The Single Best Opportunity in Europe

Portugal Offers Benefits Like No Other Country in Europe

I’m nothing if not 100% honest with you. So, in the service of honesty, let me tell you now that today I am not just writing… I am shilling.

I’m channeling the ghost of Billy Mays, legendary late-night TV pitchman famous for his OxiClean commercials from 20-plus years ago. I am not, however, pitching you on the whitening power of OxiClean or the effortless wonders of Kaboom! tile and shower cleaner.

I’m here today to go hog-wild on Portugal.

See, my compadres over at International Living announced last week that they’re holding their first ever European conference here in my ‘hood—Portugal—next April, called Fast Track Europe.And before they could even let potential attendees know about it, I was shooting off emails to the pooh-bahs in charge, asking if it was OK for me to, well, go hog-wild shilling Portugal here in Field Notes.

That you’re reading this dispatch gives you the answer.

Thing is, I’m not shilling to sell the conference. Apparently, I really don’t need to. Within about two days of officially announcing the Portugal event, they oversold the 200 available spaces—the fastest conference sell-out International Living has ever seen. (Those same pooh-bahs have asked the resort down along the beach in the Algarve to rejigger the conference room to make space for an additional 100 butts… but I gotta assume those seats are gonna vanish crazy quick, too.)

No, I’m shilling because I really love this place and I want Americans—and my Canadian friends who read me—to know about the virtues of Portugal.

During IL’s Go Overseas Bootcamp in Denver earlier this month, I can’t tell you how many people approached me to ask about Portugal in general and Cascais in particular. From reading Field Notes dispatches over the last year or so, they know I decamped from Prague—where I spent the first five years of my live-and-work-in-Europe adventure—and alighted this summer in this little beach community about 45 minutes to the west of Lisbon.

And I will tell you what I told them: Portugal is demonstrably the single best opportunity in Europe, whether you’re a retiree or a digital nomad.

Now, that’s not to say other European countries are so much stinky cheese. France, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Spain… they’re all fantastic places. I can make a case for each of them based on my time traveling through them and researching their visa/residency/digital nomad options for a European passport and residency book I wrote earlier this year.

But that just means I also know each country’s short-comings—from onerous tax rates in France, to long waits for citizenship/EU passport in the Czech Republic (10 years), to murky legality surrounding dual-citizenship in Spain.

But Portugal…

It’s the absolute best of all worlds for anyone who wants to live and/or work in Europe long-term, and whose goal, like mine, is to ultimately wrap your paws around your very own EU passport.

First, let me just get this part out of the way: Portugal is gorgeous. Incredibly scenic and photogenic. This view is an eight-minute walk from my apartment:

The whole country—top to bottom, left to right—is a truly beautiful place.

But that’s not what makes Portugal, to me, the #1 destination in Europe for retirees and digital nomads.

Let’s start with its passport. It’s an EU passport, meaning that once you own a Portuguese passport, you’re free to move about the continent.

You also have the right to live and work anywhere in the 27-member European Union. It’s no different than living in Minneapolis and deciding you want the warmth of Arizona. Pick up and move, and that’s that.

Best of all, you’re eligible to apply for a Portuguese passport just five years after obtaining your residence permit (which takes about three or four months after your arrival). So within about five years, you’re a true European citizen with rights of residency and employment across most of the continent.

Only Poland offers a quicker path—at three years—assuming you marry a Pole.

Portugal’s fast-track passport opportunity is great for both retirees and digital nomads. Nothing like options. Plus, if where you really want to live is, say, Italy or Spain, but you don’t want to wait 10 years for the passport, well, nabbing an EU passport in five years means you can easily move to the country of your choice and do so as a full-fledged EU citizen.

And then there’s the tax situation…

Granted, Portugal is not a cheap-tax country. However, Portugal offers a tax incentive to foreigners called the Non-Habitual Resident program, or NHR. Through that arrangement, foreigners pay reduced taxes for 10 years.

• For retirees, income earned from an overseas pension (like Social Security) is taxed at a flat 10% for a decade. Foreign real estate income and capital gains are tax exempt.
• For digital nomads earning their income offshore, personal income is taxed at a flat 20%.

However, the NHR plan also provides for a 0% tax rate on dividend income. Thus, if you structure your income to flow through a corporate structure, like an LLC, and then pay yourself a monthly dividend that reflects your income for the month, you have created a zero-tax structure for yourself in Portugal.

You will also be eligible to write off your first $120,000 in personal income in the U.S., thanks to the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE). You’ll still owe self-employment tax to Uncle Sam, but that’s after expenses. So, your global tax rate is ultimately in the 10% to 12% range—a fantastic rate at which to fatten your nest egg in the years up to retirement, or live a larger life if you’re younger.

Combine those two strengths—a passport in five years, and a steeply reduced tax obligation—and there’s not another country in Europe that stacks up against Portugal.

In fact, those two strengths are why I relocated to Portugal from the Czech Republic. (Keeping with our honesty theme: My wife’s desire to live by the ocean again also played a pivotal role.)

I’ve gone through all the options for the rest of Europe, and I’ve yet to find a country that offers anything close to Portugal’s benefits.

Of course, this is entirely a facts-and-circumstances situation.

Some people are not going to care about tax rates or passports. They want to live in France for X, Y, and Z reasons… They’ve dreamed of living on a Greek isle ever since visiting Corfu 20 years ago… They want a life filled with Italian wines and pasta and gelato every day of the year.

I can get behind all of those reasons.

But for anyone seeking an easy way into Europe and is specifically chasing an EU passport and/or fantastic tax-reduction opportunities, try nabbing one of those 100 additional spots to IL’s Fast Track Europe conference next April in the Algarve.

Because Portugal is your answer.

It cleans. It brightens. It eliminates odors!

Wait, that’s OxiClean…

Apparently, once you start shilling, you just can’t stop.