Germany or Saudi Arabia? Every Country Comes as a Full Box

November 11, 2026 · Career & Life · 11 min read

By Dr.-Ing. Faisal Qayyum. Weighing the same choice? See how I can help.

On the second of November, a young engineer from Pakistan joined a call with me. He had two pieces of paper and one question. The first paper was an admission letter for a Master’s in Germany, with the visa appointment still pending. The second was a signed job contract in Saudi Arabia.

Germany had always been his dream, he said. But the job was real, and it was now. Which one should he choose?

I did not answer. I asked him where he thought the answer would come from. What would someone need to know to judge this?

A judge cannot give a verdict before hearing both sides of the story and the facts. You can ask a judge to hurry. You cannot ask a judge to skip the hearing. And when you ask someone else to decide your life for you, you are asking for a verdict without a hearing. So the forty minutes that followed were the hearing. I am writing it down because the question is not his alone, and because I have watched many people get stuck in the cycle this question can start.

“Good Money” Is Not a Plan

His first answer was the one most of us would give. He wanted to earn well, save well, support his parents back home, and put something aside for his own retirement.

Nothing is wrong with that. But “earn well” is a rough, almost absurd number, and it hides more than it says. Earn well compared with whom? Saved where, in which currency, for what?

There is a bigger reason I pushed back. Our fathers and mothers lived by a formula: a stable job, a steady salary, savings in the bank, and that would get you somewhere. I believe that formula is already changing, and will change much more by the time people his age reach the position they are planning for. Company valuations are insanely high. The world order is shifting quickly. Your mobility, your security, the doors that open for you, will depend less and less on money alone and more on many other factors.

So the useful question was never “where do I earn more?” It was this: what are your values? What does your ideal day look like? What do you want from life, and more importantly, why?

He described it without hesitation. Go to work, come home to his wife and children, keep the weekends for family, live his faith fully, give his children the best the world can offer. That is a beautiful picture. Every part of it is reasonable. The trouble starts when you look at what each country puts in the same box.

Income Is the Wrong Number. Look at Savings.

He had heard that in Europe you can build wealth faster than in the Gulf. I disagreed, and with a lot of confidence. It depends on the person and the job, and you cannot generalise, but the claim as usually stated is a myth.

I do not like the word income. Income changes from country to country, company to company, city to city. A big salary means little in a city where a house costs a fortune. The number that matters is net savings: what is left after tax, social contributions, rent and life, accumulated year after year.

Here is the comparison I gave him. Take someone with my graduation date and similar professional experience who started earning on day one. I took the long road: Master’s, PhD and postdoc in Germany. Today my salary may well be higher than theirs. But compare our net accumulated savings, and theirs are far larger than mine. The same is true of almost anyone I know with the same graduation date.

I did not want to leave that as a feeling, so I checked it against published numbers. I built a simple model for one single person over the twelve years after a Bachelor’s in engineering. The first path is a two-year Master’s in Germany, a four-year PhD, then postdoc years, all on the German public-sector pay scale (TV-L E13, full-time). The second is a Pakistani engineer working in Saudi Arabia from graduation day, with salaries taken from real job adverts. No family, no money sent home, and 2026 figures held flat on both sides.

In three of the four combinations the Gulf path ends ahead, and in the early years it is not close. After two years, the German path is still paying for its Master’s, between €8,000 and €24,000 down, while the Gulf path has saved €11,000 to €33,000. The German line only catches up if you live at the student-visa minimum for a decade, which almost nobody does. Add a family living on one income in Germany, a part-time PhD contract, or money sent home to parents, and the gap gets wider.

And here is the other half, which is just as true. Day-to-day quality of life in Germany is far better. Net savings in Saudi Arabia are far better. Both sentences hold at the same time. That is not a contradiction to solve. It is the box.

Every Country Comes as a Full Box

Think of a box of mithai from the sweet shop. You open it for the gulab jamun you love, and underneath sit the pieces you never liked. You do not get to send half the box back. If you take it, you take all of it, and you finish it.

A country is the same. Saudi Arabia is a box. Germany is a box. Pakistan is a box. Each one is full of things you want and things you do not want, and it comes as a whole. You cannot pick and choose. I wrote about the same idea from another angle in Every Choice Is a Stick With Two Ends.

I have now seen two of these boxes from the inside. I spent nine years in Germany. I moved to Saudi Arabia in February 2026, and in between I spent two and a half months in Japan, which showed me yet another system and another culture. I am still learning the Saudi box. Ask me again in a year or two and I will paint that picture in more detail. But the principle has not changed once.

Your Parents Grow Older While You Settle

This is the question I think everyone who wants to move to Germany should answer first. How comfortable will you be watching your parents grow old, and not having enough time to spend with them?

Germany fully consumes you for the first five or six years. The language, the paperwork, the degree, the first contract, the second contract, the move to wherever the next job is. Those years do not wait for your family.

Every situation is different. Some parents are young and seem to have plenty of time. Some are already old. Some people leave parents behind in very old age, and some are the ones caring for them. For some, that becomes very hard. Unless you sit with this honestly before you go, you will not be able to live the guilt-free, comfortable life you are moving for.

I spent nine years there. Almost none of what I am telling him had crossed my mind before I left. I learned it the hard way: I wanted to do something, and then I realised, oh, this is the limitation. Nobody had asked me how important that thing was to me, on a scale of 0 to 10. I am asking you now.

The Questions I Asked Him, Scored From 0 to 10

I asked him these plainly, and I will ask you the same way. There is no right score. There is only your score, and the place where it can be lived.

• Your faith. How religious are you, yourself, not your future children? How close do you want your daily life to stay to your values: five prayers, the food, the rhythm of the week?
• Your children’s school. How comfortable will you be if your children go to a school whose calendar runs on Christmas rather than Eid, where their books and stories come from a different world, and where they are openly encouraged to explore and define themselves?
• Your passport. How strongly do you want a second citizenship? He said 8 out of 10. Then I asked whether he wanted it enough to accept the rest of the package that comes with it. He said he would not be comfortable with that part. That gap, between the 8 and the discomfort, is exactly where the work is.
• Your parents. How much time do you need with them in the next ten years, and how much will each country give you?
• Your money. Do you need savings fast, because of responsibilities at home, or can you afford the long road?

None of these questions has a German answer or a Saudi answer. They have your answer. Then you see Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Germany against each one and ask: where is there provision for what I need, and how much?

More Choices Should Make Us More Thankful

Here is something I have watched happen to good people. They get more options than their parents ever had, and it makes them less happy.

More choices should make us more content, more satisfied, more thankful. That is the whole point of having them. But if we have not made peace with what we chose, more choices do the opposite. They make us thankless. They keep us comparing our box with the boxes we did not pick. They leave us less satisfied with the life we decided to live, and that is a very bad place to be.

I have seen people stuck in exactly this cycle. They want the things they moved for, and they refuse the things that came with them. They do not leave, and they do not settle. Years pass in that state.

You Can Put a Box Down. It Costs Years.

Near the end he asked the question I hoped he would. “And if I choose one box, and later realise the other one was better?”

Then switch. Nobody is stopping you. You can go from Saudi Arabia to Germany, from Germany back to Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else in the world. I know many people who left Pakistan or the Gulf for Canada, America or Australia, and many who went the other way. In theory you are completely free.

But be honest about the price. This way of deciding is expensive: in energy, in time, in effort. When people depend on you, when your parents need support and you want stable savings, picking a box, dropping it, picking another and then going back to the first can cost you years. Had you picked the right box at the right time, you might have reached your goal in two or three years. Now you are trading those years for the back-and-forth.

For him specifically, I said one plan sounded very reasonable: take the Saudi job now and keep the dream of higher study alive from there. Not because Saudi Arabia is the right box, but because he would hold one box properly and come to know it, and the option to put it down and pick up another would still be there. And when he picks up the next one, he will know far better what he is lifting.

Write It Down Before You Decide

Before we ended, I gave him homework. Take a pen and paper. Write down what you have learned about Germany, about Saudi Arabia and about Pakistan. Write the things you can compromise on and the things you never will. Write your family’s circumstances and your family’s timeline. Then read it out loud, cross things out, and write them again.

It sounds too simple. It is not. Something happens when you hear your own priorities in your own voice. Here is the sheet I would start from. Copy it on paper and score each row from 0 to 10.

Once the sheet is done, talk it through with someone who has held more than one of these boxes. Not to get a verdict. To hear yourself think out loud.

Final Thought

I know this was not the conversation he hoped for. He came for a decision and left with homework. But it is the most honest help I can give, because I cannot know his box better than he does.

The people I admire most are not the ones with the most money. They are the ones who are fully at peace with the choices they made. They knew the consequences, they chose anyway because every other option was worse for them, and then they stuck with it and made the best of it.

You will do well in the world if you choose Saudi Arabia and make peace with it. You will do well if you choose Germany and make peace with its consequences. You will do well if you stay in Pakistan and make peace with that. At a turning point like this, do not rush. Choose a box. Then carry the whole of it.

Questions People Ask

If You Are Weighing the Same Move

If the Gulf box is the one in your hands, Moving from Germany to Saudi Arabia covers the visa and paperwork in order. If Germany is the one, The Hidden Cost of Life in Europe is the honest list of what sits under the gulab jamun.