How You Can Move Abroad As a Couple and Find Work or Start a Business

When I first moved abroad with my boyfriend at the time, I was determined not to be a ‘trailing spouse,’ (or girlfriend to be more accurate): not for any sort of high moral reason you understand, but because I didn’t want to be bored or skint!  I was young enough not to be too worried about going in search of a career immediately, but not young enough to be happy doing a really menial job having paid my way through university and then even further education…

Without really thinking about it, I knew I’d get a job and as it was a fairly affluent time globally, (unlike now), and I was moving to a centre of strong employment, my conviction that I would find a job easily paid off!  However, I appreciate now that I was very, very lucky.  What’s more, I have a good friend who is currently in a similar position to where I was all those years ago, and she is finding it nigh on impossible to gain employment abroad.

Now, whilst a lot depends on you, your skills and where in the world you’re moving to, if you are of working age and you and your partner want to move abroad together, how can you move abroad as a couple and find work or start a business together?  There have to be ways right?  Right – and we’re here to give you some good ideas and some pointers and tips to help you on your way.

Help!  We Want to Move Abroad Together…

In many relocations involving working age people, one or other in the partnership has secured work overseas, the visa to go with the job offer and is hell bent on making the move.  However, there is often a sticking point that is reached at this juncture – and that is, the other person in the partnership wants to move too, but has not been offered a job in the same location!  It’s very common.

Another common pattern you find is that both individuals in a marriage or partnership have a strong desire to relocate overseas, but both are still at an age where they need to work for a living and to pay into a pension!  So, again, it’s the case that both need to secure work overseas in order for the move to be a successful one.  However, finding one job is hard enough, finding two in the same place in a new country can be quite a challenge.

There’s that old adage, ‘it’s easier to get a job when you’re in a job’ – and to that we’d like to add Shelter Offshore’s twist ‘it’s easier to get a job abroad when you’re living abroad!’  In other words, whilst you certainly can work on getting a job before you relocate, if your partner already has a job offer and is ready to move, you may well find it is easier for you to get your own job once you have relocated overseas.  This is because: -

a) You will get an idea of the lay of the land and which companies or opportunities are ‘easy’ for you to get to depending on where you end up living overseas.
b) You will discover who is employing, which companies or businesses you could target with your CV.
c) You will meet new people who will be able to tell you about who’s hiring, where you might be able to meet the personnel officer of a given company and how you could go about adapting your skills and CV to match a given position – note, we don’t advocate you fabricate skills or your CV, but sometimes, if your CV is written in such a way to get you a specific job, if a role comes up that you are perfectly qualified for and would love to apply for, you may need to re-jig your CV to emphasise other aspects of your skill-set!
d) You can spend time going from company to company, recruiter to recruiter and literally knocking on doors and making yourself known.
e) You can read the local papers and look at adverts in windows offering positions for hire…

All of these realities can be of help to someone who is moving abroad with their partner and who wants to find a job of their own.

What if Neither Partner Has a Job Offer…But Both Want to Move Abroad?

If you’re in the position that you and your partner want to relocate sooner rather than later and neither of you has a job, then there are a lot of routes open to you, but you owe it to yourselves and your financial future to tread carefully.  For example, you might think you should just sell up, move and take a punt – this could work for you, but you need to be in a financially secure position to take such a ‘risk’ otherwise you could risk losing everything!  This is perhaps a move that those without dependents and liabilities such as a mortgage would find easier to make.  That said, if you do have ‘responsibilities’ you can still make such a move work…

Firstly you need to research the country you’re moving to and determine how likely it is that you will need to learn a new language to get into the job marketplace.  Then you need to see whether your skills and qualifications are transferrable to that nation, or whether you will need to undergo exams for example, in order to be able to practice your profession abroad.  You need to look around (using the Internet) to see what sorts of jobs are open and available that you could apply for.  Then you need to examine the salary aspect of the job, and see whether that would be sufficient to fund your lifestyle.  You need money in the bank to fund your move abroad, to support you for a period of a few months without employment, and then to pay for a relocation back to the UK if it doesn’t work out for you.  With this groundwork done, and with a financial cushion in place, you should be very well placed to move abroad and find work.

If however, during your research you discover that actually, you can’t practice your profession abroad or you have to learn a foreign language to stand a chance of a job, at least you will be forewarned and forearmed and can prepare as you need to prepare to find and secure paying employment overseas.  It may be a case of you having language lessons before you go.  It may be a case of you slightly modifying the town or city location you initially decided upon if there are no jobs there…or perhaps you could decide that a move abroad is a chance for you to both sack the boss and start afresh as a self-employed partnership?

A New Life Abroad – A New Career Direction

For some people the chance to move abroad is the chance to start a new venture in life – and if this sounds like you, then what about starting your own business venture abroad?  Maybe you and your partner have a skill-set that lends itself to a new business idea – or perhaps you’re aware of an opening for a company in the location you’re thinking of moving to?  The key is finding out what demand there is for your business idea in the location you’ve chosen for your relocation.

Perhaps an ice cream shop in Alaska would be a bad idea, just as another bar or restaurant in a tourism hotspot on the Med might not make you the fortune you’d love to earn – however, maybe there is some skill you have that you could introduce to a new community or a commodity you could import to or export from your new location.  Maybe you and your partner are professionals and you could start your own consultancy?

You need to look into the reality that you can make money with your business in your new location – but you also need to factor in set up costs and perhaps running at a loss for up to 18 months if you want to take the most realistic overview of what could happen!  Most new businesses fail within the first 12 – 24 months, so if you know you can ride out whatever is thrown at you during that period of getting established, you stand a good chance of being successful.  You need to understand any liabilities for reporting, your tax obligations, the bureaucracy associated with registering your business, any licenses you need; you need to work out how much it will cost to set up from scratch, or how much it will cost to buy a working business and ultimately, you need to do some hard work and research into working out the viability of your business.

All too often people launch themselves into their dream of a new life abroad without doing any of the boring groundwork – it’s these people who fail to make it work, who end up in the financial doldrums and who come home and whinge that it’s not possible to make a go of it overseas.  Don’t follow that trend!  It’s really quite straightforward to go abroad and be successful – you simply have to work hard at the research, groundwork and planning that goes into every successful move you ever make in life and you will put yourself in the best position possible for success.  Okay, so you need lady luck to shine on you too – but who’s to say she won’t?

In Conclusion – You Can Do It!

As I hope I have shown, a bit of hard work and a bit of determination as well as some planning are what need to go into your move abroad if employment or starting a business are key to your successful relocation.  Unless you’re lucky enough to be very wealthy or to be about to retire overseas, you’re probably going to want to earn yourself an income when you relocate abroad – so be prepared not only for what will have to go into your search, but for the fact that it is not as easy as it once was to find a job as there is no country in the world untouched by what really has been a global recession.  However, whilst it may now be harder to make your dreams of a new job or a new career abroad come to fruition, it is not impossible!