Stop thinking of scouting trips as a necessary step of moving countries. The level of expense added is just one layer of the insanity of scouting trips. Mentally the scouting trip also does a number on you. There is just no good that comes from wasting time and resources on a scouting trip. By believing you need to take a scouting trip, you are simply delaying your decision on where to move. Your experience living in a place will be entirely un-related to any previous trips you have taken to that country or even that city. Moving countries has a complicated set of priorities, but experts like me are experienced in helping you choose the right country for you. 🆘🇺🇸 #TikTokEncyclopediaContest #creatorsearchinsights
@nomadveronicaTranscript
I don't want to call anyone out, but I did have a commenter today who was convinced that by taking scouting trips, she was doing something strategic for herself. She felt very proud that she was going to commit to staying in places for one to three months to really get to know them and decide where was the right place for her to move. My problem with scouting trips has always been the same. It doesn't make financial sense, and it digs you in to that country in a way that just choosing it and never taking the scouting trip would not. If you take a scouting trip and then you decide, "Yes, this is the place. I love this place. I want to come here." That is going to make you feel obligated to stick with that original decision, because people do not like to admit that they were wrong about things. So you can go and live there after your scouting trip and realize, "Man, this place is such a drag." That is going to prevent you from being willing to pivot because you took that scouting trip. If you want help figuring out where you should actually move, join my group coaching program, the Global Life Accelerator. We're going to be starting in 2026 with the actual details of how you should move somewhere. When you visit a country for a month, you are not living there. You're eating out more, you're saying yes to the fun stuff, you're not dealing with doctors and taxes and long-term leases and needing to get your Wi-Fi fixed in another language. You're not managing any of those things that are true about someone who actually lives there. You get to go see the city, but that is not what your actual life will look like. Your actual life will happen on a random block, in a random neighborhood, on a random Tuesday, and that just cannot be duplicated during a scouting trip. This woman went so far as to tell me that she wouldn't go marry a man just because it looks good on paper, but the reality is, you also wouldn't marry a man if you've only been with him for a month, that honeymoon phase and people being on their best behavior all happens in the early days, just like with a scouting trip. You go and you're going to have those rose colored glasses, you're going to look at it through the eyes of the fact that you're a tourist because you are a tourist. Taking scouting trips is not a strategy. It's a sunk cost dressed up as confidence. If you want to be strategic, decide what your non-negotiables are, health care, safety, budget, language, lifestyle, long-term citizenship options, pick those, find the ones that fit on paper and by anecdotal evidence, and then move. Give it a real shot, move there, live there, because you will learn more in six months of school drop-offs and grocery runs than you will in one month adventures to different countries, six different times. If you've never seen me before, I'm Veronica, and I move to a developing country without ever having been there. I moved to the Dominican Republic and lived there for an entire year. The next place I lived, I had visited as a tourist and then I spent two months living there before I actually moved my family to live there. That was not enough time to see all the flaws that I later saw, which made me leave that country. And now we live in our third country. I've learned that just by visiting a place, you cannot get the feel of what it's like to be a local. We have visited numerous countries for a month at a time and we still have very positive feelings like we could go live there. But having actually lived in other countries, I know that all of the issues that real locals have, we did not experience in our long-term travels there. And that's the issue with scouting trips, is they cost a lot of money to not get any actual clarity about what life would look like by living there.
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