For American expats living overseas, it's not always easy keeping up with the goings-on back in the home country. This was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, when so much information was.
Cheap health care, relaxed residency requirements and a high quality of life make overseas retirement attractive, but expats have some financial complexities to navigate.
Photograph by Webb Chappell
Ellen Braaten, a child psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, fell in love with Prague when she spent seven months there on a sabbatical in 2018 and 2019. Following her sabbatical, she went back a few times to finish research she had done there, and she began thinking about how she might spend even more time in Prague while still keeping up with her Boston-based work responsibilities.
Then the coronavirus pandemic struck. Like many other professionals, Braaten found herself working from home and that presented her with the perfect opportunity to try managing her job full-time from overseas. “There was no excuse for me not to go back to Prague and work there,” says Braaten. “I had a choice to be in a place that I love.” Last fall she spent more than two months in Prague, where she used videoconferencing to attend meetings with her colleagues, teach classes, meet with patients and speak at virtual conferences.