Day 34: Local Logistics

Dear 40 Days To Your New Life In Europe Student,

Today we’re going to tackle a few different aspects of setting up your life once you’ve arrived… specifically:

• Getting your utilities hooked up…
• Opening a local bank account…
• Dealing with car administration…

The truth is, the getting-settled administration wherever you decide to launch your new life overseas won’t be insignificant… and it won’t come without challenges and frustrations.

Because, boiled down, what you’re doing is creating a new life in a matter of weeks. You created your old life over… well, a lifetime. And with a lot of help.

If you grew up in the United States, for example, you received your Social Security number at birth (without much personal effort).

You probably got your driver’s license at 16 with the help of your parents. You likely opened a bank account (or had one opened for you, again with the help of your parents), again, sometime during high school.

You bought your first car and insured it… you got your first passport (or your parents got it for you)… eventually you moved into a place of your own… where you had to arrange for electricity, cable, internet, and telephone… and furniture…

You did all these things over two or more decades (probably).

Now, in your new overseas home, you’re going to try to recreate your administrative life… while also establishing legal residency… within just a few weeks or months. You’re going to attempt to do this perhaps in a language you don’t fully comprehend. And without the support infrastructure of family and friends you’ve just left behind.

Further, like everything else in your new home, arranging for electricity, telephone, cable, internet, and other services you may need to support your day-to-day life may not be as straightforward an exercise as you might hope.

Representatives scheduled to appear Tuesday may show up Thursday… or not at all. Services scheduled to be installed next week probably won’t be. When she recently moved from one apartment to another in Paris, our daughter went without Wi-Fi at home for two months because of the inane way the company scheduled visits… in the end, they never came and she never got the internet hooked up. She had to cancel the subscription—which took multiple formal letters and months of follow ups to be reimbursed for the directly debited months of no service—and opened a contract with a different company.

We make these points not to overwhelm you, but to try to put things into perspective. This is a big agenda item. Set your expectations about accomplishing it accordingly.

And approach it in steps…