Everything you need to actually plan this move — not the aspirational version, the real one. Start with the full guide if you want to read it straight through, or jump into the questionnaire if you want a plan built around your specific situation.
What moving to Southeast Asia actually involves, start to finish — baggage and shipping realities, vehicle decisions, customs rules, and the ground-level details most guides skip entirely. Written to be read straight through.
Read the GuideAnswer questions about your actual situation — why you're moving, what you're leaving behind, where you're headed — and get a guide assembled specifically around your answers, with nothing irrelevant to wade through.
Start the QuestionnaireThere's no wrong entry point here — both paths above end up covering the same ground, they just get you there differently.
The full guide walks through the entire process in order — what to do with your belongings, vehicle decisions, shipping realities, customs rules, timelines — the way you'd read any long-form guide. Good if you're still early in deciding whether this move makes sense at all, or if you just prefer reading over answering questions.
The questionnaire skips anything that doesn't apply to you — no kids, no pets, no vehicle to sell — and surfaces the specific things that do: your nationality's tax rules, your destination's visa options, whether your situation calls for a phased move. Good once you have real specifics to work with.
Read the guide for the full picture, then run the questionnaire once you have real answers to the questions it asks — country, timeline, family situation. The two aren't really alternatives to each other so much as different depths of the same plan.
These three come up in almost every relocation, and they're genuinely complex enough to deserve more room than a quick guide answer — that's what the tabs above are for.
International schools exist in real numbers across all five countries. The question isn't whether they exist — it's how to tell a genuinely good one from a nice campus with good marketing, and whether a school is even the right tier for your situation.
Two genuinely useful, free resources exist and should be your starting point rather than a Facebook group recommendation: the US State Department's Office of Overseas Schools directory (state.gov) lists State Department-assisted schools by country — an informal quality signal since these schools meet baseline standards for embassy family enrollment. international-schools-database.com is a free, searchable directory covering the actual current landscape: 196 international schools in Thailand, 193 in Malaysia, 146 in Indonesia, and 42 in Manila alone — filterable by curriculum, fees, and class size.
A school carrying real accreditation isn't automatically "the best," but it means external, ongoing standards review rather than just a nice campus. The signals that actually mean something: IB World School status, Council of International Schools (CIS), WASC and NEASC (US regional accreditation bodies common across the region), and Cambridge International authorization. None of these guarantee quality on their own — but a school with none of them carrying a premium price tag is a legitimate question to ask about directly.
This is exactly the part most relocation guides skip entirely. The pattern is consistent across the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia: local public school is technically free and often technically open to foreign children — but it's a real option for almost nobody in a typical expat family's position. The blocker isn't legal, it's language: instruction is mostly in the local language starting in early grades, so it only works for families who are already integrated long-term or have kids already fluent.
Most relocation content jumps straight from "public school" to "$15,000/year international school" and skips the honest middle option: private local schools. They're cheaper than international, offer better English instruction than public, but are less internationally portable if you plan to move again. For families not committing permanently, this middle tier deserves serious consideration rather than being treated as a compromise.
| Country | International Schools | Typical Annual Fee (age ~12) |
|---|---|---|
| Philippines | 42+ in Manila alone | Verify current figures per school — regional data suggests notably lower than Thailand |
| Thailand | 196 nationwide | ~฿471,000/year (verify current) |
| Vietnam | Concentrated in HCMC and Hanoi | Verify per school — international zones tend to cluster higher-tier schools |
| Malaysia | 193 nationwide | ~RM42,508/year (verify current) |
| Indonesia | 146 nationwide | Varies enormously — Jakarta and Bali command a real premium over other regions |
Fee figures shift yearly and by specific school — always confirm current pricing directly with the school rather than relying on any published guide, including this one.
These five countries are genuinely not equally pet-friendly, and treating "bring your pet" as one uniform process across all of them is the single most common mistake in relocation planning for pet owners.
| Country | Quarantine | 2026 Detail Worth Knowing |
|---|---|---|
| 🇵🇭 Philippines | 30 days, but home quarantine, not a facility | No titer test required, no banned-breed list — genuinely the most pet-friendly of the five |
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | Usually none if paperwork is correct (officer discretion to hold 30 days) | Bangkok's BMA introduced a pet-per-residence limit effective January 10, 2026 — worth knowing for condo living specifically |
| 🇻🇳 Vietnam | Generally none if compliant | No titer test required from any origin country |
| 🇲🇾 Malaysia | 7 days mandatory at a KLIA facility (most countries), can extend to 6 months case-by-case | A real restricted-breed list exists — check the DVS/MAQIS site directly rather than assume |
| 🇮🇩 Indonesia | 7–14 days — the strictest of the five | New PCR test requirement for cats from the US, Netherlands, and Russia; active embargo on dogs specifically from Thailand |
Malaysia and other countries in the region maintain restricted-breed lists, and it might seem helpful to publish them here. We're deliberately not doing that: these lists change, and a static page listing specific breeds will eventually go stale and become actively wrong — worse than not listing them at all. Check the official DVS (Malaysia), BAI (Philippines), or equivalent agency site directly for your specific breed before making any plans.
Get an ISO-compliant microchip before the rabies vaccination — order matters, since vaccinating first can invalidate the chip's usefulness for documentation purposes. Rabies vaccine timing windows are typically 21–30 days before travel, not immediately before. You'll need a vet-issued health certificate from an accredited vet in your origin country, timed to each destination's specific window.
Professional pet relocation services handle the entire process door-to-door, including permits — genuinely worth knowing about as an option, not just the DIY path, especially for anyone already overwhelmed by everything else on their moving list. Roughly $2,500+ for a cat or small dog to Malaysia is one real reference point for what this costs.
For a lot of people, especially Americans, a pet isn't a logistics line item — it's a family member, and treating the decision that casually does a disservice to something that matters. If you're weighing whether to bring a pet at all versus the options covered in Sell, Ship & Store, take the time to actually work through it rather than defaulting to whatever seems easiest under moving stress.
The real decision isn't item-by-item — it's a lens you apply to everything: cost of storing or shipping, versus replacement cost, versus how genuinely irreplaceable something is.
Irreplaceable items — photos, family heirlooms, documents — where cost barely matters because the item can't be repurchased at any price. If you're relocating permanently, this is exactly the category where the shipping cost is worth paying without much debate.
Anything with a real local equivalent at your destination. A vehicle or motorcycle is the classic example — dealerships for most major brands, including ones people assume aren't available (a Harley-Davidson dealer exists in both Manila and Bangkok/Pattaya, for instance), mean nothing is actually lost by selling here and buying there.
Financially valuable but not sentimentally irreplaceable, and your destination or timeline is still undecided. This is where the honest cost-and-risk math matters most, because storage adds up fast against something with a fixed resale value.
| Unit Size | Fits | Standard (2026) | Climate-Controlled |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5×5 | A few boxes, small furniture | $40–$70/mo | $50–$90/mo |
| 5×10 | Studio or minimalist 1-bed contents | $60–$120/mo | $75–$150/mo |
| 10×10 | Full 1–2 bedroom apartment | $100–$180/mo (nat'l avg. ~$120–$136) | $130–$230/mo |
| 10×15 | Larger apartment or small house | $150–$220/mo | $190–$280/mo |
| 10×20 | Full household or vehicle storage | $150–$300/mo | $200–$380/mo |
National averages as of 2026 — actual pricing varies significantly by city and facility. A 10×10 unit runs roughly $88/mo in Houston versus $250+/mo in Los Angeles or New York. Get a size consultation from the facility directly rather than guessing.
Miss payments long enough — commonly around 30 days, though it's state-law-dependent — and a storage facility can legally auction your unit's entire contents to recover the debt. This is a genuine risk for anyone planning to be hard to reach by mail from Southeast Asia. Set up autopay on the unit before you leave — this is not the corner to cut.
Wood furniture warps and cracks, leather molds, electronics degrade in a standard unit — and critically, paper documents and photographs are just as climate-sensitive. This matters most for exactly the category of items you were planning to keep rather than ship: the photos, the documents, the things that can't be replaced but also can't survive two years in an un-air-conditioned unit.
This is a genuinely bigger story than most people realize, and it directly affects anyone assuming "leave it in the bank box" is still a default option.
JPMorgan Chase confirmed in August 2025 it's eliminating safe deposit boxes nationwide entirely — not pausing new rentals, actively closing out existing ones. Combined with Capital One (fully out since 2016) and Santander (stopped new boxes around 2023), the total number of safe deposit boxes in the US has dropped roughly 20% — from about 40 million to somewhere between 25 and 32 million. As of mid-2026, TD Bank, US Bank, Truist, and Regions Bank still offer them at most locations; Bank of America and Wells Fargo still offer them but availability is declining branch by branch. Note: this reflects US banking specifically — if you bank in the UK, Canada, or Australia, check with your own institution, as availability varies by market.
For passports, deeds, birth and marriage certificates, and any other originals: scan everything before departure, regardless of what you decide to do with the physical originals. This costs nothing and takes an afternoon, and it's the single highest-value hour you can spend on this whole category.
A home safe (a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars, per what displaced customers report) or moving to one of the banks still offering the service. Ties directly back to the shipping decision above: documents and photos are exactly the category where digitizing plus shipping the physical originals — rather than storing them — is the safest call, since a storage unit's climate risk applies to paper just as much as anything else.
These come up constantly during a move, and each one earned enough depth to deserve a full guide of its own — verified for 2026.
The same handful of questions come up over and over across the story, the questionnaire, and the deep dives above. Here they are in one place.