Why They Left

The 10 Real Reasons 24 Americans Just Booked Their Move to Europe

photo credit: Ilaria de Bona

By Michelle Garabito, Founder of LuxNomads

A note before you read this.

I started LuxNomads because I left. I left the Bronx, the debt, the noise, the grind — and I built a life in Europe that I used to only dream about. And now, every single week, I sit across from people who are standing at the exact same door I once stood at.

Over the last few weeks, 24 people booked their Pre-Relocation Assessment with my team. These are real calls, real people. An hour each. What I found was not what I expected.

I expected logistics. Visa questions. Income concerns. And yes, those came up. But before any of that — before the spreadsheets and the timelines and the attorney consultations — something else came out. Something more honest. Something most people have never said out loud to anyone.

The first four installments are available to everyone. The rest — the ones that I think are the most important — are for paid subscribers. Not because I want to gatekeep. But because what follows gets very real, very fast, and I want to share it with people who are genuinely ready to hear it.

If that is you, welcome.

xoxo, Michelle

PS And if you’re ready to talk with my team about your hopes, questions, and concerns, when it comes to relocation. Schedule a free call by clicking here.

Reason 1: “The political climate does not feel safe for who I am.”

This was the most common thing I heard. Said differently by different people, but underneath it was the same feeling.

One client — a single mom moving with her young son — told us she already has a phone call planned in her head. The friend she would call. The family member who could get to her in time. Just in case she ever gets pulled over, and the officer or agent didn’t like what they saw.

She said this matter-of-factly. Like it was just a normal part of planning her day. But it isn’t normal. She knows that, and so she’s decided it’s time to leave.

Another couple, both in their 50s, living in California, told us they have lived in the US their entire lives. They love parts of it deeply. But the husband said something I keep coming back to: “There are certain pockets and places where we are okay to go. But the shift in everything that is going on is very uncomfortable. And it kind of makes you say — why am I still here?”

He wasn’t angry when he said it. He was just tired.

Black families. Latino families. LGBTQ+ individuals. Immigrants who became citizens and built everything here. These are not people who hate America. They are people who love the idea of what it was supposed to be — and are grieving the distance between that idea and what they are experiencing right now.

They are not leaving in anger. They are leaving because the social contract changed, and nobody asked them.

Reason 2: “I am living. But I do not feel alive.”

One client said this almost word for word. She has a beautiful house, a beautiful yard, a good job, a good marriage. She works from home in a neighborhood with trees and wine country thirty minutes away.

And she cannot tell you the last time she spent a real hour outside in it.

The treadmill is on. It has been on for so long she forgot she could turn it off.

A similar idea showed up in many calls in some form. A sense that life looks fine from the outside — but feels hollow from the inside. That something essential is missing and it is very hard to name.

One woman put it this way: “I want to feel alive. I don’t want to just live. Right now we are living but we are not having that real-life feeling.”

She was not describing poverty or crisis. She was describing comfort that had somehow become its own kind of trap. A beautiful cage. And Europe — specifically the memory of what she felt when she visited — represented the first time in years that her nervous system had told her: this is what it was supposed to feel like.

That feeling does not go away once you have had it. It just gets louder.

Reason 3: “My rent alone would cover my entire month there.”

This one lands differently once you hear the numbers.

One couple in Northern California pays $3,400 a month in rent. Just rent. One month, their electricity bill was $656. The month before, $525. They do not live extravagantly. They live normally, by California standards.

When I told them that $3,400 is the rough monthly financial readiness requirement for the Digital Nomad Visa in Spain — meaning that is what you need to show for your entire month of living, not just rent — something visibly shifted on the call.

She said: “We’re thinking we’re probably going to have to make what we make here to live there. I didn’t realize that what we pay in rent alone could be for my whole month there. That was very surprising to me.”

This is the conversation that changes people.

Not because Europe is cheap — it is not, especially in major cities. But because Americans have been so conditioned to believe that a comfortable life requires a California income that the idea of living well on a fraction of that feels almost suspicious. Like it must be a catch.

It is not a catch. It is just a different economy. And once you do the math — really do it — the question is no longer can I afford to leave. It becomes can I afford to stay.

Reason 4: “I have been talking about this for years. Decades, even.”

Four years. Seven years. Ten years. One person said twenty-four years.

Twenty-four years of the dream sitting in the background. Of looking at photos of cobblestone streets and wondering. Of telling themselves someday. Of watching other people do it and thinking must be nice.

And then the political climate got louder, the bills got higher, a job ended, a parent got sick. And suddenly the question was no longer when will I be ready — it was what exactly am I waiting for.

Every single person on these calls had a version of this story. The dream was not new. What was new was that staying had started to cost more than leaving.

One woman said it simply: “Life just kept happening. I’m done letting life happen to me.”

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This is where the free portion ends.

What follows are the six reasons that I think are the hardest to say out loud — and the most important to hear. Including the one that showed up in almost every single call, that I believe is the real reason beneath all the other reasons.

If you are a paid subscriber, keep reading. If you are not — and something in the first four already felt familiar — this might be the moment.