1. Moving to the Netherlands, this is where you need to start! Moving to Europe, ask yourself this!

cloudy in rotterdam go figure we're going to the park [Music] okay we're back it was uh it was a great day at the park even though it rained a little bit it was nice you know i've been getting a lot of questions hold on all right we're back uh lately tammy and i have been getting a lot of questions about uh why did we move to the netherlands why rotterdam in particular how much money have we spent up to this point and how much money do you really need to move to the netherlands those are all great questions and over the course of the next few videos we're going to go ahead and answer those those questions but what we want to do is we want to kind of start just from ground zero where tammy and i actually started where you can go ahead and start if you're serious about this so uh what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go ahead and cover some of the challenges that we we had in front of us uh some of the the highs the lows uh how long it actually took to do this and how long it took to do that and how much money we may have spent for this uh so let's go ahead and move on and we'll just start with number one okay so this is where we're actually going to start everybody's got to start some place a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step they say so here's your first step right here as basic as it may seem and if you're really serious about this this is where you really want to start and that is you need to make sure your passport is up to date always keep it up to date if it looks like it's going to inspire expire in six months or so or less get it up to date get it renewed so important do not let that passport lapse right down and expire they're taking a long time now to go ahead and get them renewed in the united states it's becoming shorter and shorter but it's taken a long time the next thing you need to do is you need a birth certificate and you need a marriage certificate if you're married both of those or if you married all three of those my wife birth certificate my birth certificate and our marriage certificate need to have office deals on them in office deals you go to the government and they will go ahead and it goes to the official channels and they get specially stamped with an office deal uh here's my birth certificate with the office deal on it take a look at it here is tammy's birth certificate with the office deal on it uh might not not as nice as mine uh and here is our marriage certificate uh with the apostille on it uh and here's the thing is tammy was born in california i was born in new hampshire and we were married in new orleans louisiana so we had to go ahead and send away for the office deal in louisiana i had to go ahead and contact the registrar's office in new hampshire and let them know what i was doing and i let them know that i need an office deal with this and this is not foreign language to them they are totally on board with this they understand what they need to do uh the office deal usually does cost a little more uh usually like a birth certificate i think coming out of new hampshire don't hold me to this was like 21 and i think it's like an extra 12 or something like that to have the apostille done and they'll even charge you more if you want to have it overnighted to you off regular mail is okay but the bottom line is this you need your passport up to date you need an op still birth certificate your wife needs an apostil birth certificate and you need a marriage certificate that's been opus dealed so that's the place to actually start ground zero right there once you have these you're set to move on you don't have to worry about uh getting those when somebody says hey i need this or i need that you have them right there just put them in a file you're good to go so up steel and passport get it done step one let's move on to step two next step next question uh now that you've got your your passports and uh you've got your birth certificate marriage certificate open steel tuck those away those are good for forever basically is you need to ask yourself where do you want to live uh where do you you want to move to europe where do you want to live now i can only speak for uh the netherlands right now because this is what tammy and i are we looked at a lot of different countries we had a checklist that we were ticking off but we picked the netherlands in the primary not the only reason but the primary reason we picked the netherlands was we wanted a place that we could easily jump off and travel to different other different countries whether it's poland whether it is germany whether it's france london ireland you name it we just wanted a place that we could jump off and for us uh the train is right there and we can take a train into another country we can take the train ride on over to uh skipple airport and just jump off from that point right there so you need to figure out exactly where you want to live and why you want to live there so that is a big issue and a lot of people just don't really realize that um so we picked the netherlands and uh so out of the netherlands we sat down and we looked at amsterdam we looked at rotterdam we looked at utrecht and we looked at some other cities as well and we really settled on rotterdam and quite honestly rotterdam wasn't our first choice amsterdam was our first choice but amsterdam because it's so popular and it's a beautiful city it really is it was just more expensive and we weren't willing to dish the money out and i'm glad that we didn't because we can hop on a train right now and be in in amsterdam in like 40 minutes you know less than an hour so it's great so you need to go ahead and pick a city or pick a country you need to do a little research on that and ask yourself truly where do you want to live and why do you want to live there so for us it was the netherlands and because it was an easy jumping off point to travel to other countries without any problem at all so with that let's move on to the next one so number three uh and here's a question that you need to talk about and it's also a question you really need to ask yourself deep down when you're lying at bed at night and you're thinking is are you really really prepared for a new way of life because that's exactly what you're jumping into you're jumping into a whole new way of life everything from language for us here in the netherlands it was a language barrier a biking weather tammy and i were from southern california or we spent all our time in southern california so it's basically one long season it's almost the same here in the netherlands winter spring summer fall the walk we went on this morning it was cold i mean it was in the 30s so another thing is the stairs uh you know i totally forgot about the stairs when we arrived we had like five pieces of luggage six pieces of luggage and when we opened the front door to go up to our apartment it was literally like oh yeah so the stairs were extremely steep uh there is no elevator so you know we climb the stairs every day several times a day four or five times a day uh banking is different uh currency is different and the list goes on and on and on so you really need to ask yourself are you prepared for that uh some people think they're prepared for that they're really not there are some things that we didn't think were really going to be a challenge and it turned out that it really is a little bit of a challenge for us right about now people are going language uh everybody speaks english and rotterdam yes they do and they love to speak english and they love to use their english on us when we find out that we speak english as well but it's not the same you don't communicate the same way as you would when you're back in the states you understand and you talk back and forth but it's a lot of times when it comes to language it's not what you say it's how you say it so you have to be careful how you phrase things uh language is a little bit of a barrier yes you can get by with it and it's not a bad thing i don't want to make it seem like it's a bad thing but you do miss uh general natural conversations with your family or friends so you need to ask yourself uh once again are you really really prepared uh for a new way of life because that's exactly what you're jumping into so give that some thought a lot of people don't think about it they just seem like it's like gotta get over there gotta jump into it it's gonna be great uh you know and it is uh for the most part but there are some challenges that uh can throw some people back and can just be a little uh daunting so anyways uh that was number three so let's move on to number four number four uh at least for us this is when it really starts to get real i mean it really gets right down this is where the rubber starts meeting the road and you now have to start planning what are you going to be doing with your personal possessions are you going to be shipping them over here uh and evaluating what the cost of doing that is uh do you rent a furnished apartment uh when you're here so you don't need to ship that stuff over here what about all that the knickknacks that you have accumulated over the past 10 15 20 30 years clothes just everything your car so what are you going to do with all that stuff for tammy and i uh we made the commitment and we got rid of all our furniture we donated most of our furniture to a good cause and as far as cars are concerned my car was uh when i retired turned back into the company i drove a company car uh tammy's car we had this great uh car dealership uh and they don't have this here i don't believe it's called carmax and what they do is they sell used cars and they also buy used cars at the same time and so just about two days before we left to the netherlands we turned our uh a car into them and they gave us more money than they we thought we were going to get port so that was great we got a check just deposited right into the bank what are you going to do about your mail tammy and i we have a virtual mailbox set up so any mail that we had gets forwarded to the virtual mailbox into the united states they go ahead and they scan anything that we want them to scan to us they will forward anything we we want forwarded to us or they will shred anything we say hey it looks like junk mail or yes i recognize this just go ahead and shred it or we can just turn around and say can you open it up and scan it to us so we we have a virtual mailbox so that we're not missing out any mail on the back in the states and we also have an address here and mail is now starting to come to us here via uh the netherlands rotterdam so the other thing is uh bank accounts uh what do you do with your bank accounts do you close your bank accounts over there uh do you open new bank accounts here and and the answer is yes and no we have our bank accounts still set up in the states we maintain them but we also have uh bank accounts here in the netherlands the banking is different it's the same but it's different so we have that right there so the question remains what are you going to do with all your personal stuff and you really need to sit down and evaluate that because there was a lot of things that we donated to the salvation army there was a lot of things that we donated to somebody that really needed them and there were a lot of pictures that we just got rid of and a lot of knickknacks that we ended up throwing away that we've had for years and years but the bottom line is what we found is when we went through that we found some stuff that we hadn't looked at in like five to eight years i mean it was cool stuff we just haven't looked at it in five to eight years if we haven't looked at it in five day a year eight years and we didn't know we had it how much can you miss something you really didn't know you had so anyways the big question is what are you going to do with your personal possessions you really need to answer that question and you need to start putting this all together just for the big move so let's move on to the next thing okay so let's just go ahead and do a just a real quick recap right up to this point you've got your uh you got your passports you got your birth certificate your marriage certificate they've been apostilled uh you've asked yourself where do you really want to live so you should have that narrowed down by now and figured out the next thing you really need to ask yourself and this is a big one it may not seem like a big one but it's a big one is are you really really ready for uh a new way of life that's that's a big one right there the next thing is you've made that decision you are you're ready to move forward uh and your question here is what are you going to do with your personal stuff you really need to talk this over because there are some things that you may really want to keep and your wife may not want to keep if you're by yourself and you're not married that should be fairly easy evaluate the cost of getting it over to the netherlands so what are you going to go ahead and do with your personal stuff uh the next one is and this one we were kind of told about this a little bit and we really didn't realize it was going to play this much of a part but it really does and that is you need to get some apps downloaded onto your phone that you are going to use for sure you are going to use these apps the first one is uh google translate make sure you got google translate that's the one that we have found works best for us there are other apps out there but google translate just works for us especially when you're grocery shopping and you're not even really a hundred percent sure what you're buying google translate love it uh the next one is you want to get yourself set up on whatsapp get yourself set up on whatsapp and get all your friends that you can get set up on whatsapp and that way you can go ahead and you can call or you can go ahead and video call and it doesn't cost you anything it doesn't cost them anything the other app that you're going to want to have that you probably already have is facebook messenger uh go ahead and get yourself set up with facebook messenger most of you friends probably already have that if i'm trying to call my daughter or even facetime my daughter on whatsapp and it's not working i'll just switch right over to facebook messenger and it works great so get yourself set up with whatsapp and facebook messenger they pretty much are doing the same thing uh one seems to be a little bit more than the other as far as dependability but i can tell you this in europe uh and especially in the netherlands everybody uses whatsapp everybody does so uh there's that the next one is and i'm going to flash this up there again is uh the digi id uh digi id is once you start to get yourself registered with a government and we're going to talk about that in just a little on the next video actually uh it is a secure way of logging into any government websites is through digi id so get the digi id you you're not going to be able to do anything with it right away but at least you'll have the app right on your phone so digi id and the next one is ideal ideal is a way also of doing banking it is not your bank but it is a way a secure transaction for doing your banking with a payment method on that so those are the ones that i have and the last one get yourself set up with when you get here it would be okay is the ov chip card uh so the ob chip card app and that keeps track of uh where you've been where you're going how much your rides were on the triammer on the metro things it just comes in very handy so we have whatsapp id messenger facebook messenger i should say digi id ideal google translate and ov chip card those are the ones that i use on a regular basis so they are an absolute must just get it download it onto your phone whether you can log in right now or you can't log in some of them you can some of them you can't but at the very least you're going to have them on your phone so that's just going to make your life a whole lot easier so with that being said let's move on to the last thing that we're going to go ahead and talk about today last but not least today uh is we're going to talk about phones and here's the thing you can't get a bank account without a netherlands phone number and you can't get a netherlands phone number without a bank account and that holds true to a certain extent so what we did as a workaround and if you forget everything i've told you up to this point you remember this because this is going to make your life a whole lot easier go out get a prepaid sim card that has so many minutes so many gigs on it for calling somebody and go ahead and drop it into your phone and it is going to give you a netherlands telephone number and we went with t-mobile so that when we were able to do that and it comes time to go ahead and go ahead and put ourselves on a plan we were able to keep the mobile number that we had so go ahead and get yourself a prepaid sim card drop it into your phone make sure your phone is unlocked you want to make sure that you call your carrier back into the states to make sure your phone is unlocked it will go ahead and take the the prepaid chip and then from that point right there when you have it uh you're able to open a banking account and with that banking account you're now able to go ahead and put yourself on a phone plan because in the netherlands you can't get a bank account without a phone to another one's telephone number and you can't get a netherlands telephone number without a banking account but you can if you get the prepaid sim card and you just drop it into your phone so there's where we are right now those were the very basics the very beginnings of how we actually started so that's pretty much it for this video right here uh in a few days i'm going to be putting out the next video which is going to be covering exactly how to get into the netherlands what we uh experienced trying to get in here what our roadblocks were and i know that that's what you're really looking for but i really wanted to start with uh the basics of getting over here and what you really need to prepare yourself for everything from the office deal birth certificates and marriage licenses there's no two ways around that get them get get that started right away if you don't use them you can always just tuck them away uh the phones and you really need to ask yourself where do you want to live they sound like basic questions are you ready for a new way of life and covering the apps that you are absolutely going to need get those apps downloaded onto your phone you're going to thank me for those you are going to be using those apps right there so with that being said until the next video coming out in just a few days from soul to soul travels we'll see you there

Channel: Soul to Soul Travels

Views: 19,977

Keywords: moving to the netherlands, is the netherlands a good place to live, moving to the netherlands as an expat, expats in the netherlands, american expat in the netherlands, moving abroad, living in the netherlands, life in netherlands, moving to the netherlands from america, living in the netherlands without speaking dutch, pros and cons of living in the netherlands, life in the netherlands, moving to the netherlands should i, living in the netherlands pros and cons

Id: QaoPVO9-FbU

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 06 2022