Welcome Aboard -

The brochure price of a new life abroad is rarely the real one. Doreen looks at the true cost of living, banking and currency swings across borders, finding health insurance and local care, and why a cushion for the unexpected may be the best thing you pack.Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you.Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.nomadicdiariespodcast.comWe would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

How you leave shapes how you land. Doreen explores why saying goodbye well, to people, places, pets and possessions, matters as much as any arrival, and shares simple leaving rituals that help you close the door without slamming it.Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you.Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.nomadicdiariespodcast.comWe would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

The paperwork is the part of moving abroad everyone underestimates. Doreen covers why you should start visas and residency earlier than you think, which papers people forget, and why one red folder and a visit in the season you dread most can save you a world of trouble.Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you.Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.nomadicdiariespodcast.comWe would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

The honeymoon always ends, often in a queue at the bank. Doreen explains why the frustration that follows is normal, not failure, and shares one simple tool for getting through the hard weeks.Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you.Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.nomadicdiariespodcast.comWe would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

You will rarely feel ready to move abroad, and that’s exactly the point. Doreen looks at the gap between fear and readiness, shares stories of people who moved later in life or against the odds, and offers small acts of courage that prove to yourself what’s possible.Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you.Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.nomadicdiariespodcast.comWe would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from What does “permanent” really mean when you move abroad? Doreen looks at why people go, how a chosen move differs from a company posting, and the one question to ask yourself before you commit.Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you. Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.We would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

Two suitcases, 31 days, one letter at a time. In this opening episode, Doreen explains why every move abroad is really two journeys, the one you can map and the one you can’t, and invites you to ask yourself where you are on the road right now. Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad is a 31-day NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. In ten-minute episodes, Doreen Cumberford draws on fifty years of life across eight countries and four continents to guide you from the first thought of moving to the long road home. Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you. Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds: a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.We would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

Fifty years. Eight countries. Two suitcases. Now 31 days.Welcome to Launch to Landed: The A to Z of Life Abroad, a NaPodPoMo series from Nomadic Diaries. Every day this November, Doreen Cumberford brings you one ten-minute episode, built around one letter. The series runs from the first “what if we moved abroad?” to the homecoming nobody warns you about.Whether you’re dreaming, packing, living abroad or heading home, there’s a letter for you.New episodes daily, 1 to 30 November. Follow so you don’t miss one.nomadicdiariespodcast.comWe would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

About our GuestSimon D. spent fifteen years running his own renovation business in Hamilton, Ontario, before he and his wife swapped Canadian life for Belize in 2022, a country they first fell for on their babymoon. Leaving his trade behind, he turned to content writing just as large language models arrived, and rather than retreat, he went all in. Today he helps founders and small businesses build AI integrations and automations, hosts the podcast Foreign Radio, and writes about life abroad on Substack. His newest project, MoveSmart, brings those two worlds together: an AI tool built to help people decide where in the world they might thrive.What You’ll Walk Away WithDoreen and Simon explore self-initiated expatriation and the gap between the holiday version of a place and the lived one. Simon describes a pattern he sees again and again in Belize: people sell everything, ship their belongings, build a house, and are gone within eight to twelve months. His own family took two and a half years to feel truly at home. He talks about smashing the rose-coloured glasses, from months of sargassum on the beach to the quaint old town where you can never find parking, and shares a wonderfully telling story about high- and low-context communication at the immigration office, where the right question unlocked a stack of paperwork the wrong one never would have. An honest conversation about building and using your own judgement when moving overseas. Connect with Simon Email Simon at [email protected] can find him on Substack at Simo’s Substack, read his AI writing at BotBot, and connect with him on LinkedIn as Simon D.https://simod.me/https://movesmart.world/Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds — a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.We would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

Don’t Transplant Your Life, Translate It: Repatriating to Poland Lucyna Boland left Poland already asking where she could go next. Twenty years later she had lived in the United States, Germany, England, Spain and France. She had built a career in corporate learning and talent development, married a Canadian and started a family. Then, during the pandemic and while grieving her father, she felt a pull home she couldn’t quite explain. Within a week, the family had decided to move into her mother’s attic flat. Today Lucyna is an expat coach and a fractional learning and performance partner. She lives in a house built on the very plot where, as a girl, she was embarrassed to pick potatoes beside her dad.What You’ll Walk Away WithLucyna never called it going back. Poland had changed, and so had she, so she set out to build a new home in her old one. She admits to feeling like an outsider in her mother tongue, unable to joke or let go in Polish. People also asked her about her own country, and often she couldn’t answer.You’ll hear what the move meant for her husband. He found Poland’s endless calendar of celebrations exhausting, yet sums it up in one line: here, things work. You’ll also learn how their trilingual family keeps three languages alive with a few simple rules.If you’re facing a repatriation that feels harder than expected, Lucyna shares a practical tool. When she’s tempted to book a flight out, she rereads her written list of the six reasons she came back. She also explains why, as a coach, she rarely gives advice, and why she still hasn’t “landed” and doesn’t mind.At the heart of it is the phrase that lingered after we stopped recording: "don’t transplant your life, translate it".  The soil is different, so your joys need a new language to grow.Connect with the GuestExpats, repats and anyone with more than one home can find Lucyna at lucynaboland.com. Recruitment agencies will find her on LinkedIn, where she posts every day.Share this episode with someone who’s standing at one of those thresholds — a new country, a return home, or simply a life that’s asking them to become someone they haven’t quite met yet.We would love to hear from you, send us a text please!Support the showYou can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.