XP:moving internationally

[UnderProtest]

Oh, make sure you get an allowance to cover new warmer winter clothes. Edinburgh is COLD! It is a really nice city though.

[Brit]

Make sure that your cost of housing will be supplemented (or income increased) so that you are not paying extra for housing. Also make sure that the company will equalize tax liability to keep you whole.

If you have children and private school is a concern, that needs to be covered in your negotiation. (For example I moved to a place with no public schools, so my company pays for private school since I would not normally have that expense at home.)

Check on what happens with a 401K, IRAs, etc. On a true expat assignment, you will likely still be able to have 401K benefits, but if it is a local hire assignment you may need to be paid extra to compensate for lost savings power due to no 401K eligibility.

Cost of living supplement: If the cost of living is higher in your host location, you want an income supplement to keep your buying power whole.

In short, make sure that you will be financially whole. If you will not be, make sure that you value the experience enough that you are ok with it.

[loira]

I've no experience with being reassigned, but make sure they don't screw your H on annual leave. Minimum annual leave in the UK is 20 paid days per year, which might already sound like heaven if your H gets the (sub)standard US 2 weeks, but many companies offer 25-30 paid days per year plus bank holidays. You'll want him to have lots of holiday time for the kids' term time and to take awesome European trips. Good luck! I love Edinburgh!

[anna7602]

May 19, 2015 14:47:39 GMT -5 loira said:

I've no experience with being reassigned, but make sure they don't screw your H on annual leave. Minimum annual leave in the UK is 20 paid days per year, which might already sound like heaven if your H gets the (sub)standard US 2 weeks, but many companies offer 25-30 paid days per year plus bank holidays. You'll want him to have lots of holiday time for the kids' term time and to take awesome European trips. Good luck! I love Edinburgh!

Ah, I forgot all about this when I answered your post in MMM. DD had two weeks off from school for every six weeks she was in school when we were living abroad. It came out to something like 8 weeks all school year. DH didn't get all of this time off, but he was able to get away with us on a few vacations, something that would have eaten up all of his available vacation time and then some in the U.S., but that was part of his re-negotiating about 8 or 9 months into his international assignment. 

[fbf2006]

May 19, 2015 14:47:39 GMT -5 loira said:

I've no experience with being reassigned, but make sure they don't screw your H on annual leave. Minimum annual leave in the UK is 20 paid days per year, which might already sound like heaven if your H gets the (sub)standard US 2 weeks, but many companies offer 25-30 paid days per year plus bank holidays. You'll want him to have lots of holiday time for the kids' term time and to take awesome European trips. Good luck! I love Edinburgh!

I responded to you on MM but this is so true! I'm still trying to get used to the 26 paid days plus 8 public/bank holidays I have. As loira said, make sure they don't screw you on that! We visited Edinburgh in November last year, it's a lovely city. I really don't think you should add a clothing allowance into your negotiations unless it's already common at your husband's workplace. It just strikes me as quite odd, but who knows.

[origami]

I've never heard of a clothing allowance before, but we got a lump sum that is based on the # of people in your family that we were to use for incidentals like small appliances, restocking the kitchen, etc. We could have used that for clothes, if necessary.

[origami]

Oh I just remembered. I haven't used this yet since it happens upon repatriation, but my DH's company has some sort of career assistance for the trailing spouse. I think it's just resume writing and a few little things like that. Not like a job or anything awesome, but hey. I thought I'd mention that since you'd also be quitting or going PT.

[pittpurple]

You won't need a clothing allowance but there's no real need to bring a huge summer wardrobe - unless you want to do lots of travelling. Also no real need probably to bring your very, very cold clothing. It hardly ever snows here. It's basically from 40 degrees F to 60 degrees F pretty much year round.

There are so, so many places you can get to easy/cheap from Edinburgh Airport - just came back from a weekend in Barcelona and heading to Copenhagen next month. Definitely one of my favourite things about living here (I get 36 days plus 10 days over Christmas off a year!)

[fbf2006]

May 20, 2015 5:13:45 GMT -5 RockNVoll said:

May 20, 2015 3:43:21 GMT -5 pittpurple said:

There are so, so many places you can get to easy/cheap from Edinburgh Airport - just came back from a weekend in Barcelona and heading to Copenhagen next month. Definitely one of my favourite things about living here (I get 36 days plus 10 days over Christmas off a year!)

WOW!  And here I was thrilled to go from 20 vacation days in the U.S. to 25 in London

I know right ?. My 26 seems so low compared to 36! Lol

[GilliC]

Since what you negotiate for depends on what you want/need, I'll just tell you what I've gotten in my last two international transfers:

Visas -- The company contracts a relocation company to take care of all of the paperwork and fees related to visas for the employee and family.

Househunting -- Depending on the timeline of the move, the employee either gets a 1-week househunting trip to find a place in advance, or a month in temporary housing upon arrival. In both cases, the company provides relocation services to assist with this. (When we moved to Norway, our relocation agent was terrible, so we actually just found a place on our own.)

Housing -- In Beijing, they paid this directly to my landlord. We got a budget based on seniority and family size, and some people chose places under budget and negotiated with their landlord to include utilities or even housekeeping in the "rent" so that it came out of the allowance. In Norway, the allowance was paid out in my paycheck. Here they gave an extra percentage on top of the allowance to help offset the high local taxes (so if your allowance was 10,000 NOK, you'd get 12,000 because after tax you only take home 7,200 of that). Norway is a bit different from a lot of locations in our company, because they allow you to use the allowance towards a mortgage. However, if you decide to buy, you stop getting the extra tax-offset money.

Furnishings -- When we moved to Beijing, we rented a furnished apartment, so the company paid for storage in the US. We also got an allowance of around $1000 (reimbursable with receipts) for additional furnishings (linens, dishes, etc). For the move to Norway, the company paid to ship all of our belongings here, and we didn't get an additional allowance. Which kind of sucks, because the voltage difference meant that we had to replace a lot of household appliances (kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaner, etc).

Education -- I have no children, but if I did, the company would cover their international school tuition.

Salary premium -- Beijing was considered a hardship location at the time, and I got an extra 10% on top of my salary. In Norway, my contract was considered mobile, so they could have moved me out whenever they wanted, so I got a 15% premium as compensation for the mobility. This is on top of my salary, which was adjusted here in Norway based on cost of living. My base salary here is comparable by local CoL standards to what I was making in the US. In China, which had a much lower CoL, my base salary remained the same.

Home travel -- Our home travel allowance was determined by the average cost of a full-fare economy ticket to my home airport for each member of the family. This varies a lot by company. In our company, it's a fixed amount of money, and you have to spend it on transportation for you or your family (including parents and siblings). We don't have to use this money to actually travel "home," so we spent it on vacations.


Tax assistance -- This also varies by location and contract. In China, the company paid the local income taxes on my behalf. In Norway, I pay them myself. However, in all cases, they provide some tax preparation assistance. In our company, they pay someone to do your US tax return for the years that you move to or from the US. For all of the years in between, we have to do our own US tax returns (or pay for it ourselves). The company also pay someone to do the local taxes.

Medical insurance -- In China, the company provided full ex-pat health insurance so that we could go to the expensive ex-pat hospitals. In Norway, international employees have an option for supplemental insurance on top of national healthcare. While I'm generally pleased with the national healthcare here, it took some time to learn how it worked, and I wish we'd started out with the optional supplemental insurance (we had to make this decision as soon as we arrived, and our HR rep really didn't explain enough for us to make an informed decision).

Retirement savings -- When I left US payroll, I was no longer eligible to contribute to a 401K. Our company has an international pension plan, but this is generally pretty useless if you don't stay mobile and bounce from place to place, because I really only paid into the plan for 5 years. I think I'll get something back in the end, but it won't be much. Here in Norway, I also pay into Norwegian social security, which isn't bad. (I had to stop contributing to my Roth IRA, because the income cut-off is based on modified AGI, which adds back in all the foreign income exclusions. So the housing/travel/etc pushed my modified AGI over the limit.)

Language courses -- Not really relevant for Edinburgh! We had private language classes in China, because it was cheap. In Norway they offered reimbursement for one basic level course.

Spouse's association -- Our company has a worldwide network for trailing spouses that arranges social activities. However, they do not include any job-finding support (beyond basic networking opportunities).

One thing our company does not cover, which would have been nice was pet relocation. It can easily cost $500-1000 to move a pet depending on the location.

[pittpurple]

May 20, 2015 7:17:00 GMT -5 fbf2006 said:

May 20, 2015 5:13:45 GMT -5 RockNVoll said:

WOW!  And here I was thrilled to go from 20 vacation days in the U.S. to 25 in London

I know right ?. My 26 seems so low compared to 36! Lol

It's made up of 28 holiday days (got the extra two days after I'd been at my job a while) plus 8 public holidays (we can use them whenever we want) - so like Victoria Day and whatnot. The place I work doesn't close for bank holidays, we just get them as part of our allowance. So probably the same as you in the end!

[Cicero]

If you want to be jealous, when we were in Kalaysia between H's PTO, holidays, and floating holidays you could take whenever he got something like 50 days off.

ETA: That should be Malaysia. I've never heard of this magical Kalaysia place.

[anna7602]

May 20, 2015 8:32:11 GMT -5 GilliC said:

Home travel -- Our home travel allowance was determined by the average cost of a full-fare economy ticket to my home airport for each member of the family. This varies a lot by company. In our company, it's a fixed amount of money, and you have to spend it on transportation for you or your family (including parents and siblings). We don't have to use this money to actually travel "home," so we spent it on vacations.

Wow, this is so dreamy. Our home travel allowance was "use it or lose it."

[GilliC]

May 21, 2015 8:54:04 GMT -5 anna7602 said:

May 20, 2015 8:32:11 GMT -5 GilliC said:

Home travel -- Our home travel allowance was determined by the average cost of a full-fare economy ticket to my home airport for each member of the family. This varies a lot by company. In our company, it's a fixed amount of money, and you have to spend it on transportation for you or your family (including parents and siblings). We don't have to use this money to actually travel "home," so we spent it on vacations.

Wow, this is so dreamy. Our home travel allowance was "use it or lose it."

Ours was also "use it or lose it," but we could spend it on any kind of transportation. This is why we ended up going to Perth for Christmas the first year we moved here. It was an "Oh shoot! We're way under budget!" moment, so we decided to go visit some of XH's old friends who'd moved to WA!