The upshot of your visit is that you’ve remembered or possibly found a reason that justifies why you left in the first place: manipulative, selfish relatives.

Whether you move half way across the planet or an hour away, you have to go off and live your life. You aren’t an indentured servant to their emotional needs.

Yep, I had this with my in-laws, who lived within 2-3.5 hours from us. Drama, whining, needing almost daily phone calls from my husband/their only child. I can’t imagine how they would have been had we ever moved further than 6 hours away (the furthest we ever lived from them) and to another country.

My fam is all overseas.

My dad and stepmom visit from overseas regularly, keep in touch, no drama. My siblings I keep in touch with fairly regularly. Extended family tends to have the out of sight out of mind experience. Not being part of each other’s daily lives just means you don’t register often (this goes both ways mind you.)

My husband’s mom was like that.

A narcissist.

She loved to stir the pot and create drama. One year she planned to visit for Thanksgiving and booked a train ticket. Less than a week before, she called my husband and picked a fight over the phone… out of the blue, no reason. Then she huffily said that maybe she should cancel the trip if he was “being this way” and apparently wasn’t groveling and begging enough for her to still come (he was immune to the guilt trips, and she was too blind to notice). He told her to do what she felt she had to. She cancelled the trip, and then for weeks after would be all weepy and go on about how she missed not seeing us and the kids. She didn’t like it much when hubs told her that maybe she shouldn’t have cancelled her trip then.

Depending on what your income is, your healthcare (as in your co pays and insurance contribution) is not so expensive that it’s going to eat up that difference in pay check.

And in those very good jobs, you frequently get better insurance with better coverage and lower co-pays.

Owning a car in the US I have found to be WAY cheaper than the EU. I am not the person you asked this of, and it’s been 16 years since I was in Australia, but gas prices in some parts of the EU/AU would make an American weep. I have family in the UK and EU and they pay almost more per liter than what you pay for a gallon here, and a gallon is 3.78 liters. MSRP on a lot of vehicles is cheaper in the US. I don’t know what car insurance rates are like, but unless you’re getting hosed in the US because you are a crappy driver, there’s no way that the difference in rates makes a huge difference on the bottom line at a certain income level.

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

Based on the current rates, my fam in NL are paying double the US cost in gasoline. And despite what people say about bikes and public transportation, the vast majority of people I know back there still commute by car.

A Toyota Corolla costs $22k in the US and £30k+ in the UK.

Cost of Living seems to be having problems everywhere. In the US there are places that span the range from cheap to normal to expensive to astronomical. Plenty of people in the EU saw costs rise a huge amount during the pandemic, and housing crises are making living spaces pricey too.

I recommend reading news sources of the places you want to be, subreddits too, and while some are biased towards what people complain about versus praise, it does give some info on what are problematic issues.