So, in about a year (May 2017 - February 2018), I, a C++ programmer, finally found a job in Europe. I have applied for jobs dozens of times in England, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands and even Portugal. I spoke twenty times by phone, Skype and other video communication systems with recruiters, and somewhat less with technical specialists. I went to Oslo, Eindhoven and London three times for final interviews. All this is described in detail . In the end, I received one offer and accepted it.
This offer was from the Netherlands. It is relatively easy for employers in this country to invite a worker from abroad (not from the EU), so there is little bureaucratic red tape, and the registration process itself takes only a few months.
But you can always create difficulties for yourself. That's what I did and tightened my
moving for another month. If you are interested in reading about the hassle (no, not very pleasant) associated with moving an IT family to Western Europe, welcome to the cat.
Offer
I don’t know how standard the offer I received for Europe is, but the main points in it are as follows (except for salary, of course):
- open-ended contract
- trial period 2 months
- 40 working hours per week
- 25 working days of vacation per year
- 30% rolling (see below)
- payment for all documents (visas, residence permits) for the whole family
- payment for one-way tickets for the whole family
- payment for transportation of things and furniture
- payment for temporary housing for the first month
- assistance in finding permanent housing
- assistance in opening an account in a Dutch bank
- assistance in filing your first tax return
- if I am fired within the first year, I will also be relocated back to Russia for free
- if I decide to quit in the first 18 months, I am obliged to reimburse half of the cost of my relocation package; if I quit between 18 and 24 months, then a quarter
As I later learned from conversations with colleagues, such a relocation package is estimated at 10 thousand euros. Those. It’s expensive to quit in the first 2 years, but some people quit (hence the known amount).
30% ruling is such an indulgence for foreign highly qualified specialists from the Dutch government. 30% of income is tax free. The size of the benefit depends on the salary; for an ordinary programmer it will be approximately 600-800 euros net per month, which is not bad.
Documents
The following documents were required from me:
- translated and apostilled birth certificates (mine and my wife’s)
- translated and apostilled marriage certificate
- copies of my diplomas
- copies of our passports
Everything is simple with copies of foreign passports - only the HR service needs them. Apparently, they are attached to applications for visas and residence permits. I made scans, sent them by email, and they were not needed anywhere else.
Diplomas of Education
All my diplomas are not needed for a visa and residence permit. They were required for background screening, which was carried out by a certain British company at the request of my employer. Interestingly, they didn’t need a translation, only scans of the originals.
Having sent what was required, I decided to apostille our diplomas just in case. Okay, I already found a job, but it was assumed that my wife would also work there, and who knows what documents she would need.
An apostille is an international stamp on a document that is valid in countries that have signed the 1961 Hague Convention. Unlike documents issued at the registry office, diplomas can be apostilled, if not in any regional ministry of education, then certainly in Moscow. And although diplomas issued in other cities take longer to verify (45 working days), it is still convenient.
At the end of February 2018, we submitted 3 diplomas for apostille, and they took them back at the end of April. The hardest thing is to wait and hope that they won’t lose their diplomas.
Birth and marriage certificates
Yes, the Dutch need adult birth certificates. This is their registration procedure. Moreover, you need an apostille for the originals of all these certificates, a translation of these documents (including an apostille), and an apostille for the translation. And apostilles should not be older than 6 months - that’s what I was told. Plus, I already googled somewhere that the Netherlands may not accept our Soviet-style birth certificates, but modern Russian ones - no problem.
Yes, I read , how he only made an apostille in Russia, and the translation was already in the Netherlands. There are so-called authorized translators, whose seal actually replaces the apostille. But, firstly, I wanted to come with fully prepared documents, and secondly, before translation, I still had to get an apostille for the original.
And this is troublesome. An apostille on documents issued at the registry office can only be issued by the regional registry office of the region where the documents were actually issued. Where you received the card, go there. My wife and I are both from Saratov and the region, which, although not very far from Moscow, did not want to travel around because of three seals. Therefore, I first turned to a certain office that seemed to deal with such matters. But their timing (in the first place) and price (in the second place) did not suit me at all.
Therefore, a plan was drawn up: my wife issues a power of attorney for me to apply to the registry office, I take a vacation for a few days and go to Saratov, where I receive 2 new birth certificates, submit 3 certificates for apostille, wait, pick up, and return.
I called all the necessary registry offices in advance and clarified the schedule. There were no problems with the first three points (power of attorney, vacation, trip to Saratov). When I received a new birth certificate for my wife, too, I went to the registry office, wrote a statement about the loss (I didn’t come up with this), paid the fee, and received a new one. Taking into account the break at the registry office for lunch, it took approximately 2 hours. They didn’t even ask about the old certificate, i.e. Now we have 2 birth certificates :)
For my new testimony, I went to the regional center where I was born. There, as the only visitor, I was given a new document in less than an hour. But here's the problem - it indicates a different place of birth! Those. in my old certificate and in the registry office archive there are different settlements.
Both are related to me: one is where the maternity hospital itself is located, the other is where my parents were registered at that time. By law, parents have the right to indicate any of these addresses in documents. At first, parents either chose or left the default - one. And a few days later (this is from their words) they decided to change it to another one. And the registry office employee simply took and corrected the address in the already issued certificate. But I didn’t make any changes to the archive or didn’t even intend to. It turns out that I lived with a fake document for 35 years, and nothing happened :)
So, now the record in the archive cannot be corrected, only by a court decision. Not only is there no time, but the court is unlikely to find grounds for this. In all my documents, including my marriage certificate and internal passport, the same place of birth is indicated as in the old birth certificate. Those. they will also have to be changed. There is no need to change your passport, the place of birth is indicated very approximately: in Russian - “Saratov region”, in English - even “USSR”.
By law, it takes up to 3 months to exchange a marriage certificate, although a passport can be changed within 10 days. It's long, very long. My contract specifies the start date for work - May 1st. Basically I had 2 options:
- hope that the regional registry office will not ask for confirmation from the district one and will put an apostille on my old certificate, and the Dutch will accept it
- change marriage certificate and passport
I almost took the first path, but thanks to the head of the registry office. She promised to exchange the marriage certificate as quickly as possible. I agreed with the HR service to postpone my start date for work a month in advance, issued a power of attorney for my father at the notary, handed over my marriage certificate for exchange, paid all the fees in advance, left all other documents in Saratov and returned to the Moscow region.
The registry office really did everything very quickly - in two and a half weeks they exchanged the marriage certificate, and another 4 days were spent on apostille. At the end of March 2018, my father came to Moscow on business and brought me all the ready-made documents. The rest was relatively simple and uninteresting: I ordered a translation into English from an agency, and received an apostille for the translation from the Moscow Ministry of Justice. It took about a week and a half. In total, each A5 sheet of certificate turned into 5 A4 sheets, certified with seals and signatures on all sides.
Passport
Exchanged through State Services. Everything was as promised: a week after submitting the application, I received a letter saying that I could get a new passport at my local Ministry of Internal Affairs. True, the Ministry of Internal Affairs deals with passports only 2 days a week, so I received my passport on the 18th day after the application.
Visas
A residence permit, a work permit are all good, but then. First you need to come to the country. And for this you need visas.
When I finally collected all the necessary documents, I scanned them and sent them to HR. It’s good that in the Netherlands, ordinary scans have the same legal force as the originals; you didn’t have to physically send the documents. HR submitted an application to the migration service. The Migration Service gave a positive answer after 3 weeks. Now my wife and I could obtain visas at the Dutch Embassy in Moscow.
So, it's mid-May and I have to start work in Eindhoven on June 1st. But all that remains is to stick the visa in your passport, pack your suitcase and fly. How to get to the embassy there? You need to make an appointment on their website. OK, when is the next date? In the middle of July?!
I didn’t even worry anymore, after the adventures with the documents. I just started calling the embassy. They didn't answer the phone. I discovered a useful auto-dial feature on my phone. A few hours later I finally got through and explained the situation. My problem was solved in a few minutes - my wife and I were given an appointment in 3 days.
Among the documents, the embassy needed passports, photographs, completed forms and a signed employment contract. We had all this. But for some reason the wife’s photo didn’t fit. None of the three options. We were sent to do the fourth one in the house opposite. They took a photo and even charged for it, not exorbitantly, not even twice as much :)
By evening I picked up our passports with multi-visas for 3 months. That's it, you can choose a flight and fly.
Things
My employer paid me to transport my things. The transportation itself is handled by an international company; HR communicated with it in the Netherlands, and I spoke with its representatives in Russia.
A month and a half before my departure, a woman from this office came to our home to assess the volume of things being transported. We decided to travel relatively light - no furniture, the heaviest thing was my desktop (and that without a monitor). But we took a bunch of things, shoes and cosmetics.
Again, from my documents, I needed a power of attorney to go through customs. It is interesting that you cannot export paintings from Russia without an expert opinion, even if it is just a sketch you made. My wife does a little painting, but we didn’t take any paintings or drawings, we left everything in the apartment. In your own (albeit mortgaged) apartment. If we were leaving “completely” or from rented housing, there would be one more problem.
A week before departure, 3 packers arrived at the appointed time. And they packed all our junk very quickly, very nicely. It turned out to be 13 boxes of different sizes, on average about 40x50x60 cm. I gave the power of attorney, received a list of boxes and was left without a computer, with only a laptop for the next 6 weeks.
Settlement in the Netherlands
Our plan for moving was this: first, only I fly, settle there, rent permanent housing, and go through a probationary period. If all is well, I return for my wife, and we fly to the Netherlands together.
The first difficulty I encountered upon arrival was how to call a Dutch number? All contacts were given to me in the format +31(0)xxxxxxxxx, but when I tried to dial +310xxxxxxxxx I received a robo-response “Invalid number”. It's good that there was free WiFi at the airport. I googled and figured out: you need to dial either +31xxxxxxxxx (international format) or 0xxxxxxxxx (domestic). It’s a small thing, but we should have taken care of this before arriving.
For the first month I was placed in a rented apartment. A bedroom, a kitchen combined with a living room, a shower, a washing machine and a dishwasher, a refrigerator, an iron - that’s all for one person. I didn't even have to sort the trash. Only the building manager forbade throwing glass into the general trash, so for the entire first month I carefully avoided buying anything in glass containers.
The day after my arrival, I met with Karen, my guide to the world of Dutch bureaucracy and part-time real estate agent. She made appointments for me at the bank and the expat center in advance.
Bank account
Everything at the bank was very simple. “Do you want to open an account with us, but you are not yet registered in the Netherlands and do not have a BSN? No problem, we’ll do everything now, and then just update the information in your profile on our website.” I suspect that the signed contract with my employer contributed to this attitude. The bank also sold me liability insurance - insurance in case I break someone else's thing. The bank promised to send a plastic card of the local system by regular mail within a week. And he sent - first a PIN code in an envelope, and 2 days later - the card itself.
Regarding plastic cards. Even when my wife and I came to see the Netherlands in the fall, we experienced this ourselves - Visa and Mastercard are accepted here, but not everywhere. These cards are considered credit cards here (although we had them as debit cards) and many stores simply do not contact them (due to acquiring fees? I don’t know). The Netherlands has its own type of debit cards and its own iDeal online payment system. From my own experience, I can say that at least in Germany and Belgium these cards are also accepted.
Residence permit
The expat center is a kind of lighter version of the migration service, where I was officially registered at a temporary address, was given a BSN - the main resident number of the Netherlands (the closest analogue in Russia - TIN) and was told to come for a work and residence permit in a few days. By the way, my pile of documents (apostille, translation, apostille for translation) caused slight surprise; I had to explain what was what. By the way, number two - the country of birth in my Dutch documents is Sovjet-Unie, and the country of arrival is Rusland. Those. at least local clerks are aware of this metamorphosis of our state.
I received a residence permit with the right to work as a highly skilled migrant in about 3 working days. This delay did not affect my work in any way - my three-month visa allowed me to work. I can change jobs, but I must remain just such a specialist. Those. my salary must be no less than a certain amount. For 2019 it is €58320 for people over thirty.
cellular
I bought a local SIM card myself. Karen advised me of the operator (KPN) and where to find his store. Because I had no financial history with a local bank, they would not have signed a contract with me, they would only have sold a prepaid SIM card. I was lucky and the store accepted Visa, I paid with a Russian bank card. Looking ahead, I will say that I still use this prepaid card. I studied the tariffs of this and other operators, and decided that prepaid suited me best.
Medical check
As someone who arrived from a not very prosperous country, I needed to undergo fluorography. Registration in 2 weeks (in the Netherlands, in general, compared to Moscow, everything is very slow), almost 50 euros, and if they don’t call me in a week, then everything is fine. They didn’t call :)
Search for rental housing
Of course, I was still looking at advertisements for apartments from Russia, but on the spot I had to quickly give up hope of finding housing within the range of, if not € 700, then at least € 1000 (including utilities). About 10 days after my arrival, Karen sent me links to a couple of dozen advertisements. I chose 5 or 6 of them, and the next day she took me to see them.
In general, in the Netherlands it is common practice to rent out housing not only without furniture, which I can still understand, but also without flooring - i.e. without laminate, linoleum and other things, just bare concrete. This is what I don’t understand anymore. The tenants take the floor when they move out, but what is the use of it in another apartment? In general, there are not many furnished apartments, which made my task somewhat more complicated. But on the other hand, 5 views a day is just a fairy tale compared to Dublin or Stockholm.
The main disadvantage of Dutch apartments is, in my opinion, the irrational use of space. The apartments vary, from 30 to several hundred square meters, but, of course, I was interested in inexpensive ones, i.e. small. And so, for example, I look at an apartment of 45 square meters. There is a corridor, a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen combined with a living room - that’s all. There is a constant feeling of cramped space; there is simply nowhere to put the 2 desks we need. On the other hand, I remember very well how my family of 4 lived well in a standard Khrushchev-era apartment building at 44 meters.
The Dutch also have different ideas about thermal comfort. In that apartment, for example, the front door is just one layer of glass, and from the apartment it leads directly to the street. There are also apartments in old buildings, where all the glazing is single-layer. And nothing can be changed, because... the house is an architectural monument. If someone thinks that winters in the Netherlands are mild, then they are, but there is no central heating, and the locals can keep it at +20 at home and walk around in just a T-shirt. But my wife and I, as it turns out, can’t. We keep the temperature higher and dress warmer.
However, I digress. Of the 5 options, I chose one: 3 rooms, 75 meters, clearly not new, as we would write - “without European-quality renovation” (ironic, right?). I signed the contract, paid for the first month, gave a deposit in the amount of the monthly fee and something about € 250 to the realtor on the owner’s side. This €250 was later reimbursed to me by my employer.
The apartment rental market, as I understand it, is regulated by the state. For example, my contract (officially in Dutch, but there is a translation into English) consists of only a few pages, which list mainly personal data and differences from a standard, officially approved contract. By law, a landlord cannot increase rent by more than 6 or 7 percent per year. For example, in the second year my price was raised by only 2.8%. By the way, the owner of my rented apartment is one of the very few people I have met here who speaks very little English. But after signing the contract, I didn’t see her even once, we just wished each other Merry Christmas and Happy New Year on Whatsapp, and that’s all.
I will also note that housing here is becoming more expensive year after year - both rent and purchase. For example, one of my colleagues was vacating an apartment that he had been renting for several years for about €800 and wanted to offer it to a friend of his. But for a friend, the price was already € 1200.
Internet
The rented apartment did not have the most important thing - the Internet. If you google it, there are a lot of providers here, most of them connect via fiber optic. But: this optical fiber is not already available everywhere, and it takes several (up to six!) weeks from application to connection. My house, as it turns out, is deprived of this benefit of civilization. To connect through such a provider, I need to go to work - naturally! — time to wait for the installer. Moreover, having cooperated with all the neighbors below, because The cable runs from the first floor. I decided that I was not ready for such an adventure and canceled the application.
As a result, I connected the Internet from Ziggo - via a television cable, with an upload speed 10 times less than the upload speed, one and a half times more expensive, but without an installer and in 3 days. They simply sent me by mail the entire set of equipment, which I connected myself. Since then everything has been working, the speed is quite stable, it’s enough for us.
Wife moving
I found housing, there were no problems at work, so according to the plan, in early August I went to pick up my wife. My employer bought her a ticket, I bought myself a ticket for the same flight.
I made an appointment for her at the bank and expat center in advance; there was nothing complicated about it. She opened an account in the same way and was given a residence permit and work permit. Moreover, unlike me, she has the right to get any job, not necessarily as a highly qualified specialist.
Then she herself registered with the local municipality and had fluorography done.
Medical insurance
Every resident of the Netherlands is required to have health insurance and pay at least a hundred and something euros per month for it. New arrivals are required to take out insurance within what seems like four months. If they don’t sign up, they are automatically assigned insurance by default.
After the first month of my stay in the Netherlands, I chose insurance for myself and my wife, but getting it turned out to be not very easy. Have I already mentioned that the Dutch are leisurely people? Every few weeks they asked me for personal information, documents, or something else. As a result, my wife and I were only issued insurance at the end of August.
Credit card
Within the first two months, I realized how inconvenient the local debit card was. You can pay with it online only where iDeal is available. Those. only on Dutch sites. You won’t be able to pay for Uber, for example, or buy a ticket on the Aeroflot website. I needed a normal card - Visa or Mastercard. Well Mastercard, of course. Europe is the same.
But here it’s only credit cards. Moreover, they are issued not by the bank itself, but by some national office. At the beginning of August, I sent an application for a credit card from my personal account on the bank’s website. A few weeks later I was rejected on the grounds that I had been at my current job for too long. In my response letter I asked, how much is needed? A month later, I was suddenly approved for a credit card and sent it by mail within a couple of weeks.
Rouhling
30% rolling is a great thing. But to get it you need to be a kennismigrant and live more than 18 km from the Netherlands for the last 150 months before coming to the Netherlands. It’s a pity that they are giving less and less ruling – once it was issued for 10 years, then for 8, now only for 5.
My employer pays for the services of an intermediary office, which submits a local tax application for my ruling. As my colleagues told me, this usually takes 2-3 months, after which the “net” salary becomes much larger (and is paid for the months without rollover).
I filled out the application form and sent the documents in early June. The tax office responded that right now they are switching to electronic document management, and therefore the approval of the ruling may take longer. OK. After 3 months, I began to kick the intermediary office. The office sluggishly passed kicks to the tax office and back to me. At the beginning of September, I was sent a letter from the tax office, in which I was asked to provide evidence that I lived outside the Netherlands for 18 months before April 2018.
Coincidence? Don't think. It was in April that I received my new civil passport. Now I don’t remember exactly, but it seems that a scan of the passport was attached to the application for ruling. As evidence, you can show utility bills in my name. Again, the good thing is that I lived in my apartment for several years and all the bills came in my name. And I keep them all :) My relatives sent me photographs of the necessary bills, and I sent them (with an explanation of what is what) to the intermediary office.
Again, I received a notification that the tax office is switching to electronic document management, and processing the application will take longer. In November, I started kicking the mediator again, and kicked him until mid-December, when I was finally approved for ruling. It started affecting my salary in January, i.e. It took me 7 months to complete the rollout.
Wife finds a job
Here, too, everything went according to plan. My wife is a software tester with 4 years of experience. For the first few months, she continued to work for her Moscow employer. Special thanks to him for allowing us to switch to completely remote work. The advantage of this solution: you don’t have to rush headlong into an unfamiliar environment and earn yourself extra stress.
Minus: as it turned out, from the moment of registration here the wife is a tax resident of the Netherlands. Accordingly, you must pay taxes on any income. Maybe the local tax office wouldn’t have found out about this income, or maybe they would have (since 2019, the automatic exchange of tax data between Russia and European countries began). In general, we decided not to risk it and reported this income in our tax return. How much you will have to pay is not yet known; the declaration is in the process of filing.
Somewhere in November, my wife started looking for work here. There are few vacancies for Software Testers and QA Engineers here, but they do exist. In the vast majority of cases, ISTQB and/or Tmap certifications are required. She has neither one nor the other. As I understand from her words, in Russia there is much more talk about this than there is a real need.
As a result, my wife was rejected twice, without even being invited to an interview. The third attempt was more successful - in early December she was called for an interview. The interview itself lasted a little over an hour and was held in the “life conversation” format: they asked what she does, how she copes with such and such situations. They asked a little about experience in automation (there is, but very little), there were no technical questions. All this is just over an hour and in English, of course. This was her first experience of being interviewed in a foreign language.
A couple of weeks later they called me for a second interview - with the owner and part-time director of the company. Same format, same topics, another hour of talk. A couple of weeks later they said they were ready to make an offer. We started discussing details. I, remembering my relatively successful experience, advised to bargain a little. It happened here too.
The offer itself is a 1-year contract with the prospect of switching to a permanent one if everything goes well. A permit for any work was very useful, because... In terms of salary, the wife does not yet reach the level of a kennismigrant. And she is not entitled to ruling, because she has been living in the Netherlands for several months.
As a result, since February 2019, my wife has been working full-time as a software tester in a local company.
Local rights
My status as a kennismigrant, in addition to ruling, gives me the right to exchange my Russian license for a local one without passing an exam. This is also a big saving, because... Driving lessons and the test itself will cost several thousand euros. And all this will be in Dutch.
Now that I got the ruling, I started exchanging rights. On the website of CBR - the local equivalent of the traffic police - I paid 37 euros for a medical questionnaire, where I simply noted that I have no health problems (I always wear glasses, but there was nothing about glasses, only can I see with both eyes?). Because I have a taxi and am exchanging a category B license, no medical examination was required. 2 weeks later I received a letter stating that CBR approved my rights exchange. With this letter and other documents, I went to my local municipality, where I paid another 35 euros and gave up my Russian license (without translation).
After another 2 weeks I was notified that the new licenses were ready. I picked them up in the same municipality. My Russian license was valid until 2021, but my Dutch license was issued for 10 years - until 2029. Plus, in addition to category B, they include AM (mopeds) and T (tractors!).
The Dutch will send their Russian licenses to our consulate, and the consulate will send them to Russia at the end of the year. Those. I have several months to intercept the rights in The Hague, so as not to look for them later in the MREO - either in Saratov, or in the Moscow region.
Conclusion
At this point, I consider our process of moving and settling in to be complete. My plans for the next few years are to live and work peacefully. In the next and final part I will talk about the everyday and work aspects of life in the Netherlands.
Source: habr.com