5 Tips For Those Who Are Looking At Becoming An Expatriate

Every year many thousands of individuals make the decision to move permanently overseas and to make a new life for themselves and their families in a new land. For many of these people this will prove to be one of the best decisions that they have ever made, but for many other people their dream will rapidly turn into a nightmare. Below are a small selection of the numerous things that you will need to consider.

� Make certain that you really do want to live permanently overseas.

It is true that the grass is always greener on the other side and it is very easy to create a heavenly picture of life in your chosen country. However, once you arrive, you might find that the grass is now much greener back at home. It is also generally the case that your opinion of a country when you are a holidaymaker is quite different from your view when you are a resident.

Not only should you visit the country a number of times before deciding to move there, but you must visit at differing times of the year and for increasingly lengthy periods of time. You also need to try 'living' in the country by renting a house or condo and living as far as possible as you would as a resident and not as a holidaymaker. If you still feel that relocating is the right choice after you have spent several months or so 'living' in the country, then it is a fair bet that you would not regret your decision.

� Make sure that you fully understand the immigration policy of the country concerned.

Check out the current immigration requirements of your chosen destination and also look at its immigration history and any published or rumored plans for the future.

In the majority of cases you will have to meet strict visa requirements and these may be inconvenient, expensive and leave you without much security. The very last thing you want to do is to cut your ties with home, purchase a house and get your kids settled into school only to learn that you cannot extend your visa and have three days to leave the country.

� Sit down and work very carefully through your finances.

Think very carefully about how you intend to support yourself in your chosen country. For instance, do you intend to seek employment once you arrive to provide you with an income, or do you plan to fund yourself from saving, investments or a pension from home?

If you intend to seek employment abroad then how easy will it be to find work? If you can get work, what sort of salary are you likely to get? Will they let you work at all? Many countries will require you to apply for a work permit and these are sometimes issued only in exceptional circumstances or for employment requiring special skills or qualifications. In a lot of cases your visa will specifically state that you may not seek employment.

If you wish to fund your stay from sources at home, do you have sufficient resources not merely for today but for the next five or ten years or more? For instance, if you are receiving a pension abroad will it keep pace with the rising cost of living? In many cases you are allowed to draw a pension abroad but, if you choose to do so, you lose any cost of living increases and your pension is fixed at the level at which you start to receive it abroad.

� Consider what to do with your assets at home.

If you own your own home will you sell it, rent it out or just leave it empty? What will you do with your car, furniture and other personal possessions?

Of course your home is a great deal more than simply an asset as it also provides you with a link to your home country and provides you with an address back home which might be extremely useful if you do not have friends or family who are happy for you to use their address. You only have to wait until your credit card runs out and your credit card company tells you that they will only send the new card to the address to which the account is registered in your home country.

As far as your other possessions are concerned you can of course get rid of many of them if you wish, retaining only those or especial real or sentimental value, or you might decide to take them with you. But how easy will it be to ship things out and what will it cost? You must look carefully too at the regulations in your country of destination. Some countries will permit you to bring more or less anything you want into the country, while others will have very strict limits or levy high import taxes. For instance, in many cases it is far less expensive to purchase a new car than to import your own car and to pay high import duty and maybe to have to have the vehicle altered to satisfy local requirements for registration.

� Examine the facilities for healthcare.

You might feel fit and healthy today but, if you are considering relocating overseas permanently, then the time is going to come when you will need to make use of the local healthcare facilities. Just how good are those local facilities and how do they stand up against the facilities that you have grown used to?

Another extremely important factor is the availability of public healthcare. If you come from a country which provides publicly funded healthcare, like the UK, then you may be more than a little surprised by the cost of treatment when you find yourself in a country with only private healthcare. Of course, if you are accustomed paying for private healthcare, you could be very pleasantly surprised to find that you obtain the same or better treatment much more cheaply.

No matter what the case, this is one thing that you need to look at very carefully and you will certainly need to have some sort of expatriate health insurance policy.

This brief list of just five tips is certainly not exhaustive but hopefully it will give you a starting point and get you going in the right direction. Becoming an expatriate is a very big step and one that needs considerable and careful thought.

By: Donald Saunders

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Donald Saunders writes on many subjects, in particular health, and is also himself an expat. For more information on expatriate health insurance or on affordable health insurance in general then please visit MedicalHealthInsuranceToday.com