Choosing a country for a family: the criteria that actually decide

Most country comparisons start with tax and end with weather. Families who choose well start elsewhere, and the order of the questions is most of the method.

First: the constraints

Establish what is fixed before comparing anything.

• Passports held, and where they permit you to go without a programme at all.
• Ancestry, which may already entitle someone in the family to a citizenship.
• Language. Which languages the family has or can realistically acquire — this removes more countries than any other single factor.
• Where the income comes from, and whether it survives a move.
• Health needs now and foreseeable.

Second: the children

In practice this decides most moves and is usually discussed third.

• Curriculum continuity, and whether a qualification will be recognised where they might study next.
• Language of instruction against the language of the country.
• What status the child has at eighteen, in a system where dependants age out.
• University fees — domestic rate against international rate is the largest single number in many family calculations, and it follows from status rather than from residence.

Third: the status question

• Does time there accumulate into permanence, or does it not?
• What happens to the family's status if the principal's basis ends?
• Is there a route to citizenship, does the family want one, and what would it cost in renunciation or obligations?

Fourth: money

• Tax on the actual composition of your income, not the headline rate.
• Total cost of living including schooling and healthcare, which frequently reverses a tax comparison.
• What it costs to leave.

Fifth: everything else

Climate, food, community, distance from grandparents. These matter enormously to whether a family stays, and they are the things people over-weight at the start and under-weight when the decision is being made on a spreadsheet.

The exercise worth doing

Write the family's constraints on one page before looking at any country. Most of the shortlist eliminates itself, and what remains is a choice between three or four places rather than a comparison of thirty.