This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sam Correll, 38, and Spencer Claiborne, 30, who moved from Kansas City, Missouri, to Saranda, Albania, a coastal town about 30 minutes from Corfu, Greece. Correll and Claiborne moved to Albania in August 2024 and now help others relocate there. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Claiborne: Like a lot of people, Sam and I worked toward that concept of the American dream, where you have a nice house and a stable job that you go to regularly — and we had done that.
We had completely renovated our house during the pandemic, and it felt like I was spending every weekend at Home Depot and then my entire workweek in a cubicle.
I think Sam was feeling a similar level of burnout from the sameness. We both realized that we had grown up to believe this should be our path — professional, managerial-class work, homeownership, and dutifully going to Home Depot all the time.
Instead, we wanted to chart our own path.
Correll: It really wasn’t fulfilling at the end of the day. We’d done the things, and we built the life, but we weren’t doing anything new at that point.
Claiborne: It really seemed like we were going through the motions, and there wasn’t a whole lot of excitement to look forward to. We didn’t want to wait until we were retired, elderly, or either of us had some sort of health event before we decided that we wanted to go and see the world and become international.
Correll: We were tired of our day-to-day grind, but we didn’t initially plan on moving to Albania. We went on a three-month-long scouting trip through Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, and the UK.
We went back home, and then we decided we wanted to make the move less than a year later. It made sense from the housing market we were in to sell our house, so we listed it. Then it was more about where can we go, and where can we stay for a while while we make a longer-term plan?
We thought entrepreneurship would be our best bet for working in Albania
Claiborne: Sam and I both left the corporate life and six-figure remote jobs to take a chance and to bet on Albania, because it’s a great opportunity to be an entrepreneur here. And frankly, in this region, if you’re not retired, entrepreneurship is the main way that you can move abroad.
Correll: It was still a huge risk because Spencer had decided he was leaving his job, and I planned to keep my corporate job for a period of time, but we knew that that wasn’t sustainable long-term.
So we had to do something to monetize ourselves and be entrepreneurial. We had the corporate skills to do consulting and things like that, but we didn’t go into this with a solid plan.
Claiborne: Specifically for Americans, Albania lets Americans stay for 12 months with no visa required. You just enter, you go through an e-gate, and you can stay. If you’re expatriating, it’s a really easy way to get out, get started, and establish yourself.
And if you want to stay long-term, you can very easily get a longer-term visa. We opted for an entrepreneurship, business-creation route to residency, and we’re able to get a five-year residency permit with relatively minimal cost within about six months of arriving here.
Correll: It was less than $2,000 for both of us.
The point that really stood out in our decision-making process was we could do all of this from within the country.
If you’re moving to Portugal, or you’re going to a lot of the other countries, you need to get the visa before you leave the US. And because we wanted to sell our house during the summer market, we didn’t have the time to do that.
Claiborne: One of the nice things about Albania is that it’s both an ancient and a very young country — the government here is 30 or 35 years old in its current iteration, and there’s a lot of rapid catch-up to the rest of Europe that’s happening, especially as Albania gets ready to join the EU and rapidly modernizes.
When Sam and I landed, we weren’t 100% sure of what we were going to do for money, but I could tell for sure once we got here that our American business sense and our entrepreneurial mindset would be valuable.
We’re glad we abandoned our lives in the States
Correll: I think what’s allowed us to succeed in moving abroad and moving forward is that we let everything go. We let our stuff go, and we let our old life go.
I grew up on a family farm with my great-grandparents’ stuff from a hundred years ago, and my parents’ stuff from several years ago that we inherited.
In Kansas City, we moved into a historic house, and we filled it with art and furniture and all of the things you do early in your stages of building a life.
Ultimately, we decided to let most of it go. We didn’t want to bring most of it.
Claiborne: What I realized in that process was that it was our stuff that was holding us back. In working with other people moving abroad, we realized that as well. It is incredibly freeing but also incredibly challenging to get rid of all of the items that constitute your life. For a lot of people, the stuff really does weigh them down.
Most people who are relocating are older. They’re in their retirement years, and they get a retirement visa. It’s rare to see younger people who are in Albania for any length of time.
Especially when moving at an earlier stage of life, you have to have an attitude of, “I’ll at least try it.” You don’t need to completely decide to do something like move abroad or live in Albania forever, but the nice thing about doing this when you’re younger is that you can say, “OK, I’ll try it. And if it doesn’t work out, I still have time to do something else.”
For me, there was a realization that I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t try.
I really want to see if this is something I like, see if this is a lifestyle that I prefer — and I’m really grateful that we did.
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