How we research

Settled Overseas sells one thing: research you can check. This page explains how that research is done — where the facts come from, how numbers get their dates, what happens when we cannot verify something, and how the dossiers are kept current after you buy them. It is the standard every page on this site is built to, including this one.

Primary sources first

Every country file starts with the documents that actually govern a move: the statute (for example, Costa Rica’s Ley 8764 for its pensionado and rentista categories), the migration authority’s published requirements, the tax agency’s pages, and the official advisory of the U.S. Department of State. When a rule matters — an income threshold, a deposit cap, a filing window — we work from the official text or the agency’s own page, and we say which one.

Secondary sources — reputable law-firm analyses, established expat publications, crowd-sourced cost databases — are used where official sources are silent, and they are labelled as secondary wherever they carry weight. A figure that rests on a single secondary source is never upgraded to a fact by repetition.

Every figure carries a date and a source

Costs move, fees are re-indexed, and laws are repealed. So no number on this site travels alone: rents are dated asking-rent samples from captured listings — asking, not paid, and printed with that caveat; official fees carry the agency and the month we checked them; exchange-rate conversions carry the rate and its date. If you see a figure without a date on one of our pages, that is a defect — tell us and we will fix it or remove it.

Gaps print as gaps

The rule that shapes everything here: what we could not verify is printed as a gap, not filled with a plausible number. You will find pages that say, in plain words, that a current fee schedule could not be confirmed, that a rent series is too thin to print, or that two official-looking sources conflict and we will not pick a winner. That is deliberate. A relocation decision built on an honest gap can be planned around; one built on an invented figure cannot.

What a dossier contains

• The residency routes, separated by life situationPension, passive income, remote work, family, long stay — what each route requires, what it does not allow, and where the official text lives.
• City chapters with dated cost samplesAsking rents and planning ranges per city, each with its date and source class — never blended into a single “typical” budget.
• Healthcare, city by cityWhere the hospitals actually are, what the public system covers, and the distances that matter — including where the honest answer is “care is thin here.”
• The U.S. sideMedicare’s limits abroad, Social Security direct deposit, and the foreign-account reporting duties (FBAR and Form 8938) explained at the level a mover needs.
• A dated checklistThe sequence in order — documents, money, household — with the timing traps flagged.

How dossiers stay current

Rules change after publication; pretending otherwise is how guides go stale. Each country carries a “last checked” stamp per fact family, the public update log records what changed and when, and when a rule change moves a number in a dossier, buyers receive the update at no charge. Re-verification runs on a rolling cycle — and a reader report of a changed rule jumps the queue.

What we do not do

We do not invent medians from a handful of listings, average away tier differences, or print a premium, fee, or threshold we could not trace. We do not sell your data, and the free tools on this site — the planner and the quiz — ask for no email. And we are not lawyers, tax advisors, or doctors: this is editorial research, published with its limits printed next to it.

More free guides

Free, in full, and held to the same standard as everything on this site:

• Banking abroad & the FBAR: the two reports, plainly
• Verify the number before you build a life on it
• Residency routes, compared as families
• Mexico vs. Portugal: the honest comparison