How we Moved Abroad With Four Kids Under Six

It’s a runway, not a leap.

A few weeks ago I posted a reel that did something none of my reels had done before. It took off. The comments and DMs that followed all asked some version of the same question: how did you actually do this?

I want to answer it properly, because the short answer doesn’t really do it justice. The real version is longer, less dramatic, and likely more useful.

First, a correction. We didn’t move to Italy exclusively. We’re living abroad for the next few years, moving every few months with a program called Boundless Life. Pistoia is just the first stop.

The most important thing I can tell you about how we did this is that this didn’t happen quickly. It looks like a leap from the outside. But it wasn’t a leap, it was a long road to get here. But it did start with a decision and a line in the sand.

It’s a runway, not a leap

We booked our spot with Boundless over a year in advance. That’s the visible part. The invisible part started years before.

Chris is an attorney and entrepreneur who owns his law firms. Over the last four years he slowly structured his businesses to run without him at the office every day. He built a strong culture that didn’t rely on him. He hired an operator. He moved his role to remote where he could. He built systems that didn’t depend on him being in a specific office on a specific day. Four years of the unsexy grind so that one day he could close his laptop in Pistoia and his firm could continue running and growing.

I’m a family physician. I spent my 20s in med school and residency and amassed a fortune in debt in the process. Then we started a family and my priorities changed. As we started having kids, I started stepping back. Full-time became part-time. Part-time became as-needed shifts. I’m still technically employed by my company. I just rarely work and consider my situation more of a “prolonged sabbatical”. I have no doubt I will come back to medicine someday in a form that works for my family.

Our “leap”, if you can call it that, is when we made the decision to live life differently than what was prescribed for us. The decision was our line in the sand and it was scary as hell (still is sometimes). Then things started to fall into place.

By the time we booked the program in Italy, we’d spent years building our work lives around it. We didn’t quit anything. We didn’t burn it down. We slowly built our careers and lives to fit our vision for our family and our future.

If you’re reading this and thinking about doing something like this, the most useful thing I can tell you is to start now. Draw your own line in the sand. You don’t have to leave tomorrow. But you can start and you can do it. The runway is the whole thing and you have to start to get anywhere.

What Boundless is

Boundless is a program for families who want to live abroad without doing it alone. They handle the housing, the school, and the logistics that would have taken us a year of Google searches. You travel as part of a cohort of other families, so when you land in a new country you already have a community there. Your kids already have classmates.

We could have tried to do this ourselves. Trying to figure out four kids’ school enrollment/childcare, long term rentals in foreign countries, and a community of other families to do this with, but that would have ended the project before it started. Boundless made it possible for us. Now that we’ve done this, we might go out on our own in the future but for now, Boundless checks all the boxes and makes a very challenging process easy.

The plan

We’re not just doing Italy. We’re moving every three months for the next few years, through a handful of countries on different continents. We choose the Boundless locations that interest us. Then we show up.

We can’t book the full multi-year plan yet. Boundless releases cohorts in waves, and visa rules have to be carefully considered when planning out locations. Many are European cohorts and cannot be done back to back due to the Schengen rules for visitor visas (we are allowed 90 days within a 180 day period). Some families are able to bypass this rule by getting digital nomad visas for countries like Spain or Greece (we are looking into this for maybe next year — will keep you posted!)

So we’re booked as far as we’re able and figuring out the rest as we go. We’ll share each location as we land. One of the beautiful things about this life is that we never know what will happen, who we’ll meet, what we’ll learn, and where we’ll end up.

The kids

They are 1, 2, 4, and 5. (I know.) All boys.

The three older ones are in the Boundless program school. They go to school with kids from the other families in our cohort, so they have built-in classmates wherever we land. The youngest wasn’t quite 18 months when this cohort started, so he’ll join in the next one.

The boys love school and made best friends almost immediately, the way kids do. Faster than the adults, honestly. (Though the adult version of this is its own kind of gift, because the families who sign up for something like Boundless are pretty self-selecting. Everyone here is interesting and a little brave and willing to be uncomfortable, which makes for a much better community than the one you get by accident.)

What I didn’t expect, and what’s been one of the best parts so far, is how quickly they’ve integrated into local life in Pistoia. Our oldest joined soccer practices with the local kids’ team. The boys started jiujitsu. Boundless has coordinated a bunch of ECAs (extra-curricular activities) in the community and it’s made us feel even more we actually live here.

The house question

We have a house in the US that we didn’t sell. We also didn’t rent it out. For our first cohort, we’ve left it sitting there ready for us to come back to.

That was the security blanket version of the plan, and I think it was the right call for our first cohort. Going through this much change at once and also dismantling our entire home base felt like too many variables. We needed one thing to be stable.

We’re not staying in that holding pattern forever. The house is the most active conversation we’re having right now. If you’re considering something similar, my advice is don’t try to optimize the house decision in the first few months (if you are able). Give yourself permission to keep one foot on the ground while you figure out whether the rest of it actually works. You can always sell later. You can’t easily un-sell.

What it costs

I’ll point you to the Boundless cost calculator for the actual numbers. What I’ll add is the context that doesn’t show up in a calculator.

The Boundless fee looks scary on a spreadsheet. What it doesn’t show is what you’re not spending during those months. We’re not paying for daycare for four kids. We’re not running two cars. We’re not doing the weekly Target trips. We’re not paying for the random extra activities and birthday party gifts and all the soft costs of American family life that quietly add up to more than we want to admit. But of course, we’re still eating out, taking small trips, buying things from Amazon.it when we need it.

It’s not cheap. But it’s also not the inaccessible luxury people assume when they see a family of six doing this. From our experience and from the people we’ve met, it’s very doable, especially if you start years in advance. (See again: the runway.)

The hardest part

It’s scary.

It’s uncomfortable in ways you don’t expect. You don’t have the food you grew up on. You don’t have your bed. You don’t have your people ten minutes away. You don’t have the language or the cultural cues or the muscle memory of knowing which aisle anything is in.

Those are the obvious losses but they’re not the hardest part for me.

The hardest part is that stepping off the path I’m “supposed” to be on and it feels I’m like doing something wrong, even when I know it’s right. There’s a cultural script for what a Canadian/American family with four small kids is supposed to be doing, and we are not doing it. The pull of that script is stronger than I expected. I feel it in the offhand comments from people who don’t quite understand. I feel it in my own brain at 2am when I wonder if I’m being selfish or reckless or both.

Nobody warns you about that part. The logistics are hard but they’re solvable. The cultural undertow of “you’re supposed to be doing what everyone else is doing” is the part that takes real work to push through.

The why

We only live once. Our kids only get one childhood.

We didn’t want the version where we get two weeks of vacation a year and spend the rest of it on autopilot, shuttling kids between activities and catching glimpses of them between work calls. We wanted the version where the day-to-day is the point.

That’s it. That’s the whole why.

Where we go from here

I’m going to keep writing as we go. Each location gets its own blog posts, its own honest version of what worked and what didn’t. If you want to follow along, the blog and the Instagram are both yours.

If you’re seriously considering doing something like this, my DMs are open. I’m not an expert and I can’t tell you whether it’s right for your family. But I can tell you what we did, what we’d do differently, and what we wish someone had told us. We have had some incredible people inspire us to start this journey, and it feels only right to keep passing the torch.

And if the idea is rattling around in your head, the only thing I’ll say one more time is: start now.