Approach

Building Elsewhere is a record of looking for somewhere to belong. Everything about how it’s written starts from a single premise: home is not always where you were born.

On the search for home

Most publications in this space try to be encyclopedic travel aggregators or tax-haven lists, rotating through trending queries to catch search traffic.

I am doing something different. I am writing my way toward somewhere else and keeping notes as I go.

I left one country and spent the next decade learning that arriving somewhere is not the same as belonging to it. Whether I am dissecting residency pathways, looking at the reality of buying land in a new market, or just trying to understand the true cost of living somewhere else, every dispatch belongs to the same core pursuit. Some of what I try works. Some of it does not. This is simply the public record of what I found out, what I got wrong, and what I am trying next.

On reporting

Three principles guide these notes.

• Primary realities first: Immigration ministry documents. Tax authority publications. Property and land realities I’ve actually dug into. Secondary sources and certainly AI-generated summaries are flagged exactly as what they are.
• Skepticism about appealing claims: If a relocation program or cost-of-living estimate sounds too good, I assume I’ve missed something and dig until I find it. Every claim in a Building Elsewhere dossier should survive a skeptical reader with a lawyer.
• First-hand where possible: Not every essay can be written from the ground. But when the stakes of a decision are high—can you actually get this visa? does this tax structure hold? what is the day-to-day reality of a neighborhood?—the writing prioritizes firsthand experience or interviews with people who’ve done the thing.

On what this publication does not do

I do not accept sponsorships from residency firms, real-estate developers, or relocation consultants. My honesty about these pathways is the entire project. Accepting money from the firms I might need to criticize would destroy it.

I do not publish AI-generated listicles. I do not pad posts for SEO. I do not invent ground truth.

There is no rigid method here and no false promise. There is only the work of paying attention.

On the reader

The implicit contract is simple. You give me your attention. In return, I share the working notes of my search.

Once a month, when there is actually something worth saying I send a letter. Sometimes it is about a specific country. Sometimes it is about the question underneath the country. It arrives when it is ready rather than on a schedule I would only end up breaking. It is honest, specific, and kept in public for anyone else who is bound for elsewhere.

One letter a month. Leave whenever you like.