(Editor’s note: This post on Paris is part of a series for Americans fleeing MAGA. There’s only one Pip Pullen. For everyone else, relocating to Europe requires a LOT of research. If you focus and talk to the right people, you can do it within, say, one year. Full disclosure: It took us 18 months before we actually arrived in the Netherlands. .)
With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency today, this is a scary time for Americans. More than a few are at least fantasizing about pulling up stakes and heading for somewhere safe and fun. Like – oh, I dunno – Paris. But in the real world, can you do it?
Well, turns out we know a couple of Americans – Pip Pullen and Carrie Day Wilson – who just did, though their move to Paris had nothing to do with Trump, per se.
A guy like Pip … he’s not your typical American expat. For one, he’s London born-and-raised, so when we at Dispatches talk about “highly skilled internationals,” we’re talking about him and everyone like him. Two, he’s worked building advertising firms most of his career, and he’s smarter than the average bear. Which means he knows how to read people and how to negotiate the madness.
Three, he didn’t move to Paris to escape Trump. Just to escape.
Learn from him.
‘I don’t want to go back, anymore’
Pip and his wife Carrie Day Wilson moved to an apartment on Île Saint- Louis in the 4th arrondissement on 24 December from our hometown of Louisville, KY, a move he describes as mostly painless. That said, since you can only apply three months before arrival, there was some visa drama.
“We knew we wanted to arrive on December 25, and the DRIEETS approval – the critical approval part of the business plan – didn’t come in until two months and three weeks out,” Pip said. “So, we applied immediately after that. I mean, it was really easy. Everything went exactly as we hoped it would. You know, everything arrived when it was supposed to arrive. There were no hurdles.”
Pip attributes the lack of bureaucratic snafus to hiring a consultantwho provided and curated all the paperwork and helped him fill it out and answered questions. “But for someone like me, that was that was really useful,” Pip says.
The consultant told Pip when he started the process how there’s this myth that it’s very easy to get into America and it’s very hard to go to Europe. “He said it’s actually the other way around, very difficult to get to America, but it’s pretty easy to get into Europe,” Pip says. “And the people we’ve talked to here, who are limited in number, have all said it was a pretty easy process.”
Not unexpectedly, everyone in the US has been asking the couple if the move is related to the reelection of Donald Trump. “How many people said, ‘Oh, my God, are you doing it because of Trump?’ ” Pip says. “Do you have any idea how long this takes to engineer? You don’t just do it overnight because you’re pissed off at the election result. “
In reality, Pip and Carrie’s journey started 10 years ago when they began their tradition of spending Christmas in Paris. Six years ago nearly to the date he arrived, he was texting my wife and co-CEO Cheryl Boyd about our move to the Netherlands.
The last year they came as travelers, 2023, they were returning to the US “and it was the first time the trip felt kind of weird. We both noted it,” Pip says. “It was like as if we didn’t really have a foot in, and we didn’t really have a foot out. And on literally the flight back, I was like, ‘You know what ? I don’t want to go back anymore.’ You know, I didn’t like leaving, but this is the first time I really don’t want to go back.”
A lot of the pieces for a permanent move were already in place including their apartment, which they bought in 2022 as a rental property. The hardest part of the move was getting a bank account in France. “That was incredibly difficult. And then when I got it, it was the wrong type, but that all fell together just in time,” Pip says.
When he tried to get is cellphone number ported with Google before he left, the transfer was never completed.
Take-aways
• Start a business.
Pip got a talent visa, which is a four year visa and had to start a business. After selling his previous ad firm, An Agency, Pip still has a small portfolio of clients on retainers generating a multiple of the minimum income to stay in France. He does “high-end, cool design, beautiful stuff with lovely people.” Carrie, who until recently was a career middle school teacher, helps out by doing a lot of the research and provides him with production-design support.
• Tough to get a mortgage:
“France could be different from other countries, certainly, but we could not get a mortgage. In the US, you’re grown up if you have a mortgage,” Carrie says. So they paid cash for their apartment. And it was one of the best decisions they made, purchased at a time when the real estate market wasn’t as tight as now. AND it was a moment when the euro was at its lowest versus the dollar, saving them $30,000.
“Pip is just really, really damn lucky,” says Carrie. “I say that with a lot of envy, because I don’t think of myself as being lucky at all. But you know, I’ve continued to look at those (apartment) apps and the real estate in the area, and nothing that is in as good a shape as this ever comes up. It’s ground floor, so we don’t have to climb all the stairs.”
• It’s not that expensive to live in France:
“Everybody’s like, how can you afford to live in Paris? And it’s shocking, because number one, the eligibility criterion financially for a visa, is 1,400 euros a month,” according to Pip. “That’s the number. No mitigating factors, nothing. They’re very, very black and white about everything, I found.”
Living in Louisville, which is a compatively affordable small city, requires at least $3,000 a month including rent or insurance, car, health insurance, food and a little bit of travel. “Here it’s a lot less. Food is less expensive. You don’t need transport. The rents are low,” Pip says. “So it’s actually incredibly affordable, yeah, especially if you have an American pension.”
if you look at buying a place outside of the fourth it’s not expensive, it’s cheaper than Louisville, he adds. “Someone was asking me yesterday, how’s it going? It’s like the city is a dream to live in, just as a dream on the river, because you’re on the island here, so right on the river.”
• Hire an expert … and don’t rely on the kindness of strangers on Facebook:
“ I’m in several, or was in, several Facebook groups about expats and moving from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they all tend to be incredibly obnoxious, Pip says. “Some people are lovely and warm, but
then the admins will come in and chide them for asking the wrong kinds of questions and say, ‘We’ve already addressed that in earlier threads.’ I didn’t find those environments to be very helpful at all.”
Find a consultant, or someone who knows what they’re doing, Pip says, then leverage their expertise. “That was the most important thing to me. Then they hooked me up with other people, like the banking thing. I ended up making good friends with a guy in England who works here and there, absolutely lovely fellow. Got his own little firm.
“Now, finding people like that, to me, was the most important part of the process, just finding reliable resources.”
Make sure to have your mobile number ported on Google Voice;
“I had my head about this conversation, but I was thinking yesterday, if I had to give any advice to anybody on Facebook who was doing this, what would it be? It was, ‘Make sure your number is ported before you get there.’ That has been our only headache … not having a mobile number that worked here,
What holds most people back:
“You know what the biggest barrier for people is? And I’m not wired this way. Carrie is, but she was able to overcome it,” Pip says. “The biggest barrier, the very first thing anyone ever says is, ‘Oh, but my parents are here . Oh, but my children are here.’
“It’s just the comfort and the familiarity of your world, and a good excuse for that is family, or at least the great metaphor for that, or a symbol of that is family. And then they lean into that quite aggressively as a rationale not to do it.”
Don’t do what’s best for them. Do what’s best for you, he says. That said, Pip admits it was a bit tough to leave Louisville, which he calls “he Goldilocks city of America,” large enough to have a strong cultural scene and restaurants without the expense of a San Francisco or New York.
“I loved living there,” Pip says. “I just didn’t want to die there.”
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Read more about Paris here and France here in Dispatches’ archives.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
