The Schengen Shuffle: What 18 Months of 90 Days In, 90 Days Out Actually Looks Like
For 18 months before we became Italian residents, Joe and I ran the Schengen Shuffle: 90 days in Italy, 90 days in the US, repeat. We did it as a system, not a workaround. By the end of it, we had been in Borgotaro in every season, had comparison points f
(Or: The Reconnaissance Trip That Wouldn't End)
If you've been researching the mechanics of moving to Italy (or anywhere in the Schengen Zone) you've met the 90-day rule.
Non-EU citizens can stay in the Schengen Area for up to 90 days in any 180-day period. Which means: 90 days in, 90 days out. If you are not yet a resident (if you haven't cleared the visa and permesso di soggiorno hurdles) this is the rhythm you are living by. Actually in our case it was just residency. My husband was an Italian, but we were not yet ready to commit to residency. There were business and family concerns that required us to be in the US every 6 months or so, so we dragged our feet on the obligations (and benefits!) that come with residency.
Some people treat this as an obstacle. We decided to treat it as a system.
For 18 months, from May 2016 to our decision to obtain residency in November 2017, Joe and I ran what we eventually started calling the Schengen Shuffle. It was an 18 month journey for us, but for some, it will be 3 months, 9 months, 5 years.
Here's what that actually looks like.
First: Who This Is For (and Who It Isn't For)
Let me be clear about the population of people for whom the Schengen Shuffle is a practical option — because it isn't everyone.
This works well for:
Retirees or near-retirees with no school schedule to manage
Digital nomads with location-independent income
Empty nesters whose children are grown and launched
Families who are genuinely homeschooling (with intention — not as an afterthought)
This is genuinely difficult for:
Families with school-age children in traditional school systems
Anyone whose medical situation requires continuity of care that can't be replicated across two countries
Anyone who hasn't yet solved the income question — which I'll come back to
We had adult children when we did this. Well almost — we sent our youngest, a newly minted 18 year-old, off to an exchange year in Belgium and sold our house. He complained that he was homeless, but we reminded him that we had left him a forwarding address!. We had geographic freedom. Those two facts made everything else possible. I'm not pretending otherwise.
Our Version: The 90/90 Reality
Our 90 days in Italy were anchored in Borgotaro. Our 90 days in the US were anything but simple.
We had a daughter and family in the Denver metro area. Two children on Whidbey Island in Washington State. My mother on the Tennessee River. And I was still speaking at conferences — technology conferences, roughly every six months — at various locations around the country.
So we built our US 90 days around all of it. A month in the Denver area. Time on Whidbey Island. Tennessee. Whatever city was hosting the next conference, which we deliberately scheduled to coincide with the US stay so we weren't making extra crossings just for a three-day event.
It was an adventure. I want to be honest about that first, because it genuinely was. Two countries, multiple cities, a life that felt expansive and nomadic and slightly cinematic.
It was also exhausting.
We had clothes in four places. Toiletries in four places. Electric toothbrushes in four places. The electric toothbrush thing sounds minor until you've forgotten yours on another continent for the fourth time and realized: you just buy another one and leave it there. There is a particular cognitive tax to living out of a set of partially-populated locations — always calculating what you packed, what you left behind, what you need to buy again, what you can borrow from yourself in the next city. Where was that wrap around teal dress anyway?
By month seventeen, the adventure was still real. The exhaustion was more real.
The One Thing We Did Right
We kept our apartment in Borgotaro the entire time.
Not just during the months we were there. All eighteen months. We paid rent whether or not we were in residence.
At €300 a month (which, yes, is what we paid, and is what we still pay ten years later) this was both emotionally and financially sound. We were not packing up every 90 days and starting over. We were not leaving our things in storage or dismantling a home every time we crossed the Atlantic. The apartment was there. Our things were there. We came back to a life, not to an empty flat we had to reconstruct from scratch.
This also meant zero pressure every time we returned to Italy. No frantic searches two weeks before reentry. No "this is temporary" mindset every time we walked through the door. In fact, the permanence of the Italian apartment compared to the true "shuffle" from place to place in the US probably made the decision to be in Italy seem all the more sound. We were going home.
If you are doing the Schengen Shuffle in a place you are genuinely evaluating for residency: keep the apartment. In non-tourist towns, landlords often prefer the stability of a long-term tenant even with intermittent occupancy. Italian leases generally allow you to give notice and exit with as little as 90 days' warning — we were never trapped (although our condo building DID change the locks on the portone (the door to the building) once while we were away, and thankfully we arrived home at 3 PM and not 3 AM and a neighbor let us in!). We chose to stay, because it was the right call.
What We Were Actually Learning
The thing about eighteen months of 90/90 is that by the end of it, you have a data set. Not a vacation impression. Not honeymoon optimism. A data set.
We had been in Borgotaro in every season. Bored there in January. Delighted by it in September. We had watched the mushroom and chestnut festivals happen and the August shutdown descend and the market vendors we recognized begin to recognize us back. We had eaten at Bar Centrale enough times to have developed opinions.
We also had comparison points: the 2014 reconnaissance trip had taken us through Piacenza, Pontremoli, Lippiano, Ancona, Pescara, and a beautiful atmospheric village in Abruzzo where it became immediately clear you needed a pre-existing family connection to ever truly belong. We had data on all of them. We kept coming back to Borgotaro.
By month eighteen, "this is the place" had shifted from optimism to conclusion.
The Part That Made It Possible
No one talks about the income side of the Schengen Shuffle clearly, so I will.
It is not free. Transatlantic flights four times a year are not free. Maintaining rent in Italy while covering US costs — whether that's family hosting, short-term stays, or something else entirely — is not free. Conference travel is not free.
We could do this because we had built income that moved with us. That is not a small thing. It is, in retrospect, the entire foundation of the plan. The Schengen Shuffle is a genuinely useful reconnaissance tool for people who have solved the income question first. It is a stressful endurance sport if you haven't.
I'll write about what our income actually looked like, and what I learned the hard way about money and mobility, in a separate post. But it belongs on the table here, because the Shuffle doesn't run on romance. It runs on math. I'll say this much here: it wasn't passive income in the fantasy sense. It was portable income — deliberately structured that way before we ever bought the first plane ticket. The difference between those two things is worth an entire post on its own. Which is what's coming next.
And Then We Said Basta
In November 2017, we said enough.
Not because we had failed to love it. Because we had succeeded. Borgotaro was the place. Joe got residency. We arrived to stay.
The Schengen Shuffle had done exactly what it was supposed to do: given us eighteen months of evidence before we made an irreversible decision. We did not move to Italy on a dream. We moved on a conclusion we had earned.
That distinction matters more than I can tell you.
