every single step we took to move abroad to Amsterdam

“What brought you to Amsterdam?”

We get this question all the time, and it really seems to throw people off that our answer isn’t “One of our jobs” or “To be near family in the area” or anything other than our honest answer, which is: “We visited, fell in love with the city, and agreed we’d both be interested in moving here, so we did.”

To us, though, it’s pretty simple. Since my partner and I started dating in 2012, we always talked about living abroad one day. A decade later, after an anniversary trip to Amsterdam, we decided that “one day” had arrived and it was time to make our move. And so, in November 2022, we officially entered our immigrant era.

Of course, the process was a bit more complicated than that. But on the whole, at least in our experience, moving from the U.S. to the Netherlands was not nearly as difficult as most people seem to expect based on the avalanche of questions I’ve gotten from people about it since we did so.

If you’ve ever daydreamed about running off to live in Europe or wondered how moving abroad might actually work, here’s a step-by-step guide to exactly how we moved from America to Amsterdam (with our 70-pound dog!) without totally losing our shit—forms, links, and printable checklist included.