Can AI Help With A Move Overseas?

Chapter 1: Introduction

Let’s talk about the dangers of AI, specifically when it comes to planning, thinking about a move abroad or even just travel abroad or even in your own home neighborhood.

Chapter 2: Should You Trust AI to Make Personal Decisions?

So, using ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other artificial intelligence platform to make everyday decisions is becoming more and more commonplace. We know this. We see it every day, and people aren’t just using AI to process data or to guide their professional work. The majority use it for personal guidance. So, ChatGPT, for example, has 900 million weekly users and about 70% of consumer usage relates to personal life.

And while AI, I will admit it, it can be useful for brainstorming, research, finding statistics, things like that.

It is very limited in its ability to process the human element. So, there are certain classes of personal decision like, those based on emotion, instinct, personal tastes and preferences that AI just does not work for. So, for me, and I think anybody who’s done it before would agree, the decision to move abroad is definitely in one of those classes. It is a purely instinctual, emotional thing, and it cannot be figured out with logic or statistics alone. We at Live and Invest Overseas have been advising people on how to and where to move overseas for decades now.

And every day we receive letters from hundreds of readers with questions relating to moving abroad.

Everything from cost of living to being a resident versus being a citizen. And on and on. Recently, though,

Chapter 3: Why AI Shouldn’t Decide Where You Move

readers have started writing in for clarification about information that they’ve gotten from AI. So, this is really troublesome for two big reasons. One, AI isn’t always accurate, first of all. And two, moving abroad, as I said, and choosing a new country to live in are deeply personal considerations that require self-reflection, not just Wikipedia entries that have been summed up into an AI paragraph. Here’s a recent example that

Chapter 4: How AI Deterred a Reader From Moving to Panama

illustrates this point. A reader recently wrote in to us to say, AI warned me about mosquitoes in Panama and dengue fever. It said that they are real and ongoing issues. To give some background, Panama is one of our top recommended countries for relocation and investment. It’s an economic safe haven. It uses the U.S. dollar and it’s pretty affordable, especially relative to, you know, living on the beach or living oceanfront. It’s got two long coastlines, one Caribbean, one Pacific.

It’s got these stunning landscapes, jungle, and offers diverse lifestyle options, whether you’re looking for mountains or beach or rural or city. So, to sum it up, Panama offers a massive opportunity for prospective expats to upgrade their quality of life.

Yet this reader took it completely off of their list because fear was instilled in them by AI.

So, this reader will miss out on all of this. Won’t even take the chance to go and see it for themselves. Because of this AI information. And so,

to elaborate on the background of this AI information is not always accurate. Every AI

Chapter 5: Why AI Information May Not Be Accurate

model hallucinates. That’s what they call it. It presents false, misleading or fabricated, completely made-up information as fact, it delivers it as though it were gospel.

So, for example, Claude Opus 4.5, is said to hallucinate 58% of the time when it doesn’t know the answer. And that’s the highest benchmark that there is. Other than that, the rates are over 80% for both ChatGPT 5.1 and Gemini 3 Pro. So, these AI models work by collecting vast amounts of data from the internet, everything from authoritative sources to opinion blogs.

Then processes all that data. It condenses it, puts it into a nice little package, and it produces a sequence of words with the highest probability of satisfying you. And that’s a really important thing to understand. Any history, any conversation you’ve already had with your AI, it has gotten to know you. It knows what you want, and it will give you that confirmation bias. So, if you have let it know that you have a certain fear of mosquitoes or are especially prone to mosquito bites, it might automatically say, oh, well, don’t ever go to Panama. There are lots of mosquitoes there. And to put it bluntly, ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, they’re not databases. They are language models. They are designed to produce statistically likely text, and the one that will please you the most to keep you talking to it. They’re designed to be agreeable and to reinforce your own beliefs, even if those beliefs are inaccurate. So, to go back to this reader who talked about Panama and dengue fever, had they asked any one of us expats who’ve lived in Panama an objective opinion about mosquitoes in Panama. I can personally say that, yes, dengue fever exists. I lived in Panama for seven years. The West Nile virus exists in the U.S., and it does not exist in Panama. So, you know, there are diseases that are insect-borne all over the world, and they just vary by continent or country. But in more than 25 years of spending a lot of time in Panama, seven years living there full-time and advising thousands of people to relocate here over the years, and knowing many, many dozens of expats who have made successful and contented moves to Panama that they’re very happy with after the fact. I have never known a single person to contract dengue fever.

So, the risk of contracting it is very low in the places that we generally recommend. These are population centers. These are places with good hygiene, you know, good street cleaning to make sure that the risk of dengue is kept at an absolute minimum.

So, really, this lady did not at all need to just strike it off the list of options altogether. It was just a point that should have been in a big list of pros and cons and considerations.

Chapter 6: How AI Misled a Reader About British Citizenship

So, another reader went on to ask, what are your thoughts on the UK? I read that citizenship can be had in a single year, and again, AI provided very misleading information that could have been massively catastrophic to this person’s life and not to mention expensive.

So, yes, you can apply for UK citizenship after holding indefinite leave to remain, i.e. permanent residency for 12 months. However, getting that permanent residency generally requires living legally in the UK for five years prior to that. So, now we’re at six years. Then, once you are eligible for citizenship, that means the passport, the process can take up to a year. That puts us at seven years. And that’s if you’re very lucky and things are going very smoothly.

Chapter 7: Misleading Information From AI

So, the misinformation and the misdirection in everyday use for AI is acceptable to a certain degree, but it can be dangerous when planning an actual trip, whether that’s in your home, you know, the state next door, or abroad. So, for example, ChatGPT has sent travelers to destinations that don’t exist on several occasions, not just one. For example, there was a high-altitude town in Peru that someone went to based on the advice of ChatGPT, and it doesn’t exist. My husband recently tried to renew his U.S license in order to exchange his old one for a French one and used the AI to try and help with the process and turns out AI was completely wrong, and he had to teach it the correct process. And each time it would thank him, acknowledging, oh, I was so wrong.

A couple of months ago, it sent me to the wrong airport terminal, which nearly had me miss my flight because due to that, I had to get a shuttle to the right terminal after arriving. Cost me another 45 minutes of travel time. Just last week I was on holiday with my kids and it sent me to two indoor playgrounds that hadn’t been operational in years. And that was very obvious from Google, which said permanently closed for each of these locations. Coming home from that same holiday, I was in the airport and it assured me that we could get breakfast at a bagel place right next to our gate. No such cafe existed, and there was not even any storefront there to indicate that any of that ever existed or was a thing ever. Yet ChatGPT kept insisting to me that it was there, and it had just gotten me hours of operation wrong. These little blips, these little mistakes, they’re annoying, they’re frustrating, but they’re not life altering, they’re not catastrophic. For somebody planning a move abroad, a major life change, misinformation can

Chapter 8: Can You Trust AI for Legal Advice?

be devastating. Policies relating to residency, taxes, banking, currency exchange and so on, they change all the time and they change very quickly, sometimes with absolutely no notice. And if AI isn’t trolling the right websites to get this new information, it’s just looking up all the old information and that’s all you’re ever going to see.

So, according to Presenc AI, general AI models hallucinate 58% to 88% of legal queries. So, imagine you ask, can I get legal residency in Panama or can I get legal residency in Malta? And if it can’t find a website with a reliable, authoritative answer, it will just make up a response based on what it thinks, pulling together all these different websites. So, it’s absolutely, reliable when it comes to legal issues that could have big implications for somebody getting them wrong. So, relying on this outdated and incorrect information can make or break a decision or the success, rather, of going abroad.

Chapter 9: How to Start Planning Your Move Abroad

AI can’t tell you why you want to move abroad, nor can it decide the type of lifestyle, culture, climate, cuisine that suits you best. Only you know that. You are simply one and millions of users being used and served by an algorithm in this case. Whereas if you go to real people with real experience who can actually tell you the realities of life on the ground, you have a much better chance of actually finding what’s right for you. And again, you can’t just do that from reading, whether it’s reading my content, Live and Invest Overseas content, AI content, you have to actually go and do it for yourself. So, if you’re considering a move abroad, you’ll need to do some first and self-reflection about your current life and your aspirations for your future life. And you’ll need to make some hard decisions sometimes at the beginning stage, especially of this process, there’s a bit of an emotional toll to moving abroad. You know, it’s not an easy thing to pack up and leave home and your friends, possibly your family. You’ll need to downsize. If you’re moving to Europe especially, you might have to let go of some heirlooms, some prized possessions. You may sell your home that has lots of memories imbued in it and you will likely have to say goodbye to friends and family, at least on a temporary basis. No amount of AI can prepare you for this.

Only people that have actually done it before and can understand the toll that it can take. And choosing a country to relocate to, is perhaps even more personal than the decision to move abroad

Chapter 10: The Best Resource for Planning a Move Abroad

itself. So, the best resource for navigating this process based on a career now and a lifetime, really, of advising people and relocating internationally several times myself, is real people who have made the move abroad. You should do plenty of online research. I’m not putting that down at all, but you should temper any data you collect with insight from people living in the places that you’re actually considering, because that’s what will make it all real and practical.

Then the only solution after that, the only next step, is to follow this up by putting boots on the ground. Your own feet in that country where you’re thinking of living. Hop on a plane. Experience the country that you’re thinking about, dreaming about, fantasizing about, and the only way you’ll determine if this place is right for you is by being there, getting that gut feel. It’s an instinct. It’s a completely indefinable and ineffable quality that a lot of people feel when they find the place that they want to move overseas. Personally, I have fallen in love with places as soon as I’ve stepped off a plane and smelled the local air for the first time. I have also met a man who decided to move to a city based on his experience at the airport.

And while he was waiting for his luggage carousel, decided that was the city for him. He lived there happily for many years before moving to another city in Spain after several years of living there. So, what we often ask is, if you are a prospective expat, what is the view that you’d most like to have from your bedroom window or out your front door? And that’s a great starting point for this decision. The practical considerations like the visa and tax policies, they’ll also guide your choice of country. But you really need to start with your own personal reaction, your own chemistry with a place. AI might be able to regurgitate a lot of information about the best countries to choose from, from other internet sources. I’ve seen lists for best countries for retirees. The world’s happiest country, the best place for singles, etc. on and on and on. But these lists are massively misleading because they aren’t well researched beforehand. They feature countries that are not realistic options because of their residency policies. So, for example, Singapore often comes up as one of the best places in the world for expats, but it is near impossible to get permanent residency in Singapore. You need to be a highly skilled professional or a multi-millionaire to qualify for residency in this country. And yet it is one of the top-rated countries for happiness, satisfaction, and expat contentment. Because if you are an expat there on work, you’re very happy to do so, etc. So, things can be very misleading if you don’t have the right actual real-time information. After you move, you’ll experience a bit of culture shock that I mentioned and perhaps a language barrier. These are messy. These are awkward. These are completely 1,000% human experiences that AI cannot navigate or predict for you. It might be able to warn you. People say that they feel a bit of culture shock after moving overseas, but they can’t tell you exactly how France is different from Kansas, or how Italy is different from California, or wherever country in the world is different from whatever city that you were originally born and raised in. And these are things that only another person like you can determine, and you are the best person to determine that for yourself. So, most people have to live through these experiences multiple times, sometimes before learning the proper etiquette for interactions in a new country, before learning how to take it all in stride. And to say the least, you should not rely on AI to make any of these big, life-changing decisions.

And we in Live and Invest Overseas are the real people with decades of actual personal experience, ready to help you make your dreams overseas come true.