u/notasmilo

We’re Ukrainian family, I’m 27, wife 26, son 1 year old and cat. Planning to move to Bulgaria within the next year or so.
It's not a random pick. My family is Bessarabian Bulgarian, so I'm going through citizenship by
origin. Passport is in progress, wife and kid come on family basis after.

Money is where I'd really like a reality check. I'm not American, so the whole Roth/401k thing doesn't exist for me, saw the thread here about Roth IRAs being useless abroad and yeah, that's just my baseline. Everything sits in a plain brokerage. Right now mostly VWCE (world index, accumulating) through Interactive Brokers, plus a smaller crypto slice, mostly BTC and a
bit of ETH. I keep the crypto part small on purpose, not trying to have the whole plan ride on it.

The thing that makes Bulgaria interesting for drawdown, at least from what I've read: flat 10% income tax, and capital gains on ETFs/shares traded on EU regulated markets are apparently 0%. So a VWCE drawdown would be tax free if I understood that right. Crypto still gets the 10%. If someone here has actually lived this and can confirm I'm not misreading it, that'd help a lot, not taking a random blog's word for it.

What I'm trying to figure out:
- realistic monthly budget for a family of 3, comfortable but not fancy.
No idea yet if we'd land in Sofia, Plovdiv or somewhere on the coast and the numbers I keep finding are all over the place.
- given that, what portfolio number actually makes sense. We're not trying to fully stop at 30, more like keep some remote/crypto income going a few years and let the index part compound (coast fire I guess), then ease off.

Current pot is around the 120k which I know isn't enough to sit on forever, hence the coast plan.

Is Bulgaria realistic on a modest number if you stay out of Sofia? And does keeping everything in a normal brokerage, just VWCE + a bit of crypto with no tax wrapper, sound sane to people who don't have US retirement accounts?
Would especially love input from anyone who did the eastern europe move
with kids.

Got into it with a friend last week who thinks the Changenow/Fixedfloat instant swap services are dead now that aggregators exist. Don't fully agree, but my actual use for them has shrunk to maybe two cases.

One is cross chain stuff no single dex routes. BTC to XMR, or some random L2 token back to native SOL. The alternative is bridging twice and praying nothing gets stuck halfway. The swap service just handles it.
Two is when I don't want coins sitting on an exchange at all. Not overnight, not even for an hour. Quick in and out. Fixed rate option is slept on too

Where they're just bad is trading. Spread vs a real book is rough and per swap fees pile up fast if you do it often.
Oh and non custodial doesn't mean no compliance, found that out the annoying way. They still AML score whatever you send in.