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Regards
Adolf
No Minister 
The Exile will officially be over soon: I have decided to return to New Zealand with (some) of my family. Hopefully by March. We shall see.
There’s a lot of reasons for this. America is a wonderful, wealthy and crazy land of opportunity, but I feel that my own opportunities at this point have exhausted themselves, and there are numerous reasons to return:
Health insurance. It has become unaffordable for families in the United States. My most recent offer had a premium of $1300/month, and that’s the employer subsidized rate. And that doesn’t even cover everything! There is an excess (called a deductible in the US) of $3000, and after that, only 80% coverage. Bear in mind that hospital rates are vastly inflated in the United States, and it is literally cheaper to fly to New Zealand and be treated in a Southern Cross hospital than in America. Hospitals will not shirk from billing you ten grand a night. It is not sustainable;
Following on from that, my wife is pregnant with our third child, and my fifth. The cost of staying and having the baby here will be significant. It will be much cheaper and easier to give birth in Auckland;
I will get pretty decent WFF on three kids, much more than the tax break I get back from the American IRS;
I also wouldn’t mind collecting NZ Superannuation one day, since I lazily have not bothered accumulating a 401k, and I need residency for that;
My chosen career here in the States has hit roadblocks in terms of my ability to maximize income. It’s not sustainable over the long term, unless I change careers/retrain, and I’m too old for that nonsense;
My homemaker wife gets zero family support for herself or our kids. She is closer to my mother than her own. So we want to be around family who support us;
My parents are in their seventies now, and I want to be near them again;
Mince pies and cricket.
The biggest downside will be leaving my teenaged twins behind with my ex wife, but there is always Skype, and I will fly them over every winter when they are not in school.
Interesting. One of the reasons I didn’t go independent in IT until I got back to NZ was the cost of private health insurance in the USA. Obviously you don’t work for a corporate where their health insurance plans are comprehensive. But as you well know, even before Obamacare screwed up the private market it suffered by comparison because it’s not counted as a pre-tax purchase like the corporate market.
Big down thumbs to the GOP for never fixing that even before 2010. They deserve to get government healthcare at this rate.
And then Obamacare’s super comprehensive provisions for an insurance contract blew the premiums out of the water: no more cheap policies covering only unlikely emergencies like cancer in a 25 year old male; now you got pregnancy care whether you needed it or not.
When my first child was born our insurer sent me all the invoices, presumably to use me as an auditor to make sure they weren’t being ripped off by the hospital, and when I added it up it came to about $US 9000 – and that for a perfectly normal birth. I remember sending my summary to a friend who worked for Southern Cross and she was shocked. And that was more than twenty years ago.
Haha. You may not have seen this post on Kiwiblog by one “Kiwi in America” about his recent return visit to NZ where he raved about the food here: NZ is worth a kilo a week for visiting expats and near daily consumption of pies is the main culprit..
I added my comment about striking exactly that problem during a mid-90’s return visit to NZ. It’s one thing for wifey to notice extra pudge when you step off the plane at O’Hare – quite another when your co-workers notice!!!!
Actually you should probably read the whole series that KIW did, especially this last one, NZ 4 years on, Bitter/Sweet – Part 3, although you have already made your decision and in your case I can’t argue against it.