Twelve years is a long time to build a life somewhere. Long enough that Germany started to feel less like a place I was staying and more like a place I lived — until the year everything about that quietly stopped being true.
It wasn't one thing. It was my father's second knee surgery that I found out about three days after it happened. It was my daughter asking why her cousins in Hyderabad "knew" each other and she didn't. It was doing the math on retirement in euros and realizing the number that felt comfortable to me would feel like wealth to my parents.
The decision that took two years to make and six months to execute
My wife and I talked about moving back for almost two years before we did anything about it. That's normal — and honestly, it should take that long. What changed things wasn't a single conversation, it was building an actual financial model: what our savings would be worth in India, what school would cost, what our monthly expenses would realistically look like.
What we got right
We started the RNOR clock deliberately — timing our move to maximize the window before our German pension income became taxable in India. We also over-invested in the school search, visiting four schools in person before deciding, which meant our daughter started term one with friends already made from the trial days.
Same question we ran before our own move — get a rough estimate now.
“We didn't move back because Germany got worse. We moved back because we finally let ourselves imagine what better could look like at home.”