I’m an American primarily from Texas and California, but currently living in West Sussex in Southeast England.
So how did this happen?
I grew up across a few places in the US as my parents moved for career opportunities. I’ve never really called a single city or area home, which has made the travel bug I developed early that much stronger.
In 2014 I was a bored attorney in Austin, Texas questioning where I was going to find the next challenge that would actually inspire me. To make the next several months of soul-searching vastly oversimplified, my husband agreed it was time to do something nutty with our 4-year-old daughter in tow and we soon moved from Austin to Kingston Upon Thames outside London. I entered a postgraduate degree in International HR Management, enrolled my daughter in Reception and my husband started working in London.
That year we traveled to multiple UK cities and EU countries, made friends, and fell in love with the UK. But…
Then, in 2015, we had to face our crappy visa prospects for staying in the UK long-term. At the time, postgraduate students had only a few months after finishing their degree to find sponsored employment. (NOTE: This is not the rule for student visas today!) I wasn’t having great luck finding an employer willing to sponsor me, and my husband’s work had been outsourced to a company unwilling to offer him sponsorship to stay.
We eventually decided this just wasn’t a battle we were likely to win and moved back to Orange County, California, where we had lived years earlier and I had attended law school. We gradually set up a life, bought a house, and my husband and I both landed jobs at companies where we had dreamed of working.
Things were good in California, but we never stopped talking about how much we loved living in the UK.
When Covid lockdowns struck, my daughter was suddenly schooling from home while my job stress amped up exponentially as my employer coped with those “unprecedented times”.
On our many walks around the neighborhood, my husband and I eventually decided it was worth a try to line up another living abroad adventure. Neither of us saw value in going back to school at this point, but we also both had a lot more career experience than the last time we had been in the UK.
My husband’s career is in IT, which tends to be in demand to some extent all over the world. We narrowed down our list of countries where we’d want to live and I used my HR skills to craft his resume for overseas applications. About 6 months from when we first started talking about this idea, he had an offer in Berlin…
Obviously, Berlin is not in the UK.
If you’re not already aware, Germany’s immigration policies are actually quite a bit more friendly to Americans than what you find in the UK. Germany was on our list of maybe places so I was looking at several companies there.
However, that job just wasn’t quite the right fit and with a lot of “oh no, what if this is our one shot?” worries, he turned it down. A few stressed out months later, he got the offer that would bring us back to the UK.
This time we moved to West Sussex.
We moved in September 2021, just in time for my daughter to start secondary school. We moved with our dog and cat, which is a whole thing, into a temporary flat. Eventually we settled in a rental house that I love.
Living abroad has its ups and downs, but on the whole we are so happy to be here. I started this blog to share some of what I’ve learned from this back and forth moving process, and to share my genuine love for this beautiful place I get to call home.
If you’re on the fence about moving to the UK, or just want some ideas for your next visit, definitely get in touch! I’m a real human and love to receive questions or messages that aren’t bot spam!
