The library › Readiness
Six questions with hard edges. Answer them honestly and you will know whether to move this year, next year, or not yet.
Readiness is not a feeling. Almost everyone who moves back feels ready, including the people it goes badly for. Excitement is not evidence.
What follows is six questions. Each has a bar, and the bar is deliberately uncomfortable. Nobody clears all six on the first read. That is the point: the gaps are your to-do list, and every one of them is easier to fix from where you are now than from a rented flat in Lekki with your savings already committed.
Nigerian landlords commonly want a year or two of rent in advance, and agency, legal and caution fees sit on top. For a modest family place in Lekki Phase 1 that is fifty thousand dollars or more before you have bought a kettle.
The bar: you can cover the upfront housing cost, the fees, the flights, the setup, and three further months of living, without touching your pension, without a loan against the house you still own abroad, and without selling an asset in a hurry.
The phrase to watch for in your own thinking is "we will sort it out when we get there." Things cost more there, not less, and you will be sorting it out with less leverage and no local credit history.
This is the question people most want to skip, and it is the one that decides everything.
There are only three honest answers. You keep earning abroad, remotely. You have income-generating assets that pay you regardless of where you sleep. Or you have a specific, funded plan to earn in Nigeria, with the runway to survive being wrong about it.
"I will find something" is not one of the three.
The bar: you can name the accounts your money arrives in each month, and the amount, and it covers your realistic number rather than your hopeful one.
If you are keeping a job abroad, get it in writing. A verbal "sure, work from anywhere" often turns into a payroll, insurance or data-protection problem the moment HR is formally asked. Ask before you resign from anything.
If you are relying on assets, notice which ones survive the move intact and which ones quietly do not. Rental property abroad usually keeps paying. A business that needs you physically present does not. A portfolio held in a brokerage that closes accounts for non-residents is a problem you want to discover now, not in March.
Build the income before you need it. Someone who spends the year before their move turning savings into something that pays monthly arrives with options. Someone who arrives with a lump sum and a plan to invest it locally arrives as a target.
If you last checked this before 2026, your information is out of date, and the change is not in your favour.
Nigeria's tax rules changed with effect from 1 January 2026. Residency used to hinge mostly on counting days, and staying under 183 days was the standard diaspora workaround. That no longer works on its own. The current test also looks at whether you have a permanent home available to you in Nigeria, whether you habitually stay there, and whether you have substantial family or economic ties, meaning a spouse, parents, children, or significant business interests.
Meet any one of those and you can be treated as resident. Residents are taxable on income earned anywhere in the world, not only income earned in Nigeria.
Read that twice if you own a flat in Lagos, or your children are there, or you have a stake in a family business, and you assumed your foreign salary was none of Nigeria's concern.
Then note the other half of the problem. Leaving your current country does not automatically end its claim on you either. The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live. The United Kingdom and Canada each have their own residency tests, and Canada has a departure charge that catches people who do not plan for it. It is entirely possible to be considered resident in two countries at once, which is what double taxation treaties exist to sort out, and which is not something to improvise.
The bar: you have had one paid conversation with a cross-border tax professional who has seen your actual numbers, and you know which country expects what from you.
Nothing on this page is tax advice, and it cannot be, because the answer genuinely depends on facts we do not have. What we can tell you is that this is the single most expensive thing to get wrong quietly, and the cheapest to get right early.
You will move money for years. Small inefficiencies compound into serious sums.
Work out, specifically: which account receives your foreign income, what it costs to convert, how long it takes, what happens when a large transfer gets flagged, and how you would pay a school or a landlord who wants dollars when your money is sitting in naira.
Get a domiciliary account sorted before you need it, not during the week you need to pay rent. Understand the difference between the rate you see quoted and the rate you actually get. Keep a clean paper trail on every large movement, because the transfer that gets questioned is always the urgent one.
The bar: you have moved a real, meaningful sum through the route you intend to use, and you know exactly what it cost and how long it took.
Test the pipe before you depend on it.
Not agreeable. In.
Ask your partner separately what worries them most, and listen to the answer instead of solving it. Ask the children, if they are old enough to have a view, and take seriously that a teenager leaving their friends is losing something real that your excitement does not compensate for.
Schooling is the piece that turns theoretical. International school fees in Lagos run from around fifteen thousand dollars a year per child, and strong Nigerian private schools cost a fraction of that. Both are real options. Which one you choose changes your budget by an order of magnitude and changes your child's next few years more than that.
The bar: every adult can state, unprompted, why they are going, and it is not only because you want to.
The returns that come apart are rarely about money. They come apart because one person moved and the rest were transported.
Ask anyone who has done this and they will tell you the same thing: have a way out that does not depend on everything going well.
A parent falls ill abroad. A contract ends early. Something happens locally that makes staying unwise for a while. None of these are predictions. They are the ordinary reasons people need to move quickly, and the difference between an inconvenience and a catastrophe is whether you prepared while things were calm.
The bar: you could leave within seventy-two hours without losing access to your money, your documents, or your children's school records.
We wrote that one up separately, because it deserves more than a paragraph.
Count the bars you clear.
Six. Go. Your remaining problems are logistics, and logistics are solvable.
Four or five. Go, but fix the gaps first, and name a date. Most people sit here, and most of the gaps take a few months rather than a few years.
Two or three. Not this year. That is not a failure, it is a plan with a timeline. The people who move a year later than they wanted to, having fixed the money question first, tend to be the ones still there in five years.
Zero or one. You want to go, which is a real thing and worth respecting. You are not ready, which is a different thing. Start with question two, because income solves more of the others than any of them solve alone.
There is no prize for going sooner. There is a substantial penalty for going unprepared, and it is paid by your family as much as by you.
If you want a second opinion on where you actually sit, tell us your situation and someone will read it properly.
Nothing here is tax, legal or financial advice. It is a checklist for deciding what to ask, and who to ask. Figures are current as of September 2026 and change.