Europe. The dream. The old cobblestone streets, the afternoon espresso, the healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you, the pace of life that makes you wonder why you ever spent thirty years commuting in traffic just to sit in a fluorescent-lit office.
Every year, tens of thousands of Americans pack their lives into suitcases and make the move. And every year, many of them come back because they made mistakes — avoidable, predictable mistakes that nobody warned them about.
I’ve been covering expat life for years. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people who made this move. And today I want to give you the honest version, the real list of what goes wrong and why some americans regret moving to Europe, so that if you’re planning this, you do it right.
Five mistakes — let’s get into it.
If you are planning the move itself, grab Moving Out, Working Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity for the eleven secrets behind a smoother expat life.
Mistake 1: Picking the Wrong City Within the Right Country
You did your research. You watched the videos, you joined the Facebook groups, you read the articles. And you found it — the city. The one with the quality of life, the walkability, the café culture, the international community, the mild winters. Everything lined up. You were ready.
And then you looked at the property prices. And your stomach dropped.
So you opened the map. And you zoomed out. And ten kilometres to the south — or east, or west — you found another city. A name you didn’t recognise. But the rent was literally half the price. And you thought: it’s so close. It must be almost the same.
“Why am I paying twice as much just for a more famous postcode?”
This is one of the most common and most painful mistakes people make.
Let me give you an analogy from the US, because it’s the clearest one I know. Munster, Indiana. And Gary, Indiana.
If you’ve never heard of them — Munster is a quiet, safe, pleasant suburb. Good schools, low crime, well-kept streets. Gary is — and I say this with no pleasure — one of the most economically devastated and dangerous cities in the entire United States. Consistently ranked among the highest crime rates in the country.
The distance between Munster and Gary, Indiana? About eight miles. Eight miles. You could cycle it on a Sunday morning.
And they could not be more different places to live. One is a place people choose. The other is a place people leave.
Europe is full of these pairs. And the cruel thing is that if you’re moving from abroad, you often have no idea which side of that line you’re landing on.
The desirable city — let’s call it the Munster — has high property prices for a reason. It has a functioning local economy, people who choose to be there rather than people who got priced out of somewhere better, restaurants that survive because locals eat in them year-round rather than just because tourists visit in August. It has infrastructure, it has investment, it is safe.
The cheap city ten kilometres away — the Gary — is often what urban planners call a dormitory town: built, or evolved, as a place where people sleep. They work somewhere else, they socialise somewhere else, they spend their money somewhere else. There is no local life because the town was never designed to have one.
And when dormitory towns decline — and many of them do — they decline fast. The shops close. The young people leave. The property that seemed like a bargain becomes very difficult to sell.
Add to this the crime dimension: in many European countries, the affordable neighbourhoods on the fringes of desirable cities have much higher rates of petty crime, and in some cases serious crime, than the city centres. The price gap is not a secret, the locals know why it exists. You, moving from four thousand miles away, might not.
When you find a city you love and the property prices scare you, do not immediately zoom out on the map looking for the cheaper neighbour. Ask yourself — why is that place cheaper?
Ask in local forums. Ask people who actually live in the region. Visit it on a weekday, not a weekend. Walk around after dark. Check the crime statistics if you can find them. Look at whether the high street is thriving or half-shuttered.
The price difference is almost always telling you something. Your job is to find out what.
Mistake 2: Underestimating Distance from Your Loved Ones
I want to be careful with this one, because it’s the one that I see bring people home more than any visa problem, any bureaucracy nightmare, any language barrier. More than anything else on this list.
Before you move, you know you will be far from the people you love. You know it intellectually. You’ve thought about it. You’ve told yourself you’ll visit for the holidays, that they’ll come and stay with you in your beautiful new apartment, that video calls make the world smaller, that this is 2025 and distance isn’t what it used to be.
And then you move. And three months in, your sister calls you because your father had a health scare. Nothing serious, it turned out fine. But for six hours, you were sitting in your apartment in Valencia or Lisbon or Athens, completely unable to do anything. Unable to drive to the hospital. Unable to sit in the waiting room. Unable to be there.
And something shifts in you in those six hours that no amount of research prepared you for.
Or it’s smaller than that. Your nephew says his first full sentence and you watch it in a ten-second video on your phone. You watch it four times. And you think — I wasn’t there.
The flight math sounds reassuring on paper. “I’m only two hours from New York.” Except it’s two hours from the airport, forty minutes from your apartment, plus you need to book it, and prices spike during the exact moments you most need to travel — emergencies, holidays, school breaks. Not something you can do casually three times a year.
And the most difficult is the slow accumulation of small absences. Birthdays you miss, inside jokes you’re not part of anymore. The family dynamic that shifts slightly over the years, and each time you visit you feel it.
You might expect the main reason people come home to be paperwork, or the language barrier, or some bureaucratic nightmare — and you would be wrong. It is the distance.
If those flights home are the part that worries you, Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide collects 50 tricks for cheaper flights and travel.
Now, this doesn’t mean don’t go. It means have an honest conversation with your partner about what each of you is leaving behind. And it means stay connected, in every way you can.
Many of you write to me and say the hardest part of moving abroad isn’t finding the apartment, it isn’t the visa, it isn’t even the language. It’s the Sunday afternoon when your nephew does something funny and you’re not there. And you end up on a video call, squinting at a little phone screen, trying to catch their expression.
Mistake 3: Not Learning the Basics of the Language Before Arriving
Let me be clear about something upfront: I am not telling you that you need to be fluent in Italian before you move to Italy. I am not telling you that you need to spend two years studying Spanish before you book the flight to Seville, but you need the basics of the language.
Still, too many people arrive just with “tourist” language skills. What’s the difference?
Tourist language is: un café con leche, por favor. It gets you through a holiday beautifully. Survival language is: understanding your lease well enough to know what you’re agreeing to. It’s being able to communicate with the civil servant at the government office who has your residency paperwork in their hands and speaks no English. It’s being able to tell your doctor where it hurts. It’s being able to negotiate with your landlord when something in the apartment breaks.
That government office moment is the one that ambushes people most brutally. In many southern European countries — and we’ll talk more about bureaucracy in the next section — you will at some point sit across a desk from a civil servant who speaks zero English, who is processing something critical to your legal status in the country, and who is not going to slow down or switch languages for your comfort.
For people who arrive speaking nothing, that moment is genuinely terrifying. And it happens in the first few weeks.
But the language barrier does something else to you that is harder to quantify. It keeps you permanently in the expat bubble — your social world inevitably shrinks to other foreigners, the only people you can have a full conversation with.
And that bubble, while comfortable, is a strange way to live in a country. You are physically in Italy but socially in an anglophone enclave within Italy. You never fully arrive.
There is also the psychological weight of it: in your home country you are a capable adult who can negotiate, advocate, joke, explain, push back, charm. When you move abroad without the language, every interaction that requires more than pointing at a menu turns you into a helpless child (and nobody warned you about that part).
You can’t advocate for yourself at the pharmacy. You can’t understand what the plumber is telling you about why the repair is going to cost three times the estimate. That low-grade helplessness, sustained over months, creates a stress and a frustration that a lot of people don’t anticipate and don’t know how to name.
And fixing this is simpler than you might think. Three months of consistent Lingq Language Learning App gets you further than you’d think. A few weeks of actual lessons — even online — before you arrive will cover the situations that will genuinely ambush you.
You don’t need elegance. You need enough to survive the first year while you absorb the rest naturally by living there.
Learn it before you go. The version of you that arrives knowing even the basics will have a profoundly different first year than the version that doesn’t.
Mistake 4: Underestimating Bureaucracy
I have a theory. It is not based on any academic research — it is based entirely on observation, conversations with expats, and what I consider to be an overwhelming body of anecdotal evidence.
The amount of bureaucracy you will face when moving to a European country is almost perfectly inversely correlated with the amount of sunshine that country receives.
Think about it. Germany: efficient, organised, bureaucratic but at least logical. You fill in the form, the form goes to the right place, the thing gets processed. It is not fun, but it functions.
Move south. Spain: more sunshine, slower processes, more trips to the office, more forms that reference other forms.
Move further south. Italy: legendary sunshine, legendary bureaucratic complexity, a system that has been described by people who work within it as — and I’m paraphrasing people who actually told me this — a creative interpretation of organisation.
And then Greece. If you want to spend your afternoons on a terrace watching the Aegean light do something extraordinary to the world, you must first be willing to spend your mornings in a government office that seems to be operating on a different relationship with time than the one you grew up with.
In Europe, the sunshine and the bureaucracy come as a bundled package.
The document rabbit hole is sometimes deep. They ask for a document. That document requires another document. That second document needs an apostille — an official government stamp that certifies it’s genuine. The apostille needs to be attached to a certified translation. The translator is busy. The apostille office in your home country has a four-week processing time.
The people who navigate this best are the ones who hired help before they arrived. A gestor in Spain, a commercialista in Italy, a local immigration lawyer wherever you’re going. They are the difference between your first year being an adventure and being an administrative nightmare.
Budget for it. Find someone recommended by people who have actually used them. And hire them before you land.
Before you face that paperwork, read Residence & Citizenship in Europe for a country-by-country guide to visas, residence and EU citizenship.
And understand this: the stress of bureaucratic uncertainty is different from other kinds of stress. And people who didn’t anticipate it find that it colours the entire first chapter of their new life in a way they really didn’t expect.
Mistake 5: Moving to a Place They Only Visited on Holiday
You went in June. Or July. Or the last week of August. The restaurant near the harbour had a line out the door. The square was full of people until midnight. There was music. There was laughter.
Local families were out with their children at ten o’clock at night — something that felt impossibly charming to you compared to how early and quietly people go home back in the States. The market was running on Saturday morning. The beach was perfect.
The whole place felt alive in a way that made you think — this. This is where I want to live.
You signed a lease. You moved in October. And by November… you are feeling like Will Smith in the movie I Am Legend.
Empty streets. Half the restaurants shuttered for the season, with a handwritten sign on the door that says see you in April. The beach bar where you had that incredible sunset cocktail? Boarded up. The Saturday market? Gone until spring.
The international supermarket that stocked the things you actually wanted to eat? Closed on Sundays, closed on Mondays, and going through a seasonal staff reduction that means it’s only open four hours a day until March.
And the other expats — the thriving, welcoming, active community you read about online? It turns out many of them are seasonal. They’re snowbirds. They winter somewhere warmer, or they go back to their home country for a few months, or they simply weren’t year-round residents to begin with.
The Facebook group for expats in your area, which had hundreds of members posting every day in August, goes quiet. There are three of you left, essentially (and they’re all thinking of leaving too).
This happens in the Algarve. It happens on the smaller Greek islands. It happens on the Croatian coast. It happens in parts of the Spanish Costas. It happens in Canary Islands towns that aren’t the main tourist hubs. These places are extraordinary in summer — and completely different in winter.
What makes this especially difficult is that the things that made the place work for you as a visitor often simply do not exist in winter — the variety of restaurants, the open shops, the street life, the social energy. The actual local population of some of these places is tiny, and the town you fell in love with is, in a very real sense, a seasonal performance.
The fix is simple but requires discipline. Visit in the worst month. Go in January or February, before you sign anything, before you commit. Spend at least a week.
See if the things you need — the social life, the open businesses, the community, the services — actually exist in winter. Find out what the expat population looks like in February, not August. Ask the people who stayed year-round what the winter is genuinely like.
What you find will tell you more about whether you can actually live there than ten summers ever could.
Still narrowing down the destination itself? Our guide on where to move abroad walks you through how to match a country to the life you actually want.
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