Why?

We are an American family with four children (ages 3, 6, 9, and 11) and we plan to spend the majority of the next school year living in Spain. The question we get asked the most when telling people of our plans to spend next year in Spain is, “Why?”

 

Why live abroad with kids?

Even before having kids, I knew I wanted my future family to live abroad at some point. I have traveled a lot and studied abroad during college. My most important takeaway from time abroad was that the United States was not the center of the universe and that there were so many different perspectives from people who have grown up in different countries with diverse life experiences. I knew that I wanted my future children to experience this when they were young so that they would grow up with a global awareness and, hopefully, a desire to see the world themselves.

 

Why now?

We have an eight year gap between our oldest and youngest, so wanted to pick an age where living abroad would be a good fit for the whole family. We wanted our youngest to have the experience of attending school abroad, and we were also hoping to make this trip before our oldest hit adolescence and would have a harder time moving away from friends and acclimating to a new environment.

We plan to spend two weeks in July 2016 getting settled in Spain and then tour Europe for the month of August. We will return in time for the kids to start school in September. We are leaving our return date somewhat open ended, but it is most likely we will return home the following spring.

 

Why Spain?

A large part of raising my children as global citizens was to make sure they were proficient in another language. We decided to raise our kids in a city with a dual immersion public elementary school where our older kids have been learning Spanish since kindergarten. Our youngest also attends a Spanish immersion preschool. So when we started planning to live abroad, we knew we wanted to live in a Spanish speaking country to further develop their proficiency in Spanish. I studied Spanish in school and have had many opportunities to practice through the kids’ schools, so my Spanish skills are pretty solid. My husband has done a few lessons with a tutor and is gradually learning, and we hope to both further develop our Spanish skills while we are there.

At first, I was focused on Costa Rica, which is a country I have visited twice. I remembered how inexpensive things were there, and we wanted to live in a place with a low cost of living since we weren’t yet sure what our employment situation would be. From my research, we would be able to live in Costa Rica on tourist visas and send our kids to private schools. I did some early research on school options, and it seemed like most of our options would be bilingual schools where a large part of the curriculum was taught in English. This wasn’t a deal breaker, but might not provide as much Spanish exposure as we had hoped. I also felt like by attending private school they may not have the same experience of getting to know how most people in the country live. I looked into housing a bit and was surprised to find that rental costs were higher than I expected. I did a cost of living comparison to Spain, and found that Costa Rica and Spain had similar costs of living. In Spain, we would be able to obtain residence visas and send our kids to public schools, which would be a significant cost savings with four school-aged children. We also had always planned on doing a multi-country European trip with the kids at some point, and realized that if we lived in Spain, we would be able to travel all around Europe. My husband even had some job connections there, which may give us some more options. It was looking more and more like Spain was going to the right country for us.

 

Where to live?

We settled in on Spain in mid-2015 and then had a while to think about where in Spain we wanted to live. We immediately ruled out any area that spoke another language in addition to Spanish, such as Catalonia and the Basque region. From my time studying abroad in Ireland, I knew that schools pushed minority languages really hard to try to preserve them, and I wanted our kids to just be able to focus on Spanish in school. My husband had some potential job leads in the Madrid suburbs, but when those didn’t pan out, we realized we could pick where to live, which was an overwhelming prospect.

Many expats live in the south of Spain, which has excellent weather. I was drawn at first to Sevilla since they have invested heavily in bike paths. We bike commute year round at home and since we won’t have a car in Spain, I wanted the option to travel by bike while we are living there. The weather in Sevilla is wonderful most of the year, but it is miserably hot in the summer, so it seemed like it may be hard to arrive there during the summer and get to know our new city. We wanted to make sure everyone has a pleasant first impression.

I also did a lot of research on Madrid, since I love the idea of living in a big city and it has a great public transportation network. As I thought more about it, I realized that Madrid was what I wanted, but not necessarily what was going to make sense for our family. We want our kids to get involved in a lot of activities to fully integrate into the Spanish culture, and with such a big city everything is quite spread out and sports fields tend to be on the outskirts of the city. The life I had pictured of hopping the metro to visit the Prada while the kids were in school would likely evolve into trying to get four kids in four different directions to various activities far away from where we would be living. Housing for a family of six may also be a challenge and would cost far more than we would pay elsewhere in the country. I also heard that air pollution in Madrid is an issue and since I have asthma, was concerned about living somewhere that may cause on going health issues.

I did some other searches and eventually settled in on a small inland city with inexpensive rents and many activities for kids. There are very few expats there so we will all be forced to integrate fully into Spanish culture. It seemed like it had everything we were looking for, and my initial inquiries with some people there reassured me that it would be a welcoming place for our family.

 

How are we affording this?

Our original plan was to take a break from working during our time abroad since finding jobs abroad seemed very complicated. Since we have been planning this for several years, we have been saving and knew that if we rented our place back home, we would be able to afford a short-term stay in a country with a lower cost of living. When we decided on Spain, my husband realized he had some job connections there, so we started considering the possibility of him working while we lived abroad. Those leads did not pan out, but he has talked to his current place of employment and is planning to be working remotely during our time abroad. I will likely be doing some remote work as well during this time, either for my current place of employment or elsewhere.

We will be getting non-lucrative visas which do not allow us to work in Spain, but we have read on other blogs that many people are able to obtain these visas when they are working remotely. Others have said that you aren’t allowed to work remotely and need to show that you have enough savings to support yourself. Since we had the required amount in savings, our plan was to not mention working remotely during the visa process unless explicitly asked and see how it goes.

 

Why blog?

Throughout this process, reading blogs of others who have moved to Spain with their families has been enormously valuable, especially Bucking the Trend and Wagoners Abroad. I want to educate others on the visa process and be a resource for those who want to try something similar. I am also hoping this will help family and friends from back home keep up with us, and will serve as a record of our time abroad after we return.