About

My name is Wouter and I live in London with my wife and 2 children. I was born and raised in Belgium. When I was young, we traveled in the summer around Europe. I became intrigued by other countries and started learning languages more intensively. I now speak English, Dutch (Flemish), German, French and Spanish. I also studied Russian and Chinese for a while. When I was 17, I remember telling my parents that Belgium was just too small for me and that I wanted to explore the world.

I left Belgium for the first time in 2000 when I went to live and study in Berlin. After completing my studies in Brussels in 2002 and graduating with a degree in Dutch, French and German translation, I moved back to Berlin. I lived in the Schöneberg and Neukölln districts.
 
I moved to Hamburg about a year later and still feel blessed to have lived near the Großneumarkt in central Hamburg. It is such a cute area, very quiet despite its central location. I wrote an article about why Hamburg is such a great city to live in. Between 2005 and 2007, I worked as a freelance translator and language teacher in Barcelona. My wife and I rented a lovely flat in L’Esquerra de l’Eixample (the left side of Eixample) near Hospital Clinic. I will always remember walking in the streets of that area late at night and feeling completely safe – and warm. Find out more about what I loved about living in Barcelona here.

London was calling in the summer of 2007 for a new chapter in my life. We looked into buying a flat in Notting Hill in 2008 and, to this day, I regret not going ahead with it. Yes, I admit, I too have made mistakes when it comes to buying (or rather, not buying) property.

After renting for several years in North West London, in 2014 we finally purchased the flat we now live in. This was followed by a buy-to-let in 2022.

It was always my dream to own a property in Southern Europe. Knowing that my budget wouldn’t stretch as far to buy properties in Spain, France or Italy, I looked further east to Montenegro. By the summer of 2024, I signed the purchase contract for my apartment on the beautiful coast of Montenegro. By early 2025, the full renovation was completed.

In the spring of 2025, my eye fell on a condo in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It is an ideal example of a property for investment purposes as it can easily be rented out long-term and bring in a healthy rental income. I am in the process of purchasing the condo and will write about it soon. I already wrote about my love for Chiang Mai without ever having been there.

In the past two decades, I regularly took time off to spend lengthy times abroad. I travelled to North and South America, spent several months in Australia and New Zealand, toured around Europe for one of my jobs, and worked from Hong Kong and China for several months every other year.