Migranto
Where Should I Move?
How to Actually Decide
There is no one best place for everyone. There is a place that fits your life — and a better way to find it
12 min readBy Migranto Team
No place is the best for everyone
If you search for where you should move, you will quickly find the same answer in different forms: the 10 best countries to live in, the best cities for expats, the happiest countries in the world, the best places for remote workers. These lists look useful because they give you an answer immediately. But there is one problem: the best place for whom?
Switzerland may be an excellent choice if income, safety and healthcare are your priorities. Bali might be perfect if you work remotely and want a tropical lifestyle. Finland may be ideal if you value stability, public services and the Nordic way of life. But none of those rankings knows what you need.
Maybe you want warm winters more than a high salary. Maybe keeping housing costs low matters more than having the highest possible income. Maybe you want mountains nearby, a strong tech scene, good schools, or easy access to an airport. A place can be objectively excellent and still be completely wrong for you.
The lists are not necessarily wrong. They are simply answering a different question. Their criteria were chosen by someone else, their priorities were chosen by someone else, and the final ranking reflects those choices. You are shown the result without ever deciding what the result should mean for your life.
That is why the useful question isn’t “Where is the best place to live?”
It is “Where would I have the life I actually want?”
And answering that question requires a different approach.
Start with your life, not with a country
Most people start looking at places too early. They open a map, search for countries with good weather, read rankings, compare salaries and rent, and gradually accumulate dozens of tabs without getting any closer to a decision.
Start somewhere else.
Before looking at a single country, think about what would make a move work — and what would make it fail. Start with the things you could not live with. Maybe your income depends on reliable internet. Maybe you know that long, dark winters make you miserable. Maybe you are moving with children and access to good schools matters more than nightlife. Maybe you need to stay within a few hours of your family.
These are not minor preferences. They are constraints, and constraints are often more useful than a long list of things you vaguely like.
Then think about what would make your life genuinely better. Perhaps you want a beach you can reach after work, a city where you can live without a car, mountains close enough for weekend trips, a place where you can get by in English while learning the local language, or a housing market that leaves enough money for the rest of your life.
The distinction is important. Instead of asking “Which countries are good?”, you are defining what good actually means for you.
Once you know that, places become something you can compare rather than something you have to guess about.
Would make me leave
- Unreliable internet
- Long dark winters
- Unaffordable housing
- Poor schools
Constraints. Any one of these is enough to say no.
Would make life better
- Warm winters
- Mountains nearby
- English at first
- Walkable city
Preferences. Nice to have; none of them decides alone.
Not everything matters the same
Knowing what you want is only half of the problem. Most people care about many things at once, and those things rarely matter equally.
Suppose you want warm weather, affordable housing, good healthcare, reliable internet, mountains nearby, English widely spoken and good public transport. All of those can be important, but imagine that reliable internet is essential for your income while mountains are simply something you would enjoy having nearby. Treating them as equal would distort the decision.
The same is true when comparing actual places. Imagine that Place A is excellent at almost everything: great healthcare, high salaries, safe streets and excellent infrastructure. Place B is merely good at most things, but it has the climate you need, the cost of living you can afford and the lifestyle you actually want.
A generic ranking will probably choose A.
Your life might be much better in B.
That is because choosing a place is not about finding the place with the highest average score. It is about finding the place that performs best on the things that matter most to you.
Your priorities are part of the answer.
A generic ranking
Healthcare, salary and safety weigh most
- Healthcare
- Salary
- Safety
- Warm climate
- Cost of living
- Lifestyle
Place A
81
Place B
70
Your priorities
Climate, cost and lifestyle weigh more
- Warm climate
- Cost of living
- Lifestyle
- Healthcare
- Salary
- Safety
Place A
54
Place B
83
Say what you actually mean
Once you start thinking about your priorities, another problem appears: how do you describe them?
Most relocation tools give you a questionnaire. Choose your preferred climate. Rate the importance of healthcare. Select your income range. Pick your preferred city size. Choose how important nightlife is. The questions look structured, but they also define the decision for you.
What if the thing that matters most to you is something the questionnaire never asks?
Maybe you want to be able to swim in the sea until October. Maybe you don’t want to own a car. Maybe you want your parents to be able to visit easily. Maybe you want a real tech scene, not just a large number of remote workers. Maybe you want somewhere quiet enough to sleep with the windows open.
These are much closer to how people actually think about their lives, and they can still be turned into things you can compare.
That is the important part. A good decision system should not force you to think in its categories. It should be able to understand yours.
You should be able to describe what matters in your own words, turn it into something measurable, and then see how different places perform against it. If the result does not sound right, you should be able to change the criterion and see what changes.
The goal is not to fill out the perfect questionnaire. It is to describe the life you are looking for as accurately as you can.
The best country might not be the best place
There is another trap hidden inside the question “Where should I move?”
We often talk about countries as if they were places. But you don’t really move to a country. You move to a city, a town, a village or a particular part of a region — and those places can give you completely different lives.
Portugal is Lisbon and Porto, but it is also the Alentejo. Spain is Madrid and Barcelona, but it is also Galicia, Valencia, the Canary Islands and hundreds of smaller towns. The same country can contain completely different climates, housing markets, job opportunities and lifestyles.
So a useful decision needs more than one level.
Country
First, look at the things that define the overall environment: residency and visas, taxes, the healthcare system, language and national economic conditions. These help you decide whether a country makes sense at all.
Region
Then go closer. Is the coast important? Do you want mountains nearby? How far are you from a major airport? Where are the jobs? What does housing cost outside the biggest cities?
Now the country starts turning into actual places.
City
Finally, look at where you would really spend your days. Can you walk to the things you need? What does an apartment actually cost? Is there a community for the kind of life you want? Are there good schools, parks, gyms, restaurants or coworking spaces?
This is where “I could live there” becomes “I could see myself living there.”
The decision should move in the same direction as the map:
country → region → city
And you should not have to start your thinking from scratch every time you zoom in.
Country
the environment
Visas · taxes · healthcare · language
Region
the geography
Climate · coast · mountains · jobs · airport
City
your everyday life
Housing · transport · schools · community · things to do
A score can narrow the search. It can’t make the decision.
Once you are comparing hundreds of countries, regions and cities, you need some way to narrow the search. A score is useful for exactly that. It can turn a huge world of possibilities into a shortlist you can actually research.
But there is a catch: never trust a score you cannot understand.
A number by itself tells you very little. Suppose a city scores 82 for you. Why 82? Maybe it has excellent internet and affordable housing but poor public transport. Maybe it scores well because of its healthcare system, even though healthcare barely matters to you. Maybe the score depends on assumptions you would not make yourself.
The number is only useful if you can open it and understand what produced it.
You should be able to see which criteria were used, how important each one was, how the place performed on each criterion, and why it received that score. If you cannot inspect those things, the number is not really helping you make a decision. It is simply another ranking — with your name attached to it.
A good score should make the reasoning more visible, not less.
Fibre in every town
Gigabit fibre reaches the whole district; outages are rare enough to make the local news.
About €900 for a one-bed
Rents sit well below the national median and rose slower than wages over the last three years.
Mild, 14 °C in January
Winters are mild but wet: long stretches of drizzle rather than cold, and the sea is swimmable from May.
Buses, no rail
An hourly bus network covers the town; the nearest rail station is forty minutes away.
In the centre, less outside
Common in cafés, the university and among younger people; rarer in clinics, banks and rental paperwork.
Look at the why, not just the number
This is where a comparison becomes genuinely useful.
Imagine a place scores low on your “warm winters” criterion. That sounds bad, until you look at why. Perhaps the winters are mild but considerably wetter than you expected. Maybe that is perfectly acceptable to you.
Or perhaps a city scores poorly on “English in everyday life”. The explanation tells you that English is common in tourism and universities but much less common in healthcare, banking and rental paperwork. Now you know what the score actually means, and you can decide whether that matters.
A number gives you a direction. The reason gives you something to think about.
The explanations also give you an opportunity to correct your own thinking. You may discover that one of your criteria was not quite what you meant. Perhaps “warm winters” was really “no freezing temperatures”. Perhaps “good public transport” was really “I don’t want to own a car”. Perhaps “affordable” only makes sense once you consider your expected income.
That is not a failure of the process. It is the process working.
The goal is not to produce a perfect answer on the first attempt. The goal is to make your assumptions visible, test them against real places, and get closer to an answer you can actually defend.
So, where should you move?
By now, the question has changed.
You are no longer asking:
“Which country is the best?”
You are asking:
“Which places fit the life I want, and why?”
That is a much more useful question.
Start with what matters to you. Separate the things you cannot compromise on from the things that would simply be nice to have. Give the important things more weight. Describe them in your own words instead of trying to fit yourself into somebody else’s questionnaire.
Then compare places at the right level — country, region and city — and use scores to narrow the search rather than pretending that a number can make the decision for you. When you get a result, look past the score and understand why the place ended up there.
At that point, you are no longer browsing lists of places that might be good.
You are comparing places against a life you have actually defined.
And that is how a question as broad as “Where should I move?” becomes something you can answer.
Try it with your own criteria
This is the idea behind Migranto.
Instead of starting with a list of “best countries”, you start with your own life. Describe what matters to you in your own words, turn each thing into a measurable criterion, decide how important it is, and compare countries, regions and cities against the same criteria.
When a place appears at the top, you can see why. You can change what matters, change how much it matters, and see the results change with you.
Because there was never supposed to be one universal answer to:
“Where should I move?”
There is only the answer that makes the most sense for your life.
Start with one thing you care about.
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