No deal for us: how Iran–US talks affect ordinary Iranians

I’ve grown the habit of checking the dollar exchange rate every few hours, even though I sold all that I had a few months ago—or perhaps because I sold all that I had a few months ago.

Late last year, when I did that, the dollar was 68,000 tomans. Two weeks ago, it hit an all-time high of 102,000. Then it started dropping sharply when Tehran and Washington began negotiating.

It’s now an almost masochistic exercise, calculating how much my partner and I could have gained had I waited a little bit longer.

Over the last six-seven years, we converted whatever we had and could save into dollars. It stood at around $20,000 in the fall of 2024.

We kept the cash at home, living in constant fear of a break-in. But we didn’t trust the banks either. People’s foreign currency deposits were once forcibly converted to rials during a currency collapse in the early 2010s. Public trust was shattered.

Our savings weren’t enough to buy a home in Tehran. Renting here, with inflation this brutal, is terrifying. Prices climb relentlessly. Our income doesn’t. Half of what we earn goes straight to rent.

Then the war drums began to beat louder. The Israeli-Iranian cold war heated up with missile attacks and airstrikes. War felt closer than ever. We went to bed each night bracing for the worst.

That’s when we made our decision: we’d buy a home outside Tehran—somewhere to safeguard our money, and ourselves, if war came. A property in the capital was out of reach anyway. A small 600 sq ft apartment in a modest neighborhood would cost about 5 billion tomans. We had less than two.

Even ChatGPT approved our thinking.

“If you're buying as a refuge, stay away from military centers and major cities, and prepare for wartime shortages,” it said.

We found an old 2000 sq ft house in a small town in Iran’s northern province of Gilan, far from military sites and with clean air. We sold our dollars overnight, sold the little jewelry that we had, and borrowed 600 million tomans to close the deal at 2.5 billion.

We couldn’t move. We’re both job-bound to Tehran. But now we had a place to escape to. A safe investment. A backup life.

Almost immediately, as if waiting for us to get rid of our assets, the dollar and gold surged. We couldn’t help calculating what we’d lost. It was dreadful. And all the more so because we had been advised against it by our family. “Why sell when the dollar is rising?” they said.

The stress and the anxiety boiled over into a fight. My partner kept saying “I told you so.” He hadn’t. Eventually, we decided and promised not to revisit the issue, but privately, we both still do. We check the rates. We run the numbers in our heads.

Since these US-Iran talks began, I’ve been torn. A deal with Donald Trump could bring much-needed cash to the government’s coffers. Would it ease the people’s hardship? Most likely not. It would only benefit Iran’s bloated IRGC-led oligarchy and its loyal forces inside and abroad.

Still—for now at least—the threat of war feels more distant. That offers a fragile peace of mind.

But Many are not even torn. In a recent poll on Telegram, seven in ten of over 5,000 participants said they’d rather the deal fell apart and the Islamic Republic was attacked. I can’t say this reflects society as a whole, but I know more than a few who oppose a deal because they believe it prolongs the theocratic rule in Iran.

Even the dip in the exchange rate hasn’t brought joy. Prices haven’t dropped. Inflation hasn’t eased. And the rule still holds: we earn in rials, we spend in dollars.

For me, personally, the falling dollar has brought a strange feeling of comfort. It makes the choice we made feel a little less like a loss.