This probably gets ask a lot.
I’m approaching my FIRE date , and looking for ways to reduce tax . I’ll have good amount of income from deferred commissions.
Thinking of moving to a state with no income tax for a year, before going overseas for a few years.
I’m currently in Ca. If I move to Washington state, get my driving license, sign a 12 months lease and stay for 12 months, is that’s sufficient to clean break with Ca?
I'm hoping to eventually CoastFIRE during my lifetime. For those that actually did do it, how did you decide where to do it and did you visit before making your move? How many times did you visit, and did you go for long periods of time if you did or did you just try once and then decided it was for you? Are you truly living there 365 days a year or are you doing consistent border runs back and forth? Would would you recommend given your experiences to people reading here that you do not believe most people consider?
So far, I think I'm on an OK path to getting to do this at some point in my life. Just turned 24 with a little over 100k in my retirement accounts (spread across 401k, Roth, and taxable) and contributing 4k a month for the next few years before it drops a lot but still gonna contribute as much as I can. Aiming for a 60k a year USD goal in current USD for when I do stop. Part of me worries about the hidden costs that don't get mentioned here will make this not enough.
Hi! I'm an Italian citizen, lived in the US 7 years, now in Madrid earning euros (paid to Santander).
I'm trying to figure out which of these actually leaves me with more money:
A) Just use my Santander debit card for everything in Spain. Simple, no fees, but earns nothing.
B) Use my BofA Travel Rewards card (US, no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, 1.5% back) for everything, and top up a Wise account from Santander each month to pay the bill, losing (i think???) ~0.5% on the EUR→USD conversion plus the fee of 1.5 dollars per transaction.
By my math, B nets ~1% ahead (1.5% rewards minus ~0.5% conversion), so on my spend it's a few hundred euros a year vs. debit. Am I right, or am I missing a hidden cost?
Also: I have a Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95/yr) I'm planning to downgrade to a no-fee Freedom Unlimited since I don't use travel transfer partners (I fly Ryanair). Any reason not to?
Appreciate any blind spots!!
38 (wife 40), two kids aged 8 and 6. Aiming to FIRE around 48–49, when the kids hit university. Saving ~£6k/month consistently. Current expenses around 8k pcm.
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Net Worth
Real Estate (net) | £595,000 | 40% |
Pension | £235,000 | 16% |
Global ETFs | £211,000 | 14% |
Individual Stocks | £87,000 | 6% |
Equities/Other Investments | £150,000 | 10% |
Cash | £75,000 | 5% |
Crypto | £11,000 | 1% |
Total - £1,480,000
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I feel like we are on track although liquidity is poor and I know I need to get rid of some RE and move to VWRA or so. Thoughts?
Secondly, I am nervous kids' university costs in 10 yesrs or so will be ridiculous.
Now the tricky part is - we are currently residing abroad in the middle east. So trying to save and invest into vwra when possible. This stint has made us realise that there is so much life to be lived when moving out of the UK, so we are thinking retirement life is probably going to be a mix of a UK base + abroad.
I know this is for much later but does anyone know what the best options and tax efficient ways are to withdraw pension if we are living abroad, say, in a 0 tax country? Do we still have to pay tax in the UK?
Thanks!
I am currently living in the US and use an H&R Block accountant to file my taxes every year. Never had a problem and I am planning to keep using this service as long as I am staying here.
The idea is to eventually retire somewhere in southern Europe (born and raised in Italy, I have Italian citizenship) in 3 to 5 years and I wonder if anyone has tried H&R Block for expats and has any feedback?
Does anyone know if it's confirmed that all global wealth and investments will be taxed at 36% every year starting in 2028? I'm deciding whether it makes sense to move from the US to take on a job offer in the Netherlands. I'm not a US permanent resident or citizen, but I do have savings and investments in the US that will now be exposed to taxes in NL if I choose to make the move.
We're still some years out but we're starting to work on narrowing down the potential places we'd like to relocate to. How did you conduct your research? Without kids we could move to a place for a few months/years and then relocate if we didn't like it but that seems less of an option with a 6+ yo. We're EU/US citizens and we're considering mostly Europe so visas and residency is not an issue but language is.
21F Asian American. Having a good selection of asian food is very important to me as I grew up on a multicultural area and can be picky. I have 350,000 USD saved and have a pension of 3000USD monthly. Although I plan to primarily live off of my pension I would like not to spend more than 2000USD a month.
M36, no children, I own a small web agency full remote. I've been resident in Malta for the last 6 years.
This has allowed me to make taxation as efficient as possible and therefore accumulate in these years in which I have pushed hard with my business, while also travelling a lot.
I don't like to live in Malta at all. In these years, I stayed 2-3 months in Malta, 2-3 months in Spain, and then the rest travelling.
I'm tired of my business now, and I'm not pushing it anymore. I'm still making around €65-70.000€ a year, but I'm not actively looking for new clients, so likely this income will gradually decrease year after year.
I come from a poor family, I will not receive any big inheritance.
10 years ago my net worth was 0€ and in these years I accumulated a net worth of around €770k, roughly allocated as:
50
• 25% real estate: 2 properties I let (in Spain)
15
5%
5%
I spend 35.000€ per year.
Financially, staying in Malta is attractive because of the tax system, it would allows me to save even more and so going on FIRE with an higher invested net worth.
On the other hand, I would like to move to Spain and have my base there because I enjoy the lifestyle much more, I could potentially apply for the Beckham Law if I move.
I calculate that, with my current income, I would save around 25-30.000€ net every year staying resident in Malta only from the income from my business activity, in addition to the fact that the bureaucracy is much lighter and I don't even have capital gains taxes, so I manage my investments in a much more peaceful manner.
The question I'm struggling with is whether, now that I've reached a relatively comfortable level of wealth, it still makes sense to optimize taxes as much as possible by staying in Malta 1 or 2 more years, or whether I should prioritize quality of life and move to Spain sooner.
What do you think about it?
We're a 40yo couple who had a big life event and we're looking for a change of pace. Ireland seems marvelous. According to some financial models we ran, we could potentially retire on our 1.7M portfolio now at 3% drawdown (so 51k USD/yr) which would hypothetically not touch principle indefinitely.
Would it seem daft to take this amount to Ireland? We're at 250k salary in the US, high tax state, so we see about 150k of that and we contribute about 50k/yr to retirement fund. We're just tired and we work too much.
We expect this to be a major life change, and according to Internet searches (potentially overrun by AI, so not sure how good the info we're turning up might actually be) an upper middle class salary in Ireland is around 70-80k EU which we could probably meet easily if we did portfolio drawdown and one of us worked part-time.
Any thoughts? No clue if 70-80k EU is actually as comfortable in Ireland as the AI-derived search tried to make it seem.
For some background: I’m 30F and still have about 10-12 years to go before FIRE - my target number is $1.5-1.8M in today’s USD depending how desperate I am to exit corporate life. I plan to support two people solely on my savings - my partner has very little and I am the breadwinner.
I am a Chilean citizen (thanks Mom) so I have considered retiring there because I have family there and find it to be a beautiful country, but I speak Spanish poorly. I am working on getting better. I also led the nomad life for a few years while working and I absolutely loved the life but keeping long term friends was hard, and I was limited to those who spoke English. I feel building some kind of community or friends will be important in retirement - I have great friends where I live in the U.S. now and would like to replicate that even if just a little bit when I eventually retire.
I can also legally move to the U.K. with my partner (he is a British citizen) and while I like parts of it, I would have to amass more $$$ to move there and I’m not sure about it yet.
For those who pulled the trigger abroad - how did you find community or fulfillment? Especially interested to hear from those who nomadded for a long time or retired to a country/countries where you did not speak the native language at all or not very well when you moved there as an adult.
I'm based in Canada and travel a lot, about 5 international trips a year. I also have accounts in Africa and will probably add UK accounts in a few years. Every app I've tried connects my Canadian accounts fine and then gives up on everything else. Is that normal or am I just picking the wrong apps?
Right now it's spreadsheets and manual CSV imports and I'm tired of it.
Just wondering:
What exactly are you using to sync multiple accounts in multiple countries? And what does it cost?
Does it actually connect to your non-North American banks or are you importing CSVs manually?
Anything you tried and dropped? What made you quit it?
Not looking for a spreadsheet template. That's what I'm escaping from.
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.
I’m a remote sales rep from West Africa living in Southern California. Looking to spend 2–3 months abroad somewhere affordable, safe, with great internet, gyms, and a good community. I was thinking Thailand or Colombia but I’m open to other recommendations. Where would you go, and where can I find cheap monthly rentals and connect with other nomads?
Brit, 54, packed it in last year after 22 years on the continent. Started in NL, been in Switzerland the last 9 and that's where I'm staying. Pension is two frozen workplace schemes ticking over on their own, one UK one Swiss, I don't touch either. The Dutch pot from the NL years I moved out a while back, wasn't doing much sat where it was. The pile I have to babysit myself is around €1.2M equivalent.
Thing I keep circling back to and the usual FIRE content is no help because it's all written for Americans: how are other long term EU expats dealing with the boring "safe" chunk once the paychecks stop?
Quick background so it's not totally abstract. Ran 100% equity till about 2021. Started tilting toward roughly 70/30 through 2022 as the actual date got real. That 30% is what I've been poking at all year.
What the conservative side looks like right now:
The ETF side does its job but god it's dull. Yields are sat at a level where the duration risk feels lopsided to me. And here's the part that shifted at 45 I wouldn't have blinked at that duration. At 54 with no route back to a salary, I feel every bit of the sensitivity.
Anyway. What I'm actually after from this sub.
If you FIRE'd somewhere that isn't home, how do you actually think about currency on the safe sleeve? Pensions pay in GBP and CHF. Spending is mostly CHF and EUR, we still travel a fair bit and half the family's still in NL. And the safe sleeve is nearly all EUR, purely because that's where the non pension money happened to end up. Is anyone deliberately splitting bonds and cash across all three, or am I just inventing a problem for myself?
For the wider 50+ lot who've already pulled the trigger is the bond ETF approach still earning its keep in 2026, or have you drifted into other things? Ladders of direct bonds? Pure money market and leave it? Some mix?
I'm not after a pat on the head for the allocation. I want to know what's held together in real life for people who can't just work off a bad call anymore.
I would love to FIRE in Greece. I'm Greek living in the US currently less than 30 years old. I am a dual citizen, have my Greek passport and inherited a house there. The house is just a few mins drive from the center and beach (like 5-7mins) and is a great size. It is approximately 3 beds 2 baths and its being renovated to be a little bit more modern. I have a wife who is NOT Greek or a citizen. No kids. 1 cat.
I have been about 15 times throughout my life and have visited many islands and regions. My wife has been once, loved it but understandably it would be hard for her to pick up everything and leave and learn a new language. I am so ready to go down and live there but she needs some convincing and maybe another visit or two to kind of get her excited for it too.
Being we already have a paid off home that will not need updates/renos, how much do you think we will need to live there indefinitely without working. My magic number is around 1 million for us to to truely enjoy. If we hustle and save , i think we can reach like 1.1m before 34.The money would be in a basic portfolio in the US market. Some basics about what we would like....
-freddo espressos on the beach very often
-monthly weekend/daytrip in local region
-2 trips to NY a year (stay with parents so barely any expense, just flights which i prioritize finding cheap flights)
-3 international trips a year (other european cities or safe asian/african countries) maybe like 5 days each. We are budget travelers.
- we cook a lot but do enjoy dining out in casual tavernas
-would own a small car, but honestly would prefer walking and biking places
-healthy
-we dont buy designer/name brand stuff to impress. We are realistic and spend money only on necessities although we do know when to treat ourselves.
Thoughts anyone? First post here as i just joined this group. Thanks!
I’m married 52F. Husband and I own a small HVAC business and we plan on retiring in about 2.5 years. We are saving up around $200k in cash to launch our retirement. Along with savings we will sell our business to our senior tech for roughly $400k (business is worth more but it’s a long story) we plan to sell our house and pocket $500k-$600k in net proceeds. We also have a rental property that is worth around $300k and only owe $75k left on the mortgage. The rental property has 4 units and currently nets $3k/mo after expenses. We estimate we will have a little over a $1M once we sell business, main home and refinance rental property. Hubby and I are disabled vets and receive $6k+ monthly (tax free), $2k monthly from rental property. I feel like we’re set especially if we put our proceeds in an ETF and just let it grow. We are retiring to Italy, probably Umbria. Am I crazy to think we are really going to be set without any financial worries? What am I missing?
I've spent the last few years bouncing between countries, and the thing that always stressed me was counting days. The Schengen 90/180 window, the 183-day tax residency rule, days per state for state taxes. I tracked it in a spreadsheet and still second-guessed myself at every border.
So I built a small app just for me that tracks where I am and warns me before I hit any of those limits. One thing I cared about: no account, no ads, and it collects zero data. Everything stays on your phone, since it's basically a log of everywhere you've been.
Now I'm trying to figure out if it's useful to anyone but me, and I'd rather hear what's broken than what's good. Two things I'm stuck on: what do you track that I might be missing (multiple passports, rolling windows, per-state rules)? And what would make you trust an app with this instead of your own spreadsheet?
Not dropping a link so it doesn't look spammy. If you want to poke at it and tell me what sucks, comment or DM. Full disclosure, I made it.
