Are You Really Suited to Living Abroad? The Questions Worth Asking

Most of what is written about moving abroad addresses questions with answers: what the visa requires, what it costs, how the tax works. This publication spends most of its time on those, because they are checkable.

They are not what determines whether it works. People rarely return home because they misread a visa threshold. They return because of things that were true about them before they left, and which nobody selling a relocation has any incentive to raise.

The questions that actually decide it

What are you moving toward, and what are you moving away from? A move motivated by something specific — a place you know, a climate you need, a cost base that makes a plan work — has a decent record. A move motivated by dissatisfaction that travels with you has a poor one. The distinction is uncomfortable to make honestly about yourself and it is the most predictive thing on this page.

Have you been there in the off-season? Nearly everyone visits somewhere at its best. Living there means the rainy season, the humidity, the smoke haze in northern Thailand each spring, the months when the tourist infrastructure that made the place pleasant is shut. A fortnight in February tells you very little about August.

Who will you talk to? Social isolation is the most common reason people give for going home, and it arrives slowly enough that it is easy to dismiss early. Expatriate communities are smaller, more transient and more prone to friction than they look from outside. If your social life at home runs on decades of accumulated relationships, understand that you are giving that up and that rebuilding it takes years, if it happens.

How do you behave when things do not work? Bureaucracy that makes no sense, an appointment that achieves nothing, a rule that changes without notice, a repair that takes six weeks. Living abroad means this happens weekly rather than occasionally. People who find it charming for a fortnight and enraging for a year are common, and the transition is predictable.

Will you learn the language? Most people say yes and most do not. Be honest, because the honest answer changes which countries suit you. If you will not, you are choosing among places where you can live without it — the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore — and a place where you cannot function without the language will wear you down regardless of how much you like it.

What does your partner think, actually? Not what they have said to keep the peace. A move that one partner wants and the other tolerates is among the most reliable predictors of an early return, and often of considerably worse.

The one nobody plans for

What happens when someone gets ill — you, your partner, or a parent at home?

Distance from ageing parents is the single most common reason for an unplanned return, and it is entirely foreseeable. If you have parents in their eighties, the probability that you will need to be there at short notice within five years is high, and it should be part of the plan rather than the thing that ends it.

The same applies to your own health. Living abroad at 60 and at 80 are different propositions, and the second one is the one that is harder to change.

How to test it honestly

Rent for a year before buying anything. In most of Asia you cannot own the land anyway, which makes this easier to accept than it sounds.

Keep the return option open and priced. Not just emotionally — know what going back would cost, and whether you could still afford housing at home. People who sell everything remove their own ability to change their mind, and then discover that the decision has to hold for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it is working.

Go in the worst month. Then decide.

The point of this

None of this is an argument against moving abroad. A great many people do it and are unambiguously happier for it, and the ones who succeed are usually the ones who asked these questions in advance and answered them unflatteringly.

The failures are rarely people who chose the wrong country. They are people who did not ask whether they wanted this or whether they wanted something else, and who found out after committing capital that could not easily come back.