor has an open floor plan, which is not common in Germany or anywhere in Europe. It is a living room and dining room, and a kitchen, which is the size of an American kitchen table. I designed it that way because in the US we had this massive, gorgeous kitchen, which I absolutely loved, but what it did was it taught me that I didn't need all of that.
Leigh William
The upper floor is what's in Germany called a dachgeschosswohnung. It's an attic flat where my husband's office is. He needed space away from the kids so the kids could play and do their thing downstairs, and he has no clue of what's going on in the rest of the house when he's there because there's two floors between him and the kids.
We always had the intention that we would eventually go back to Europe. We thought that our kids would've graduated from high school and we would go back in our retirement years — we catapulted that a little bit faster because of a variety of things.
We felt like being back in Europe would feel more calm, and it does feel that way very much.
