I’ve been here a lot less than that. My family circumstances and work brought me here at the start of the year from the UK which given everything that has been

I’ve been here a lot less than that. My family circumstances and work brought me here at the start of the year from the UK which given everything that has been going on turned out to be perfect timing! Some thoughts: - Work in tech, the company is as international as any back in London, just with a higher margin of Finnish people. Total compensation (take home / benefits / holiday) is pretty much comparable to places I worked in London. I’m not a web developer. - Not had to use healthcare luckily apart from paying for a COVID test so I could shorten the isolation period on my last trip back. It would cost you more to be ill here - prescription prices for one are higher than in the UK. It feels like a public insurance system and not a National Health Service. NHS has waiting times and I’m sure they do here. Private sector is more established. - If I earned a couple of 10s of thousand euros either way (higher or lower) then UK taxes would definitely be cheaper but tbh as a portion of my salary it seems about the same. The high taxes manifest themselves as the ‘built in’ price for pretty much everything. Bell peppers (paprikas) are something like 3 times the price as the UK. Neither country grows them at any meaningful scale (crappy example I know) - The country is effectively an island on the edge of Europe (Finland, not the UK). It has a small population so there isn’t really an economy of scale - this also makes things more expensive. - Language is a pain. I went to a class to study the basics, and make an effort to pick things up. I can order coffee and beer in Finnish but a lot of the time they switch back to English. I can get the gist of a lot of conversations. Most of my friendship group are friends of my wife or other foreigners. Tbh most of my good friends in London weren’t British so that’s the same. - Immigration isn’t really on the same scale as London. Yeah as a proportion it’s probably higher but it is a small number of people. - Education is free in both (student loans in the U.K. are just a tax under a different name. It’s not a loan. I was also paid to do my PhD back there) But here you could choose to study a(nother) masters degree at any point in your life for basically free which would be very expensive in the UK. - I’m writing all this from my perspective as someone who had a job lined up before arriving. If you are thinking of starting a new life here and you’re not highly employable but have bought in to the American hype about it being a land where the state will provide everything for you then you’ll get a rude awakening. Even as a (not any more) EU citizen I had to provide proof of income to fully register here which ironically the UK never required from EU citizens. - I had to drive 20km to find a good curry last weekend.