How to Actually Use ExpatStarterGuide to Run Your Move

Most people arrive here in the middle of something. You are three weeks from a flight and you have realised you do not know how the health system works, or you are eight months out and trying to decide between two countries, or you are already there and stuck in an office queue wondering what the form means. The site is built to be useful at all three of those moments, but it is not always obvious how the pieces fit together.

So this is the short tour. It is the one post on this blog that is allowed to talk about the site itself; everywhere else I try to stay out of the way.

The two halves: why versus what

The whole thing rests on one distinction.

The blog explains how things work in general - how a residence permit differs from a visa, why your take-home pay is lower than you expected, what a landlord is really asking for when they want a guarantor. These principles hold almost everywhere, so they are worth understanding once.

The country guides carry what is true in a specific place - which office, which document, which threshold, which deadline. That detail changes constantly and varies enormously, which is exactly why it does not belong in blog posts.

If you find yourself reading a blog post and thinking “yes, but what about here”, that is the seam working as intended. Go to the guide.

Start with the country comparison

If you have not settled on a destination, do not start with a deep dive. Start by opening the country index and reading the overview for every country you are seriously weighing up.

Three overviews side by side will usually kill one candidate outright - a visa route that does not exist for your situation, a healthcare model that does not work for your family, a cost profile that does not survive contact with your actual income. Eliminating candidates cheaply is the whole point of this stage, and the framework for doing it honestly is in how to choose your country.

Only once you are down to one or two does it make sense to go deep.

What is in a country guide

Each of the 120 countries has the same structure, which is deliberate - it means you can compare like with like rather than reading four differently-organised government sites.

The free sections cover the practical ground you need immediately: the country profile, emergency numbers, public holidays, currency, transport, daily life, and moving with pets. That is genuinely useful on its own, particularly in your first fortnight.

The in-depth sections are where the move-planning material lives: visas and permits, documents, tax, healthcare, insurance, jobs, employment rights, qualification recognition, costs, banking, renting, buying property, education, social security, citizenship, retirement, language learning, leaving the country again, common scams, and the mistakes that cost people the most money. These are unlocked with the one-off supporter payment - it is not a subscription, and it covers every country rather than one.

I built it that way because relocation is not a recurring purchase. You need everything for a few months and then you mostly do not need it at all.

Work the checklist rather than the reading list

Reading about a move and executing one are different activities, and the second is where people come unstuck. If you create an account, the site keeps track of what you have actually done, per country, so the move stops living in your head and in six browser tabs.

The order the checklist puts things in is not arbitrary - it follows the same dependency chain I set out in your first 90 days abroad, where the address unlocks the bank, the bank unlocks the lease, and doing them out of sequence means doing several of them twice.

The most useful habit is to work one phase ahead. While you are still at home, you should be dealing with apostilles, translations and criminal record checks, because those are the things that become genuinely difficult to obtain once you have left. While you are in temporary accommodation, you should be sorting the bank and the registration, not the perfect apartment.

Use the forum for the things a guide cannot answer

Guides describe the general case well and the edge case badly. Individual situations are full of edge cases: a nationality with an unusual bilateral arrangement, a partner with a different passport, a professional qualification that half of Europe recognises and half does not, a landlord doing something you cannot tell is normal or outrageous.

That is what the forum is for, and it is organised by topic so questions land in front of people who have dealt with them. If you are wrestling with a permit, visa and immigration is where those conversations happen. If a rental agent is asking for something that feels wrong, ask in housing and rentals before you transfer anything - a lot of losses are prevented by someone saying “no, that is not normal here”. Tax, banking and currency questions live in money and banking, and anything that does not fit a category goes in general.

The forum is also the fastest correction mechanism the site has. Rules change, offices move, procedures get digitised. When something in a guide goes stale, it is usually a forum post that flags it first.

A realistic timeline for using all this

If you are more than six months out, you are in the choosing phase. Read how to choose your country, compare overviews, and work out your legal route with visas and residence permits explained. Do not book anything yet.

Between six and two months out, you are in the paperwork phase. Read the visa and documents sections of your chosen country’s guide properly, start the applications, and begin the financial groundwork in managing money as an expat - particularly the parts about accounts and moving money, which take longer than people think.

In the final month, switch to the arrival material: healthcare, banking, registration, temporary housing. Book any appointments the country lets you book in advance, because in several capitals the wait is the binding constraint on everything else.

After you land, work the checklist and use the forum aggressively. This is the phase where a five-minute answer from someone who did it last month saves you an afternoon.

What the site deliberately does not do

It does not give you legal or tax advice. Where a situation genuinely needs a professional - complex tax residency, an appeal against a refusal, a contentious property purchase - the guides say so rather than pretending otherwise.

It does not publish precise figures that go stale. Fees, thresholds and processing times change without notice, and a wrong number is worse than no number, so where an exact figure matters the guides point you at the official source rather than repeating something from last year.

And it does not pretend that any of this is easy. It is mostly quite boring and occasionally infuriating, and the value of a guide is not that it makes the difficulty disappear but that it stops you being surprised by it.

If you get stuck on the site itself rather than on the move, the support page is the place to shout. And if something in a guide is wrong or out of date, please say so - that is how it gets fixed.