Bancini, You Don't Know Tired

IT HAD been on the cards for as long as I can remember to move back to (in my case) — or simply to (in my wife's case) — the States when the right time presented itself. In spite of how much the Germans can piss us off from time to time, one thing or another had always managed to keep us in Germany just a little bit longer, whether it was the enticing carrot-on-a-stick of Elterngeld, the quality of health care, the fact that we had established a cozy little niche for ourselves here, or the general quality of life; but when the US housing market plummeted around the same time we introduced a fourth member into our already rather narrow two-bedroom apartment, we agreed that it was high time to make the move. Sure, we could always "upgrade" to a larger apartment, but a larger apartment means more money in rent, and rent is money that we're essentially just tossing out the window each month. We're anglophones. We like to own.

I, in all my naiveté, thought that making that decision was going to be the hardest part. After that, the process ought to be pretty straightforward. You find an area and a house that you like and that you can afford without pie-in-the-sky financial planning, you get some paperwork together and apply for a mortgage, you purchase the house, you move in when you're ready. Everybody—and I mean everybody—lives happily ever after, right?

The world, however, as is its custom, delighted in putting its steel-toed boot to my face as we optimistically charged ahead.

First, there's the fact that, living outside of the US, anything we earn is classed as foreign earned income (FEI) and doesn't count unless we're paying US taxes on it. I didn't—and still don't—quite see the connection here. I'm a fully-fledged US citizen and I fill out and submit my 1040 and 2555 forms every year as a formality and to keep my paper trail above board, therefore that income is officially on record with the IRS. Yet the simple fact is that I reside in Germany, I earn my wages in Germany, I use my share of German resources, my clients are mostly German, and I pay taxes in Germany: why, then, would I be obliged to pay taxes to the US to make that money somehow "valid"? I could have an annual income of six million euros ($8,200,000) abroad and still be rejected for a mortgage because that money is invisible to most US loan underwriters. Not one of the dozens of people with whom I've spoken has provided a satisfactory explanation why this should be so, even in light of the absurd example I just gave.

I'm also self-employed. In Germany, being self-employed (selbstständig) means going down to the Finanzamt (bureau of finance) and telling them so; from then on you get a unique tax number and can work on an ad hoc basis for whomever you like, so long as you punctually send in your paperwork (invoices and expenses, for example) to the Finanzamt. And each month they review those invoices and expenses and you get a typically curt notice from them telling how much of your income you owe in taxes. Compared to the US system, the Germans' actually looks like a shining model of forthrightness and efficiency, and it's quite easy for, say, our financial advisor to look at our year-end documentation, the Steuerbescheid, and figure out where we stand. This has not been the case across the Atlantic. The unrelenting stress and strain of having to prove my income over and over in every possible permutation has literally led me to just curl up on the rug in the fetal position and take a recuperative nap while my daughter uses me as a jungle gym.

I can understand the underwriters' concern about this. Really, I can. A loan of this size can't be a leap of faith.¹ But even the guy earning $500k per year could lose his job tomorrow, and if you can reliably document what you're earning, and you've shown that it's within your means to live comfortably on that, then I don't quite see the need to provide receipts for the pack of gum you bought on June 23, 1996. In our case, the proposed mortgage, property taxes, and utilities would be about two-thirds of what we're currently paying in rent and utilities, which means if anything it will be more affordable for us. And still the potential lenders are hedgy.

Finally, there's the matter of moving into the house within 30 days. Some other lenders have said sixty. Either way, it's a stipulation that strikes me as ridiculous. If we've jumped through all the requisite hoops and succeeded in purchasing the house, what difference does it make if we move in within two months or six as long as we do intend on moving into it? Analogously, if I buy a big-screen TV or even something as large as a yacht on financing, do I have to use it within thirty days to make it officially mine? This rule probably exists for a reason, maybe to prevent crooked speculators from gaming the system, but it seems to me that there should be a waiver in mitigating circumstances such as ours. What do domestically relocating families do if they can't sell their previous home or have other obligations that extend beyond that time? This looks like yet another stipulation that, whatever its intended purpose, causes far more agita in well-intentioned folks than any crooked speculator types, who'll always find a way around it.

If we ticked the application check boxes neatly, if I'd never left the US and married an American and worked the same routine nine-to-five ever since graduating university, then I'm sure none of these issues would have surfaced. But we always end up straddling one box and another, and nothing other than a bit of humanity in the application process would make things any easier. Finding even a hint of that humanity has been a needle-in-a-haystack kind of ordeal, and amid the inherent pressure of house-hunting and all its frustration and unfairness and decisions and deadlines it's left me nothing but tired, tired, tired.

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^[1] Well, for many lenders it was a leap of faith until the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Now they're erring on the side of caution, which penalizes modest earners and long-term savers like us.[↩]