Lagos to London
A techie’s guide to moving from the commercial capital of Nigeria to the commercial capital of the UK
Hello, reader! Q1 recently ended, and it was quite huge for me. Just before it started, I relocated from Lagos to London to start a new job — and Q1 was filled with settling down into my new life, understanding what my reality is now and making sense of it. In this post, I talk about my relocation journey — enjoy!
Who is this for?
The primary audience of this post is anyone who works in any Nigeria and plans to move out in the near future. This could apply to any of the major cities in Europe — but London is where my experience lies. However, if you love a good story, please read and share too! It took a couple of months to plan the process of moving, a lot of lessons learned, and a lot of memories made. I’d like to share them — primarily to help inform whoever wants to make a similar move sometime soon or to a curious mind, who just wants to know what it’s like.
What this isn’t
It isn’t a post that teaches you how to get a developer job in London nor does it tell you how to interview for jobs in London or Europe while in Nigeria. I plan to do a video or write a post on that later. Do subscribe to my new channel if you are interested in knowing when that drops and let me know in the comments section what else you’d like to know!
Why did I decide to move?
Short answer: Nigeria happened.
Long answer: I was living a pretty much OK life back in Nigeria. OK, as in I could afford a living cost of 3x what about 2% of Nigerian graduate earns monthly, so it's safe to say money was not the problem. Nigeria happened in December 2017 — around the time I tweeted this:
Side note: The movie title was “get out”.
Specifically, what happened was fuel scarcity. It was bad enough that you could not get constant electricity, you could not even generate if you needed any — even if you had money to do so. I’ve been bruised by different challenges Nigeria poised, but that broke it for me, and I was done. While I had a plan B, plan A was getting out and I decided to work on that in the New Year (2018).
Finances
I love money. LOL, that might sound like a cliché but I really do — it gives me happiness. The joy of looking at your bank account and seeing money there is just a thing of pure, undiluted bliss. So knowing I have to move meant I had to answer the question: “How much do I need to relocate successfully?”.
I love comfort. I know, another cliché, but the fact that I can create a certain level of comfort for myself means a lot to me — which brought up another question: “How much do I need to maintain an OK level of comfort when I relocate?”.
These two questions majorly informed how I planned my finances from when I decided to move till when I actually moved.
At the time, I was looking to move to a city either in the EU region or in Canada, but I focused more on the EU later since it seemed like getting an opportunity there would be easier, and for some reason, Canada looks like somewhere I’d like to go and spend my retirement.
In planning my finances, four (4) sets of tools I found particularly useful were:
- Spreadsheet: primarily, Google sheet — to do my calculations. Anyone close to me would tell you my life revolves around my spreadsheets. I have a spreadsheet for everything!
- Cost of living comparison tools: e.g. Numbeo and Expatisan — I particularly like Numbeo because I found it easier to use. I was able to determine how much I needed to earn in my destination city to maintain the quality of life I had in Lagos.
- Currency converters: primarily, Google currency converter. I needed to do conversions from (Euro | Dollar | Pound) to Naira and vice versa.
- Salary comparison tools: e.g. Stackoverflow salaries, and Glassdoor — and a lot of googling.
With these tools at hand, I was able to create a couple of analysis that helped me understand — How much I needed to earn, spend and save monthly to live decently.
I highlighted things I needed to buy/pay for in order to have accommodation and transport settled when I moved and had a cost breakdown of those like this:
I was also able to estimate my monthly living costs like:
Finally, I was able to do a summary of earnings, spendings, and savings and these figures helped me create a savings plan while I was in Lagos, negotiate during my offer stages and getting a clearer picture of how life, when I relocate, looks like financially.
Side note: My monthly savings while in Nigeria wasn’t going to be much different after I moved.
Getting your savings pot ready
At this point, I knew how much I needed to “settle down” after my relocation — so I created a relocation budget. I needed the budget to be in any currency other than the Naira, and I needed easy access to the funds while I was in Nigeria, and after I moved, so I decided to open a foreign account to serve this need. I chose N26, but there are other options e.g. Transferwise, Payoneer. In my situation, in addition to having a foreign account where I save my relocation budget in monthly, it was essential to have bank accounts in three major currency: Euro, Pound, and Dollar — and I did just that.
The decision
Between January to May 2018 — I was busy working towards having enough money saved up (while not hurting my current living situation in Nigeria), being awesome at the job I had then, living the baby boy life I was created to, looking for new roles in my target cities, reviewing companies, interviewing with companies and enduring Nigeria.
By June 2018, I had two offers I really liked. The first one was for a company in Hamburg, Germany while the second (which is my current job) is based in London. That explains the final edits I made to the sheets in the screenshot.
To make the decision, I fired up my google sheet — got into research mode and used the system I have always used to decide whenever we have job offers. Side note: this is the third time I am using this “process” to make a job decision. I came up with a bunch of factors that were important to me about relocation and my next career step, I weighted those factors and I pointed them for both offers I was considering. London won! 🎉🎉
It was particularly tough because I had to rescind my acceptance of the Hamburg offer. It’s a moment I am not proud of nor was I happy about but I had to make the best decision for myself based on the information I had at hand, rescinding the offer is a story for another day.
Getting a VISA
I had the job contract signed, I needed the visa. To work in the UK, I needed a General work visa (Tier 2) which is issued if you are a skilled worker and your employer is a licensed sponsor. The tricky part was having to ensure that the job has met all the requirements of the home office in order to let an expatriate fill the role. In order to get the visa, one of the requirements is to get a certificate of sponsorship (CoS) — which is issued monthly by the UK home office. Applicants need to meet a certain point threshold that is determined monthly before they can be issued a CoS. When you get the CoS, then you can apply for a Tier 2 visa. The Tier 2 visa is also issued via a point based system and you can determine your eligibility before you submit an application. In my case, my company had an immigration lawyer that made the process quite easy for me as I only had to focus on getting the valid documents across and submitting the visa application. Four major criteria are used to determine your eligibility for a Tier 2 visa if you are a Nigerian, they are:
- A valid CoS: the company took care of the process of getting this but I had to provide the requested documents.
- An appropriate salary for the job: at least £20,800 per annum for experienced ‘new entrants’, while more experienced workers must receive at least £30,000
- Knowledge of English: Either your degree from a UK university or a degree from outside of the UK that has been validated by UK NARIC. You can also take an IELTS test as a substitute but be aware that the one you took for Canada express entry cannot be used for this (yup, another 75k!).
- Proof of maintenance funds: If your employer is not an “A-rated” sponsor (most of them are), you would be required to prove that you have at least £945, and have had this money continuously for a 90 day period ending no more than 31 days before the date of the Tier 2 application.
- Tuberculosis Test: For some reason, Nigerians are required to get tested for Tuberculosis (TB) as part of the requirements. It is required that you use one of the approved test clinics to get the test done and they issue you a certificate if found TB-free. I was glad I didn’t have tuberculosis, whew!
Side note: when you do go for your test, try not to cough in a TB test clinic.
Before submitting your application, the UK home office requires you to pay for your health care during your stay in the UK. I find that odd because I’ll be paying taxes that directly or indirectly pays for the NHS but whatever. I applied for a 5-year work visa that allows me to stay up until 2023 when I am able to convert that to a permanent residency which will ultimately lead to getting the citizenship a year after. I got my response in less than 10 working days and as you guessed, I got the visa! 🎉🎉. London, here I come.
Side note: I have a beef to settle with the UK embassy in Nigeria — they still owe me 200k for my 2 years tourist visa, but that's a story for another day.
The visa application process costs about $3,300 but my company took care of the bill so that didn’t have to come out of my personal funds. Yayy me!
Getting to know my new city
I had the job offer, I had a valid work visa, I had a travel date. I had to mentally prepare for Obodo Oyinbo (the city of white people). I’ve taken a number of trips (work and personal) to a bunch of major cities (including London) before now but this is different. This is me living in a new city. First time living fully outside of the country — so I figured I need to mentally prepare for that. I started reading a lot about life in London, life in the UK, moving out of Nigeria. I watched a lot of youtube videos, a whole lot and I mean a lot of videos. I also did a lot of reading. Basically, you could ask me about living in London and I’ll tell you the A-Z of it based on other peoples experiences. I became a Londoner living in Lagos.
Making lists
Plans, plans, and more plans. I used Google Keep to create three lists.
- Pre-travel list which was a list of things I had to do before my travel date. They contained things like confirming my reservations, notifying who needs to know, quitting my job and saying my goodbyes to ex-colleagues, removing all materials with personally identifiable information (PII) from my apartment and storing them safely.
- Travel list which was a list of items I needed to have in my travel bags. I usually travel light, but this was an exception.
- Arrival list which as you must have guessed is a list of things I had to do when I landed in London. This included items like — picking up my biometric resident permit (BRP), activating my bank cards, getting a travel card, opening a UK bank account, renting a flat, switching phone numbers, getting myself on the voter's register (yes, I can vote!), setting up direct debit for bills etc.
I found the arrival list particularly useful since I had a defined set of steps to enable me to hit the ground running.
Lagos to London
1 year (minus 2 days) after I made my original tweet about leaving, I got on a one-way non-stop flight from Muritala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos to London Heathrow and that signified a new beginning. I was excited about the opportunities ahead, I was unsure of the challenges I’d face but I was certainly glad I was leaving Nigeria.
To be continued
In the second part of this series, I focus on my life after I moved to London, how I settled into the new environment, the mistakes I made in my planning process and the lessons learned.
Be kind enough to share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section :). See you in part 2!
** Edit ***
Part 2 is out, click here to continue reading!
2 years later, I wrote a follow-up here.
If you are interested in getting a copy of the planning sheet I used, here is a link to the sheet.
Watch the video where I discussed this experience here!
