The Spreadsheet I Kept for Six Years and Never Used

A Habit, Not a Plan

Every January for six years I opened the same spreadsheet on my laptop. It was called "Home", and it was supposed to be my plan for buying a flat in Nairobi. It had a column for the area, a column for the price, a column for notes, and a column I had optimistically labelled "Next step". The first five rows were from 2020. By last Christmas there were more than a hundred rows, and the "Next step" column was still empty.

I am a theatre nurse. I moved to the Gulf on a two year contract that turned into nine years. I send money home every month, I pay for my niece's school, and I still manage to save. On paper there was nothing stopping me. In practice the spreadsheet had become a sort of hobby, the way some people collect recipes they will never cook.

My younger brother noticed before I did. At my cousin's wedding he leaned over and asked, very gently, "Is this the year, or is it the spreadsheet year?" Everyone at the table laughed. I laughed too, but it stung, because he was right.

Finding the Real Fear

It was a slow night shift a few weeks later that changed it. One of those nights where the ward is quiet and you finally have time to think. I sat in the staff room with a cup of rooibos and asked myself honestly why I had never moved past the spreadsheet.

It was not the money. I had saved enough for a deposit on something modest. It was not the distance either. Plenty of people buy at home while working abroad.

It was what came after buying. Every story I had heard from colleagues ended the same way. The tenant who stopped paying. The caretaker who disappeared. The burst pipe at two in the morning, the phone calls across time zones, the flights home that cost more than the rent ever earned. A friend from Mombasa told me she had aged ten years managing one small flat from Abu Dhabi.

I work twelve hour shifts. I sleep at odd hours. I could not picture myself chasing plumbers on WhatsApp from a hospital corridor. So every year I looked at listings, felt that knot in my stomach, and closed the laptop.

Asking a Different Question

Once I had named the fear, I realised I had been asking the wrong question. I had been asking which flat I could afford. The real question was which kind of flat I could own without having to run it myself.

That sounds obvious now. It did not feel obvious then. I had always pictured myself buying an empty unit, furnishing it on a visit home, finding a tenant through a relative, and somehow keeping it all together from far away. Every one of those steps was a place where things could go wrong.

What I needed were furnished apartments in Nairobi where the furnishing, the letting and the day to day looking after were part of the arrangement from the start. Someone else's job, done properly, with me kept informed rather than kept awake.

The Family Group Chat Weighs In

I mentioned this to the family group chat, which was a mistake and also exactly the right thing to do. Within an hour I had eleven opinions. My uncle said I should only ever buy land. My sister said I should wait until I came home for good. My mother asked whether I was eating properly.

But my cousin, who works in Westlands and knows the city far better than I do now, sent me a voice note that I listened to three times. She said that people in my position were increasingly looking at managed residences rather than ordinary rentals, and that I should spend less time on listing sites and more time actually speaking to people who manage property for a living.

She also told me to stop looking all over the map. She suggested I look properly at a few quieter neighbourhoods close to the places people work. She mentioned apartments in Spring Valley, Nairobi, and said the area had changed a lot since I left. Leafy, close to Westlands and the UN area, but calmer.

Doing the Boring Part Properly

So I did the boring part. I made a new spreadsheet, a short one this time, with only five rows. I wrote down questions instead of prices. Who handles the letting? Who looks after the furniture and repairs? How will I be paid, and how often? What happens if the unit sits empty for a month? When will it actually be finished, if it is still being built?

I registered my interest with a developer and booked a call for my day off. I prepared for it the way I prepare for a shift handover, with everything written down in order. When the advisor called, I went through my list one item at a time.

Not every answer was the one I hoped for. One project I spoke to would not be finished for a few years, which meant a long wait before any rent arrived. But the answers were clear, and that was the thing I had been missing for six years. I could finally weigh a real option against my real life, instead of weighing a vague dream against a vague fear.

I also took the advice my uncle gave me, the one useful thing he said in the whole group chat discussion. Treat every promise about future income as a forecast, not a payslip. I wrote that on a sticky note and put it on my laptop.

Telling My Brother

I have not signed anything final yet. My lawyer in Nairobi is reading through documents, and I am planning payments around my contract renewal. But I have something I never had before, which is a decision I understand.

When I told my brother, he did not laugh this time. He asked good questions, the same questions I had asked on the call, and when I answered them without hesitating he sent back a single thumbs up. From him, that is high praise.

The old spreadsheet is still on my laptop. I keep it as a reminder. A hundred and twelve rows of flats I looked at and never had the courage to think about properly. The new one has five rows, and every one of them has something written in the "Next step" column.

What Changed

Nothing dramatic happened. I did not win money or get a promotion. What changed was that I stopped treating the whole thing as one enormous frightening decision and broke it into small questions I could actually answer.

The fear was never about Nairobi. It was about being a landlord from four thousand kilometres away with no one to call. Once I looked for a setup where I would not have to be that person, the fear lost most of its grip.

My mother still asks whether I am eating properly. I tell her yes, and I tell her that next year I might be eating it at home.