020: Housing, Schools, and Visas: Planning a Move Abroad as a Doctor

Dr. Kristine shares a practical framework for doctors who want to move abroad without getting buried in logistics. The episode focuses on the three biggest pressure points: housing, schooling, and visas, with a strong emphasis on why having the right guide matters more than collecting more information. If you are a physician thinking about location flexibility, this episode is especially useful because it blends lived experience across 17 countries with specific advice for families, solo movers, and parents of children with special needs.

Key topics:

• Why moving abroad is a process that becomes manageable when you stop trying to solve everything alone
• How filtering by values makes the housing search easier
• Educational options for different family setups, including accredited online schooling, world schooling communities, private international schools, and intentional family communities
• Supporting children with special needs or learning differences
• How digital nomad visas have expanded
• Choosing the right visa for your situation

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Transcript

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When doctors start seriously thinking about living and working abroad, the questions come fast. Where do I live? What do I do about schools? How long does a visa actually take? These are real questions and they apply whether you are moving alone, with a partner, or with a whole family in tow. Today I want to talk about what I've actually learned navigating this across 17 countries, what I help clients think through, and why the piece that makes the biggest difference isn't the information. It's not doing it alone. If you are ready to stop figuring this out by yourself and start implementing a real plan so that you can become location independent, book a one-to-one freedom call. The link is in the show notes. Let's get into it. You're listening to Doctors Abroad, the podcast for doctors who want to build remote income and create location independence. I'm Dr. Christine Goyne, founder of Nomad MD. I've exceeded my hospital income while working part-time and living abroad. And on this show, we break down how to make hospital income optional. Let's get started. The logistics of moving abroad. Housing, schools, visas, these are all things that need to be figured out. And figuring them out while you're still working, while your life is still fully assembled in one place can sometimes genuinely be a lot for doctors to hold. So what I want to offer you today is not a checklist. It is actually something closer to what I wish I had had before I left, which is someone who has already done this, who knew what questions to ask, who could help me understand what the process actually looked like from the inside rather than from the outside looking in. I have lived in 17 countries over five years, and I've watched physicians move with partners, with children, with pets, with complex family situations, and even by themselves solo dolo. And I've helped families think through what their specific children need in a new environment. I've gone through my own visa processes, and what I know from all of it is that the thing that makes this navigable is not more and more and more information. It is having someone in your corner who already knows the terrain. So just to start with housing, what I have learned about choosing it well. The housing question is usually one of the first ones that come up because it's the one that feels the most concrete, which makes it the one people spend the most time trying to perfect before they leave. And here is what I've learned from doing this the criteria that you use to choose housing matters even more than the specific listing that you find. And most people don't know what their criteria are until they've lived somewhere for a while or really spent some time being intentional about it. And I will tell you mine, not because everyone should want, you know, the same things, but because knowing what you're actually looking for makes the decision about housing so much easier, so much cleaner. So for me, I always want to be in a walkable neighborhood. That means I can get everywhere I need to be on foot or easily through public transportation or an affordable ride chair. Point being, I don't want to have to drive. That's just me. I want to be near fresh markets. I prioritize fresh food. I want it to be accessible. I don't want it to be a project to figure out. I want proximity to the kinds of movement that I love: yoga, reformer Pilates or swimming. I want to be near nature. I want beautiful views. I want to be somewhere that makes it easy to connect with other people, particularly local people, where the community I'm looking for is easily accessible and the things that I like to do, right, are easily accessible. When you know your own version of that list, housing research becomes a very different exercise because you're not scrolling endlessly through things. You are filtering for the things that matter most to you. On the practical question of how to find housing, I've seen it done multiple ways. I have arrived somewhere with housing booked in advance without having ever seen it or even been to the country in person. And I've also seen people take extended trips to scope out the neighborhoods before committing. And both work, right? What doesn't work is spending so long trying to get the perfect housing that you never actually leave. So the first place that you end up living abroad, it's rarely your last place. And you learn what you want a lot of times by being there. Um, what most physicians discover once they arrive is that the housing that they find abroad, especially in the countries where most physicians settle, they find that it's more spacious, it's more affordable. It often comes with more support than what they had in the US, a cleaner who comes twice a week, a building with services, a neighborhood where everything you need is walkable. And for most people, it is genuinely an upgrade in how daily life feels as a doctor. Now for schools. For doctors with children, the school question carries a specific kind of weight. It's not just logistical, it's also emotional. It touches on every parent's core fear. Like, what if this is the wrong decision for my child? And I want to bring my clinical perspective to this for a little bit because I think it reframes the question in a way that's genuinely useful. As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, what I know about children and transition is this children are more adaptable than we give them credit for. And what they need to thrive is not being in the same school system forever or the same neighborhood or even having the same set of peers for life. What they need is connection, meaningful relationships, consistency in their relationship with their parents, and a sense of competence, the feeling that they can navigate their world, that they have skills that work in the new environment. And those things travel. And when parents are intentional about protecting them through a transition, children not only adapt, they tend to flourish. The research on children who grow up with cross-cultural exposure is consistent, greater social intelligence, language acquisition, flexibility, and a global perspective. The fear that a move will harm children is very understandable. The evidence more often points the other way. For families who are fully location independent and moving between countries, let's say as opposed to just settling in one country, accredited online schooling has become very excellent. There are established programs that follow US curriculum standards and allow children to learn from anywhere. For example, Connections Academy. And I can point you towards options that fit your child's specific needs when we work together. World schooling communities bring families together around multi-age experiential learning that integrates travel and cultural immersion. And these are established networks where children learn alongside other children whose families are living the same kind of life. For families that are settling in one location for an extended period, private international schools are often exceptional. Many operate on internationally recognized curricula and offer flexibility that US school systems typically don't. And the cost is frequently less than a US private school tuition, sometimes even a fraction. So for families who do want an intentional community built specifically for this kind of location-independent life, programs like Boundless Life have created exactly that. Communities in beautiful locations around the world where families can live and work and build deep connections while being immersed in local culture. And another aspect of thinking about this is for families with children who have additional needs. And this is where my background as a child and adolescent psychiatrist becomes specifically relevant and where I've been able to offer something that most people in this space cannot. Having clients with children with special needs who are in the process of moving abroad, what mattered to them was not just whether the move was possible. It was whether someone could actually help them understand what their child would need in a new environment, how to find the right supports, how to connect with resources, whether domestically or internationally. Having worked inside educational systems, having worked with families navigating these questions, I was able to help them think through that in a way that felt very specific to their child, right? Not generic. So if you have a child with special needs or learning differences who requires additional support, this life is not only possible for you and your family, but having this level of freedom and flexibility is an absolute game changer for families. And lastly, we'll talk about visas. The visa question is one that sometimes makes doctors freeze. It sounds very bureaucratic, right? It sounds like something that could go wrong. And here is what I want you to hear from someone who has been through it. The anticipation of the visa process is almost always worse than the process itself. My own residency visa in Mexico from start to finish, and this is post-pandemic, so it's a completely different process now. It took 75 days. Only 75 days. But those 75 days happened while I was living my life, while I was traveling and working and exploring and attending family events. I was not sitting somewhere twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a government office to respond, right? The process ran in the background while my life ran in the foreground. And when it was done, it was complete. What I hear most often from physicians who go through visa processes is that once they were in it, it was a series of defined steps. It's not an unpredictable maze. There are steps with a beginning and an end. And the digital nomad visa landscape has really expanded in recent years. There are countries where processing takes as little as 48 hours. Mauritius officially processes in 48 hours. There are countries where there is no stated minimum income requirement. And countries that actively welcome location-independent professionals and their families. Dubai being one of the most established, where you can sponsor your spouse and children for the full duration of your stay, and where children can very quickly enroll in school. The income requirement for Dubai is $3,500 a month, and processing typically takes two to four weeks, right? These are just examples. The landscape keeps expanding and the requirements can change over time. But the specific visa that is right for you depends on where you want to be, how long you want to stay, your income structure, and whether you are bringing family members. And what I want to leave you with here is simpler than a list of countries. The visa is not what is standing between you and your location flexibility. The feeling that you have to figure it all out alone and that you don't know where to start, that is standing between you and location flexibility. The doctors who successfully make this transition, who actually build a location-independent life, whether they use that independence to spend summers abroad in Europe or work from home and just be more present with their family, those docs are almost always not the ones who had the most information. They are the ones who stop trying to figure this all out alone. Every question I've addressed today is a question that becomes significantly more manageable when you have someone who's already done it, who knows the terrain, who can help you apply what they know to your specific situation, not a general advice forum, a Facebook page or a blog post that was written two years ago. Right, but someone who lives this every day, who can help you think through what it looks like for you, that is what I do. That is what a one-to-one freedom call is the beginning of. The link is in the show notes. And if the family conversation resonated today, if bringing your partner or your family along is the piece that you are still trying to work through and navigate, episode 15, the family meeting, pairs really, really well with this one. My mother and I have a real breakdown conversation about what it looked like from her side when I made this move. Thanks for listening to Doctors Abroad. If this episode was helpful, share it with a colleague who's been thinking about building more freedom and flexibility in medicine. And if you're ready to make hospital income optional, book a one-to-one freedom consultation at thenomadmd.com. I'll see you in the next episode.