Expat Problems Archives - Expatriate Consultancy - Poland, Russia, Eastern Europe and Brazil

The Best Countries to Start a New Life Abroad…

I was just a recently graduated countryside boy with no money in the bank. I asked myself how could I move out. What were the best countries to start a new life with no money?

Since I was 15, I dreamed about living abroad, for multiple reasons. Some were real, like my willingness to escape the Brazilian violence (including the murder of a family member). Others were fantasies from my mind, or as the maxim says, the feeling that the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.

This plan to move abroad even influenced my choice for a university degree. That is why I refused to apply to law school and studied economics and management.

But most Brazilian expatriates already have either solid careers, luring recruiters from abroad, or they have deep enough pockets to invest overseas and gain an investor’s visa.

I had none of it.

I was just a recently graduated countryside boy with no money in the bank. I asked myself how could I move out. What were the best countries to start a new life with no money?

One year after graduation, I found the answer. I moved to the first country on this list. There I lived until I move to the next (also on this list), and then to another country which, you guessed correctly, is here too.

One disclaimer: when I write you can move to these countries with no money, it doesn’t mean that no qualifications or skills are necessary. In fact, it is the opposite. Almost all these countries will require something from their immigrants. Either a specific diploma or a well-written business plan (but don’t worry about the funding, they help you with that).

Let’s start with the first country where I moved to, with no money and no solid career to write on a CV: Chile.

Chile

Almost every time someone talks about moving to Chile, he means Santiago. The Chilean capital alone concentrates almost one-third of the entire country’s population. It is also the services and financial center of the nation. So, unless you are planning to work in Chile’s northern mining industry or with tourism in the dazzling southern regions, it is likely you will live around Santiago.

The demographic concentration in the capital, while causing issues like traffic and pollution, brings a benefit. Easy access to infrastructure, finance, and talents. The Chilean government wants to cement Santiago as the entrepreneurial hub of South America — rivaling São Paulo and Buenos Aires. For this purpose, they created Start-Up Chile.

Start-Up Chilereceives funds from the Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Development & Tourism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of the Interior.

This means one thing: they have resources to fund good ideas.

For approved business plans, Start-Up Chile provides up to $78,000 in equity-free funding through different support programs.

They require that the entrepreneur remains in the country for a period between four months to one year to implement and expand the business. They also offer training and facilitate contact with investors and a free co-working space in Santiago.

In addition to the funds, they grant the entrepreneur a one-year work visa and a list of business contacts. You don’t even need to speak Spanish for all that.

Chile also has few booming industries, like mining and tourism, that hire foreign young professionals with little to no experience. I was one of them.

What do you need to live in Chile?

A good business plan containing a proper competitive analysis, if you want to launch an enterprise and access Start-Up Chile funds. Or the skills required by industries like mining (especially copper mining).

What makes Chile one of the best countries to start a new life?

There are concerns about the violence increase in certain regions. Still, Chile remains one of the safest and most stable countries in South America.
There is good air connectivity both with Europe and the rest of the American continent.
Santiago also has a pleasant climate.
A high number of businesses and incubators do not require the Spanish language — or provide Spanish lessons, as it was in my case.

Did I also mention that they have good, inexpensive wine?

Disadvantages of living in Chile.

After decades of economic growth — journalists nicknamed it the South-American tiger — in recent years Chile reached a plateau, and some negative indicators like violence and unemployment increased.

The United Arab Emirates / Qatar / Bahrain

Instead of one country, here grouped 3. I did it because they are similar — although someone that lived in Doha, like me, would never compare it with Dubai in terms of entertainment.

Just like in Chile, most of the expatriates will converge to Santiago, in the United Arab Emirates (the UAE), they will be in Abu Dhabi or Dubai. In Qatar, expatriates will concentrate in Doha. In Bahrain, the logical choice is Manana.

When we talk about immigrants in the GCC (the region comprising these 3 countries plus few others) we are not talking about a smaller share of the population. Quite the opposite: foreigners make the largest portion of these Arabic countries. They represent an overwhelming 88.5% of the entire UAE population.

While the internet is full of memes and tales about Emirati or Qataris with gold-plated Lamborghinis and private jets, you don’t need to be a millionaire to live there. In fact, you don’t even need to worry about a place to live.

If you have the skills GCC employers are looking for — and can survive excruciating temperatures during summer — they will provide you with all the basic needs plus a comfortable salary.

Industries like finance, air transportation, and Oil & Gas actively seek western professionals to fill both entry and managerial roles.

What do you need to live in the UAE?

There are multiple sets of skills and qualifications that can land you a good job in Dubai, Doha, or Abu Dhabi. Any of these will soar your chances:

Naval engineering
Petroleum engineering
Pilot certification
A Tourism and Hospitality degree or certification
Aerospace engineering
Experience in Financial Institutions

What makes the UAE/Qatar/Bahrain some of the best countries to start a new life?

Good air connectivity — even though the UAE has less than 10 million inhabitants, it has 2 of the world’s largest airlines. Qatar also has a national carrier with a global reach.
The GCC countries are among the few in the world with no personal income tax.
Above-average salaries.

Disadvantages of living in the UAE.

High living costs.
Scorching heat during half of the year.
Cultural idiosyncrasies that may cause a considerable cultural shock — although in the UAE or Bahrain they are less evident than in neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia.

Canada

While Canada is the second-largest country in the world, here we will focus on a specific region called Saskatchewan.

It is a province larger than France but with little over one million inhabitants. This means lots of lands and prairies.

If you got a degree and would like a bucolic life, this is a good place for you. They offer tuition reimbursements of up to 20,000 Canadian dollars.

Saskatchewan’s Graduate Retention Program was created to convince young people to remain in the province once they finished their studies. It’s now used as a recruitment tool to bring in young professionals from around the world.

Besides the tuition reimbursement, the region offers a tax rebate of up to $20,000 to its inhabitants. The amount depends on what is your diploma and is paid over seven years.

What do you need to live in Canada?

You are eligible for the Graduate Retention Program (GRP) rebate if you:

Graduated from an approved post-secondary program and applied within seven years of graduation.
Plan to move or is already moving to Saskatchewan.

What makes Canada one of the best countries to start a new life?

Saskatchewan has a lower cost of living than more urban areas of Canada.

Disadvantages of living in Canada.

High taxes.
Specialized requirements in terms of skills and qualifications that are eligible for the immigration program.

Italy

I will start the section about Italy stating a fact: there are places there where you can buy real estate for 1 euro.

The sale price is a symbolic value for abandoned houses and train stations. While the prospective owner of these properties would need to invest in renovation, local governments often offer extra help.

The Sicilian town of Troina, for example, offers for successful applicants a “restyle bonus” of up to €15,000, plus another €10,000 for energy efficiency upgrades. There is a requirement for a €5,000 deposit, but they return it to you once renovations are done.

Besides Troina, there are dozens of other cities or villages with similar offers, like Augusta in Syracuse, Taranto in Puglia, Bivona in Sicily, Maenza in Lazio, or Nulvi in Sardinia. There is even an option in the middle of the alps, in the village of Oyace in the Aosta Valley.

What do you need to live in Italy?

If you want to join the 1-Euro Houses program, what you need is:

Plan a restructuring and revaluation project (often within 365 days of purchase).
Support notarial fees for registration.
Once you have all the permits, start the work within the time decided by the municipality.
To guarantee the correct execution of the works by the buyer, the municipality asks to take out a surety policy of between €1,000.00 and €5,000.00. The policy expires at the end of the completed works, usually within 3 years.
And, of course, 1 euro to buy the property.

What makes Italy one of the best countries to start a new life?

Since most of the properties in the 1 euro program are in rural areas, the cost of living is lower than in urban regions. The job prospects are also meager, so it appeals more to remote workers, investors, or pensioners.

Disadvantages of living in Italy.

At least to purchase a house in the 1 euro program, the person needs to present a well-rounded renovation plan. The investor also needs to handle the purchase bureaucracy, and Italy is quite a bureaucratic country for European standards.

Poland

There are 2 ways to move to Poland without having money.

One way is similar to what I did. I opened a business, and Poland is one of the countries with the smallest financial requirements for obtaining an entrepreneur visa: 100 000 zlotys or more — this is equivalent to €22,000. (Here you can compare it with the requirements of other European countries for an entrepreneur visa).

But wait! You told me that about having no money and now you are talking about 20K euros?

Yes. But you don’t need to have this money in your account. Poland is a stable country with an attractive economy. With a decent business plan and some pitch training, you can find investors. That is what I did.

The second way to move to Poland with no money is to work with IT.

IT professionals in Poland are well-paid when compared to most professions because there is a deficit in qualified people, and the tech industry in the country is booming. This results in industries sourcing talents abroad.

What do you need to live in Poland?

A good business plan that will convince investors to buy your idea, and convince the government to grant you an entrepreneur visa.

Qualifications and skills in IT and project management.

What makes Poland one of the best countries to start a new life?

It is a safe country, one of the safest in Europe.
Stable economy.
Productive work environment.
It is very cheap to raise kids, and public education is among the best in the world (in Europe, only Finland and Estonia have netter systems).

PS: Uber there is also quite cheap, in case you need it.

Disadvantages of living in Poland.

While in large cities like Warsaw and Krakow, one can live without speaking Polish, dealing with public offices or living in smaller cities can represent a challenge.
An increasing tax burden.
The rent and real estate costs in Warsaw are much higher than in the rest of the country, and already similar to many western European capitals.
Risks of overheating in the economy — in other words, risk of inflation.

If you are thinking about moving to Poland, remember that Colligere Expat Consultancy can help you with that.

What about your thoughts? In your opinion, what are other places that you would place in a list of the best countries to start a new life with no money?

Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com, creator of the channel Small Business Hacks, and best-selling author. You can check his books here, his other articles here, or his Linkedin here.

Digital Nomads

5 Things to Buy Before Moving Out

Start a New Life at Full Speed!

Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity Cover — Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity

You are leaving! Time to think about things to buy before moving out! It is a new step in life — an increasingly frequent step. According to FiveThirtyEight, a person in the USA moves on average 11.4 times during a lifetime.

Millennials break this number much earlier. As the author of this article, for example.

I am not a globetrotter, but just a random, simple entrepreneur. Still, in the last 15 years, I moved 17 times, to 6 different cities, in 4 different countries, on 3 distinct continents. There are a couple of things that I learned through practice.

Some of these experiences were painful. Like when you realize you have no tools to fix your new home or no pillows, and the entire country is on a 4-day long holiday. To use a plastic bag filled with clothes as a makeshift pillow is a useful travel hack, but it is far from ideal.

In the next paragraphs, I listed 5 items (or 6, considering the bonus) to avoid regrets, back pain, and coronary disease. Some of these are affiliated links.

All of them are things to make your life abroad easier, and free your time to explore the neighborhood and meet interesting people at your new place.

A Tool Set (Or Tool Kit)

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

Hammer, knife, scissors, hex keys, screwdrivers, tape measure… Everything you need for DIY around the house are there!

One could argue that an adjustable wrench, instead of dozens of fixed wrenches, could do the same job as half of the pieces of a tool set. They are not wrong. The problem is when you lose (or loan to someone that never returns it) an adjustable wrench, you will have no alternative.

Another plus of toolsets are the cool cases that come together with them, making it easy to organize and using little space in your apartment.

What I recommend: Any decent toolbox with 120 to 150 pieces. My brother-in-law gave me one at Christmas — a nice gift! The Cartman 148Piece Tool Set General Household has everything you will need to assemble furniture, fix a shower, or make basic repairs.

A Good Mattress

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

My father had a mattress store in my hometown. I was raised hearing the phrase:

Do not save money on your mattress, because one-third of your life you will spend on them.

This phrase was convenient for the sellers, but it was true. Or at least partially true: to spend 1/3 of life in a mattress, one needs to sleep at least 8 hours per day, on average. Who sleeps that much? Certainly not me.

Buy the best mattress you can afford. The philosophy is the same for an office chair. These things can either ruin or boost your productivity, therefore, they affect your earnings multiple times more than whatever you are saving.

What I recommend: If you are a man in his 30s and more than 90kg, like me, check the Casper Sleep Element Mattress. It is one of the best-reviewed mattresses in the world for a reason — and it has an affordable price. If you are a lighter person, there is a softer version of it. Always remember to choose a mattress that fits your body weight.

A Pillow Gentle to Your Neck

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

Besides a bad pillow, there are not many things in a bedroom that can cause neck pain — unless you have company.

A person should not save money on a pillow for the same reasons already stated for the mattress above. It is the kind of item that can ruin your productivity and make you lose much more than whatever you are saving.

The world deserves you in your best state. For that, you must rest with good neck support.

What I recommend: Have you ever noticed how the pillows at good hotels are splendid? It is because they know how to choose. To turn your room into a 5-star hotel, opt for the Lincove Hotel Collection. As they describe it, The 90% White Duck Feather chamber surrounded by 10% White Duck Down creates the signature thick and fluffy support you feel on a pillow at your favorite luxury hotel!

There are some types made of memory foam. Some people love it, others cannot adapt to it. I am in the second group.

A Scale

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

To move to a new home is hard work. With so many tasks and a myriad of things to work on, it is easy to lose control of how much you eat and how little you exercise.

When I moved to the Middle East, I gained almost 10kg. My family was thousands of kilometers far away, so there was none of their comment (sometimes cruel but honest) about my terrible shape.

Don’t commit the same mistake. It is difficult to return when you go too much off the rails.

What I recommend: Scales are an inexpensive item, so look for one that, besides your weight, it also measures your body fat — how precise they measure it is a subject for another article. The RENPHO Scale does that, and has two extra benefits: an elegant design and synchronization with your cellphone to upload your measures.

Working on a White-Collar Job? Buy a Steamer.

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

You should buy it because wrinkled shirts are ridiculous. People may not tell you directly, but they will talk about it at the coffee shop at the corporate headquarters of your company.

Before opening my business, I worked at a corporate, white-collar job. The steamer was lone of the most useful gadgets to guarantee me a neat appearance — together with a beard trimmer.

What I recommend: Choose a device that has an inbuilt hanger, so you don’t need to hold the garment while you steam it — and burn your fingers in the process. The PurSteam Garment Steamer has that, plus a fabric brush to brush away wrinkles.

Bonus: The Book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

At the beginning of the article, I told that, by moving 17 times across 3 different continents, I committed plenty of avoidable mistakes.

In this book, I tell you all of them. Including:

The source of information to make you like a local, still you are not using it! (hint: I revealed it in this article)
How to adapt to the local behavior and etiquette in a few days.
How to build a time capsule and avoid the death of Harambe — I am kidding, that I am still trying to discover how to do.

Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com, creator of the channel Small Business Hacks, and a best-selling author. You can check his books here, his other articles here, or his Linkedin here.

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Expat Problems

5 Things Insanely Expensive In Poland - How They Affect Our…

This is the second article of a series about the cost of living in Poland. The first was focused on the costs of living in Warsaw.

After living on four different continents, I got this costume for praising things that are well priced in some countries. The coffee in Brazil, the wine in Chile, the gasoline in Qatar, or the mountain resorts in the Carpathian Mountains. All of them are gems that have prices far better than a foreigner would expect for their quality.

But there are dark sides in each of these countries, overpriced stuff, just like everywhere else. Electronic products in Brazil, ski passes in Chile, beer in Qatar, or… What is expensive in Poland?

Eastern Europe (or Central, as the Poles consider themselves) is not famous for being exactly expensive. That surprises many expatriates I saw on this long road of life abroad. Poland can be pricey. Especially when you behave like a little spoiled kid and prefer to not change some habits from your homeland.

Habits like…

Taking Showers Too Frequently

PS: by the time I write this article, 1 dollar is 3.74 zloty — the Polish currency.

The price of water in Poland is quite high compared to Brazil (our water prices are among the smallest in the world) but in line with the European countries. This is not the reason showers are madly expensive there.

The problem is that in some cities, like Warsaw or Łódź, the garbage collection tax is based on the amount of water used — I don’t know why, and I think nobody knows. This indexation can increase the monthly bills quickly.

Badly, awfully, dramatically quick.

The water price (considering also sewage, since most of the clean water we use later becomes sewage unless you throw it through the window as I did in the winter) in Warsaw is 9.85 zlotys per cubic meter. One cubic meter is 1000 liters.

Then comes the garbage tax. It is 12.73 zlotys per 1000 liters of water consumed.

We have a final price of 22.58 zlotys per 1000 liters of water.

Modern, efficient showers use on average 9 liters of water per minute. Therefore, a 10 minutes shower costs you (22.58/1000)*90 = 2.03 zlotys.

0.55 dollars. It may look small if you live in the USA, but have in mind that the average monthly salary in Poland is 3733 zlotys net. An average person who bathes daily would spend nearly 2% of his salary — not counting water heating.

This would be the same as an American spending 105 dollars monthly on shower bills.

To make things worse, this is the price of cold showers. If you want warm water — something enjoyable in the winters where the temperature often remains for months below zero — you need to sum the heating prices, and they are also not cheap.

Coke (and any sugary drink)

If you had been in Poland before 2021, you may think that I am exaggerating by including this item.

But in 2021, the Polish government (just like almost every government in the world) needed money to cover the bills of all the stimulus checks promised during the Covid-19 crisis.

So they created a new tax. A tax that could use the excuse of helping people’s health. A tax over sugary drinks.

This tax alone increased the price of some soft drinks by 40%.

A 2L Coke bottle costs now around 9 zlotys on the supermarket shelves. 2.5 dollars. This is 30% more than the price in Brazil, or 25% more than in the USA.

Lettuce

If the prices of water and soft drinks surprised you, the price tags of Lettuce should not.

At least 4 months per year — being optimistic — Poland is just too cold to plant it. Their delicate leaves suffer when the temperature goes below 15 degrees Celsius.

A friend of mine, when facing the outrageous prices of lettuce here, questioned: why they don’t just rise it indoors, using the hydroponic method?

It would be a good idea, if not because hydroponic crops need a lot of water, and they are expensive — see previous paragraphs. Plus, the room still would need to be warm during winter, so there are additional heating bills.

Importing lettuce is also not a simple job. It has a short expiration period.

All these problems and no straightforward solutions result in a price of — hold your breath — 5 zlotys. 1.35 dollars.

Per kilo? No. Per package of 140 grams. One kilo of lettuce would cost almost 10 dollars.

Fortunately, there are other vegetables that are more resistant to lower temperatures, so the Poles can keep their daily intake of fibers. Cabbage, for example.

Cigarettes

Another item that is costly because of the heavy taxation. A package of Marlboro in Poland costs around 18 zlotys. Almost 5 dollars. This is more than twice the price of the same product in Brazil, 40% more than the price in Miami, and even more expensive than in Doha, the capital of one of the richest countries in the world.

I am addressing the price of legal cigarettes here. Poland has quite an issue with smuggled tobacco.

Curiously, neighboring Ukraine has one of the cheapest cigarette prices in Europe — if not the cheapest. It is nearly 60% cheaper than in Poland.

This creates an enormous flow of contraband in the Polish frontier. They had arrested even diplomats smuggling cigarettes.

A Square Meter of Land in Warsaw

This is a common situation in post-communist nations: an enormous discrepancy of land prices between the capital and other cities. This is visible not only in Poland but also in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and nearly every other country that was behind the iron country.

I am not talking about comparisons between the major city and tiny villages. Even when comparing Warsaw with prosperous centers like Wroclaw, the differences are heavy.

Warsaw is nowadays more expensive than Brussels or Berlin, even though Germany has a per capita income almost 4 times larger than Poland. While food and leisure are the affordable part of the cost of living in Warsaw, an average land price per square meter of almost 5000 dollars imposes a heavy burden on the habitation costs, making the capital an exception in the otherwise affordable cost of living in Poland.

What about your perception of cost of living in Poland?

How do these costs compare to your city? I am curious to read it, so let me know in the comment section. Cheers!

If you are planning to move abroad, check this article with a list of 5 books to read before moving to another country. And if your idea is to be an entrepreneur overseas, there is a list of essential books I wish I read before opening my company far from home.

Although the cost of living in Poland is not always cheap, the book below has some awesome money-saving hacks.

Cultural Shock

Types of Expatriates: Only 16% look for a better…

There are plenty of questions to answer when you are moving out. Instead of asking which one of the types of expatriates we are, our doubts are about more trivial things, like:

● Will my money, or salary, be enough?

● Where will I live?

● Can I speak their language, or at least learn it without a headache?

● What will I do with my belongings? Should I sell or ship it?

● What about the bureaucracy or the visa procedures?

● What should I do in case of getting sick or needing emergency care?

I had been in these situations several times in my life. In another article, I wrote some of these troubles that expatriates experience. But here you will learn how to understand what you are, so you can look for the correct answers. This is the very first step for anyone moving out from home.

After you learn to identify what is your type, it may shock you to know that people move abroad without thinking about it! It may be the reason so many of them come back frustrated.

Periodically the network InterNations promotes The Expat Insider, one of the biggest worldwide surveys about immigration and emigration. They made a convenient division of the expats into 6 types:

1. The Optimizer: Representing 16% of the total, they moved for a better quality of life, finances, political, religious, or safety reasons. The majority of them are men (56%) and are in a relationship (66%).

2. The Explorer: They make 12% of the total, and moved because of the appeal of living abroad, or because they were looking for new adventures and challenges. Their numbers are quite balanced between men and women, and just a small minority have children.

3. The Foreign Assignee: Making 10% of the expats, they went abroad by request of their existing employers, and the large majority of them are men in a relationship.

4. The Go-Getter: Representing 21% of the respondents, they moved out to start their business, find a job, or were recruited locally. The majority are well-educated men in a relationship.

5. The Travelling Spouse: This 8% of the whole expat community are the ones moved to follow their partners. If most of the types until now are male-dominated, in this one, women are an absolute majority: 86%.

6. The Romantic: The last category represents 12% of the total. They moved to the country of their partners. Mostly are women in a relationship, but there are a significant number of men in this category (me included).

One interesting thing here is that the categories are not definitive. There are plenty of cases where Foreign Assignees become Go-Getters when they spot an opportunity and change from employees to employers. The Romantic also often is part of another category besides their current one.

When I moved to Chile, I was a Foreign Assignee, the same as when I moved to Qatar. My life in Poland started as a Romantic, but almost after arrival, I also turned into a Go-Getter by starting my business. Henceforth, categories should not limit or make you think you will always belong to only one of them. Eventually, expatriates will move from one to the other.

Have in mind that each of those types have their goals and dreams. Each of them have also their advantages and disadvantages. A Travelling Spouse or the Romantic may not feel as alone as an Explorer, while the Foreign Assignee, with the guaranteed income source from his job, will take less risk.

There is also a type not represented above in any category: individuals moving away to evade their families and domestic problems. My best guess for their absence is because they are short-lived. When you move away to escape from your private problems, you will not solve them at all. You are just making it even more difficult to solve them by distance when it gets unbearable.

There is another important characteristic you will discover when understanding your type: if you are a provisional or long-lasting expat. The first is someone planning to live abroad for a certain, pre-established number of years. The second is a person who is moving out with a long-term plan or permanently. A foreign-assignee or explorer most likely will be a provisional, unless they fall in love with a local or start their own business, becoming, respectively, a romantic or go-getter, two long-lasting types.

Are your plans in your new country temporary or long-term? Are you moving out just to progress in your career and then return home with a bigger salary or are you willing to build a new life outside? The first secret of life abroad is to know yourself by answering those questions. You cannot follow the other rules, especially the numbers 2 and 3, before defining who you are. You cannot research what is better for you or what are your goals if you don’t know what you are looking for. The answer to these questions not only will make you feel more comfortable and secure, but they will be a basis for a better expatriate life.

Ask yourself why you are leaving. Ask yourself if you are planning to come back soon. Then, you will have self-knowledge enough to the next steps.

If you are planning to live abroad, it is a good time to check the things to buy before moving out, but if you already live abroad, I recommend this simple but life-changing advice for expatriates.

Independent of what you are among the types of expatriates, you can save money with the hacks from this book.

Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Business

Cultural Shock Problem at Work and life – The…

Image by Hajili Sevil for Wikimedia Commons. Culture Shock Illustration

With higher mobility between cities, regions, industries, and continents, there is an equal boost in intercultural issues. Maybe you already saw one cultural shock problem of the listed below:

Different approaches to power and authority. Individuals from societies like Japan or Malaysia, perform well under rigid hierarchical structures. Meanwhile, Scandinavians or Canadians favor more flexible authority schemes.
Individualism vs Collectivism. They praise individual initiative in Australia or the US. On the other side, in Asian countries like China it carries negative shades. In collectivist societies, initiative happens in coordination with the sorrounding stakeholders, or higher authorities.
Risk Aversion. Cultures vary in their inclination to take risks. That in part explains, for example, why the British explored almost the entire globe. Great Britain is one of the least risk-averse societies on the planet.

The cultural differences mentioned above are part of the discoveries from the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede. In a previous article, we wrote about Hofstede’s findings on cultural shock. In another article, I explained how these discrepancies in societal attitudes contribute to the feeling of homesickness to the point of, in certain cases, making it unbearable.

There is a special type of problem that is forgotten when we talk about the cultural shock problem. It is a constant in universities and workplaces, harming cooperation between international teams or corporate departments. It caught my attention how this trouble is so harmful but still nearly nobody talks about it.

It is the Inertial Antagonism Syndrome. A widespread disorder slowing down, or even blocking creativity and problem-solving qualities.

To understand what is inertial antagonism, think about mob-rejection. It is the reaction entire communities have when they conform to a long-standing problem and do not know how to overcome it. Often people know that there is a problem, but they just prefer to keep the status quo instead of trying other ways to solve it.

The roots of inertial antagonism are assumptions we have against foreign methods. Sometimes these assumptions are well justified and avoid disasters. Often, on the other side, they are psychological barriers.

A famous example of Inertial Antagonism Syndrome happened in Spain. Vanderlei Luxemburgo is one of the most victorious Brazilian football coaches in history. He accepted to train Real Madrid in 2004. The team had a squad filled with some of the most successful players of the time, nicknamed Galacticos. Luxemburgo adopted techniques like the quadrado mágico (magical square), a very offensive, Brazilian-minted formation. Spanish specialists warned that such offensive style could not fit European fields. Later, Real Madrid fired him.

When locals tell you that the techniques from your land will not work here, listen to them and analyze their objections with the utmost care. If there are shreds of evidence that your once successful methods will not work, rethink your ways. But if there is no evidence of failure besides the typical inertial antagonism, then go forward, but with caution. Just like Ward Chartier.

A Recipe to Avoid IA Syndrome and Reduce the Cultural Shock Problem

Mr. Chartier is a seasoned expatriate. For 14 years, he lived in five different countries, including the Far East. When I asked about the conflicts created by bringing foreign methods and cultural characteristics, he answered me:

We, Americans, have the unfortunate reputation of being arrogant and loud. My personality is neither, but I still remained aware of the general perception and acted to avoid it. In addition, I avoided slang, spoke slower than my usual moderate pace of speech, and enunciated clearly.

A few people derided my methods and management tools as “Western thinking. Won’t work here.” My methods and tools were actually a hybrid of East and West, which I explained, but some remained intransigent. Let them think what they wish. My results were financially and operationally successful for the benefit of my customers and employers.

There are two points in the answer of Mr. Chartier that I would like to highlight:

1. There was a negative preconception from the locals. It was the idea that Americans are arrogant and loud. To confront and defeat this assumption, Mr. Chartier avoided giving any sign of these undesired characteristics. Perhaps behavior toward self-policing is a tiresome effort, and that is true. It sometimes feels that all the time you are stepping on eggs, or walking through a minefield to not hurt sensibilities.

Here it is important to balance how much you want to build an excellent reputation and establish a healthy image in your new environment. If this is a must for you, start avoiding now attitudes that give fuel to stereotypes.

2. When people doubted his battle-tested techniques, his first attitude was to check if there was any evidence to justify their doubt. Maybe they knew something that he didn’t? Maybe they already tried it before, and it already failed? Or maybe there was no raw (or human) material for this kind of solution in the place?

Talk to the Grocery Cashier

Remember that locals are in their places way before your arrival, so it is worthy to listen to their objections. This is one reason behind a recommendation I make to clients of my consulting firm that intend to venture into new territories. First have a talk with the grocery store cashier, or with the taxi driver. These locals have valuable insider advice that can soar the adaptation pace of any newcomer.

After careful investigation, Mr. Chartier realized that the critics of his imported system had no factual basis. They did not try his idea before. It never failed in a similaar scenario, and it was applicable in the Far East. People resisted because of pure inertial antagonism. So he applied his methods and proved that they work by achieving excellent results.

Point 2 is a sympathetic approach to deal with reactions like “the techniques from your land will not work here”. Investigate, ask questions, and level the expectations to realistic standards. A wonderful tool for this kind of investigation is the PEST analysis.

By using point 2, you will manage to implement innovative ideas in your university or workplace while keeping healthy relationships with locals. Locals are, according to empirical evidence, among the most important allies to a successful career or business.

Regarding point 1, not giving reasons for people to believe in their preconceptions is prudent, but only if they are negative. If they are positive presumptions, be aware that you have a positive reputation to justify. One example is the natural expectation that British and Swiss citizens will be punctual.

Even if it is just a stereotype, it is positive, so worth keeping it, right?

If you live far from your home, check this article I prepared to you about homesickness.

This article about the cultural shock problem is a small part of the book below, highly recommended.

Levi Borba is the founder of expatriateconsultancy.com, creator of the channel Small Business Hacks, and a best-selling author. You can check his books here, his other articles here, or his Linkedin here.

Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Cultural Shock

What to Consider When Moving Out

Starting Your Own Business Cover — Starting Your Own Business Far From Home: What (Not) to Do When Opening a Company in Another State, Country, or Galaxy

You just received an excellent job offer abroad, or maybe you decide to open a company abroad and have the full plan read. Either way, you concluded that you checked what to consider when moving out. You think that the chosen destination offers a good professional perspective. Now it is time to pack your things and decide the date of the flight, right?

Not yet.

If you are planning to the new place, there are other things to consider. We will call this group the non-professional elements. The reason to consider them is that it is hard to have a successful career or enterprise if you are feeling miserable, living in a place you dislike, or in an environment that goes against your values.

In my first book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity, I dedicated one entire chapter to exemplify why understanding your own life project is important to succeed as an expatriate. This applies if you are a big-corporation employee, a foreign student, a person moving with your spouse, or an entrepreneur.

Environmental Dissonance

A phenomenon frequently affecting expatriates is what I call environmental dissonance. It happens when your values conflict with the place surrounding you. In my before-mentioned book (Moving Out) I recounted the story of Breno, a colleague I met while living in the Middle East. Even having a good job and working in his field of specialization, he left months after arriving because the environmental dissonance became overwhelming to him.

Just imagine how more complicated is to suffer this dissonance while you hire and motivate a team, establish goals, write a business plan, pitch for seed capital, and so on. For this reason, becomes essential to assert that your target country, if also attractive to your business and career, also matches your life project and goals.

Just be aware that I am in no point advocating you should “follow your heart” or “listen to your feelings”. In fact, to follow your passion is poor advice. What I propose, instead, is to rationalize what your new country offers and how it matches your personal needs. For this, I recommend analyzing the following non-professional elements.

Cultural Distance

Probably the greatest modern researcher in comparative cultural aspects was Geert Hofstede. Starting in the 80s with his book Culture’s Consequences, he developed an extensive bibliography in the area, culminating with the institute that carries his name.

Present in 60 countries, the Hosfted Insights institute developed a model breaking down the cultural distance into 6 major areas. Below, each one of them, with the definitions from the Hofstede-Insights researchers:

· Power Distance – This dimension […] expresses the attitude of the culture towards inequalities amongst us. Power Distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power distribution is unequal.

· Individualism – The fundamental issue addressed by this dimension is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. It is whether people’s self-image translates to terms of “I”, or “We”. In Individualist societies people look after themselves and their direct family only. In Collectivist societies, people belong to ‘in groups’ that take care of them in exchange for loyalty.

· Masculinity—A high score (Masculine) on this dimension shows competition, achievement, and success will drive the society, with success being defined by the winner / best in field—a value system that starts in school and continues throughout organizational life. A low score (Feminine) on the dimension means that the dominant values in society are caring for others and quality of life. A Feminine society is one where quality of life is the sign of success, and standing out from the crowd is not admirable. The fundamental issue here is what motivates people, wanting to be the best (Masculine) or liking what you do (Feminine).

· Uncertainty Avoidance – It is how a society deals with the fact that we can never know the future: should we try to control the future or just let it happen? This ambiguity brings with it anxiety and different cultures have learned to deal with this anxiety in different ways. The score on Uncertainty Avoidance reflects the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and create institutions to avoid risk .

· Long Term Orientation – This dimension describes how every society has to maintain some links with its own past while dealing with the challenges of the present and future. Societies prioritize these two existential goals differently. Normative societies. which score low on this dimension, for example, prefer to maintain time-honored traditions and norms while viewing societal change with suspicion. Societies scoring high here, on the other side, take a more pragmatic approach: they encourage efforts in modern education as a way to prepare for the future.

· Indulgence – The Hofstede-Insights define this dimension as the extent to which people try to control their desires and impulses, based on the way they were raised. Relatively weak control is called “Indulgence” and relatively firm control is analogous to “Restraint”. Cultures therefore are grouped as Indulgent or Restrained.

When I had my first contact with the research of Dr. Hofstede, my immediate action was to check how the countries I lived before (Brazil, Chile, Qatar, and Poland) scored in each ranking. The comparative results from each one – got from a tool available on his institute website – reflected with Swiss-precision the reality I witnessed living in each of them.

For example, according to the results, the Power Distance in Qatar is very high. This matches my observations of a place where the people take as natural the near immutable social differences. Similarly, the higher levels of indulgence and femininity (as per Hofstede’s definition of femininity) in Chile are noticeable in their capital. At the end, the results from Poland fused two of my biggest impressions from living in this country: it is a non-indulgent society, with a considerable level of risk-aversion.

The two characteristics mentioned above – frugality and risk-aversion – of the Polish people contrasted with my cultural baggage.

As a Brazilian, I grow up seeing people spend a fair share of their income in branded shoes, new cars (paid in installments distributed across years), and eating out. Even though nowadays Poland has a similar income to my native São Paulo, someone will rarely buy a new car, and a 10-year-old vehicle is still OK. Personal anecdote: my wife considers it absurd that someone would spend over 5 times his salary in a new automobile. In contrast, in Brazil it is not rare to see people buying cars with the price tag of their annual salary.

The Latin America vs Europe example

This difference, summarized in the Indulgence factor of Dr. Hofstede research, probably affects not only me but thousands of other expatriates that move between Latin America and Europe. Sean Lana, an expatriate living in Germany, lists how other factors of Hofstede research (Individualism) impact his daily life.

Germany is not a country you want to be if your only major goal in life is to own a Bugatti, Ferrari, Tesla and shows off! Collectivism means the country is trying to redistribute wealth equally, at least in order to mitigate poverty and support low-income earners. Expect high taxes and you will enjoy a high quality of life with infrastructures. So if you are very individualistic, consider the next flight to another country. German organisation system is based on the ideology of Max Weber (bureaucracy), Americans practice Scientific management (Taylorism). If you are not used to obeying rigorous rules, regulations, huge laws, paper works, transparency, slow process, appointments, etc then you shouldn’t stay in Germany.

Cultural differences withing a country

It is essential to remind that cultural discrepancies – of the types studied by Dr. Hofstede and perceived in the two examples above – can exist even inside the same country.

Henry Eshleman, a Park Ranger at Fairbanks North Star Borough in Alaska, USA, explained how he felt closer to foreign students than locals while in Indiana, Midwest of the same country.

In Indiana, being from Alaska made me an exotic curiosity. People would ask me questions I never got in Europe, Canada, or Mexico- “What are you doing here?” “Is it cold there?” “What it’s like when it’s light all the time?” And so forth. As a student, I rapidly realized I had more in common with the foreign exchange students, or with my buddy Angel, from Puerto Rico, than I did with the “regular” kids.

My biggest culture shock was essentially domestic in nature, the result of coming from a state which isn’t directly connected to the rest right into the Midwest Heartland.

Even in a country with the size of a single American state, cultural differences are noticeable. In Poland, the northern region of Gdansk has considerable differences to the Subcarpathian cities in the south. Differences shaped during centuries of partitions between Russia, Austria and Germany. Nowadays, the differences reflect electoral results, practices and consumer behaviors.

Besides cultural characteristics, there are other non-business aspects to consider when doing a professional shift:

· Future family prospects: It is easy to make a decision when it concerns only you. The same is not true when it involves wife and kids. Even if you are single, it is important to reflect on what you want for the next years. If you are planning to build a family, consider this beforehand. This was my case when I decided to move out of Qatar (my previous country). My first thought was to move to Panamá with my then-fiancée, but we had plans to marry and maybe have kids in the next few years. For this reason, we live in Poland, closer to her family.

· The Time zone. I already mentioned how different time zones can create business problems. This also applies to your private life. A person in South Africa, even though is distant from his relatives in Europe, is still inside a similar time zone, but not someone living in the Middle East and with a family in South-America. This was my case years ago. The 5 to 6 hours’ difference restricted the chances I had to keep contact. During my mornings, they were sleeping. During their evenings, I was sleeping.

· How friendly the country is to your lifestyle. For example, if you enjoy practicing outdoor sports, places like Dubai or Doha may not be a good idea, since it is excruciatingly hot for more than half of the year.

To go deeper into this subject, my first book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity, has plenty of considerations to reflect on the personal side of expatriation. Still, if there is one positive advice in business and personal life, it is to immerse yourself in the local culture from the beginning. Talk to the grocery store cashier is a good start.

Conclusion of what to consider when moving out:

· Cultural discrepancies: How you will adapt to different degrees of Individualism, Power Distance, Risk-Aversion, indulgence and so on?

· Future personal prospects: Are you planning to marry, build a family, or remain single? How the local offer of schools, nurseries, etc., fit your plans?

· The time zone difference: Is the time difference considerable? How will that affect your relationships back home?

· How friendly the country is to your lifestyle: Of your routine and favorite activities, what you can keep or adapt to your new destination?

If you are planning to live abroad, it is a good time to check the things to buy before moving out, but if you already live abroad, I recommend this simple but life-changing advice for expatriates.

This article on what to consider when moving out is related to the highly recommended book below.

Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here and his articles here. The inspiration for this article comes from the book Starting Your Own Business Far From Home: What (Not) to Do When Opening a Company in Another State, Country, or Galaxy

Cultural Shock

How to Adapt to a New Culture – The…

Step 1 of How to Adapt to a New Culture: Get over the fact that you will never be 100% native. And you don’t need to.

I start this article making a minor excuse: the title you see above is not 100% true. There are exceptions, subordinated to specific contexts, where expats become like a native. For example, in the French south-west, where some long-term Brits living among wineries abandoned their fish and chips and become more French than the locals, as the blog Bordeaux Expats reported:

58-year-old Darren Taylor moved to the Dordogne from Essex 30 years ago because of his love of the novels of Proust and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, which he used to borrow from Dagenham Library.
He said: “You’ll have to excuse me, it’s such a long time since I spoke English. What’s happening over there now anyway? Is Sven still England manager? Is Minder still on? I wouldn’t know. I spend my days listening to the music of George Brassens and sipping pastis.”
Pensioner Norman Kemp said, “Don’t be deceived by my prominent bulldog tattoos. That was the old me. Nowadays whenever I’m not preparing magret de canard aux pommes sarladaises, I’m practicing the accordion or playing pétanque in the village square in my favourite beret.

It is refreshing to see cases like this above, where immigrants adapt so flawlessly. However, two points make these exceptions.

1st – The United Kingdom and France are neighbors with centuries of cultural, social, and economical entanglement. Therefore, the civilizational difference decreases thanks to mutual influences, and the expat adaptation is quicker.

2nd – Even in the British-in-France context there are plentiful examples of not-so-smooth adaptation, to the point of existing a mutual-help social network. The name of it is “Survive France”.

Therefore, this advice is for anyone moving (or planning to) between countries not that similar. And if you arrived until here in this article, congratulations: you already know how to go through the worst phases of your new life. The German firm Archer Relocation designed the Expat Adjustment Curve, where the first stages remind what I described in a previous article, but with a different end:

Honeymoon Phase
Initial Culture Shock
Superficial Adjustment
Culture Shock
Recovery
Integration

The fundamental difference here is the sixth phase. Whoever reaches the Integration overcame the culture shock (our previous articles help you with it) and recovered to run the show in their new life. As much as achieving this stage of adaptation is a brilliant victory, there are different levels of it. We can break down the concept of integration in 4 different types.

The 4 dimensions of cultural integration

● Economic Integration—It is when foreigners work and generate wealth for themselves via their salaries and profits, and to their new country by paying taxes. They add their contribution both as supply, by their products, and demand, by their consumption. Skilled expats often achieve this type quickly, but for students or non-working spouses it can take longer.

● Social—When people mingle with the locals, adopt social codes of the new country and its etiquette. Although the personal efforts to achieve social integration are important, how fast you will achieve depends also on how friendly is the population. The portal Internations researched about a similar subject and concluded that in places like Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador or Colombia, to create a social circle can be much easier than in Nordic countries or Saudi Arabia.

● Cultural—This kind of integration is when people adopt the habits and culture of the new place. To reach a full cultural integration, it is indispensable to have a good understanding of the local language and go across all its components (music, literature, beliefs and celebrations). The cultural integration can be even harder than the social integration if your original country and the new one are from different civilizational foundations, for example, India and Eastern Europe.

● Emotional—This is the last type of integration in the list for a reason: it is the hardest. I may take longer to explain emotional integration because it is essential for understanding this entire article. There is a word in my native language called saudade. This term is almost untranslatable, but fits very well in this description. We may define saudade as the presence of absence, the yearning for something or someone that right now is unreachable, and whose absence creates a void in your inner self. It is not only “missing” and does not have a completely negative meaning because it brings sadness and joy together. It is, as deciphered by older generations, the love that remains. We can translate a partial emotional integration as loving your new country and shaping your personality by its influences. The fully integrated, however, will go beyond this and not feel any saudade from his origins.

If you are already living abroad for some time, you probably are thinking how far you are in those four different dimensions. The good news is that you don’t need to achieve all of them. In Chile, I was very well-integrated economically, socially, and culturally. I didn’t need to do much effort since they are close to Brazil in all those components. This similarity plays a big role. That is why in Poland, to reach the same level of assimilation from Chile, it took much longer. In Qatar, I achieved economic integration, but the social and cultural aspects were distant from my daily life.

What about emotional integration? Even though I had part of my personality changed by every country that I lived in, my core is still the same, and it is Brazilian. Therefore, differently than the British mentioned at the initial paragraphs of this story, I am still not 100% emotionally integrated, and maybe I will never be. Maybe I will always feel saudade of the southeastern plains of Brazil.

And this is ok.

It is almost the rule when you are a first-generation immigrant.

In an article of Humanity in Action Denmark, I read two stories that exemplify it. One from Savas Coskun and the other from Sabeena Din, who moved, respectively, from Turkey and Pakistan to Denmark.

It was the experience of travelling back and living one year in Turkey that convinced Coskun that whatever cultural identity meant; he had to have a mixture of both cultures in his identity. “Until ten years ago I said I was Turkish only,” he says, “because saying to say I was Danish seemed a little false to me. And then I went to Turkey for a year and realized that I cannot be just Turkish. I have to be Turkish-Danish. I have to be both. Like Coskun, Sabeena Din, a 21-year-old born in Denmark, has two identities. When she is in Denmark, she feels more Pakistani. When she goes to visit Pakistan, she feels more Danish. However, Din does not feel that it is a crisis for her. “It is not a bad thing”.

To make the best efforts to integrate into a new country is not only good for you. If you plan or already have children, this will have an enormous positive impact on them. Descendants of first-generation, well-assimilated immigrants growing up in the company of local children will carry the advantage of youth years shaping them when compared to their parents. This will allow them to adjust (economically, culturally, socially and emotionally) to a much greater degree.

The upside and opportunities of being peculiar

Even doing your best attempts, still there is a chance you will never be like a native (especially if you are a first-generation newcomer like me). Even after learning the language, you still will speak with an accent that will persist for decades. You will still have your tastes for food, music, and traces in your personality shaped in your fatherland. If you are moving to a homogeneous country like some in Asia or Eastern Europe, you will also be the person looking different.

I have some splendid news for you: all those things can turn into opportunities. Your varied taste for food and music can give way to very interesting conversation topics. Your accent and knowledge of a foreign language can be useful to understand the so common loanwords from a globalized world. Those holidays you celebrated back in your country can double the opportunities for fun. With my wife we celebrate both Valentine’s (14 of February) as her tradition and Dia dos Namorados (12 of June) as mine, so we have twice the amount of romantic dinners than a standard couple!

Sometimes, being the different person opens doors to great opportunities. This is a point that people miss when trying to understand how to adapt to a new culture.

In Poland, it is normal that younger people come to talk to me in English, since I look like a foreigner, and when I answer in their language, I hear nice compliments and salutations for learning their idiom. The same would be if a westerner moved to Thailand and mastered Thai. Inside homogeneous countries, with a quick look people will know you are a foreigner and while this may scary some expatriates, it is a significant chance to surprise and earn the local admiration.

Nobody likes the arrogant expat that prefers to show off his differences at every point while despising the social and cultural features of his new home. On the other side, the complete opposite of him-the expatriate wishing to cut his roots and be like a local in every aspect- also risks entering a road to frustration because of unachievable goals.

You don’t need to lose your roots to be the guy from a snowless country talking about winter sports with his Norwegian workmates, or the American that moved to South-Africa and now invites his neighbors for a braai (South African barbecue). In countries where people expect you to be just another foreigner without interests in common, you will be in high-regard if you go beyond their expectations.

If you live far from your home, check this article I prepared for you about homesickness and this about a very common cultural shock problem.

This article on how to adapt to a new culture is part of the highly recommended book below:

Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here and some of his articles here. The inspiration for this article comes from the book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity: 11 secrets to make your expat life better than you imagine.

Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Digital Nomads

Moving Abroad Checklist Part 2 – Researching Your New…

This is the second part of the Moving Abroad Checklist (the first you can find here). To give the perfect context to the importance of researching about where you live, I will start with a personal anecdote.

During the time I lived and worked in Doha, most of the company staff were foreigners. It was just a reflection of the country’s demographic, largely made of immigrants. Curiously, however, there were almost no other Brazilians like me, except the boss of the boss of my boss. There were rumors about people from Brazil not resisting much time there because of the vast distance to their country, plus the enormous cultural differences. To my surprise, just a few months after they hire me, they also hired a fellow Brazilian called Breno.

Breno had a respectable curriculum. Graduated is the USA, in one of the top universities in his area, worked for the pride-company of the Brazilian aerospace industry and despite being young (he was just slightly older than I was), had a list of achievements uncommon for his age. He also looked slightly like a frat-boy coming out from a B-class American comedy. Breno was a very easy-going person, making funny jokes about all things.

In one of his first days, I was at my desk calibrating some technical parameters, and Breno comes to me and ask:

Hey Levi! What’s up? What about we go for some drinks?

Qatar was not an easy country to go for drinks. It was illegal to sell alcohol in all stores except one, which was state-owned and demanded a special license to buy their 300% overpriced booze. They also sold alcoholic drinks at bars and restaurants of luxury hotels. There, a round of cocktails could cost as much as a weekend on a Greek beach, hotel included.

Despite being busy, the question of Breno surprised me, since at the beginning you don’t have so much money to spare, at least until receive your first salary. Did he know the alcohol was so expensive there? Maybe he found someone with a license to buy alcoholic drinks and was giving a house party? The guy was so easygoing, it would not be a surprise.

No. It was nothing like that. He had another idea in mind, which I discovered when I asked where he wanted to go.

“Maybe we can go to the party district! Where is it? You know, this street full of bars and clubs that every big city in the world has!”

That is it. He just asked me about a Bangkok style party district in an Islamic society where a woman could face problems if their skirts were above their knees. A place where was often cheaper to buy an airline ticket to another country if you wanted to party.

This guy had no idea where he was.

Do not rely solely on Media

The story of Breno may sound odd, but it is not uncommon. There are plenty of people that don’t make a proper field research before moving. Or when they make, they use only media sources, with information written by journalists. Some of those journalists act almost as public relations from governments, publishing information that is unrealistic or exaggeratedly welcoming.

Maybe Breno imagined Doha as a middle-eastern Barcelona because he saw so many media vehicles praising Qatar for having less strict Islamic rules when compared to Saudi Arabia. Yes, it is less strict, but what the media omitted is that Saudi is the strictest Islamic country in the world. To be less, in this case, is natural. When Qatar earned the right to host the football World Cup, there was plenty of government money going around. Maybe that is why journalists felt compelled to do unrealistic and overoptimistic comparisons, like between Doha and Dubai.

I cannot stress enough how important is to do proper research before moving out, and I am sure most expats do it. However, unfortunately, they just do not do it right. Go to the easiest source of information (newspapers, internet portals or YouTube videos) is not a good idea. Editors, presenters and reporters are not there to help someone to live abroad but to earn a living, so they may just create content to draw attention. Sensationalist talks.

This is something that I saw in Poland. More often than never I witnessed in expat forums questions about how safe is for a dark-skinned person to walk in the polish streets. The answer, from my side, is elementary: as safe as you can imagine. The number of racist assaults in Poland is negligible and even being an olive-skinned guy and knowing plenty of Afro-Brazilians, I still didn’t hear about this kind of problem. So, why people fear those hordes of racist poles which, in over three years here, I did not saw? Because they write about it in the media, they show it on the TV, and it may be one of the first things you see when you type Poland at Google. However, all this repetition does not make it true.

The difference between what the press portrays and street reality can be abysmal. So if I am telling here that the main media vehicles are not the best source to research your new country, where should you seek information? Can you guess?

The Locals

Ask the real people. The ones who went through the same experiences and endured it for years. Thanks to the same web I criticized above, you also can reach them easily.

Social media today is full of groups. They often have names as “Foreigners in [name of the place]”. I don’t recommend these groups as the sole source of information because many of their members are expats still in their honeymoon phase, before the cultural shock, or just tourists. But while they cannot provide you with the most reliable information, it is still better than the traditional media.

The real deal is to look for groups of locals. One simple way I found is to find language learning groups in the country where I am moving too. Not only you will be able to communicate with locals from your new country and learn their idiom, but they will be excited if you offer to teach them your language. It can be fun too!

Another possibility is to look for common interests. Even before moving to Europe, I was already in local groups about entrepreneurship, football and philosophy, three subjects interesting to me. While discussing things I enjoyed, I learned about local views on those subjects and other common topics. If you are already in the country but feeling you don’t know enough about it – since most of your contacts are foreigners – enrolling in a course or volunteering can be useful and pleasant.

A third way is to find people from your new country that now are living where you live. You can do that on social media. For example, if you are a Canadian moving to Argentina, you can just look on Facebook for the group “Argentinians in Canada” (or, most likely, Argentinos en Canadá). The members know how is to be a foreigner and will be glad to help with your doubts about their country.

After I told you where to look for information, comes the next question: Which information should you seek? For these answers, check this article about cultural shock.

Questions to ask yourself:

To make your life easier, I prepared the template below. Seek the information about your new country in the ways I suggested previously *communities in social media and groups related to your interests) and complete it. At the end of the exercise, should be a plethora of information useful in your journey.

1st source of cultural shock: The Rules

How do people deal with regulations? Are they rigid and play strictly by the book or there is space to some negotiation? Are systems and procedures respected daily or used as guidelines, with frequent adaptations to daily circumstances? Are plans rigorously respected, or they are adjusted according to additional requests?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

2nd source of cultural shock: The Time

Do people arrive on time on every occasion, even informal ones? Is there some tolerance for delays? What happens when someone arrives 10 minutes late for a social gathering? How do we inform at work or university that something blocked the road, making it impossible to arrive on time? Is it normal to do over-hours or to extend a meeting beyond the scheduled time?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

3rd source of cultural shock: The Humor

Which level of formality is expected in a conversation at work or public office? Is it ok to do jokes as an icebreaker? Do people laugh at small incidents or remain serious? Is a smile always considered a sign of joy or may be taken as disdain? Are puns and tricks common, or people tend to always behave seriously?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

4th source of cultural shock: The Communication

When it is time to take a decision, how is the communication process: direct and to the point, with no digressions, or it goes around many hypotheses and with space to different discussions? When people need to criticize a co-worker, do they use subtle language and avoid direct conflict, or they just say what they want to say without space for doubt? When people ask for a favor or a task, do they suggest indirectly using expressions like “maybe” or “would be nice if someone did that” or they straightforward tell you what they want? When someone needs to deny an invitation or a request, do they simply say “I can’t do it, sorry” or they use excuses?

Your previous country:

Your new country:

If you have any other important expatriate questions to suggest, send them in the comments, and see you in the next part of our series Moving Abroad Checklist.

This moving abroad checklist is one of the chapters of this book, which we recommend you to check.

Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here and some of his articles here. This article was inspired by the content of his book, Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity: 11 secrets to make your expat life better than you imagine.

Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Digital Nomads

Moving Abroad Checklist Part 1 – How to Make…

This is the first of a series of posts regarding the Moving Abroad Checklist that business travelers, expatriates, or exchange students should do to make their life far from home much easier. We will start with a very neglected subject.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
John F. Kennedy, former U.S. President.

It is not common to board a plane and start a new life focusing on what to do if unexpected and unpleasant situations happen. Sometimes you prepare yourself for the difficulties you judge possible, like homesickness (if you are worried about it, check this article), not passing the probation time of your new employer, or not being approved at university. As much as my experience shows me, expatriates are often well prepared for the problems arising at the beginning of their life abroad.

However, time passes and you get more settled, more comfortable with your surrounding, and take things for granted. Therefore, this rule is more useful to anyone already living far from home for some time.

The type of surprises that can storm your life vary between countries.

If you are living in the Middle East, you may get locked in civil unrest or geopolitical disputes.
In South America, a hyperinflation cycle can destroy the power of purchase and make your salary worth much less than what you had before moving out.
In the USA, if an accident not covered by your insurance happens, you might have a medical bill draining all your savings.
In the seismic region knows as the Pacific Ring, lives can change completely in case of earthquakes or tsunamis (like the one of 2004 in Indonesia or 2011 in Japan).

Even when there is no geopolitical crisis or natural cataclysms around, there are still the typical corporate problems. These, in some locations, can assume a different dimension. In places like the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, if you lose your job, you may have only one month to leave the country. In Singapore, it can be even worse, with a deadline of only two weeks to get out.

When I lived in Doha, Qatar, it was common to see used luxury cars on sale with huge discounts every time an oil company laid off personnel. This happened because their former staff had little time to pack the luggage and leave. Therefore, to sell their vehicles, even at a smaller price, was already a victory. That was the reason so many people there preferred to rent a car instead of buying one.

Moving Abroad Checklist: How to Make a Plan B.

When we start a new life abroad, sometimes we ignore the chances it might not go as expected. We want to keep our morale, confidence and spirit that this is going to be an exceptional year. This feeling increases when we didn’t witness any major problem recently, and our perception that nothing bad is going to happen inflates. It is the survivorship bias the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman explained so well in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Don’t get me wrong here. It is essential to have a positive mindset, hope and work for the best outcome otherwise, you would never board the plane to move abroad. However, it is equally crucial to analyze the risks (even the rare ones) and find out viable alternatives.

Bottom line: The chances of happening an unlikely surprise increase across the years, and eventually the implausible event will knock at your door. So have a Plan B! And maybe even a C.

The best way to start a Plan B is to know as much as you can about your risks. This is possible only by talking to the people that experienced failure. I recognize it is difficult to make others disclose their misfortunes, but it is worth to try. The next step is to compile all the possible situations representing a hazard and work in their contingency. For this, you can also use the experience of other foreigners by asking them in social media, expat meetings and blogs.

Questions to ask

What type of failures can happen?
What they did to protect themselves?
How they reacted when the event arose?
How did they prepare for similar events in the future?

For natural cataclysms there are well-known standard procedures. In Japan, for example, there are earthquake emergency packs with water, canned food, blankets, etc. In Indonesia, after the tsunami, they build shelters in exposed beaches and hotels to speed evacuation.

While I would not recommend cooling down and take a breath if a hurricane or tsunami is approaching, with a crisis of sociopolitical nature it may be better to sit back to think and not rush in making decisions.

A good example is the tumultuous relation between North and South Korea, which often scares foreigners, but nothing serious happened in the last decades. A similar situation happened in Armenia in 2018, when major protests erupted in their capital, Yerevan. The city stopped and was relatively chaotic for a few days. I was there spending holidays, and even before I came back, everything already went back to normal. Of course, civil unrest may turn into a long crisis, and sometimes even wars. But surely most of them don’t go that far and should not be a reason for panic.

Putting aside natural and sociopolitical reasons, another risk is more individual-related. In countries where there is a short time-frame to leave in case of losing a job (or student status), it is important to ask to include in the main contracts (like rent agreement) a termination clause, which would make you exempt of any fines to the landlord in the case your job ended against your will. In most places nowadays there is also a variety of job loss insurances covering those situations.

Another personal anecdote

As personal advice, one thing that always worked very well for me is to live light, in the sense of not accumulate long contracts, obligations, or assets. While for a big family this may be a challenge, for singles or young couples it is a great alternative.

During my time in Chile, I never bought a car and the contract with my company assured me that if they dismissed me, they would cover any fine of my rent agreement. It was not the case in Qatar, but since I was sharing my flat there, after resigning from my job, I just needed to find someone to substitute me. I also didn’t need to sell any car because my flatmate Matteo had a nice deal with me, where I paid for part of his fuel, so he took me to and from work. Another very helpful strategy was to always rent furnished apartments, so I didn’t need to buy and sell furniture or worse, move it from one country to another.

It was good that I was living light since my last move was not smooth. I needed to use my Plan B, for a reason that is quite common and is still not in this article. Therefore, I ask again for your patience for a small personal story and promise it can be useful for you.

After achieving my desired promotion in Qatar, and saved some money to open a business in the future, I planned to live in an environment closer to what I wanted for the long-term, out of the big-corporation world. I looked for a job and one startup in Barcelona took my attention. We exchanged some emails, made an interview via Skype, and they asked me to visit their Spanish headquarters. There I talked to the CEO and solved some of those modern challenges startups apply to their selections. Few days and a call later, I got the job.

Simultaneously, I also had a job offer from a huge e-commerce corporation in Poland. Even though Poland was a pleasant country to live (and my girlfriend was Polish), I didn’t want to move from one big corp to another, so I refused their job and accepted the Spanish offer. A few days later, I gave my one-month notice period in Doha.

Only two weeks before I finally leave for Spain, they called me and told me they didn’t have the resources needed to apply for my visa. They told me I should do it myself, by my own resources and taking the risk of losing anything invested if the government rejected my working Visa.

I knew that changing my life and depending on the bureaucratic skills of a small startup (where the CEO interviewed me with a greasy NASA t-shirt) was risky. So even before I had their job offer, I was also working on my Plan B: to have my own business.

To be specific, I started working on a backup plan one year before, doing market research to decide which cities were the most attractive in Poland and contacting business owners wanting to sell their enterprises. Some of them showed interest in a deal. Therefore, when the NASA-Shirt CEO of the Spanish startup called me and gave me the bad news of their lack of structure, I jumped into the plan B. Immediately I made an offer to purchase a Polish business from a couple that wanted to live in a calmer place with their newborn baby.

However, a few months later this plan also broke down. After I move to Poland and just before I transfer them the money, they gave up selling it. So, I went for plan C: Open my company from zero.

Conclusion (and happy ending?)

After all those years, the company is still working, so even a plan C can be fruitful if you prepare it properly. On a side note, the move to Poland instead of Spain gave me other surprises, but this time they were very positive.

Maybe the advice of this article does not look plain as the others I wrote before, like the solution for the ANS syndrome. But at the end of the day, the most important to remember is simple: do not think improbable and unpleasant situations will never happen to you. Be prepared. After all, this may become even a greater opportunity, as I will explain in a future article of our Moving Abroad Checklist series.

Another good article about this subject was written by Hire a Helper, with other factors to consider when moving to a new city

This moving abroad checklist is part of this book we recommend you to check.

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Business

Immigrant Adaptation – Tips for Exchange Students and Expatriates

Adapt to the local etiquette, but allow yourself minor concessions.

This article about immigrant adaptation is a chapter from the book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity

At the beginning of my book, I wrote about universal instructions, not restricted to one single area of the globe. However, some rules may apply in more distinct ways than others depending on what is the difference between your current and previous country. This is especially true for what I will tell you in this article: the concerns of immigrant adaptation. Respect the local etiquette but allow yourself minor concessions.

If you, dear reader, moved out from Canada to the USA or from Scotland to England, maybe you will see my next paragraphs and think:

Oh, Bollocks! My adjustment to the local way of life was so smooth, why such a drama?

Well, the adaptation on my first move, from Brazil to Chile, was also not difficult. The few obstacles were only internal (missing family, friends, and all other things from home – in this article I wrote about how to overcome homesickness) because the externals like language or customs were not very different from what I had before. That is because Chileans are not that different from Southeastern-Brazilians, as much as residents from Toronto are not that different from New Yorkers.

On the other hand, if you are moving to a country with a distinctive courtesy code, formalities, and behavior conventions, you may find yourself lost. Without even noticing, you might gain a poor reputation or enter a fight. My whole life I crossed my legs when sitting for longer times. For me, it was just an insignificant gesture done to feel comfortable. I thought that until I move to the Middle East.

In one of my first days in Doha, while I was in the HR department waiting for some bureaucratic procedure, I crossed my right leg over the left, leaving it parallel to the floor and with the sole of my shoe visible to everyone at my left. After a few seconds, a man around his 50s, dressing a typical thawb, told something in Arabic to me in an unpleasant tone.

I realized I made something wrong and later understood that showing the sole of your shoes to someone there is an insult. So, if you are reading this, middle-aged stranger in a white thawb, I am sorry for showing you my shoe’s sole.

There are two great ways to fire up your understanding of the local etiquette. The first one is also the easiest:

A big tip on immigrant adaptation: Watch other people!

The quickest way to adapt to other cultures is to watch the locals. Do not be cocky and realize that the meaning of certain traditions may be inaccessible to new joiners, particularly if you don’t know the idiom or ethos of the place. Rachel Heller, the author of the page Rachel Ruminations, wrote an interesting story about her time as an American in the Netherlands:

Sometimes the biggest differences are the smallest. It took me a couple of months before I realized that, rather than just placing a plateful of cookies on the table in front of visitors when we sat down to drink tea, I had to explicitly offer the cookies to them. They wouldn’t help themselves to cookies without being offered. I thought they just didn’t want any. And I had to offer them a second cup of tea, rather than expecting them to take it. I sat there, eating cookies and refilling my own tea, and didn’t realize how incredibly impolite I was being! So watch their behavior carefully: notice how they shake hands, how they sit, how they handle food, and so on.

Maybe Rachel could see in the guest’s faces that they were not serving themselves because she was not doing what the local etiquette tells in the Netherlands (explicitly offer it to the guests). When you live outside your country, it can be challenging to interpret facial expressions.

The research of the American psychologists Hillary Anger Elfenbein & Nalini Ambady concluded that we recognize facial emotions better when observing people similar to us in terms of nationality and ethnic group. Therefore, if you are in an unfamiliar environment, with conspicuous differences to your homeland, maybe observing people will not tell much to you. Therefore, as Rachel Heller advises, just ask people what are the local rules of politeness.

Learning the language while adapting to Life Abroad

The second great way to assimilate the local etiquette is more demanding, but (at least for me), very rewarding:

Learn the local language, or at least try.

To learn the idiom of your new country will open a whole new world to you. Not only you will be able to say things like Thank you or Please when shopping at the grocery store or ordering in a café, but you will take the nuances that shape people’s mood in their daily activities. To understand the local jokes and insults will give you a great idea of what is funny and what is outrageous in your new home.

The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky in her research affirmed that language shapes the way we think. Therefore, by learning the local language, you will be able to think like a local, and that escalates your chances of success (or at least survival) in your new environment. Which incentive can be better than this? As the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

While I recommend you adapt to the local politeness standards, especially in public, it would be delusional to expect that someone simply changes his whole behavior just because he/she is moving abroad. The good news is: you don’t need to.

There are always plenty of concessions you can allow yourself without being rude. I am used to eating pizza with a fork and knife, something common in my region since the pizza dough there is quite thin, so grabbing it can make a mess.

Neither in Qatar nor Poland people eat in that way, but still, all the time when I go to a pizzeria I ask for a fork and a knife. Some people look to me and some probably think that this is weird. However, the comfort of eating pizza in my way outweighs any discomfort from people looking to me and asking themselves “why this guy is doing this?”. It is not impolite, but just weird. And it is not rude to be slightly weird.

The more you adjust to the local customs, the more people will allow you to be peculiar. It is almost like there is an expat behavioral bank account. If you adopt a posture of inflexibility, always answering invitations to traditional dishes with “No, I am not used to that”, or replying questions about local matters with “I am not interested in it”, the balance of your behavioral bank account with people around will be empty. When that happens, even minor signals, like your clothes, may send a message you don’t want to integrate, and people will just give up.

However, if your colleagues or spouse’s family see that you are trying to learn the basics of their language, appreciating their dishes and drinks and even commenting on the local sports news, they will not mind your eccentricities. When I am watching TV, sometimes I like to sit in a lotus position (maybe I am revealing too much in this book, sorry). My wife told me it was weird, but since I was watching their favorite sport and trying to talk in their language, they just were ok with it and thought it was some typical way of Brazilians to sit (it is not).

That is part of the beauty of being a foreigner: others often will think that whatever oddness you have is just a typical thing of your country, and you will not look so odd.

So aim to adjust to the local etiquette, but allow yourself minor concessions.

If you are planning to live abroad, it is a good time to check the things to buy before moving out, but if you already live abroad, I recommend this simple but life-changing advice for expatriates.

This article about immigrant adaptation is a small part of the book below.

Receive for FREE! Digital Book – 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While Travelling. Click here

Receive for FREE! Digital Book - 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While TravellingLearn the one single trick to pay almost 60% less in your airline tickets!

Chile

What do you need to live in Chile?

What makes Chile one of the best countries to start a new life?

Disadvantages of living in Chile.

The United Arab Emirates / Qatar / Bahrain

What do you need to live in the UAE?

What makes the UAE/Qatar/Bahrain some of the best countries to start a new life?

Disadvantages of living in the UAE.

Canada

What do you need to live in Canada?

What makes Canada one of the best countries to start a new life?

Disadvantages of living in Canada.

Italy

What do you need to live in Italy?

What makes Italy one of the best countries to start a new life?

Disadvantages of living in Italy.

Poland

What do you need to live in Poland?

What makes Poland one of the best countries to start a new life?

Disadvantages of living in Poland.

Start a New Life at Full Speed!

A Tool Set (Or Tool Kit)

A Good Mattress

A Pillow Gentle to Your Neck

A Scale

Working on a White-Collar Job? Buy a Steamer.

Bonus: The Book Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity

Why it is one of the things to buy before moving out:

Taking Showers Too Frequently

Coke (and any sugary drink)

Lettuce

Cigarettes

A Square Meter of Land in Warsaw

What about your perception of cost of living in Poland?

Although the cost of living in Poland is not always cheap, the book below has some awesome money-saving hacks.

Independent of what you are among the types of expatriates, you can save money with the hacks from this book.

A Recipe to Avoid IA Syndrome and Reduce the Cultural Shock Problem

Talk to the Grocery Cashier

This article about the cultural shock problem is a small part of the book below, highly recommended.

Environmental Dissonance

Cultural Distance

The Latin America vs Europe example

Cultural differences withing a country

Conclusion of what to consider when moving out:

Step 1 of How to Adapt to a New Culture: Get over the fact that you will never be 100% native. And you don’t need to.

The 4 dimensions of cultural integration

The upside and opportunities of being peculiar

This article on how to adapt to a new culture is part of the highly recommended book below:

Do not rely solely on Media

The Locals

Questions to ask yourself:

This moving abroad checklist is one of the chapters of this book, which we recommend you to check.

Moving Abroad Checklist: How to Make a Plan B.

Questions to ask

Another personal anecdote

Conclusion (and happy ending?)

This moving abroad checklist is part of this book we recommend you to check.

Adapt to the local etiquette, but allow yourself minor concessions.

A big tip on immigrant adaptation: Watch other people!

Learning the language while adapting to Life Abroad

This article about immigrant adaptation is a small part of the book below.

Schedule a free 15 minute consultation!