If you follow the blog and all of my socials closely, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t really published anything in a few months. As someone who is horrible at being secretive, keeping this under wraps has been so hard. But I can finally make the big reveal – we’re moving to the Netherlands (and really soon too)!
How We Got Here
We’ve talked about the possibility of moving abroad on and off for nearly a decade, just never all that seriously. After a bunch of moves, we decided it was time to finally settle down. So in 2022 we bought our first home in Philadelphia. But not long after the itch to move came back with a vengeance. Add to that my anxiety around everything currently happening within the United States, and we knew it was time to finally take that leap and head across the Atlantic. As much as I love Philly and it truly feels like home, we know we’re meant to be on the move experiencing new places.
Now I’ll be honest, the Netherlands wasn’t our first choice – Germany was. That’s actually why we visited the country back in 2024, to get an idea of what city we’d want to live in! Unfortunately after nearly a year of job searching and interviewing, my husband realized the job market wasn’t as desperate for non-German speaking engineers as he’d been lead to believe. So we agreed to expand his search to Sweden and the Netherlands as well, even though we’ve never been to either country. And thankfully after just a few short months he got a job offer!
Moving to the Netherlands
The question we’re sure many people will ask – why the Netherlands? What really appealed to us was: how highly people rate the quality of life and work life balance, that English is widely spoken which will make integration easier while we learn Dutch, and how easy it will be to access to the rest of Europe. While we haven’t 100% finalized our living situation yet we do know we’ll be in Gelderland, which is a province about an hour east of Amsterdam.
As an engineer, my husband qualifies for the Netherland’s highly skilled migrant visa. It’s valid for 5 years, as long as he continues to work for a sponsored company. One major perk for this particular visa? We’ll be able to take advantage of the 30% tax ruling. This means he’ll receive up to 30% of his salary tax-free for the first 5 years to help offset some expenses we’ll still have in the US (and the pay cut he’ll be taking). While its a little more complex than that, I won’t get into the nitty-gritty here.
Uprooting our lives and moving to a country we’ve never visited before is definitely a gamble. This is especially true when said country is dealing with a major housing crisis! Thankfully we’re working with a relocation company that is helping handle most of the overseas moving logistics like applying for our visas, finding housing, etc. This mainly leaves us to deal with the local US-based challenges of selling our house and getting our two senior cats ready to move in such a short timeframe.
So while I’m pretty stressed about making such a major life change, I can’t wait to share our journey.
Follow along as we navigate moving to and living in the Netherlands!
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