Motivation to take an expat assignment

ivgomez wrote:

Deciding to work abroad as an expatriate is a major change. Could someone explain their motivation to take on their first expat assignment and the results from such a great decision?

Welcome to the forum

Good questions and the answers will change from person to person .

I left home at 14 to go overseas for adventure. Came back for a couple of years then off again this time  for adventure and money.   

The results were mixed. The break up of my first marriage and then kept taking overseas assignments for the money and the chance to see different countries, meet different people and get paid to do it !! 

Now semi settled with my second wife and our 3 kids and based overseas in Laos but continue to work wherever I can find a job.

Mine wasn't an assignment, so much as a punishment - I got married to my beautiful nagging wife.
She said England was too cold, and I agreed - so we set up house in Indonesia.

Yes, it was that simple - but it worked out well.

For me, it was adventure. I left home at age 23, newly qualified as an accountant and with a job lined up in London, for two or three years to "see the world" - and never quite made it back to live. But it had always been taken for granted since I was a young lad that I would go overseas; it never occurred to me or my parents that I wouldn't. Because of that "predestination", I have never regarded my departure as the turning-point of my life. That came a couple of years later when I decided to go back to Oz via Canada instead of the US. I wrote a blog about this in November 2013 called "Turning Point", predictably enough. Those interested enough can read about it there, and I won't clog up the airwaves here.

Turning points are only slightly off-topic, so I hope it's reasonable of me to ask Stumpy and Fred (to begin with) what their turning-points were, and why. My wife's turning-point was not the same as mine, at all - at least in my view - and she didn't have a job lined up for herself in London. Her t-p came when she stormed out of a cheapo Greek hotel after a fight with her backpacking companion. She left home (also in Australia) at age 22, also to see the world, also in two or three years. We each left in 1963, married in '67, and made it back to our mothers in 1970. Though not to stay.