Moving to Berlin for a year
We are contemplating moving to Berlin for a year in a little over a year. Kids would be 5 and 10. Only one adult is a German speaker. All of us are European citizens.
- do you know of online expat communities that I can tap for resources (ideally not on facebook)
- advice on finding a home/home swapping
- what can we do in advance to help the landing be as smooth as possible. How to establish credit, arrange for health insurance, etc?
Thank you! danke!
Apr 2, 2023
Parent Replies
Hi! A friend in my writing group recently moved to Frankfurt (not Berlin) for a year. She has two young children and writes about her ex-pat experience here: https://jennabrack.substack.com. She might be open to answering questions about credit/health insurance/expat questions in general!
We lived in Berlin in 2016-17 for a year with our three kids who were 7, 9, and 11 at the start. It was such an amazing experience for all of them (and us). Only my husband is fluent in German though I can kind of sort of get by and it was enough for me though sometimes I ran into issues when just I traveled with the kids.
For housing, we got a house off sabbaticalhomes.com. It was amazing! You can either rent or do a house swap and I think the houses have to be furnished. If you are going on sabbatical, you can also look into the IBZ apartments.
Our kids went to the John F Kennedy School which we thought academics-wise was sort of meh but they all met friends who could speak English and there was a nice community. The school has half English speaking kids and half German speaking kids. If you are hoping they will learn German, it isn’t a great place for that. If you just want them to have fun in Berlin, we found it good for that. There are a couple of other similar schools which might be better for German or you could just send them to the local school. The grocery store across from the German embassy has (1) tons of American foods and (2) I generally heard some people speaking English at the cafe there. If you are brave you could try to introduce yourself. I just met people through the school though.
At the time we found it was cheaper to just withdraw cash from our American accounts at ATMs than it would be to transfer money. Eventually my husband opened a German bank account with money he got from there. Lots of stores did not take American credit cards so I mostly paid in cash. You should look into whether you are entitled to Kindergeld. It was hard to find someone to do German taxes.
We kept our American health insurance going while we were gone because otherwise it wasn’t clear if we would be able to restart it right when we got back or if we would have to wait until the January after we got back. The few times we had to go to the doctor we just paid cash and it was so cheap it wasn’t worth trying to get reimbursed. For example, my husband fell down the stairs and hurt his arm. Going to the doctor two or three times, getting x-rays, getting his arm wrapped and re-wrapped was like $100 total. Taking our son to urgent care for a dog bite was like $30.
Spending a year in Berlin was such a great experience for all of us. The kids got so much more freedom and made friends and saw that other places were similar but different. They gained a ton of confidence and were sad to leave. We still go back.
Have a fantastic trip!
We are in the middle of doing this - our year in Berlin ends in July! Feel free to contact me for a conversation about how we set up in southwest Berlin. Short story is that finding a place (or neighborhood) so you can get a spot in school, and getting an appointment for Einmeldung, should be top priorities. We will be sad to leave!!