No job, no need, and the house is entirely legal, including the septic system and other infrastructure I’ve built, and I have a kid. Also good fucking luck to anyone wanting to get a bulldozer there - it’s on a 45 degree hill slope with no road access. The truck was €4,000, and it’s a hilux. I could set it on fire and it would be fine.
The property taxes are €40 a year for the house, the mill, the ruined medieval village, and the 15ha of land.
My passive income is seven figures, because rather than fritter away on crap, I invested in a diverse range of stuff, from equities to real estate to small businesses/startups. I’m noodling about with a few new ventures of my own as I have time on my hands.
And yes, emigration is useful. I draw an income from expensive economies and moved to a cheap country where quality of life is king.
To be clear, this is the current state - I worked my arse off for 15 years and lived a pretty monkish existence, and now reap the rewards.
Portugal. We actually have two habitation licenses for the property as a whole, as there are two extant habitations there, both ruinous (rebuilding one, the watermill, this year) and there are basically no code requirements for historic structures, and any other structures on the same land under 100m2.
Portugal shut down the most likely path to his story recently (actually just today), as they decided it created "lack of affordable housing" for their own population. This is another one of those cases of "just be born before the ladders are pulled away and you can do like me."
No, I didn’t do a golden visa - rather, a retirement visa - residency is easy if you have even only a moderate income of €1,200 a month or so or assets. It also handily comes with a ten year exemption on overseas income, which I don’t feel too bad about as I avail myself of no state services beyond those which I do pay for through other taxes, and I’ve made some substantial investments in local businesses.
The golden visa was a much abused scheme largely for absentee landlords who want EU residency, and it has indeed jacked up property prices in the major population centres to an unsustainable degree - many properties have been priced to the visa threshold, and then sit vacant, unrented, often dilapidating. I’m glad to see the back of it, as it gives estrangeiros a bad rap.
The property taxes are €40 a year for the house, the mill, the ruined medieval village, and the 15ha of land.
My passive income is seven figures, because rather than fritter away on crap, I invested in a diverse range of stuff, from equities to real estate to small businesses/startups. I’m noodling about with a few new ventures of my own as I have time on my hands.
And yes, emigration is useful. I draw an income from expensive economies and moved to a cheap country where quality of life is king.
To be clear, this is the current state - I worked my arse off for 15 years and lived a pretty monkish existence, and now reap the rewards.