A surprisingly not rare sunrise view from my place 📷👆🏻
A personal background
Feel free to skip this section as it’s part of my own personal life story and the (totally sane, honestly) reasons leading up to the idea of moving (hopefully) permanently to a rural location that I had never visited. I’m not some kind of property magnate or investor either - I own 1 property, the one I now live in. It’s located in County Mayo, approximately 1 hour drive from the Atlantic Ocean, 3.5 hours drive west of Dublin. Prior to moving here I had visited Dublin a handful of times and nowhere else at all in the country.
In a time which now seems quite distant (2020-2021), I decided to do something which wasn’t remotely on my radar of future goals even 12 months prior - I relocated from England to Ireland. Simple, huh?
(Side note for technicalities and history: If you enjoy being confused but also like to be one of those people who enjoy smugly pointing out the technical incorrectedness of others, the nomenclature of the islands in the region is, well, confusing. Have a look at this succinct map. The full title of what you know as the UK or United Kingdom is “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. What is usually referred to as “Ireland” tends to be the Republic of Ireland and in the country itself is referred to as “the south” even though “the north”, ie Northern Ireland only takes up about one quarter of the island in the north eastern part geographically speaking. Thus, some of “the south” (Rep of) Ireland exists directly west of Northern Ireland. Going from the map, Ireland is entire island. Also, a point which I’m sure everyone in Ireland (Republic of) will hate is that Ireland (ie Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland) is actually part of the British Isles. If you don’t know why that might cause some anger, do go look up the history of Ireland especially with regard to the British planting flags in other peoples’ countries. Also “The Troubles” as it’s known. And also the potato famine. Note that Northern Ireland isn’t part of Great Britain. And the Isle of Man is hanging out there, chilling and mostly doing its own thing.)
Up to about 2019, had I met a future me and future me told me that I have moved to rural western Ireland, I would have said “You’re mad. Why on earth would I move there?” (I mean, I would also be questioning my sanity had I met a future me…)
But then in 2019, the world was a somewhat different place. For reasons.
In 2020, some things happened. Firstly was the C word thing. Secondly the last of my immediate family unit of four people died in June - my father, 91 and a half passed quickly from a known aneurysm. It was a hot summer, and he had been out mowing the lawn earlier in the day, gardening, resting and then doing his usual of getting 30 mins exercise a day done by way of a walk. I lived in Nottingham about 3 hours drive away. Apparently, he had called the emergency services saying he didn’t feel so well and the ambulance crew who arrived had started treating him for dehydration due to being in the sun for so long without water, because we’re bad at remembering to drink water. About 5 hours later he passed in a hospital bed being well cared for. If this reads very pragmatic of me, it is, because as much of an emotional being I can be, I have processed the grief mostly and a lot and Dad was incredibly pragmatic. Plus, I have a dark sense of humour. We all have to go eventually, and to be frank, if I get to pass in less than 5 hours being well looked after in a hospital bed, drugged up on morphine with barely a clue what’s going on, in an evening after enjoying a sunny afternoon, then that sounds like a pretty good way to go. Yes, of course I still miss him even though we weren’t that emotionally close. There is an extended family in southern England but I have barely had anything to do with them my entire life mostly due to geography but also I was never emotionally close to them. A recurring theme therein!
In addition, for not entirely clear reasons, I never really felt truly “at home” anywhere in England - Nottingham felt more like what felt like “me” than any other place until it didn’t, but even when Dad died I was still looking at moving to somewhere within the county of Nottinghamshire. Dad lived in the family home located in the town where I was born 48 years earlier - the parents had bought it new for about £9,000 - a fair amount of money for a house at the time, I believe. I had always had dreams of moving abroad.
Plus, what I would call the “madness” of Brexit happened. I’m one of those 48% of people (at the time) - “Remoaners” - who firmly believes that the idea of being more closely joined with ones neighbours, freedom of movement, free trade etc seems like a perfectly reasonable idea and seemed to be working remarkably well for the previous few decades. I mean, the UK was involved in setting up the European bloc post WWII (at least the European Council) so the whole idea of the referendum on leaving seemed to come out of nowhere and seemed to me to be entirely unnecessary. Of course it had problems but none that affected me or the people I loved or even remotely knew at all. No-one I knew felt their jobs had been “taken” by “immigrants”. The whole debacle became horrendously and insidiously divisive on a scale of racism that I hadn’t really been aware of for decades. That wasn’t “my country”. The then non-front page news about government think tanks using the services of a hitherto unknown company called Cambridge Analytica and the ideas of wanting to come out of the the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) without defining what it would be replaced with around the same time set off conspiracy theory alarms in my head and heart. I don’t really follow or enjoy conspiracy theories except on alien technology in ancient civilisations which seems a fun idea but even then it’s purely “fun”, I don’t really believe them remotely seriously. Certainly not to the level of conspiracy theorists’ ideas of the EU pushing towards a federal United States of Europe, or that the UK was being “overrun” by social welfare benefits seeking immigrants (note how no-one explained about how many people were emigrating at the same time). The idea that “we” had had enough of experts and their opinions too was worrying. The way the UK government had run the country even since I left has been troubling (at best). The lurch to the right, even by the left-leaning parties is troubling. The country, like a fair chunk of the world, seems to have gone mad and I don’t like it. There’s a little too much Orwellian 1984 newspeak being normalised.
So yes, I found a place to run away to and to disconnect in a number of ways.
Plus, the housing prices of a nice place in the country well away from the general population compared to the house prices (or comparable size and location for the budget I had) was too good to refuse.
Yes, I was affected by severe anxiety about catching something from the masses which might kill me. I developed asthma in 2017 and have always been a risk-analysis, anxious person - there are “nurture” reasons for that but I think it’s also in my nature. I do not think the whole Covid pandemic was dreamt up as a way by world governments to control the people. I do not think that vaccines contain nanobots to control our minds or track us - our devices do enough of that already. I am not a “prepper” as such, although I am enjoying and looking forward to becoming more self-sufficient as much as possible, but this is more about my desire and “nurture” for independence. I am mostly an introvert - I have spent the past 20ish years trying to find a way to fit into a social world, I have lived in a variety of cities and tried a variety of careers or jobs which required more of an outgoing, extroverted and/or outwardly confident manner. Although I do refer to myself as being on the introverted side of ambivert, the whole thing is rather exhausting. I love my privacy (he says laying bare his personality in text to the public internet!) I love silence. I love love LOVE my own space. I also now love the idea that finally I am living in a place where I can’t see or hear neighbours and they can’t see or hear me and even as “chatty” as the villagers may very well be - I absolutely knew they would know about me before I arrived, and I knew about my new neighbours before they arrived as well. Including how much they approximately paid for the houses. The local estate agent clearly doesn’t respect privacy! - the villagers tend to leave me be, which is wonderful.
As the person who ended up buying my family’s house said, “I think I’ve spent more time trying on clothes than I have spent in this house” before exchanging contracts on the purchase which is a very good and telling point. How many times do you see a house before buying it anyway?
How to buy a house (as a primary residence home) remotely
In short:
- find a house in a place you like
- research the hell out of said house and the local area, government, laws etc
- make an offer
- put a deposit down
- find a solicitor/conveyancer to do the legal bits
- have a thorough survey completed
- pay for house
- move in
Depending on the country you live in and/or move to, the technical / legal details will differ. I’m not about to cover that for the entire world - plenty of websites and blogs exist to help out there.
This is more offering some advice on how to find a place to live, especially when you don’t want to or can’t visit the location first for whatever reason (eg your chosen destination may not currently be allowing freedom of movement due to a global pandemic, or it’s stupidly expensive to rent whilst finding a place to go and is a waste of precious resources to you, such as time and money).
Step 1: Know thyself
Why do you want to move? Having a really, really, really clear view of exactly what location you would love to move to and why is absolutely key here. As the old saying goes finding a place to live consists of three aspects: Location, location, location.
Build the idea of your dream location - note I don’t say dream house. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to afford to buy or build a dream house, you can always do this over time anyway. It’s much harder to change the location.
Think about the aspects of a dream life living in your dream home and dream location that most appeal to you. You wont get perfect, no, but you might as well try to get as perfect as you can when investing the kinds of money we usually do in buying a home. Start at perfect life and discount aligned with prioritisation of needs.
Know whether you want easy access to culture, a social life, hustle and bustle, noise, working away from the house. Alternatively, know whether you want privacy, tranquillity and room to expand and to work from home. Maybe a bit of both. Know whether other aspects like healthcare access is important to you, shops for food and for clothing, DIY etc. Are you or will you be self-employed, be seeking additional income streams and in what way? What potential is there that these dreams come true? Do you prefer hot weather or cool? How important is local safety and security in terms of crime rates? Do you care about how the local or national land is governed?
Think about how you currently live your life - which aspects do you love? Which aspects do you like but would like to move into the “love” category? Which aspects do you not enjoy and what do you hate abhor about where you are now? What do you want to move away from and what do you want to move towards? What aspects do you think you can cultivate by yourself and what is less easily affected by your influence?
Step 2: Know thy world
Even for the hermits amongst us, we are very much affected by many external factors which impacts our happiness in our lives.
You can break down a perfect life into categories such as internal and external:
Personal (internal): As noted above, start listing out what brings you joy, peace, happiness, relaxation - the core of you and what you want. You will be sleeping, eating and loving (and probably stressed at some points) here for a while and it’s going to cost a lot of money to buy. Possibly to live in. So be clear on this above and before all else. If you wish you can prioritise or add a “weight” scoring system here - it may be useful later. Even simply 1-3, 1 being highest need. KISS your life (sorry, that was nauseating coachy of me): Keep it simple, stupid 😉
External factors: Effectively do a “PESTLE” analysis on your life needs and dream life desires - as with business so with life. For those who don’t know, this consists of considering current (and trying to predict the impact of the future states of) Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental aspects of the location(s) you do business in. As with business, so with life. I have used slightly different categories below but feel free to adapt as you see fit. It’s your life.
Environmental: As was pointed out in a helpful Reddit forum called MoveToIreland, I noted that at least one person possibly from the US was considering that impact of climate change over the next 30 years within their “budgeting” for moving here. Interesting. Worthy of consideration when we are facing untold heat waves, forest fires and warnings of air quality vast distances away, flooding, and that some previously affluent areas of the world may have a daily impactful shortage of potable water supply, including areas of South Africa and London. How will rising global temperatures, sea levels and changes to the flows in oceanic currents, access to water and food affect your future dream location within your lifetime? It depends how long you envisage living there and what happens if you have to move because the region has reached a moment of FUBAR. Yes, I have climate anxiety. Do you like hot weather at all? All year? Snow? 36 types of rain and dramatic winds? If yes to the latter, you’d love western Ireland….
You can, if like me, even go as far as finding a whole bunch of geological and weather based maps which will give you a good understanding of average rainfall, wind speeds, directions, check for flood plains. I even found official survey maps including layers for historical maps and can tell you the are was once covered in Oak tree before (I think) the bloody British came along and wanted to build a bunch of boats… I knew fairly well before coming here that it’s one of the windiest counties and its average rainfall is actually slightly less than my homelands of The Lake District in the UK where it rains a ridiculous amount of the time. I knew well that there wouldn’t be a risk of flooding. Because of the position between warm southerly air currents to the west (Atlantic) and cold northerly air currents (Irish Sea), it rains a LOT here so water isn’t going to be an issue. Sunlight is, though so I take Vitamin D in winter, lol.
Financial: This can range from how likely is it that house prices will rise or fall in that area - again, on the climate front, if the area is FUBAR-ed and house prices collapse, how fucked are you? Consider employment opportunities, tourism opportunities (if that’s important to your income stream ideas) - to the cost of living. Energy bill costs, food costs, insurance, water, etc etc. If you can, and you can if you try hard enough, create a budget for your intended shortlist of locations. Think about how much you spend on everything where you are now and then go find comparison sites at your intended location for services, and websites for food shopping to give at least a rough idea. Think about what happens if those prices increase by a silly amount. What I didn’t do was to consider what happens if Russia, which supplies a lot of Europe’s energy needs, invades a country which produces a lot of the world’s wheat and therefore food supply, and how does that affect energy prices and food prices. I did not budget for 50-100% increase in electricity supply and 10-20% increase in food costs in a year for example! Will you have contingency plans? Does the location you want to move to have a welfare system for financial supports if unpredictable things happen or life just doesn’t go to plan? Will you be able to access that if needed? Can you make enough money anyway? On energy prices you can look at how big the property is you’re considering and then find estimated annual energy consumption costs for that size, or simply input that data into energy comparison websites for a rough idea. Even consider how stable the government is - for those considering moving to Thailand or Russia for example, this may have a genuine impact on your quality of life and sellability of your property.
Social and Cultural: Personally I did actually consider how well received a British person would be when moving into a tiny Gaelic speaking region of rural Ireland. Especially considering not so ancient history of abuse by the British in the country and the local area itself. Turns out that at least on the face of it, the legendary friendliness of the Irish is accurate and there’s also a fair number of Brits living here already. Will you feel welcome at your desired location no matter how much or little you will interact with the locals? Does that matter to you? From a social perspective, how much social life do you want and in what form? Sunday dinner in a local pub? Nightclubbing? Music festivals? Food festivals? Concerts and gigs? Theatre be it am-dram or internationally acclaimed Shakespearean quality levels? Are you happy not speaking to another human for days, like a hermit?
Services: For example, access to basic services to live, electricity, water (potable and/or grey), healthcare, internet, phones (landline and mobile) etc. I don’t need to explain this in detail but in essence, how safe, secure and reliable are access to these existentially crucial services? What happens if there are shortages in any of them? Again on energy (I’m a bit obsessed), is the location suitable for solar and/or wind and/or other forms of renewable and self-sufficient micro-generation? Apparently Ireland with its cloud cover even where I am still makes solar viable although not entirely. Plenty of wood supply locally for heating and potentially cooking if all else fails too. Remember that wood is a renewable form of energy supply - weird to think of that like that if used to city life! Owning an electric vehicle outside of the main metropolitan areas in Ireland is still a bit of a challenge if you want to drive further than your car’s battery will allow in a day and requires some active planning.
Safety and Security: More from a crime perspective but also consider geo-political viewpoints as noted earlier. As it turns out, one thing I didn’t realise about Ireland is that it is sort of a neutral state. Trying to find out whether it is technically a neutral state is a bit harder than I thought, but it is, but it’s also not. According to the linked article there, it’s more like a “nuanced neutral”. What it isn’t, however, is in the thick of it geo-politically. Ireland does have an Army but not a very big one. It is involved in peace keeping operations but doesn’t seem to be considered to be a threat (or target) to anyone (?) It is democracy and currently isn’t weighed down by populist policy or “characters” other western countries are being plagued by. From a very local perspective, although Dublin is currently getting a fair amount of flak for being dangerous after a spate of attacks on tourists, at the other end of the scale the local police station was closed as they had nothing to do. Well, it was probably budget cuts in reality, but there really is nothing much of anything going on here that’s bad it seems. I don’t feel a need to lock my doors overnight, put it that way.
Governmental and Legal: As detailed earlier - how will changes in governments and policy affect your happiness? Hard to predict of course, but consider how likely it is that extreme lurches one way or another will happen. This ties into security and financial risks as well as cost of living. It seems in Ireland there are two main parties and barely anyone can tell the difference between the two politically, yet they hold on to power for decades so nothing much ever happens here - that’s both good and bad depending on your needs. I get the impression there’s no cultural desire to leave the EU.
Incidentally for the Brits who happen upon this piece, there is a fortunate irony about leaving the EU. Ironic as Ireland and the UK have had a reciprocal freedom of movement agreement in place since arguably the 1920s. More technically post WWII, I think. Anyway, there’s an agreement called the Common Travel Area which allows citizens to move to the other country without a need for a visa. There isn’t free trade because of Brexit vs EU now, but you can literally just move which is exactly what I did. I didn’t have a job but did have the funds to buy a house. You don’t need to be able to buy either, you can just rent. And live indefinitely. And vote and have access to healthcare, and welfare as if you were a citizen of that country. Also have access to education as a citizen and not face international university fees. I also believe that if you move permanently / “ordinarily resident” status to Ireland you can apply for citizenship if you live here for “5 of the preceding 9 years” (or something), and if you get citizenship then you get an EU passport again… Which is why I decided on Ireland.
Other notes (specific to Ireland and my experience): The weather here isn’t the best and cost of living is, in some ways higher than the UK. BUT then things like housing (council) tax is about 1/10th that of the UK, there are no water services charges even when hooked up to mains water and sewerage. In rural areas, like mine, you have your own septic tank and deep bored well. The one thing I didn’t consider and absolutely assumed was that the water supply would be fine. It’s not, but it’s fixable.
Also, the population of the entire country is about 1/10th that of the UK. Currently at about 5.5 million people and most of them are around Dublin, Cork etc. So driving is relatively free of traffic and it’s easier to afford a place in the country, and be far enough away from people to enjoy privacy without being too far from shops. During the pandemic when everyone realised they didn’t actually need to work in offices, people started moving away from the cities and large towns and unfortunately rural house prices have been rising (I was lucky with timing as I bought just before Ireland came out of lockdowns - even the locals say I was lucky to get my house at the price I did). It turns out you don’t need fibre broadband to be able to work from home or use streaming TV services. I’m on a “rural” “broadband” supplier’s package getting up to 45 Meg and regularly listen to Spotify, use video calling services, stream Netflix and latency is fine enough for online multiplayer gaming no problem at all. But this is variable by location (in valleys for example!). Again, check coverage checkers and costs.
(Hopefully) Obviously when buying the place, get a survey done - you can get videos and photos of the place remotely via the estate agent (with a little persuasion at times). Pick a survey which is more in depth than the cheapest one and look for a qualified surveyor which is registered with a national body such as RICS (UK) and SCSI (Ireland). I found a chap registered with both who also owned a drone. For the money of a mid-range survey I got 150 photos of the house interior, attic, external house, land and surrounding area. Plus video tours from the estate agent.
Also, Google maps’ street view is a wonderful thing - even the single track roads locally are sometimes covered in Ireland. When shortlisting a favoured property “drive” around street views to get an idea of the local area’s state of “affluence” lets say. When I was doing that here I saw many a pristine garden and number of quality houses. I also spotted a surprisingly large sports hall which turns out to have been built around 2019. For a village population of about 1000 people that seemed… odd. Things like this help you to understand the local area and it’s probable safety.
If tourism is important for your income generation needs, or other self employment dreams, then you can do things like check local hotel prices and quality. Check what activities or sites/sights exist in the area. I say this as I considered to potential for offering coaching retreats one day. It’s ridiculously quiet here and although the land needs a lot of work to make look “pretty”, I have great views of a large lake and some small mountains - the sense of space and amount of natural light, and of nature is probably good for said retreats. It seems popular with tourists looking for a quiet place already.
Summary
So, in essence you can research the hell out of wherever you want to move to and get an excellent idea of what it may be like living there without ever setting foot in the place. Depending on where you want to move to, the culture and society may be very similar to your current domicile - Irish culture is very similar to the UK. Everything from power sockets to road markings (and which side of the road to drive), food, language etc etc is almost identical so there is little in the way of culture shock when moving.
The scariest part about buying remotely is “what happens if I missed something?” and, really what happens if you can get ripped off or scammed? How can you protect yourself against that? Sometimes that does boil down to gut feel intuition even when everyone involved in the buying process are governed by strong property purchase laws,
It seems estate agents and legal professions are becoming more used to the idea of remote purchases and are embracing the idea, so you shouldn’t face too many issues on that front. Knowing thyself, and knowing the priorities of what you need, what you can and cannot change either immediately or over time, how adaptable you are are really the key aspects to this.
