Everyone talks about what it takes to move to Spain. The visa process, finding a home, setting up a bank account, learning where to buy groceries. That’s where the excitement is and honestly, that’s where most of our energy goes too. But hardly anyone talks about what it takes leaving the US. What it takes to wrap up your life here. And the more we’ve worked through it ourselves, the more we’ve realized how easy it is to underestimate.
One thing we’d say to anyone in the early stages of planning: you can never start this too early.
It’s not that any individual item is complicated. It’s that there are so many of them, spread across so many different areas of your life, that they’re easy to lose track of. Mail that no longer reaches you. A bank account that gets flagged because of foreign transactions. A driver’s license that expires while you’re still trying to get your Spanish one. Documents you suddenly need apostilled and have no idea how to get from abroad.
We started building out a complete guide to this — category by category — and what began as a simple checklist turned into something much more substantial. Here’s a quick sense of what’s actually involved:
Some items — apostilling documents, renewing a passport, finding an expat tax advisor — benefit from months of lead time. Others happen in the final weeks. The goal is to work through it on a timeline that isn’t rushed.
We’ve put together a full guide with everything broken down section by section, plus a downloadable printable checklist you can work through and check off as you go. It’s one of the more comprehensive resources on the site and genuinely something we wish had existed when we started planning.
Check out our comprehensive overview content on Leaving The US, as well as our downloadable checklist to help you close out life here in the US.