You can love your people back home and still be responsible to the one you are trying to become here.
On sending money home from Canada — and the cost it carries on the side nobody talks about.
The phone rang and I already knew.
You know the feeling if you live this life. A certain contact’s name appears on the screen and before you have swiped anything, you already know what the call is about. Not a hello call. Not a catch-up. Someone needs something.
I was recovering from surgery when this particular call came. I had lost more weight than I wanted to think about. For weeks I had been eating almost nothing — roasted brussel sprouts, plain broccoli, whatever I could keep down. I caught myself in the mirror one morning and did not recognise the man looking back. Thinner than I had been in twenty years. Smaller. Months away from being well.
The friend on the other end of the line did not know any of this. I had told him once that I was unwell. He heard it and moved past it, because his own situation was loud and mine was quiet. I do not fault him. But it is its own kind of loneliness — the kind I tried to describe in Why You Feel Alone in Canada. The person on the other end of the line rarely knows your real situation. They know the version of you who sends money.
For the first time in the years he had been calling, I did not pick up. I did not pick up the next time either. I pulled back silently.
Afterward, I waited for the guilt. It did not come. What came was relief. That is when I understood that the cost of this life is not only financial. (I wrote earlier, in The Phone Call Home, about a different kind of call from back home. This one is about what you do after too many of them.)
The List You Haven’t Written Down
If you have been in Canada a few years and you come from somewhere your people are still waiting on you, there is a list you carry without writing down.
The parents who will not ask but whose silence is its own kind of asking. The sibling who calls every few months for something real. The cousin who calls for something less real, but you send anyway because that is what family is. A bright young person from your hometown trying to hold their footing where nothing works the way it should. The fees — GRE, IELTS, passport renewals, school registrations. The laptops for students who do not have one. The rent that came due for someone going through a bad month. The community group back home that is feeding people you will never meet. The wedding contributions. The funeral contributions. The emergencies that arrive by voice note at 2 a.m.
The list is long. It is longer than you realise until you sit down and write it out.
If you have ever tried that exercise — actually putting a pen to paper and listing where your money goes each month to people back home — you probably arrived at the same uncomfortable sentence I did: I have been doing too much.
That sentence is not a conclusion you reach through spreadsheets. It appears the moment you see your list written down.
How The Ask Arrives
The ask rarely arrives on a weekday morning at a convenient hour. It arrives on a Friday evening, when you are trying to unwind. It arrives as a WhatsApp voice note at 2 a.m. your time because the person on the other end forgot to check the hour. It arrives the week you were supposed to top up your own savings.
The ask does not always sound like an ask. It opens with news of an illness and trails off before saying what is needed. It begins with “I know you are busy but…” and lands on the amount five paragraphs later. It arrives as a wedding announcement that is also a contribution request. It arrives as a school fee deadline that is mentioned casually, almost accidentally, the way a problem is mentioned when the person is hoping you will offer before they have to ask.
You know the rhythm by now. The name appearing on your screen that already tightens your chest before the call connects. The opening pleasantries that last a beat too long. The pause before the real reason for the call lands.
The hardest thing about the ask is that it rarely arrives in a form you can refuse cleanly. It arrives wrapped in love. In history. In the favour that person did you ten years ago. In the fact that they rarely call for money, which must mean this is serious. By the time you have sorted out what you actually think, you have already said yes.
This is how the ledger grows. Not from any one decision. From hundreds of small yeses, each one the only decent answer in the moment.
The Numbers — What Sending Money Home From Canada Actually Costs
Most of us in the diaspora are sending something in the range of $400 a month home when you average it all out. Not as a clean standing order. An irregular flow — more some months, less in others, sent when needed, often felt more than tracked.
Over ten years, that is $48,000 out the door.
That is real money. But it is not the number that should worry you. The number that should worry you is what that same $400 a month would have become sitting inside a TFSA, invested in a basic Canadian index ETF, left alone at the market’s long-run average of around 7%. (If you are unsure how the TFSA actually works, It Is Not Too Late To Start Saving Tax-Free In Canada walks through the three Canadian registered accounts in plain language.)
Over ten years, $69,200. Over twenty years, $208,400. Over thirty years — $488,000.
Read that again. Four hundred dollars a month. Thirty years. Nearly half a million dollars. Of that $488,000, only $144,000 would be money you had put in. The other $344,000 would have been compounding — money making money, in the background, while you lived your life.
That half a million dollars is not a theoretical number. It is what most of us are quietly leaving on the table while we send.
| What you sent | $48,000 | |
| What it could have grown to | $488,000 |
The sending is not the mistake. The mistake is never asking what it costs you on this side.
The People On This Side
There is another list most of us in the diaspora carry and rarely write down. It is the list of people we are supposed to be building for on this side.
The partner who moved with you or who joined you later. The child you already have, or the child you are thinking about having, who will grow up Canadian and will need a cushion you never had. Your own older self, twenty and thirty years from now, who will need to stop working at some point. The parents you yourself will one day be — the ones your future children will have to decide whether to support.
You already know what this list looks like, whether you have written it down or not. It is the rent you paid last month. It is the winter tires you put off for another year. It is the RRSP contribution you meant to make but did not. It is the savings account you open in January and forget by March. It is the small line item at the bottom of your own budget labelled me, which ends up the first line cut when the month is tight.
The people on this side are quieter than the ones back home. They do not call. They do not voice-note. Their need is a slow accumulation that only becomes visible twenty years in. And because they do not ask, their ask is easy to miss.
Every dollar is a choice between two lists. The one that asks loudly. And the one that does not ask at all.
A generous person can end up with nothing on their own side, not because they gave too much, but because only one of their two lists ever picked up the phone.
The Friend Who Pulled Back
A childhood friend of mine serves in the US military. We go back decades. He is one of the most generous men I know. Over the years he sent money home with a steady hand: parents, friends, cousins, community. Then one day, he stopped. Cold turkey.
Not the parents. He kept supporting his parents. But the friends, the cousins, the people who had started treating him like an ATM — he ended it completely.
When I asked him why, he told me plainly: some of them had started taking him for granted. The requests stopped feeling like emergencies. They had become expectations.
What stayed with me was the sorting. He had figured out which giving was sacred and which had turned into something else. He still sends home. He is just much more deliberate about who and why.
What To Do With This
If you have been sending money home from Canada for years, you already know the weight of it. The point is not to stop. The point is to know what it is costing on this side, and to start sorting it.
There will always be giving that is worth every dollar. The parent you send to without asking. The sibling in a real bind. The rent for a cousin in a bad month. The laptop for the young person who will do something with it. You do not regret those sends. Then there is the other kind — the calls that have stopped being occasions and started being a pattern, the person whose name on your screen already tightens your chest, the giving that used to be loving and is not anymore. On a bank statement, the two look identical. The money moves the same direction. But they are not the same thing, and treating them as the same is the real mistake.
Write your list. Sort it. Then start a small quiet transfer into your own account before the next request arrives, and let yourself feel relief instead of guilt when you draw a line that has needed drawing for years. It does not need a spreadsheet. It needs one honest evening with yourself.
Keep being generous. Just remember — you are part of the list, too.
— J. Alabi, LandedAndLiving.ca 🍁
