Stop Calling It Plan B
When good ideas meet the wrong reasons.
I have many conversations each week with colleagues across the spectrum of global mobility, in Dublin and around the world. Nearly all of them touch on American emigration. A recruiting partner told me recently that since the 2024 election, inquiries from American doctors went from five or ten a year to five or ten a month. Americans are leaving in numbers not seen since the exodus that followed the Great Depression.
The journey abroad for my family was a deliberate, thoughtful, and multi-year decision making process, with clear, open communication and an abundance of flexibility and check points created with intention. A trending hashtag recently caught my attention, #planbmovetoanothercountry. I understand snarky humor is a part of the whole “trending” thing, I don’t purport to understand it completely, but that made me cringe. When I think about the staggering numbers of Americans inquiring or moving abroad, I realize, those numbers are people making decisions. And somewhere in that same number are people having a reaction. Sometimes our worst decisions fall under the “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” category of decision making.
Reaction vs. Decision
…the two look identical from the outside. They are not identical to live through, and they are not identical five years later. If you move your life abroad, that decision needs to have deep roots to hold, sustain, and build upon. Short term satisfaction and relief need stable ground to stand on as time passes.
Here is the test I’d offer anyone standing at that fork in the road: would your reasons for leaving still hold if you took away this week’s (year’s, month’s, decade’s) headlines entirely? Not “are you angry, are you scared, are you disgusted.” All reasonable. The question is whether the thing underneath the anger was there before the anger, and whether it will still be there after this news cycle is replaced by the next one. If the answer is yes, you are making a decision. If you’re not sure, you might be making a reaction, and reactions are expensive things to build a life around.
Why “Plan B” Undersells It
Calling this “Plan B: Move to Another Country” implies a Plan A that failed. For some people, maybe that’s honest. But collapsing years of thought into a single election cycle does something worse than mislabel the decision. It makes the decision fragile. A choice made in reaction to a headline is only as stable as the news. A choice made after years of watching something specific happen to you and the people you love survives every election, every headline, every news cycle that comes after it.
That difference is the entire conversation. Not whether you should leave. Whether you know which one you’re doing.
What Eleven Years Looks Like
2015 wasn’t when I started noticing. It was when I finally said out loud what I’d been noticing my entire life, that the safety and belonging I wanted for my family was something this country never handed out evenly. We first talked about raising our children abroad in 2015. It didn’t start as a plan. It started as a question I asked my husband, half joking at the time: what would it actually look like if democracy failed in this country? I’d always wondered if it would get worse. That question was me finally asking out loud. If your husband is a Yale Law graduate, you learn to ask questions like that and trust the answers you get back.
That conversation didn’t produce a decision. It produced more questions, spread out over years, asked in the middle of building a business, adopting and raising two children, moving houses, and renovating houses. Were we happy and yet we continued asking questions, is this the life we actually wanted, or the life we’d been conditioned to want. Being older, successful, well-educated parents, the family we built lived lives that looked nothing like the lives we lived as children, with neighbors who were like family, and childhood innocence that included playing outside all day, riding bicycles, school life without active shooter drills. We had far more financial privilege, but far less freedom. What did we want our kids to grow up believing was normal? The idea of Europe wasn’t an answer that arrived. It was the answer that kept surviving every other question we asked it.
That’s the part the “Plan B” framing erases. It wasn’t a moment. It was eleven years of the same question getting asked in different rooms, at different stages of our lives, and getting the same answer every time.
The Part Success Didn’t Fix
Here’s where the test proves itself, because this part of the story predates any election you’re thinking of.
We moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and did everything the American dream asks of you. My husband opened his law firm. We bought the big house, sent our kids to the private schools, checked every box a wealthy Connecticut suburb hands you as proof you’ve made it. On paper, we were indistinguishable from every other family on the street.
What we were not, in that town, was extended the same quiet, unearned good faith everyone else got by default. Not hostility, usually. Something smaller and harder to point at: assumptions about our finances, our marriage, our parenting, our identity, arriving before anyone had bothered to ask us a real question. The benefit of the doubt that a straight couple with the same house and the same income got automatically, we had to earn over and over, and it was never fully banked. We got good at living on the margins of rooms we only technically belonged in. We’d been doing it our whole lives. But watching our kids grow up inside that same arrangement felt different than living inside it by ourselves.
Now back to the “reaction vs. decision” question. Notice what’s not in that paragraph: an election, a president, a headline. This was true in 2015. It was true in 2020. It would have been true regardless of who won in any specific November election. That’s what makes it a decision instead of a reaction. It passes the test. Take away every news cycle since 2015 and the Greenwich years still explain themselves.
Why People Assumed the Worst Explanation
I think part of the human condition is a need to be understood. And for all our brazen claims of “not caring” what people think, in reality, we kinda do want, at least, the people we love and care for, to understand our decisions.
More than one friend and family member found our choice baffling. They assumed it was political, reactionary, something we’d decided in a panic. “Why are you leaving the country,” they’d ask, genuinely confused. My answer was always the same: why would I stay, in a place that was never going to fully extend to my family what it extended by default to everyone else, when the whole reason I was building this life was for my family?
I understand the assumption. Political reactions are the loudest, most visible reason people give right now for leaving, so it’s the explanation people reach for first. But loud and common isn’t the same as accurate, and I’d rather you judge your own reasons on the test than on what’s trending.
Run the Test on Yourself, Not on Me
I’m not writing this to tell you leaving for political reasons is wrong. I don’t know your last decade. I don’t know what you’ve watched happen to people you love, or how long you’ve watched it. That’s not mine to judge, and it’s not really anyone’s business but yours.
What I’d ask instead: strip the headlines out and see what’s left standing. If what’s left is a specific pattern you’ve watched for years, across multiple elections, multiple administrations, decades, and news cycles, that’s not panic. That’s a decision that finally has enough evidence behind it to act on. If what’s left is mostly this year, sit with that honestly before you spend the money. Not because staying and fighting is nobler than leaving. Both are legitimate. But a choice this size deserves to be made in daylight, with your eyes open to your own reasons, not made in the dark because the news made the decision feel urgent, and you were able. Remember, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Out With the Negativity, In With the Test
We didn’t call our move a Plan B while we were living through it, and I won’t call it that now. Frankly, that name is a reductive disservice to a deliberate, thoughtful, personal process that we took seriously. A thought exercise we engaged in while building our lives full steam ahead. It was hard, and slow, and it took years of the same question landing the same way every time we asked it. But hard and slow is what a real decision looks like from the inside. It doesn’t feel like an announcement. It feels like a question you keep asking until you stop being surprised by the answer.
I’m proud to be American. I’m proud of the life my husband and I built on the margins, against real friction, and I’m proud of the one we’re building now. This isn’t a failure we’re recovering from. It’s a decision that survived everything we threw at it for over a decade, including ourselves.
That’s not Plan B. That’s just the plan, once you finally trust it.
Ready to move with a real plan? Schedule your free consultation with the Contact Us button on top.