I am 31 and due to get married soon and finally (!) start trying for much longed for children. My husband-to-be and I live in London, where we own a flat. We like London, but it’s expensive and our flat is just a flat, there’s no garden and I sometimes feel like, as much as I love London, I’d prefer a slightly slower pace. Additionally, lots of our friends have either moved to other parts of the UK or abroad in the recent past and this is likely to continue.
DP is from a Central European country with a decent economy and a difficult language. I am learning but it’s a slow process. I am originally from the Antipodes, where most of my family live. Between us, we have four passports (we are both Brits, central Euro country, Antipodean country + one additional EU country for me) so mobility is not limited to a large chunk of the world. We’ve both been in the UK since roughly our teenage years. We have talked about Dubai to build a nest egg previously; we’d consider it for a few years. But where is a good place to raise kids and have a decent standard of living? If you have lived in a few places, how do they compare? Would we be better off staying put or going somewhere like Australia in the longer term? I wouldn’t want to live in the countryside, so it’d have to be a good sized city, but we do want more access to nature.