So you're thinking about moving to Europe

• Post edited to add a photo, since it feels wrong not to include at least one. This is a January view of the Rhone River valley with vineyards.

I recently learned that there are a lot of people interested in reading about the nitty gritty details of moving to another country, so I’m starting a series of posts on moving to France. Those of you who are here for the food, don’t worry – I’ll continue to write those posts as well.

Are you ready to seriously consider semi-permanently leaving the US and living in another country?

First, I recommend that you read this recent post by a fellow Substack writer:

Are You One of the Few Americans Who Really Could Move to Europe?

His ten questions are good ones, and you should think about them seriously. I want to reinforce two of his points in this first “Living in France” post.

First, I agree with his recommendation that you need to spend a significant amount of time in the country that you are thinking about moving to before you decide to make the leap. Americans can stay up to 89 days in the Schengen Area as tourists, with no need for a visa. The Schengen area is most of Europe, except for the UK and the countries that make up what used to be Yugoslavia.

Don’t think that you can leave after 89 days and come back a day or two later: you are allowed up to 90 days in any 6-month period, and the 6 months is a moving window. So if you were in Europe for almost three months (let’s say May, June, July), you would not be able to return until November.

New, starting in “mid 2025,” Americans (and everyone else) will need to have an electronic travel authorization (ETIAS) approved before coming, but this is much less onerous than a visa. You just need your passport, and you apply for it online. But don’t forget or you will not be allowed into the Schengen area. Americans also need a similar electronic approval to enter the UK starting today (January 8th, 2025).

If you’re thinking about moving to Europe, you should spend three months (or as long as you can) in the country that you’re thinking about several times before you take the plunge and move there. This means that the decision to move is a years long process, not an impulse decision.

I am lucky that I’ve been able to spend a semester abroad with students every few years, and I know what the pattern looks like. For the first one to two months, they are thrilled. Rome is beautiful, everyone is friendly, the food is wonderful, wine is cheap, there is so much to do. But at some point during month three, the magic wears off. They miss home. They miss microwavable macaroni and cheese and (inexplicably) ranch dressing. They will travel an hour on a bus to pay $6 for an iced coffee at Starbucks, when amazingly good local espresso and cappuccino are available for 20 percent of that price. They only visit one bar, repeatedly, the American owned, English speaking Drunken Ship in Campo dei Fiori. They start to actively dislike Italians, with their fancy clothes and bad parking habits and catcalling and inability to wait their turn in line. By the end of the semester, they are SO happy to be leaving.

If you’re thinking seriously about moving to Europe you’re almost certainly much older and wiser than my 21 and 22 year old students, but the basic principle holds: you will LOVE everything about your new potential home, until suddenly you don’t. You need to get to that non-loving point and through it before you think about moving.

It’s also a very good idea to explore more than one city or town in your target country before you decide where you want to land. It seems like the vast majority of Americans who move to France go to Paris. And yes, Paris is special, in both good and not so good ways. It’s compellingly beautiful, it has wonderful museums (and an even more wonderful cinema culture), great food, and so much more. But it’s also significantly more expensive than other French cities. Renting or buying is more expensive, food is more expensive, movie tickets, metro and bus passes, everything costs more. Paris is so expensive that very few French people who don’t already own an apartment can afford to live there. I met dozens of local people during my 2012 sabbatical in Paris, and not one of them lived within Paris itself, in the zip codes starting with 75. Even the relatively well-off ones (like one of my language partner who worked in marketing for luxury brands) lived an hour commute by high speed train from the city center – 150 miles away.

Seven years later when I had another sabbatical, I knew that I didn’t want to live in Paris and would spend my time in another potential future home city. I visited Bordeaux, Marseille, and Lyon, and decided on Lyon. That turned out to be the right decision since it led to meeting Christian and marrying him during the pandemic in 2020.

I should also make it clear that I am not (yet) living full time in France. Since 2019, I have spent more time in France than in the US, thanks to semesters abroad with students, a sabbatical, and a year of teaching online from Lyon during the pandemic. But I have chosen to keep my teaching job in the US, which means that I need to spend 16 to 32 weeks per year in Minnesota. I made this decision because I love my job and I do not have the qualifications that I would need in France to get an equivalent teaching job. You probably don’t have the qualifications that you would need for an equivalent job in your field either, so how you will earn your living after moving abroad is a good question.

Fortunately, there are a lot of fully remote jobs these days, and many people have entrepreneurial ways of making their living online. If you can prove that you have at least 1,800 euros per month in income (the French minimum wage), you can apply for a long-term visa of up to one year. You can reapply every year, and after five years you can apply for a residency card. Having more than 1,800 euros per month in retirement income counts as well.

The second point from my Substack colleague that I want to reinforce in this first post is that Yes, you really do need to learn the language.

If you are planning to move to the UK or Ireland, okay, you’re fine. But you can’t participate in everyday life if you don’t speak the language of the country that you plan to live in. Hopefully, you plan to communicate with employees at the bakery, the grocery store, the market, and so on. Inevitably, you will have to communicate with employees at the bank, at the car repair shop, and at the hospital. You will need to think about taxes, and be able to verify that you are following the correct procedures. You will need to argue with the people providing your phone and internet service. And you will need to prepare yourself to storm the fortress of French bureaucracy for residency cards and health care, a task that is excruciatingly difficult with good French and absolutely impossible without it.

Honestly, my advice is not to move to another country until you can speak the language relatively well, meaning that you can have a conversation without the need for Google Translate. Yes, I know that there are people who don’t. There are villages in the south of France where half the population is English or American, and people who live there can get by for decades without speaking French. Even worse, I once met a man living alone on the Greek island of Hydra (population approximately 2,000) who had been there 16 years and had not learned a single sentence in Greek. But that’s not a great way to live.

Up next in this series: my advice and techniques for learning a second (or third or fourth) language.

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