Out of curiosity, what do you find cheaper about the Swedish lifestyle? Moving from California to Denmark, I have sort of a vague feeling that's true for me also, but having trouble coming up with any specifics! I did get rid of my car, which is one big source of savings on insurance/gas/maintenance (plus a nice one-time $10k from selling it). But apart from that, I'm not too sure what's different. Maybe I eat out less as well, and do more picnics in the summer.

I haven't been to Sweden, but I assume he's talking about not being that keen on hanging out at the shopping mall where you get overcharged for shitty food when you get hungry from buying too much stuff you don't really need and spending half an hour looking for parking space after a 30km high-traffic ride from home.

I'm having thoughts on moving from Stockholm to the US (NJ or NY). It would be interesting to know how e.g. taxes are different between the US and Sweden.

Where do I find information like this? Taxes, costs of living - everything. How did you do before you moved to Sweden?

Taxes are easy to look up. There are calculators where you input your salary and the state you will live in and it'll spit out a pretty close number. Expect somewhere around 30% income tax for a middle-class salary.

Numbeo is ok for comparing the cost of items, but it's not clear how your consumption will change. My consumption is much lower in Stockholm.

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Cars are expensive, but hopefully you don't need one if you're looking at NY metro.

The big differences that are harder to predict are insurance, healthcare, and retirement. Healthcare costs can be sudden, large expenses ($2-20k USD) even if you have insurance through your employer... to be safe, you need to keep a pretty gigantic emergency fund. If you don't have insurance through your employer, you will probably bankrupt.

Children, college, and retirement cost more than you will ever earn. Don't do any of those things!

Do you find there's any language barrier or have you picked up the language?

I'm terrible with languages... it will probably take 5 years to reach 'conversational' levels.

My company is extremely international, and all business is done in english, so there is no problem. Other companies I interviewed with did bring it up as a problem. Startups seem to care very little, major corporations care a lot.

I would think that since you are living in the country if you take a night course (or something equivalent) you could probably learn a lot quicker than someone living outside the country.

Immersion helps a lot for languages.

Immersion helps, but it's pretty easy not to become immersed in Scandinavia, because everyone both speaks good English, and switches to it quite quickly when they realize you're a foreigner. It's possible to ask them to please speak Danish/Swedish/Norwegian because you're learning, and many people will then switch back, but the immediate switch to English is basically default (especially in Denmark).

I've lived in Denmark for 2 1/2 years and probably have had less real need to speak Danish here than in the 3 weeks I spent in Spain! More Spaniards are either unable or unwilling to speak English, so that trip was much more immersive language-wise, in that I actually had to interact in Spanish.

Don't be to hard on the Spanish. I lived there for some time and can attest to that most Spaniards really would like to improve their English but find it incredibly difficult to do so. This is especially true for the spoken language.

My personal theory is that Spanish Spanish (i.e., from Spain) has a range of spoken sounds that is to a large part complimentary to that of English, thus making the transition between these two languages particularly difficult. (Note that there is significantly less of a difference between the sounds of American Spanish and English).