International removals: the six-month timeline

A sea-freight move to a distant destination involves a transit time of several weeks, plus customs formalities on arrival.

Between collection in France and delivery, a household therefore lives for several weeks without its belongings. This gap needs to be planned for: accompanied baggage, temporary furnished rental, or shipping part of the furniture in advance.

The customs exemption for a new resident's personal effects is the second constraint. It generally requires proof of a change of residence and of prior ownership of the goods, and it is limited in time after arrival.

We do not publish transit times, customs exemption conditions by country or the duties payable on non-eligible goods: they vary and we have not been able to verify them in up-to-date official sources.

Some destinations pair their residency schemes with temporary import exemptions. Costa Rica has provided for them for the investor category under Law No. 9996 of 2021, with a minimum capital of $150,000¹. These advantages are limited in time and their continuation must be checked.

A prior trade-off deserves consideration: should you take your furniture? The cost of a full container to a distant destination frequently matches the cost of buying the furniture again locally, not counting duties and insurance.

The answer depends less on money than on use: European furniture is poorly suited to a humid tropical climate, and some of it does not survive the transport or the first few years. What is worth taking often fits into a few crates.

Transporting a pet involves a series of steps whose order and timing are imposed by the destination country: identification, vaccination, antibody titre test, health certificate.

Several of these steps involve mandatory waiting periods between them, which can stretch preparation to several months. Some destinations also impose quarantine on arrival.

In practice, this is the most rigid constraint of an international move: it cannot be negotiated or accelerated, and it often dictates a family's actual departure date.

It should therefore be dealt with first, even before looking for housing, which very few projects do.

Importing a vehicle is possible in many destinations, but rarely advantageous. Import duties on cars are high in Costa Rica, Malaysia and several Latin American countries.

On top of this come issues of technical compliance, type approval and spare parts, which make maintaining a European vehicle difficult and costly outside Europe.

In Singapore, access to vehicles is regulated by a system of purchase entitlements sold at auction, which makes it one of the most expensive in the world, whatever the vehicle's origin.

The trade-off is therefore simple: selling in France and buying again locally is, in most cases, cheaper and simpler than importing.

1. Six months before: start the veterinary procedures, whose waiting periods between steps cannot be shortened.
2. Five months before: obtain apostilled civil status documents and criminal record extracts, a lengthy French formality.
3. Four months before: decide on furniture and the vehicle, and request quotes for a sea-freight move.
4. Three months before: if the destination is outside the European Economic Area, file the exit tax deferral request, at least from 90 days² before the transfer.
5. One month before: plan for the period without personal belongings, and cancel or transfer French contracts.

The fourth point is a tax matter, not a logistical one, but it shares the same characteristic: it is a mandatory deadline, and missing it makes the tax immediately payable on capital gains that have not been realised. The timeline of a move and that of a tax departure overlap, and it is the latter that has the hard cut-offs.