What I Dislike About Living Abroad After 20 Years in 60 Countries

no one likes to get ripped off i get asked a lot to explain the politics and current events and decisions that my government is making and i don't always want to be that person if something crazy is happening in your country and everyone looks to you to explain it could have a lot to do with the reason that you're not there anymore and if you are from the us one of the things that you'll undoubtedly hate about living abroad is paying taxes in a country that you don't live in so i made this video recently about how i see the us after 15 years living in foreign countries and one of you commented that why don't i do a video on what i hate about living abroad since it seemed like i was hating on the u.s a bit and i thought all right that's fair let's do it so in this video i'm going to tell you at least 10 things i hate about living abroad so the thing that i hate the most about living abroad is just being really far away from family and friends now in some cases you can end up getting extra quality time with friends and family but those times are few and far between so even though i'm not the type of person to really get sick it really sucks when something important is going on and you're not there for it this is especially poignant if somebody is sick or somebody passes away the first three grandparents that passed away i was in different countries when they died and i wasn't able to get back in time to say goodbye and that was super tough for me and by pure chance i happened to be in the u.s during the pandemic and was able to be with my grandmother in hospice when she passed away a few months ago so this was the first time that i was in the same country as a loved one during that tough time and i really appreciated that and you know it would have been a lot different if i was in a different country during the pandemic it would have been a lot more difficult for me to get back and probably wouldn't have happened so as much as i love living abroad i don't like being so far from friends and family the second thing that sucks about living abroad that's kind of related is that you miss a lot of really important life events so you miss weddings you miss birthdays and not only do you miss them because you're not in close physical proximity to go but people actually stop inviting you to things because they just assume that you're not going to come or that you can't come or that you don't want to come and this can kind of hurt your feelings over time because when you first move abroad people will still invite you to things just out of courtesy and politeness and because they want to include you but the longer you're abroad the less and less people will invite you to stuff because even if you happen to come home for a little while or even if you would be willing to fly back to go to whatever the thing is people either don't want to bother you or they just assume that you're not going to go and so you can end up just not getting invited to a lot of your friends weddings and things like that so it's definitely a trade-off i i still think that the trade-off is worth it for living abroad versus never living abroad but definitely one of the things i don't like is missing out on life milestones and events that everybody else is there for another thing that i hate about living abroad is never having a home like this is something that people i think really take for granted who continue living in their home countries is that even though i like being a minimalist and not having a lot of stuff i've never lived in a home that i owned and i've never lived in a home for more than maybe a year at a time so i've never had my own space i've never had my own furniture like i don't even know what my home would look like if i had one and so that is kind of a weird feeling like the good thing about living abroad is that you can make your home wherever you are and you realize that you can fit in anywhere in the world but the downside is that even when you rent a property long term or even if you buy a property in another country if you know in the back of your mind that it's temporary it's very difficult to actually put down roots in that place and this has a lot of ramifications that extend into your personal life into your social life but it starts with your physical surroundings and where you live like a weird thing that starts to happen if you're a digital nomad especially is that you'll start to kind of attach to a place so after traveling for many years you'll get really fast at making your home base wherever you are even if it's a hotel room and so recently when i was living in bulgaria for a couple months i had a fixed departure date to go to lisbon portugal and when that time came i was so comfortable in bulgaria that i didn't even want to go and lisbon is an amazing city and one of my best friends was there and once i got to lisbon i really liked it but i really didn't even want to move from where i was because i had been traveling so much unless you get permanent residency or citizenship in a place and you know you're going to be living there a long time this feeling can be a bit disruptive the fourth thing i hate about living abroad is saying goodbye saying goodbye to people saying goodbye to places and in the video about what i love about living abroad i talk about all the amazing people that you get to meet but on the flip side the part that sucks is saying goodbye to them and knowing that you might never see those people again as the saying goes it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all and i definitely feel like it's the same way with travel with experiencing new places and with meeting other people but that doesn't take away from how awful it is to have to separate from them and have that uncertainty of when or if you're ever going to see them again and that leads me to dating dating can also be really difficult when you live abroad now some people find love really quickly and i've had some clients that they met their future wife like the day that they stepped off the airplane and so it can happen but in my personal experience i mean i guess i don't have much to compare it to because i haven't dated so much in the us but i have found it to be pretty difficult because there's confusion over who to date first of all it's like do you date locals do you date other expats do you date tourists and you will end up dating all different types of people but in many cases the locals don't want to date you if you're only there temporarily because they don't know how long you're going to be there with expats it's a really good bet except you don't know how long they're going to be there either so you might meet somebody who's in the 11th month of a one-year work contract or even in the last week of a one-year stay in a country i once met a guy who was in the last like five days of a one-year around-the-world trip and if i had met him in the first five days maybe we would have ended up traveling the world together but because i met him at the end he had to go back home and so that really sucked and another guy i was dating in amsterdam broke things off pretty early on because he knew that i was only going to be there for three months and then i had to leave because my passport stamp was running out so dating while living abroad can be extra complicated and i know this all depends on perspective like you can live anywhere in the world and have the mindset that dating is tough but i really do think that it's harder as a traveler so even though you get to meet a lot of people it's not so good for longevity and dating and along those lines another one of the things that you might start to crave is feeling like a local in a place but being accepted by other locals as a local so what i mean by that as an example one time i was staying for a while in santorini greece and i had just been on a cruise through the mediterranean and like a different place every day and finally my friends and i stopped in santorini for a couple weeks and i went to the same coffee shop every morning and i started to get like a little bit envious of the locals that were coming in every day to get their coffee and how they had this rapport with the baristas and the people that were working behind the counter in the bakery and it just struck me that like no matter how long i stay in santorini first of all i don't speak greek and i would just never be maybe i would be recognized by the barista but i would never fully be a local in that place and so these are just little things that make life life and like being a human and it's kind of weird to never have that familiarity that is confirmed by other people like even if that became my favorite cafe and i went there every day like to the locals i was just a tourist passing through because i was the next thing that sucks is that you'll never fit in completely in your new adopted country but the other thing that happens is that you also won't fit in completely anymore in your home country now you might already feel like that and that's totally normal maybe all of us don't feel like we fit in in the world sometimes but when you move abroad even if you become a citizen even if you learn the language even if you live there for 10 years 20 years 50 years people who don't know you will always see you as an outsider and you'll always have this kind of burden of proof to prove that you are a local there to prove that you deserve to live there to prove that you're part of that society as human beings we all have a need to fit in we all have a need to find community and even though you can find community in a foreign country long term you'll always be a bit of an outsider and then likewise when you come home you'll experience some degree of reverse culture shock which i talked about in another video about what it was like coming back to the us after living abroad for so many years and so you could kind of find yourself in this parallel universe where you don't fit in 100 anywhere you go and that is a weird feeling but it's manageable and along kind of the same lines there's also the discrimination that you will experience inevitably at some point as an expat now some people have already experienced extreme discrimination racism in their home countries but if you've never experienced it at home then you definitely will at some point when you're living abroad intensity of the discrimination that you experience will depend on who you end up meeting and what type of country that you're in and a lot of different factors and it's never your fault when you experience this it always has to do with the person exerting that onto you but it's never pleasant there are stories of people who live in japan where the locals will get up and stand up on the metro because they don't want to sit next to them and your personal experience with this will depend on where you go and it might be more extreme in a really homogenous culture like japan versus a very mixed diverse city like amsterdam with 180 or 190 nationalities represented all in the same place hey everyone so i'm here in my co-working space reviewing and editing this video and i get to the part about discrimination and i have to say that i'm not sure that i have fully underlined the seriousness and severity of this topic with respect to how dangerous it could actually be part of that is because i'm white and so i can't speak from experience to the injustices that many people in my own country experience because of the color of their skin or what they look like and this topic of discrimination and racism is a lot more serious than someone just saying something rude to you or not including you in their culture or not wanting to sit by you on the subway it's actually dangerous and in some cases life-threatening and it could be that way in your country of birth but it also could be that way if you travel to a foreign country depending on the conditions so in some cases if you are endangered or discriminated against in your home country immigrating or moving or traveling to a more tolerant country with more freedoms more safety and security and different public policies could actually be better for you so in that case traveling abroad could be safer or living abroad could be safer and more pleasant than your personal experience in your home country and so there are a lot of complexities to this topic but i just wanted to really underline the seriousness and significance of this and its potential implications shoot like this is a tough topic i think it's important that we talk about it i don't have all of the answers but i hope that touching on this can bring some light to it help you and your own personal making process when it comes to where you're going to travel or live in the world in the future and regardless i just hope that everyone has a positive experience i do recommend to check sources like the global peace index and there's even a feature on nomad list there are metrics on freedom of speech female friendly racial tolerance and lgbtq friendly and so i don't think that's scientific but definitely do your research on something that you think might affect you when going to another country stay safe take care of yourself just be careful wherever you go another thing that sucks about living abroad is the learning curve so this comes in a few different ways first there's the actual logistics of moving to a new country and learning everything new for the first time that a lot of this can be avoided if you're using a relocation company and i'm biased because i have a relocation company and that's what i've been doing is helping people avoid the pain that comes with moving to a new country that doesn't really add value to the experience it just becomes a source of frustration or wasted time wasted money and so that part is never fun about moving to new country i guess it builds character but it's something that you will experience to some degree each time you move to a new country because you there are always going to be things that you don't know how to do and that you can't expect so that part really sucks and then on the back side there's the cultural adjustment period that comes from moving abroad so what happens is that at first you get into the honeymoon stage of living in a new country where everything is really fun really beautiful really exciting and then that initial excitement wears off and the tough part comes of adjusting and integrating with that culture and i'll drop some links below to the curve of cultural adaptation for foreigners living abroad if you want to check that out but it's definitely one of the harder parts of living in another country and the amount of time it takes you to adjust to a new country will depend on a lot of different things but namely how different your new country is compared to your home country so in another video i've talked about the hofstede index where you can compare and contrast countries on different parameters and so you can basically see how different a country's culture is to your own beyond language and things like that but on freedom and individualism versus collectivism and all different measures so if you come from a country that's very free let's say you come from norway and then you move to a country that has a lot of restrictions like saudi arabia it's going to be a lot tougher for you to adjust to life there versus if you moved from norway to canada so there's cultural issues there's language issues there's logistical issues and then there's also like government red tape and everyday annoyances like figuring out how to pay your bills or waiting for the internet guy to show up and then there's those little things that you don't think about like in some countries if you are two seconds late you're gonna miss your train whereas in other countries if you're two hours late to dinner it's no big deal because no one else has gotten there yet so there's all these different nuances that you have to get to learn and it's not the best part of living abroad it can definitely be a challenge the next thing that sucks about living abroad is getting ripped off on occasion no one likes to get ripped off and i actually talk about this in the video about things i love about living abroad because after you get ripped off enough times you become kind of like an ex-pat ninja and you're able to artfully avoid it but it is a part that sucks about living abroad and it's just the reality whether you get ripped off exchanging money or you get overcharged for your housing or for your taxi ride if you're not a local somewhere and you've never lived there before you're not going to know everything and eventually people are going to take advantage of you i also had a friend who had all of his luggage stolen twice out of the trunk of his car once in costa rica in a shopping center when he was eating dinner and another time when checking into a hotel in miami so you just never know when it's going to happen the more you travel the more countries you live in the more opportunities there are for things to go wrong just by virtue of you being in a new place foreign land and interacting with more people and just exposing yourself more so it sucks it's a reality of living abroad i don't like it but you can still make the best of it another thing i don't like about living abroad is language barriers so i don't like when i don't speak the local language and i don't like it because i feel rude not speaking the language i don't like it because it's harder to communicate i don't like it because it's harder to get to know people it's hard to find your way around and even if people don't expect you to speak the local language i still feel a lot better if i can do it and i only speak english and spanish so there are quite a few countries that i can get around in just knowing those two languages but no matter how many countries i go to i always wish that i can speak their language and i find myself reverting to spanish no matter which country i'm in because it's like wherever i go my brain defaults to like oh foreign country switch to spanish even if the language is portuguese or french or russian this can be overcome of course by learning the language and that means that you need to practice a lot or stay in a country for a really long time to be able to learn and this is harder and harder with technology because it's so much easier to have your safety net in your comfort zone with you your cell phone to be able to talk to people in your home language to be able to translate things that you don't understand and so it really takes a lot of effort to be able to learn the language wherever you are you've got to go out of your way to do it but it really pays off if you put in the effort i'm really embarrassed to say that even in places like bulgaria i never even learned the alphabet when i was living there and i was there for months so if you're working full-time it takes extra brain power to learn the language but it always pays off another thing that happens when you live abroad is that you become the spokesperson for your country so if you're the only one from your country who's living in the area people are going to come to you to get an explanation and advice about what's going on in your country now depending on how much your country is in the news this can of course differ by your country of citizenship but being from the u.s i get asked a lot to explain the politics and current events and decisions that my government is making and i don't always want to be that person so it's it's kind of weird to be like the representative of your country wherever you go and the smaller your country is the more people might expect this of you it's another one of those trade-offs that comes with living abroad so if something crazy is happening in your country and everyone looks to you to explain it try if you can but i mean a lot of times the crazy things that are happening in your home country could have a lot to do with the reason that you're not there anymore and if you are from the us one of the things that you'll undoubtedly hate about living abroad is paying taxes in a country that you don't live in now the u.s and eritrea are two of the only countries in the world that tax their citizens based on country of citizenship not country of residence that means if you're a u.s citizen and i'm not an accountant by the way this is not financial advice but if you are a us citizen who has never even been in the united states you could be expected to file a u.s tax return every year and likewise if you left the us at a young age and never went back even if you're living abroad the rest of your life you could still have to file a tax return pay taxes and even get audited this u.s tax policy is definitely one of the things that i don't like about living abroad even though i sometimes can qualify for tax credits like the foreign earned income exclusion but it's also a big reason why so many u.s citizens give up their citizenship because they don't want to be tied to a tax system in a country that they don't plan to go back to and that's perfectly understandable i personally think that the us should join other countries in the world and allowing its citizens to change their tax domicile based on where they live whether it's six months one year or more there should be some method for u.s citizens to be able to change their tax domicile without moving to puerto rico and then the last thing that i don't like about living abroad is what happens after like what is the end game of living abroad do you go back to your home country do you become a settler in a new country there's a lot of questions and it's good questions to have because it means that you have the freedom to choose but i don't know the answer to that yet i don't know if things come full circle and you go back where you started like do not pass go do not collect 200 but i think that it really just depends on the person i think some people try living abroad as an experiment and then they go back home whereas other people decide to stay abroad forever these are all questions that i don't know the answer to because i haven't lived this process out yet in life i have some hunches that we eventually settle and make a home in a place that resonates with us but i really don't know i think it depends on you it depends on your personal experience it depends on what you want to do and it depends on how you feel and maybe it's something that changes throughout different phases of life like maybe you're nomadic when you're single and then you meet somebody and you have kids and you become nomadic van lifers or you buy a house somewhere and settle down maybe you give up your citizenship and get a new passport or maybe you just get a second place of residence i don't know there is no right or wrong answer but let me know in the comments what are some of the things that you dislike about living abroad or what are some of the things that you're not looking forward to when and if you do move abroad if you like this kind of video you'll also want to check out my video on what i love about living abroad and also how i see the us after living abroad for so many years any other questions or comments don't be shy let's start a discussion in the comments below make sure to like and subscribe if you're new here and see you in the next video

Channel: Traveling with Kristin

Views: 203,222

Keywords: living abroad, live abroad, pros and cons, life abroad, truth about living abroad, living abroad advice, reality of living abroad, living abroad as an american, leaving america, moving abroad, moving to another country, living in another country, working abroad, American abroad, American living abroad, united states of america, usa, living overseas, retire overseas, expat life, what it's like, real talk, my thoughts, travel, abroad, digital nomad, Traveling with Kristin

Id: ZwxGU1jhPKs

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021