r2i forum

The time has come for me to share my R2I experience. We R2I?ed from Dallas, TX to Coimbatore in May 2018 after 18 years in US. Both husband and wife are from Coimbatore and hence it was our top choice for us to return. This forum has been extremely useful in planning my R2I and I feel that it is time for me to give back.

Background

We are a family of 4 with two kids age 8 (girl) and 5 (boy). Husband & wife on GC and Kids are US citizens with OCI. I moved to US in 2000 to do my MS and then joined a major semiconductor company in the Dallas area. Stuck with the same company until my R2I though I switched roles within the company. Note that wife is a homemaker and chose not to work.

Why R2I

I was working in IT in a technical role for about 10 years which was great and then after my MBA moved to the business side of IT. That?s when things started to sour as I was exposed to the dirty side of IT. The politics of the job was just too much for me to handle so I was looking for a career change. R2I was always in the back of my mind but never really considered it seriously. Besides my wife was against R2I.

All of this changed when my FIL passed away in Feb 2017.

This really shook us and all of a sudden R2I became a serious thing for me; and for my wife she went from against to neutral. My dad who is running a small industry in Coimbatore wanted to take his business to the next level and sought assistance as he still doesn?t understand computers and internet. By now my job sucked so bad and that I was ready for a change and this came as a great opportunity.

With kids and schooling we can move only during May/June. So if we miss this upcoming window then we have to wait for another year. I pulled the trigger the moment I realized that if I don?t move now it is going to get harder every year from now on. (esp from a kids perspective).

I need to pause here and say that R2I decision was first made by me. It was not a combined husband and wife decision at first. After I convinced myself that R2I is the right move for our family I spent the next 2 months convincing my wife the same. In the end she came on board and then in Dec 2017 we finalized our decision to R2I.

Steps to R2I

We created a detailed Google spreadsheet for R2I which acted as a project plan for our return. There are plenty of blogs and forum threads that talks about what to do for R2I and we took lots of info from those to plan our R2I.

The first step to R2I is to evaluate your financial position. Please see this thread http://www.r2iclubforums.com/forums/showthread.php/26055-ABCD-of-R2I . The author of this thread is spot-on on what potential R2I'ers need to do.

We have quite a bit of properties/assets in Coimbatore so I did not buy anything more nor invest in equity markets. This means all the savings from 18 years of employment in US was kept in FD?s. I acknowledge financially this is not the best move however from an R2I perspective it came as a big help since the cash was generating comfortable interest income. I estimated living expenses in Coimbatore to be 1 lakh per month and the interest income I was getting was more than sufficient to cover that. Our financial position comfortably checked positive for R2I

Second step is to find schooling for kids. I shortlisted international schools in Coimbatore that are friendly to NRI kids (through forums and generic internet search). After some research we shortlisted two schools - TIPS and KSIRs. TIPS was twice expensive as KSIRs and very far from the city. Besides it had mixed feedback from NRI forums so we finally picked KSIRs. So far we haven?t regretted this decision and things has been going smooth for kids.

Once schooling got confirmed the next was to pick a place to live. Since the school itself is closer to the IT Park area we had plenty of choices in terms of gated community. I reached out to my friend circle to see if any had properties available for rent and one of my friends friend happened to have a never occupied villa for rent at Sreevatsa Global Village in Chinnavedampatti. We finalized that villa for rent. The owner is also a US based NRI so he was happy to rent to us as it was empty for almost 6 years. (Note we could have picked an apartment but we picked a villa because we wanted to have pets)

The second thing I did once schooling got confirmed is to let folks at work know that I will be resigning mid May. Suffice to say that folks were completely shocked. They have never heard someone leaving US so there was constant chatter about my move. My manager was happy since I gave him almost 4 months notice and this gave management plenty of time to plan my replacement.

Next step is to book one way flight tickets. We had a dog (lab) and wanted to take that dog with us to India. The plan was for wife and kids travel separately to Kochi and then me and dog to Chennai since animal clearance can be done only at 4 metropolitan airports. We booked tickets accordingly. (I took Lufthansa since it had the best overall deal for accompanying pet travel)

We own our house (no mortgage) and decided to sell the house after R2I as we did not want to complicate house selling with our R2I activities. Accordingly we hired a Desi realtor and gave her Power of Attorney to sign the closing papers. This allowed us to stay in India and still sell the house without coming back to US for closing.

We hired a 20 ft container as we had to pack a lightly furnished 4 bedroom house. Container hiring was done with Universal Relocations as their pricing was very competitive.

Everything was going well and on one fine day in spring our dog stopped eating all of a sudden. We took it to the vet and found out that our dog is dying of lung cancer. It totally crushed us but had to accept the fate. We decided not to put the dog down and decided to let the nature take him from us. This sad development also meant that we couldn?t bring the dog to India but logistically it was a bit of relief since now I didn?t have to deal with dog?s R2I.

Wife was putting things on craigslist, nextdoor to dispose of items we didn?t see value in shipping to India. I also sold our minivan to a fellow desi through craigslist. My replacement was hired at work and my work responsibilities started to wind down allowing me to focus on R2I activities. We finally packed everything and shipped through container.

The last few days after container shipment we stayed at our friends place and then finally departed to India mid may.

In my next post I will go into detail on what worked for us, what didn?t and some lessons learned for the benefit of others. We also had some pleasant surprises along the way that helped us to settle down.

Nice post! Dallas and Coimbatore both hits home to me! Non IT cities in India seems to be the saner choice to avoid the crazy traffic jams! Seems like you have made all good choices in ksirs and Global village! Are you planning to join your family business or try in IT?

I want to let you know that I am rooting for your success!

Me too, Coimbatore is on the top of my list to live if I R2I...hopefully we will get to hear good things about the place....

VS007;680550Nice post! Dallas and Coimbatore both hits home to me! Non IT cities in India seems to be the saner choice to avoid the crazy traffic jams! Seems like you have made all good choices in ksirs and Global village! Are you planning to join your family business or try in IT?

I want to let you know that I am rooting for your success!

All the best OP, I am keen to know, when you said FDs are they Indian FDs or US FDs. Generating 1L per month via Indian FDs doesn't take a lot, but generating them using US FDs is a big deal. Indian interest is not really returns, you shouldn't look at them that way. Indian FD interest is merely replacing some of the lost purchasing power of the principal.

Sent from my Redmi Note 4 using Tapatalk

VS007;680550Nice post! Dallas and Coimbatore both hits home to me! Non IT cities in India seems to be the saner choice to avoid the crazy traffic jams! Seems like you have made all good choices in ksirs and Global village! Are you planning to join your family business or try in IT?

I want to let you know that I am rooting for your success!

Thank you !!! The plan is to join the family business but so far I have been spending time in getting the idle properties ready for leasing out. Definitely not going into IT.

wd40;680567All the best OP, I am keen to know, when you said FDs are they Indian FDs or US FDs. Generating 1L per month via Indian FDs doesn't take a lot, but generating them using US FDs is a big deal. Indian interest is not really returns, you shouldn't look at them that way. Indian FD interest is merely replacing some of the lost purchasing power of the principal.

Sent from my Redmi Note 4 using Tapatalk

They are Indian FD's. I am not looking at them as returns but rather as monthly cash flow for now.

What worked for us in USA (after R2I decision)

Detailed Planning using Google spreadsheets. We had done detailed planning and accounted for even the smallest things (for example I had a task to deposit all the coins, use up all gift cards etc). Suffice to say that this drastically reduced the stress level and would recommend potential R2I’ers to plan out as detailed as possible. This forum is big help and there are plenty of resources on the internet as well. So plan, plan, plan.

What would I do different

Container shipping - I only took container rental meaning I had to pack and load the stuff by myself. Looking back I should have gone for full service. Here is why.

-We packed 120+ boxes. I was frequently shuttling back and forth to Lowe’s to pick up moving supplies. It felt like we spent a fortune on packing and moving supplies.

-I don’t know whose fault it is but all our furniture's arrived heavily damaged. I had to hire a local carpenter to make the best of what was remaining. Under full service insurance would have covered these damages.

-Shippers document accurately what is being shipped since this list is critical for customs clearance. We just documented what we can and rest we just threw it in and hoped for the best. This could have easily gone against us.

- Under DIY you only get 2 hours to load an entire 20 ft container. It is impossible to do that. Besides the guys I hired were local movers and did not know how to pack a container so they left lots of empty space. And then Container’s do not have a loading ramp so everything had to be manually lifted which resulted in people getting tired in the hot Dallas sun. Under full service they load the container in their own sweet time optimizing space usage.

-The container originally did not arrive as scheduled. It came the next day and I had to scramble to find loading guys since the original loaders were not available the next day.

Quite frankly I think it is a miracle that we shipped the container on time to be sent on train to Houston for loading into a ship. If I had taken full service none of this will be my problem. This is one thing I regret and highly recommend that people go for full service. The extra cost is so worth it!! and given the complexity of the transaction(s) there are so many things that can go wrong.

And finally the amount of time it took to sell our house surprised us. We were hoping for multiple offers on day one since for houses in our neighbourhood that is the norm. But instead got none for a good 45 days. In the end I had to reduce the price twice and then the house got sold in 90 days after listing. It appears that real estate in Dallas has slowed down significantly. Luckily we don’t have a mortgage but still had to pay for utilities and upkeep of the house.

Other than these two everything else went as per plan. Our neighbors and friends were big help especially during the last week and we owe them so much.

In the next post I will detail our experiences after landing in India.

In this post I will highlight what went in our favor post R2I.

No boss to report to - This is probably the biggest positive in our R2I. Since my plan is to join my Dad?s business I had the liberty (and could afford) to take some months off and just focus purely on settling the family down. This also allowed me to focus on winding down my US interests as I had a home to sell.

R2I to our hometown - Me and my wife are from Coimbatore and thus experienced the ?returning home? feeling due to R2I. We would have felt like outsiders if we had chosen any other place to R2I. Being in hometown means we have all the immediate family living here. They were of tremendous help both physically as well as emotionally in helping us to settle down. But having relatives this close also had its downside where we constantly came under scrutiny in all things we did/planned to do. This cost us our privacy. I will touch more on this as I plan to write a separate post on how our relationships fared post R2I.

Government ID?s - We had all the ID?s (Aadhaar, Pan card, valid Driving license) which was taken during our previous trips. So we were all set from Day one. Besides me and my wife are comfortable driving on Indian roads as we tend to drive during every India trip. Because of this drivability my parents had a dedicated car just for us (that was sitting idle most of the time and got used only during our India trip). Once we R2I?ed we simply took this car. We also had a new two wheeler that was bought for office purposes (but that employee quit soon after) and I took it for my own use. So we had a car and a two wheeler at our disposal from day one. We are in the process of buying a second car as wife wants a slightly bigger car and one that is Automatic.

Finances - I had a couple of sweet surprises here. The first one is USDINR exchange rate. I had forecasted that I will be moving money to India at 63/64 INR per USD expecting our house to sell immediately upon listing. But our house sold 3 months after listing during which USDINR appreciated to 73. All my transfers post house selling was done at 72/73 which was a nice surprise. Note that I used services like Remitly, Money2India, IndusFastRemit and moved $10k at a time instead of a big wire transfer that would have costed me lot in commissions.

Second surprise came from interest rates on Fixed deposits. Major banks were returning around 7% for FD?s at that time and I had forecasted my cash flow in India based on that. But once I landed in India, I discovered Small Finance banks giving much higher rates on FD?s. I closed all my existing NRI FD?s with ICICI at a small loss as it was premature closing and opened FD?s at ESAF small finance bank. They offered 8.75% at that time. I didn?t want to put all my deposits in one bank so I went to another small finance bank which is Jana Bank. They were offering 8.5% at that time which was good with me. As part of the money movement I had deposited a 1 crore check at Jana Bank and the Manager requested that I meet with him. In that meeting he said that bank can offer special rates if I have a single deposit of more than 1 crore. Thus he reached out to the Bank treasury and obtained a special rate of 9.5% for my 1 crore deposit. I accepted the offer and opened a couple of 1 crore deposits (using the money I got from selling US house). From a forecasted cash flow at 7% return I now have cash flow at 9.5% return which again was a unexpected surprise and one that provided a significant boost to my monthly cash flow from interest income.

Weather - Our R2I experience was further sweetened by the amazing weather. I still vividly remember experiencing the SoCal weather when I stepped out of Burbank airport and I experienced the same if not better weather in Coimbatore. This was a win for all of us. I hate cold weather and thus do not miss the fall and winter weather in US. Waiting to see how summer is as I am told that Summers have become hot in Coimbatore.

From a housing perspective I think I have covered the positives in my previous posts. Suffice to say that our current living standards reasonably mirror what we used to have in US.

Here are other things that worked in our favor

-They opened a Taco Bell in Coimbatore. Enough Said!
-Delighted to find veggie options at our local Burger King and McDonalds. Even Pizza places have excellent veggie option. This worked in my favor because I am a vegetarian :wink
-Online shopping has become robust. I didn?t see any difference in how I ordered in US with Amazon prime vs India. It all felt the same to me.
-Similarly online streaming with Amazon prime works really well
-Local government is slowly adopting e-governance and thus had couple of good experiences applying for land certificates online. Paying for utilities and taxes online is also available and is very convenient.

In summary I think we have returned to India at a good time. India is developing at breakneck speed and it is exciting to be part of this change. Apps like Swiggy and Ola/Uber have improved the convenience factor many folds and have made life easy for the masses (A restaurant in our neighborhood simply closed their sitting area and purely does business through Swiggy/Zomato). Whatsapp is enabling business to be done quickly and efficiently. We even used BigBasket to order grocery once and were amazed at the quality of produce delivered.

Bottomline India has improved a lot and is improving in areas that needs improvement. I am optimistic for my families future in India and looking forward to be part of India?s growth story as well as benefiting from it.