I think of this blog as an unfiltered diary to my past self. A place to share things that don't translate well to short form video, that can't be compressed into a hook and a scroll. This is one of those pieces. These are the things I've discovered — and in some cases stumbled into headfirst — through the process of actually doing this. Moving abroad with a family, with no real blueprint, figuring it out as we go.

Some of these are practical. Some are emotional. All of them are things I wish somebody had told me before we left.

This is probably the most common mistake people make when they romanticize moving abroad, and I made it too. You see other people living this life on social media and it looks clean and free and unburdened. What you don't see is everything that followed them there.

Your bills don't care that you moved to Spain. Your taxes don't care either. The capital gains on the house you sold before you left — still very much your problem. The aging parents, the friendships you're trying to hold together across time zones, the financial responsibilities like setting up your banking abroad to handle the new currency — all of it comes with you. You don't start over. You just change your location.

I would still make the same decision a hundred times over. But I'd make it with my eyes wide open and a much clearer picture of everything involved.

We didn't get to visit Spain before we decided Spain was where we were going. I don't regret the decision itself, but the specific area we chose initially wasn't the right fit. A visit would have told us that within a few days. Instead we had to figure it out the hard way, on the ground, with our whole lives already packed up.

No amount of 4K walking tours, travel blogs or TikTok deep dives can replace actually being somewhere. Especially if the people creating that content don't look like you, don't have kids like yours, don't come from a similar background. Their experience will be different from yours. A week or two on the ground will tell you more than six months of research ever could. Seriously, book a scouting trip on Expedia and grab a car rental to drive through the actual neighborhoods where you might live.

There's some comfort in being around people who speak your language and understand your situation. But if you're genuinely trying to immerse yourself in a new culture, surrounding yourself primarily with people who aren't doing that either can work against you. If you need help learning the language, try TalkPal, that’s what I use.

In our experience, a lot of expat-heavy areas had a transient feeling. People passing through rather than planting roots. Some weren't learning the language. Some weren't engaging with the local culture at all. That wasn't what we were looking for. We often took an Uber out of the tourist zones just to see where the locals actually hung out. The further you can get from purely expat-centric areas — depending on your goals — the more authentic your experience is likely to be.

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This one I still struggle with personally. When I'm somewhere new, my instinct is to do everything. See everything. Maximise every single day. But this is your life, not a two-week trip you'll never get back to. You will burn yourself out. Especially with children.

Give yourself nothing days. Sit in a café. Find a park. Let your kids run around while you drink something warm and just exist in the city without an agenda. Those slow days give you a perspective on a place that the tourist version of you never gets. Before you leave home, make sure you have your travel essentials sorted so you aren't scrambling for the basics while trying to live your new life. When we arrived in Spain the pace of life was dramatically different from anything we'd experienced in the US. It took time to acclimate to.

This one took me three months to figure out and I genuinely think it's the most important thing on this list. There's a thing that happens when you settle into life abroad — particularly somewhere that doesn't have the relationship with guns that America does — where something in your body just... exhales. Your central nervous system stops doing that thing it's been doing your whole life. That low-level background hum of vigilance. The habit of clocking the exits. The part of your brain that's always just slightly switched on in a crowd, at a school event, at a concert, in a shopping centre.

It took me a long time to realise what I was feeling was the absence of that. That the strange calm I couldn't explain was just safety. Actual, unremarkable, everyday safety. You can't put a price on it and you can't fully understand it until you've lived without it for long enough to notice the difference. But once you do, it changes something in you permanently. So if you get there and you can't quite name what feels different — don't overthink it. Just breathe. You're probably safer right now than you've been in years.

Moving abroad is not a cure for your problems, a reset button for your life or an escape from everything that stressed you out back home. It's just a different version of your life, in a different place, with a different set of daily textures. But done with clear eyes, with some preparation, and with a willingness to actually slow down and be present in it — it can be the most grounding and clarifying thing you've ever done.

It was for us.

Zachary Lincoln
@ZachMovesAbroad

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Enough thinking.