We just moved to London at the end of April 2025. It was our second time moving abroad from the Bay Area and (spoiler-alert) we made it to the UK. Now that we have a semblance of calm, I can take a moment to breathe and reflect.

The funny thing about doing something a second time is that it can feel both completely unsurprising and also more shocking when expectations differ from reality. We moved to Japan in August 2018 and spent six months preparing for the move, both logistically and emotionally. I think it took four months prior to that to even to commit to moving abroad. This time, we decided to move to London in December 2024 to move and started planning at the end of January. We are here three months later!

View from the plane as we descended towards London, April 2025.

Timeline-wise, it was obviously much faster. But what else was the same or different? Is it possible to become skilled at the act of moving your entire life abroad? Are there fundamental learnings that can apply to any major life decision like uprooting your home and work?

Well, two points do not necessarily create a trend line, so I may need to wait until the third time (!) to create a truly unified theory of international moves. But for now, here are my working observations on making the decision to live abroad, preparation and execution of moving, and post-move details.

I collected my stream-of-consciousness thoughts into three chronological sections: before, during, and after the move.

• Deciding to move abroad
• Executing the move
• Post-arrival reflections

I will explore broader themes and advice on moving abroad in a later essay.

Deciding to move abroad

The first time we considered moving to Japan in 2018, I was in psychological angst for months.

I did not have any close friends who had moved abroad yet. I myself had moved across the country for work, but it felt necessary to relocate to Silicon Valley in order to be close to the action. I had attempted to negotiate contracting with my then-employer to work from Japan, but that ended up falling through.¹ I was deeply worried about taking a year or more off from full-time working. As an ambitious young person in tech, I had not taken off longer than two weeks in four years of working. This was before funemployment and sabbaticals became de rigueur among my cohort, and I wasn’t sure if there would be a long-term impact to my career. And I had only been dating my boyfriend for 3 years.² Although we were very serious—already living together and at the stage where we openly discussed the timeline for marriage—we would be facing another level of challenge by choosing to live alone in a country where neither of us spoke the language.

Happily, it ended up being one of the best years of our lives. But working through the nerves and anxiety took many months before I was able to commit to moving abroad. I have never been the kind of person who could leap without looking, so I needed to soothe my tendency towards catastrophic thinking with a rigorous framework.

Dru was abundantly optimistic and I was very nervous about the big change. Here we are the Color Factory in October 2017, during the period we debated the move decision.

Starting a decision journal was incredibly helpful to stop spiraling and give me the confidence to make a decision. The basic concept behind a decision journal is to cut through the motivated reasoning that colors every aspect of our understanding of self. We constantly rationalize past decisions with our current context, literally rewriting the memories of a past event to make ourselves look better or smarter. So it’s not only important to document the pros and cons of a particular decision, but also to write down the motivations and predicted outcomes based on the frame of mind you were in when making the decision. Then, after the decision resolves, you reflect on the delta between predicted and actual outcomes to learn how to refine your decision-making.

If the decision works out, then great—your mental model of yourself and reality are likely well-tuned. If the decision ends up being wrong, it instead becomes a learning opportunity to revise your decision-making to be better next time around. What I was worried about most was not necessarily any one of the bad outcomes. I simply could not bear the idea that I could misunderstand myself so badly to be miserable, and then not learn a thing from it for the next big life decision.

As we were packing up our house this time for the London move, I found my old decision journal from Japan. It was a surreal, full-circle moment to read through my original thinking about the decision to move abroad.

End-of-month review from January 2018 in my decision journal.

In hindsight, the most useful part of the template was a detailed accounting of the range of possible outcomes for the decision. I listed the potential downsides and assigned probabilities to each projected outcome. Then once we completed the move to Japan, I returned to the decision a few months later and filled out the actual results of the decision.

Before (Worries)	After (Outcomes)
Negative consequences on my career	No negative outcomes, in fact it probably helped me land my next job at a startup because it showed I was willing to take big bets.
Change in lifestyle/habits and the impact on our relationship	Effect in total was no major issues on the relationship. The first 1.5 months apart when Dru left for Japan early was difficult, but allowed us to focus on our own hobbies/social activities during that period.
Knuckles being traumatized/disliking the new country	Knuckles was completely fine, adjusted very quickly! Biggest hurdles were import regulations and the flight itself.
Not taking full advantage of living in a new country & feeling like outsiders	Biggest barrier to offsetting the feeling of not taking full advantage of living in country is not being able to speak the language, and we actively worked on that. By the time we left, we felt decently integrated into the local community (although we were nowhere close to fluent!).
Boredom/loneliness	The positive perspective on this is that we had more time to invest in self-development and hobbies. It was also hard to feel lonely when we had many friends and family come to visit!
Inability to access favorite hobbies or activities	This one is definitely not an issue because Japan was so interesting to us. I was very into doing acrobatics at the time and did end up dropping that. But I adopted many new favorite activities, like biking while living in Japan.

All these worries could equally apply to moving to London, but this time I was able to lean on my firsthand experience to work through the concerns. When Dru got an unexpected opportunity to accept a very exciting role based in London, it took us less than two weeks to evaluate and commit to moving abroad instead of four months. It was a satisfying thrill to directly compare notes with my past experience to see how well I had internalized the learnings from seven years ago.

One aspect of moving to London that was significantly easier was the lack of language concerns. Half of the anxieties I outlined in the Japan decision journaling were related to not being able to speak the language: inability to connect to the community, feeling socially isolated, and lacking access to enjoyable activities that require communication proficiency. I definitely feel like moving to an English-speaking country made us feel more instantly integrated. We were able to establish ourselves as locals in our neighborhood cafe in the first few days of landing in London, whereas it took a full year to work up to the fluency that allowed us to make small talk with our favorite coffee shop in Tokyo.

I predict that the main downside of London compared to Tokyo is that it’s a potentially less attractive destination for our US-based friends and family to come visit. Many of the people we know have already visited the UK or have no specific upcoming plans to visit the UK. In comparison, we had an almost-constant stream of friends and family coming to visit us in Tokyo. The language barrier was an actual benefit in this regard. It was a sweet deal to be able to stay with us for free and have local guides who could speak the language (albeit poorly).

Navigating Tokyo without knowing Japanese can be quite intimidating.

Executing the move

Setting a move timeline

The most interesting retrospective from the journal was that our move to Japan was too slow. In my review of our first move:

Wished we had moved on the decision faster (Dru felt ready for the move ~4mos ahead of time, I felt ready ~2 mos because I felt like I was just waiting for my stock vesting timeline to run out). Also don’t tell my manager so far in advance because it just made things awkward.

I had completely forgotten I felt this way, which just goes to show the unreliability of our memories! And even though I rediscovered my journal only at the end of our second move, these learnings really validated our decision to have an accelerated move.

Here is the rough timeline:

• Dec 2024: Dru accepts his position at the London startup.
• Jan 2025: Visas are granted, Dru begins working alternating between London/US every 3 weeks.
• Feb 2025: I visit London for two weeks to find a new team based in London. We start surveying neighborhoods to live in. I choose my new team. Decide on how to transport the dog to the UK.
• Mar 2025: Notify my previous team manager and begin the formal transfer process. Start relocation services and begin purging the house by selling/donating items. Chose storage service and property management company for our house in Oakland.
• Apr 2025: Announce my departure to my previous team. Shipping and hauling appointments completed. Hop on the flight with the dog to London!

In terms of actual moving logistics time, it took us 2 months to clear the house and get everything stored, packed, and shipped to the UK. When I would tell people about our moving plan, everyone exclaimed about how it was faster than they would be able to handle.

I think you counterintuitively want to select a moving schedule that feels a bit too fast. The time it takes to do a seemingly endless amount of logistics is like an ideal gas: it will always expand to fill the provided container. I could have taken 4 or 6 months to move out of our house, and I’m sure I would have utilized all the time with only marginal improvements in the results. Rather than granting myself more peace of mind, I would have just prolonged the chaos and stress of orchestrating an international move.

Time-boxing your move is so important since the memory of the moving pain fades quickly once you’ve achieved your goal—that is, successfully landing in the new country. By compressing your move into the minimum time required to not royally screw it up, you will be able to minimize the suffering of this period and quickly get to the other side. Now, sitting in my new apartment and sipping tea like a true Londoner, I can look back on the hijinks of my second international move with good humor instead of wanting to tear my hair out.

We were also incentivized to speed up our move because Dru was already working from London in three-week chunks. It was a massive tax on his wellbeing to be regularly flying between London and the Bay Area. The constant business travel legitimately felt like it was draining his life force, from the pervasive jetlag to the disrupted routine, not to mention the extended separation from his wife and dog. We wanted to land the plane (metaphorically and literally) so that we could be reunited as a family unit again. By the fourth month of this working arrangement, he was exhausted and couldn’t wait to be full-time in London.

Luggage I brought with me on the flight to London (dog-included).

I also suggest not telling your manager about the international move beyond the standard notice period. In our first move to Japan, I told my manager five months before my intended departure date. This was so much lead time it was essentially useless, and actually made it more stressful because it wasn’t clear how my manager should utilize this information. We ended up still conducting the standard 2-3 weeks offboarding. For this recent move, I gave 1.5 months notice since I had informal managerial responsibilities and the team required a more structured transition plan. The standard notice period is perfectly sufficient to determine when to notify your employer, so you avoid unnecessary confusion.

The good, bad, and ugly

Moving your entire life abroad requires a million different micro-decisions that depend on your own preferences, values, and resources. This is a summary of the positive and negatives of my experience but your mileage may vary.

While moving is hard and scary, I feel like there are quite a few benefits to the process as well. At a minimum, it forces you to really evaluate all your worldly possessions. There is a very real dollar-cost to ship or store every single item. I am not someone who frequently edits the stuff in my house, so this gave me a reason to actually do the KonMari method. I purged everything that was extraneous and did not bring us joy. Even though we had only purchased our home in 2021, it was truly shocking how much random crap we had accumulated in our spaces.

A truly embarrassing amount of items we were selling, giving away, or discarding. This was actually the second pile after we had already purged the first one.

We did a donation party for our friends, as both a way to give our items a new home as well as have a unique sendoff for our upcoming departure. People got really into it too—digging through our donation piles with the glee of a treasure hunt. It was a fun party activity, as various friends came in the afternoon to hang out, popped in and out of the donation areas, and left with bags stuffed full of good stuff.

My friend R was a fantastic saleswoman and persuaded many people to pick up a few extra items.

I was determined to ship as little as possible, since London apartments are certainly going to be smaller than our house in California. My company did give us a shipping relocation benefit so we outlined some guiding principles for what we did want to ship. All the items we sent abroad were either (1) both sentimental and functional items, or (2) tedious/expensive to replace on the other side. Sentimental items included our Japanese kotatsu, which we used every single day and one of the few items we spent an exorbitant amount of money to ship home to the US from Japan, as well as my small collection of Heath ceramic mugs and dinnerware. We also chose a few art pieces and framed photographs that would remind us of our home back in the US. All these items we would be willing to pay the cost to bring back with us from London.

One of the two small piles of items we shipped to London.

Otherwise there were a long tail of miscellaneous items needed for daily living would take a while to recollect on the other side if we got rid of—such as a basic home office setup, cutlery, and books needed for my creative research projects.

What we didn’t choose to send is probably more important to know about. I still remember the painful lessons from shipping big furniture items to Tokyo. The beautiful big American-sized couch almost didn’t fit into the living room, even with the legs removed and two professional movers trying to maneuver it up the narrow Japanese staircase.

The accursed couch that almost didn’t make it into the building.

We also made the mistake of sending a mattress to Japan via sea shipment, which meant that we were without a proper bed for the full three months it took to arrive. These items were expensive enough that it felt extravagantly wasteful to spend money on temporary furniture when we had the same items on the way, so we just sat on the floor and slept on the ground the entire time the stuff was in transit. The first few month of living in Japan ended up being highly uncomfortable, delaying our ability to fully settle in.

This time around, we sold off all these items on FB marketplace to use the money to buy replacements immediately upon arrival.

One of the best hacks for moving abroad is to work at a FAANG company. We were fortunate both times that we could take advantage of generous relocation benefits, first Google Tokyo and now Meta London. These benefits include not just pure moving support but also key assistance with government and local bureacracy, such as visas, taxes, and housing contracts. The benefits were more pronounced in Japan compared to the UK—without company sponsorship it would not have been possible for us to rent the apartment we lived in, since there are restrictions and biases against renting to foreigners.

It never ceases to irritate me how much useless friction there is to set up a basic functional life in a new country, from bank accounts to housing to government registration. London is no different from Tokyo in this regard. But the bureaucratic tedium of setting up a new life is significantly easier when you speak the native language. All the same actions that are mildly frustrating or concerning here in the UK were high-anxiety situations in Japan, since we were terrified that a simple miscommunication could lead to us getting deported. These days, my daily mantra is: “How hard can it be? At least they speak English.”

Last but not least, the single hardest task of moving abroad continues to be importing our dog into the new country. We have a highly intelligent, anxiety-prone working dog breed which means we are extra concerned about the travel arrangements. We want to fly her with us in cabin rather than cargo, both for comfort now that she is getting older, but also for safety. We’ve heard horror stories about accidents happening in transit when being shipped via cargo. Import paperwork is also very complex, requiring at least 3+ examinations from an accredited veterinarian and official endorsements from the US Department of Agriculture. The entire import process is high stakes because getting refused entry by border control is really the only way we could fail in our goal of moving abroad.

Knuckles nervously looking out of the window of the plane.

Ultimately, though our options were limited and very costly, we did succeed in bringing our dog into the UK. I could write an entire essay alone on the details of how to import dogs, so feel free to reach out if you have questions.

Post-arrival reflections

It’s been one week since we’ve entered the UK so there’s still much more that I’ll be learning about our new home. We had been dreaming about living abroad again and the ideal location for us was somewhere with:

• engaging culture & rich history
• beautiful living environment with seasons & access to nature
• possibility of permanent living (>1 year abroad)
• import laws that allowed us to bring our dog

London has more than lived up to these expectations so far. I’m beyond thrilled for this grand new adventure and can’t wait to discover all the similarities and differences from our last time abroad.

And if all the advice in this essay so far hasn’t been enough, I’ll leave you with one more: read fiction set in your new home base. I’ve been creating my own repertoire³ of fantasy, romance, and science fiction stories based in London and it’s been absolutely delightful. The fantastical elements inspire me to see my surroundings in strange and wonderful ways.

Here’s my recent reading list:

• Babel by R.F. Kuang
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
• Bringing Down the Duke (League of Extraordinary Women series) by Evie Dunmore
• A Discovery of Witches (All Souls series) by Deborah Harkness

All my dreams of seeing the pup frolic through the London parks, realized. At the Hill Garden in West Hampstead Heath.

1. I ultimately enrolled in a Japanese language school and stayed on a student visa. I also did freelance software engineering work for 3 months for an East Coast startup, but I ended up declining a contract renewal because the timezone difference was too brutal. ↵

2. He is now my husband! We did eventually get married in 2021. ↵

3. This was a fortuitous accident. During our visit to London in February, I was checking out famous bookstores like Daunt Books and Waterstones. I purchased a recommended book from an author I was familiar with. That book was Babel by R.F. Kuang and it felt like serendipity to read about Hampstead while exploring Hampstead. ↵

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