One of the tricky parts of deciding whether you’re up for the challenge of living abroad is that it’s different for everyone. You can read other people’s experiences until you’re blue in the face, but it still won’t guarantee your success.





Even still, knowing what to expect can help you to decide if you’re up for it, and do a lot to set expectations. So what challenges are the most common?





The most commonly mentioned challenges of living abroad are 1) Learning a new language 2) Making friends and 3) Dealing with a new culture.





Obviously, that’s not a particularly helpful or complete answer. What makes these things hard? How hard are they? What are other challenges could you face?





For this article, I enlisted the help of 114 other expats across the world to come up with some insights into the challenges we all face.





There were expats chiming in from Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Belize, Chile, New Zealand, South Korea, Finland, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, Indonesia… plus a lot more.





Want to know something really cool?





The challenges and solutions were almost identical across countries and demographics. It’s really interesting what we can learn from this



