You signed it. There’s a start date on the calendar, which somehow makes it more real than the offer letter ever did, and under all the excitement you’ve probably noticed a small voice asking whether you’ve made a terrible mistake.
Good. The people I’ve watched do this well were never the fearless ones. They’d just gotten the dull stuff out of the way early, which left them free to wobble a bit when they landed without it actually costing them anything.
The weeks before you leave
Documents first. Most of what follows depends on them. Check that your passport still has plenty of validity left, then dig out the originals of anything official you might one day have to produce from a thousand miles away: birth certificate, marriage certificate, diplomas, professional licences, whatever fits your situation. Get them translated. If your destination wants documents legalised or apostilled, do that before you leave — sorting it remotely, through an embassy, in a language you’re still learning, is the kind of errand that eats a month. Scan it all as well and mail yourself copies you can pull up from any phone.
Start on housing now, too. One rule I won’t bend on: never sign for a place you haven’t seen, or that someone you actually trust hasn’t seen on your behalf. If a “landlord” wants a deposit wired before you can view the flat, you’re not renting an apartment, you’re funding a scam. Book something temporary for the first few weeks. The real lease can wait until you’ve worked out which neighbourhood is genuinely a fifteen-minute commute and which one only looked that way on the map.
Money trips up more people than anything else. You’ll be spending in the new currency well before your first salary clears, and that gap can run past a month. So build yourself a cushion. There’s the deposit, the first month’s rent, the furniture you swore blind you wouldn’t need to buy, and then a long dribble of small fees that appear the second you start signing up for things. Phone your home bank before you go, or they’ll cheerfully freeze your card the first time it gets used somewhere they weren’t expecting. Carry some local cash for the first day, too. The ticket machine at the station does not care that you haven’t set up contactless yet.
And then there’s the bit that never makes it onto the spreadsheet, which is telling people. Do it properly, in person, not by text from the departure gate. Sit down with the ones who’ll actually feel it and let them be sad about it, even though it was your idea — partly because it was your idea. For most of us the move stays abstract right up until some ordinary moment when it suddenly isn’t: you’re paying for a one-way ticket, or you catch yourself thinking “last time I’ll do this here.” That clang of realness is going to come for you at some point. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.
What to carry, and the first day or two
Pack as if your checked bag is going to disappear, because every so often it does. Documents, medication, chargers, a change of clothes, your cash — those live in the bag that never leaves your shoulder. The winter coat can go in the hold; you can replace a coat in an afternoon. You cannot replace your birth certificate from a baggage carousel in a country where you don’t speak the language.
Day one tends to feel weirdly unreal, like you’re watching a stranger arrive somewhere on your behalf. You’ll also be flattened in a way no amount of plane-sleep prevents. Resist the urge to conquer the place. Find a bed, eat something hot, get a phone that works, sleep. And give it a day or two before you make any real decisions. When you’re that wrung out the city looks bleaker than it is, then unreasonably charming once you’ve slept, and your read on it is worthless either way.
Paperwork is the part that runs your life
Nobody dreams about registration offices. But this dreary little chain of errands is the exact thing that turns you from tourist into resident, so get it done early, while novelty and adrenaline are still doing some of the lifting for you.
Registering your address is usually the thing everything else hangs off. In a lot of countries almost nothing happens until the state knows where you sleep — no bank account, no tax number, sometimes not even a SIM card you’re allowed to keep. Find out what locals actually call the process, because the official term is rarely the word anyone uses, and book the appointment the moment you’ve got an address to write down. Those slots vanish fast.
The bank account is next, and the logic here will make you want to scream: you need an address to open the account, the registration to prove the address, and occasionally a local phone number to receive the codes they text you. Ask HR which bank the company’s other foreign hires landed at. There’s nearly always one branch that’s seen the whole circus before and won’t blink at a folder full of stamped documents.
Sort out healthcare while you feel completely fine, because feeling fine is precisely when you’ll let it slide. Work out whether you’re covered through the job, through the public system once you’re registered, or whether you need private cover to bridge the gap in between. Learn the emergency number. Find the nearest clinic and the nearest pharmacy. You really don’t want the first time you think about any of this to be at 3am with a temperature and a translation app.
Honestly, I’d put the local SIM near the top of the whole list, because so much hangs off it. The bank’s verification text, the appointment reminder, that message from the colleague you met yesterday — none of it reaches you without a working number. Ten minutes in a phone shop on arrival saves you weeks of small, grinding hassle. After that, figure out how the city actually moves: the travel pass, the apps everyone seems to have, whether you want a bike, a car, or just decent shoes. Learning to get around your own neighbourhood does more for your nerve, oddly, than almost anything else you’ll pull off that first month.
The part that actually matters
The paperwork, for all the dread, is the easy bit. The hard bit shows up on some unremarkable Tuesday a few weeks in. The bank’s done, the registration’s done, and you’re sitting in a flat that still feels like a mid-range hotel, in a city where there isn’t a single person you know well enough to phone on a bad night.
There’s a name for what you’re feeling. Culture shock rarely looks like the films, though. No tearful collapse in the middle of a market square. It’s quieter and more underhanded — a slow pile-up of tiny frictions, the flat exhaustion of operating in a second language all day, a ridiculous ache for a corner shop that doesn’t even exist where you’ve moved to. It comes and goes. The first weeks can feel like a long holiday, then something droops around the one- or two-month mark, and then it lifts. Knowing the dip is coming makes it far easier to sit through. You haven’t failed; you’re asking your brain to rebuild an entire life from nothing, and that takes a while.
Learn some of the language, badly, without embarrassment. You’re not chasing fluency. You want enough to say good morning to the woman in the bakery and apologise for butchering her grammar. The goodwill that buys you is absurdly out of proportion to the effort. People forgive a dreadful accent without a second thought, and they remember that you bothered.
Finding your people takes patience and a bit of courage you won’t always feel like mustering. Say yes to the after-work drinks even on the nights you’d rather fold onto the sofa. Expat groups are a gentle landing and there’s nothing wrong with that — but let them become your entire world and you can spend two years somewhere without ever really arriving. The friendships that turn a city into home are usually the slow, local ones, and those take months. Call home, sure. Just not so constantly that you end up living back there in your head while your body’s somewhere else entirely.
If you’re bringing family
Doing this on your own is hard enough. Moving a whole household is another thing entirely, and timing matters more than anything else. Most families do better if one person goes ahead first, gets the address, the bank and an actual flat sorted, and only then brings everyone into a place that already functions. A few weeks of solo legwork spares the rest of them the worst of the chaos.
Kids cope better than you’ll fear and feel it more than they’ll admit. Get the school sorted early; the good ones fill up, and those waiting lists are real. Children pick up the new language at a pace that’s frankly rude, but the disruption still lands on them under the bravado, so let them be sad about the friends they left without pushing them to love the new place by the end of the first week. Keep an eye on your partner too, especially one who gave up a job to come with you. That’s a big thing to do for someone. It can also get lonely in a way that’s easy to miss. They’ll need their own routine and their own people, and a lot sooner than you’d think.
A year from now
The woman in the bakery will know your order before you’ve said a word. You’ll have a table you always grab, a route your feet take without consulting you, a couple of people you could ring without thinking twice if something went wrong. The anxiety churning through you this month will have thinned out into the ordinary background hum of a normal life.
Right now, suitcase half-packed and stomach doing something unpleasant, I know that’s hard to credit. It’s still the truest thing I can tell you about moving abroad. At some point, with no fanfare at all, it stops being a brave thing you’re doing and turns into the life you have. And a life like that, in a place you actually chose, is not a bad one to land in.
If you’d rather not work all of this out alone, that’s what we do at TrustGlobe.
Need a hand with recruitment, paperwork or relocation?
Get in touch