Free Sample
The Expat Life Starter Guide
A practical, evidence-informed system for moving abroad with clarity, confidence, and a plan that actually survives contact with reality
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: Why Most Approaches Fail — and What Actually Works
You are not going to fail at moving abroad because you are disorganized, or because you lack courage, or because you haven't watched enough YouTube vlogs about "My Day in the Life in Lisbon" or "10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Moving to Bangkok." You are going to fail, or at least suffer unnecessarily for the first eighteen months, for a much simpler and more systemic reason: you are following the wrong advice.
The prevailing wisdom about becoming an expat comes from two sources, and both of them are actively working against you.
The first source is the "Romanticized Over-Planner." This is the person, and perhaps you are this person, who creates a 47-tab spreadsheet before leaving home. They have a tab for tax implications, a tab for school districts, a tab for healthcare, a tab for visa timelines, and a color-coded calendar of every single administrative task for the next 24 months. They believe, with all their heart, that if they can just gather enough information and control enough variables, the move will be smooth. They are terrified of the unknown, and their strategy is to eliminate it through sheer force of information gathering.
This is wrong. It is wrong not because a plan is a bad idea, but because planning becomes a form of procrastination. This approach fails because the emotional and psychological engine of the move - the part that deals with loneliness, loss of