Ask HN: Who has moved from the U.S. to Europe?

Netherlands, 10 years now. Actually ready to move on… Portugal, Malta, Thailand, perhaps spending 1-6 months at a time in a given location.

Gave up my car and driving frequently. Fantabulous gift of freedom not having to deal with traffic and car management. Public transport is a gift, and taxis or very short term car rental programs are a fine fallback.

Gave up some income as salaries are annoying much lower and taxes are much higher. But quality of life, depending on where you go, is much higher.

Get rid of as much of your possessions as you can. You can re-buy what you really need, and with more great activities available (non-COVID times) you spend less time at home needing stuff. Also apartments are smaller, so you don’t want to be crowded with stuff.

My first 5 years were in Amsterdam area, and it’s really fun. So many great social options, including for nerds (lots of tech meetups, often with free pizza and beer :) ). Plenty of bars and clubs and restaurants. Most restaurants are underwhelming and overpriced, so that’s not the attraction… but it provides social options.

If you’re American, it’s incredibly easy to set up residence in Netherlands based on the DAFT agreement. Look it up.

Portugal and Malta have visa programs for freelancers and people who can show that they have reliable income from outside sources. Lisbon is pretty great with much better food on average than Amsterdam. And much better climate.

I'd be curious what is prompting you to leave? I think the Malta and Portugal Golden visas are quite expensive though no?

Netherlands is worth spending a year or few in, but the winter weather is dismal wet and dark. Amsterdam is pretty expensive for rent, and with remote work it doesn’t make sense to live there unless you have a circle of friends you want to be near. Plus, the world is large and interesting… time to continue my exploration.

Malta has an actual digital nomad visa which costs something like 300 eur.

Portugal has a D7 visa which is a bit more complicated to setup than Malta (partly because Malta has English as an official language).

As a Dutchman who used to live in Malta for a few years, I have to warn you: Maltese public transport really bad in comparison. If your bus might be 10 minutes early or 20 minutes late and it won't show in the public transport app. If you want to get somewhere on time that's not within walking distance, you'll need a car (there are ride sharing cars and scooters). Bus tickets are cheap though.

And yeah, the climate is much much better. I really mis being able to see the sun.

Thank you for the warning. Are scooters common? In Thailand and Bali that is the easy answer in most cases, and I imagine Malta weather is usually reasonable for this mode of transport.

I would say maybe about as common as in The Netherlands. So it's definitely not at a Bali level, but you can there are still plenty of them.

I didn't buy or long-term-rent one myself, but used https://whizascoot.mt/ and https://gotoglobal.com/en/goto-malta/ and I would buy one over a car. Traffic and parking can be bad, and scooters really help out there. And the fastest you can go on any road is 80km/h, so you can get everywhere by scooter. (the ride sharing ones are limited to 50km/h, so roads with a higher maximum speed are not ideal)

Ironically, one of the reasons Amsterdam rents are so high is because of expats willing to pay ridiculously high rents.