[_huayra_]

Please read up on the tax implications if you are a US citizen. Unless you move to some place in Europe with low taxes (e.g. certain cantons in Switzerland, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more difficult country to get a work visa for outside of getting EU citizenship by ancestry), you likely won't end up owing the tax difference as income, but it can be difficult to navigate retirement savings, especially for mandatory systems that don't have a bilateral treaty with the US, wherein the US IRS recognizes the special tax-deferred status of a pension or IRA equivalent.

You will likely be limited to working only with the largest banks, as they're the only ones that are usually willing to file the FinCEN reports back to the US.

I still recommend doing it. Yes, you'll likely take a hit financially (lower salaries, certain consumer items being a lot pricier, a big PITA tax situation), but I think it's worth it to see how it is to live in a place that is much better designed. It's also great to be able to experience how it is to trade off the "grindset mentality" in the US for much better WLB. I literally had colleagues whose OOF messages that said "I'm bikepacking through Norway and will be offline for all of August" meanwhile back in the US, I've had colleagues join conference calls on their phone while recovering from surgery (not because of a lack of PTO, but because unfortunately industry research labs are highly competitive).

Also, it's a good idea to make great efforts to learn the local language or you'll end up in an Anglo bubble and you'll end up feeling like an alien on a foreign planet.

[sersi]

As an alternative, I'd recommend trying to live in places in Asia like Hong Kong or Japan. Walkable cities, relatively low tax rate (but not sure how it works with US citizens tax system), higher salaries than Europe (in the case of Hong Kong, Japan really depends although CS salaries have increased quite a bit lately).

You can also be a digital nomad while living in those places. Japan has a special visa IIRC, with HK you can just use the 3 months tourist visa and do hops to other countries (I know quite a few people who have done that for years)