I'll be moving to La Rochelle, France on Friday and be in London on business next week, so this will be brief and the blog will recommence as soon as I'm able. As usual, you can click on the photos for larger versions.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Mailbag: A beginner's guide to moving to another country
Another mailbag post! A friend emailed me about someone about to lose her job and stated that she was interested in moving abroad, particularly Europe. Since she has no background, I decided to give her an overview of the process. I thought it might be useful to repeat this here. There's nothing in here that I've not written about before, but I thought a recap might be a good idea for new readers.
Hi Sally (not her real name),
I hope you're doing well and I'm sorry to hear about your current troubles.
[Redacted] mentioned you want to live abroad and he asked if I could give you some advice. I've lived in the US, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands (twice) and France. I've not only been doing this for a long time, but I've also spent years researching and writing a "how to become an expat" blog at overseas-exile.com. I've also started thinking about doing day seminars on the topic in the US. The good news: with enough determination, you can move abroad. The bad news: it takes work, sometimes hard work.
If you want to live abroad, it's hard to do, but there are several general routes (I assume you're not rolling in dough, so I'm leaving some options off of this. If you have a large pile of surplus money, there are investment routes you can take, but be careful, not all are legal):
For option #2, citizenship, I would strongly recommend that you trace your family tree.
The reason for that is because many people don't know their family tree well and when they do research, they often find legal opportunities to move abroad that they were previously unaware of. For example, if you have an Italian ancestor dating from 1861
(when Italy unified) or later, you may qualify for Italian citizenship. If you are of Jewish ancestry, many European countries have repatriation schemes for those of Jewish descent whose families were displaced in WWII.
There are other ancestry routes, but they're hard to find. The trick is to research your family tree and if you find any relatively recent ancestors from a foreign country, start focusing on that country's immigration laws (and don't rely on hearsay because these laws change frequently). Don't just start researching different country's laws at random (unless you have carefully targeted countries) because the laws tend to not be well documented and they change frequently. Plus, officials from various countries are often unaware of their country's laws, but a decent immigration lawyer (after you have a target country) can sometimes help.
So you've researched your ancestry and maybe you find that you could claim citizenship in [some economically depressed EU country] but think "but I don't want to move to [some economically depressed EU country]." That's OK. The great thing about having an EEA (European Economic Area) passport in one EEA country is that you can usually legally live and work in any EEA country. Fancy London? Another EU country's passport will probably get you there.
So do you family tree. ancestry.com is a good place to start.
However, let's assume the common case of not having anyone you can marry and not having a useful ancestor (dead ancestors are so rarely useful, the ingrates!). In that case, you're looking at the work permit/Blue Card route.
Before I explain those, it's helpful to understand immigration in general. This lets you reason better about your opportunities.
I live in Paris, France. Not only is Paris the number one tourist city on the planet, but France is the number one tourist country on the planet. As much as I would love for the word citizenship to go the way of the word slavery and see borders drop, it's not realistic. If France opened the floodgates, they'd see their social systems overwhelmed and they'd collapse (interestingly, the countries people are leaving might also collapse to due to what's called "brain drain", but that's another story).
But France does allow people to move there. The trick is to demonstrate that you will benefit the country more than you will cost the country. The best way to pull this trick off is to have a strong skill (and usually a degree) in a STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine). Those are very high value jobs (from an economic standpoint). A psychology degree, on the other hand, while certainly being a worthy degree, isn't a high economic value degree and typically doesn't get you anywhere. So, in short, you have to show that you provide a positive economic value that is in short supply. Doctors, engineers, and software developers are always in short supply. Sadly, project managers and hair dressers aren't (trivia: there was an interesting time when hair dresser was on the Australian skill shortage list and thus eligible for immigration).
If you think you might have skills that can get you a work
permit, start reading my five part series on how to get a work permit. That will give you a solid strategy
for improving your résumé/CV and finding and approaching employees.
Barring being highly skilled, you may wish to read the young person's guide to moving abroad. That explains multiple ways that someone with little money, education, and few internationally marketable skills can still find ways of moving abroad. (Note: having at least a Bachelor's Degree significantly increases your opportunities). One of the most popular routes is teaching English abroad, .
Oh, and if you're the entrepreneurial type, the Netherlands has a visa for you. The UK has an entrepreneur visa too.
Finally, start reading about the European Blue Card.
The Blue Card is Europe's attempt to create a unified immigration policy to attract skilled workers. Ireland, the UK and Denmark have opted out, but for the others, if you qualify, it's much easier to get to Europe. In fact, Germany's Blue Card implementation is so generous that they government assumes that if you have a job offer with a large enough salary (usually around €45K or higher), than you must be qualified and can waltz right in. You usually have to have at least a BA for this (they make some exceptions for IT, but many German foreigner's offices seem to have missed this part of the law and it's a headache). Once in Europe with a Blue Card, you usually have to stay in the country for two or three years and then you can live and work in other EU countries (except the ones who have opted out). So if you have a BA, start making contacts in Germany and see what you can swing!
I hope that helps and gives you a start on figuring out your options. Let me know how things go!
Good luck,
Ovid
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| Public Domain Image |
Hi Sally (not her real name),
I hope you're doing well and I'm sorry to hear about your current troubles.
[Redacted] mentioned you want to live abroad and he asked if I could give you some advice. I've lived in the US, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands (twice) and France. I've not only been doing this for a long time, but I've also spent years researching and writing a "how to become an expat" blog at overseas-exile.com. I've also started thinking about doing day seminars on the topic in the US. The good news: with enough determination, you can move abroad. The bad news: it takes work, sometimes hard work.
If you want to live abroad, it's hard to do, but there are several general routes (I assume you're not rolling in dough, so I'm leaving some options off of this. If you have a large pile of surplus money, there are investment routes you can take, but be careful, not all are legal):
- Marriage/Civil Partnership
- Citizenship
- Work/residence permit or the equivalent
For option #2, citizenship, I would strongly recommend that you trace your family tree.
The reason for that is because many people don't know their family tree well and when they do research, they often find legal opportunities to move abroad that they were previously unaware of. For example, if you have an Italian ancestor dating from 1861
 |
| Duomo, Milan Personal photo |
There are other ancestry routes, but they're hard to find. The trick is to research your family tree and if you find any relatively recent ancestors from a foreign country, start focusing on that country's immigration laws (and don't rely on hearsay because these laws change frequently). Don't just start researching different country's laws at random (unless you have carefully targeted countries) because the laws tend to not be well documented and they change frequently. Plus, officials from various countries are often unaware of their country's laws, but a decent immigration lawyer (after you have a target country) can sometimes help.
So you've researched your ancestry and maybe you find that you could claim citizenship in [some economically depressed EU country] but think "but I don't want to move to [some economically depressed EU country]." That's OK. The great thing about having an EEA (European Economic Area) passport in one EEA country is that you can usually legally live and work in any EEA country. Fancy London? Another EU country's passport will probably get you there.
So do you family tree. ancestry.com is a good place to start.
However, let's assume the common case of not having anyone you can marry and not having a useful ancestor (dead ancestors are so rarely useful, the ingrates!). In that case, you're looking at the work permit/Blue Card route.
Before I explain those, it's helpful to understand immigration in general. This lets you reason better about your opportunities.
I live in Paris, France. Not only is Paris the number one tourist city on the planet, but France is the number one tourist country on the planet. As much as I would love for the word citizenship to go the way of the word slavery and see borders drop, it's not realistic. If France opened the floodgates, they'd see their social systems overwhelmed and they'd collapse (interestingly, the countries people are leaving might also collapse to due to what's called "brain drain", but that's another story).
But France does allow people to move there. The trick is to demonstrate that you will benefit the country more than you will cost the country. The best way to pull this trick off is to have a strong skill (and usually a degree) in a STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine). Those are very high value jobs (from an economic standpoint). A psychology degree, on the other hand, while certainly being a worthy degree, isn't a high economic value degree and typically doesn't get you anywhere. So, in short, you have to show that you provide a positive economic value that is in short supply. Doctors, engineers, and software developers are always in short supply. Sadly, project managers and hair dressers aren't (trivia: there was an interesting time when hair dresser was on the Australian skill shortage list and thus eligible for immigration).
If you think you might have skills that can get you a work
 |
| Kalahari Desert, Botswana Photo by Winfried Bruenken |
for improving your résumé/CV and finding and approaching employees.
Barring being highly skilled, you may wish to read the young person's guide to moving abroad. That explains multiple ways that someone with little money, education, and few internationally marketable skills can still find ways of moving abroad. (Note: having at least a Bachelor's Degree significantly increases your opportunities). One of the most popular routes is teaching English abroad, .
Oh, and if you're the entrepreneurial type, the Netherlands has a visa for you. The UK has an entrepreneur visa too.
Finally, start reading about the European Blue Card.
The Blue Card is Europe's attempt to create a unified immigration policy to attract skilled workers. Ireland, the UK and Denmark have opted out, but for the others, if you qualify, it's much easier to get to Europe. In fact, Germany's Blue Card implementation is so generous that they government assumes that if you have a job offer with a large enough salary (usually around €45K or higher), than you must be qualified and can waltz right in. You usually have to have at least a BA for this (they make some exceptions for IT, but many German foreigner's offices seem to have missed this part of the law and it's a headache). Once in Europe with a Blue Card, you usually have to stay in the country for two or three years and then you can live and work in other EU countries (except the ones who have opted out). So if you have a BA, start making contacts in Germany and see what you can swing!
I hope that helps and gives you a start on figuring out your options. Let me know how things go!
Good luck,
Ovid
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Sixfold increase in Americans giving up their passports.
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| The ignorant view of renunciation Image in public domain |
Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier as the government prepares to introduce tougher asset-disclosure rules.
Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to 1,131 in the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register figures published today. That brought the first-half total to 1,810 compared with 235 for the whole of 2008.
For those of us who following this topic closely, it's very frustrating reading this because it's not accurate. To be accurate, you would state that there's a sixfold increase in the number of Americans the Federal Register reported as having giving up their passports. We in the expat community have known for a long time that the Federal Register reporting is far lower than the actual numbers, but we've never known whether this is incompetence or a deliberate distortion of the data.
Heck, I reported over a year ago that far more Americans are giving up citizenship than reported, but it's hard to prove. However, after numerous FOIA requests from various people, much reporting of numbers that don't match the official tally, and the discovery of the FBI NICS index which gives a much better accounting of Americans who have given up their citizenship (because under US law, they can't own guns), we've finally started getting a better picture of what's going on and it may just be that the renunciation numbers being reported to the Federal Register are being quietly fixed to avoid the continual embarrassment, such as Swiss embassy renunciation figures alone suggesting that Switzerland had over half the reported renunciation figures worldwide, a figure that beggars belief.
However, from what I read on Bloomberg, Forbes, Reddit, and other sources, many Americans are saying "so what? It's such a small number." This shows a lack of knowledge about what's going on. For example, during my trip to Kiev, one American told me he tried to relinquish his US citizenship on the grounds that he took citizenship in another country. The US State Department denied him this because after he took that citizenship, he had to travel to the US and used his US passport. Using his US passport was considered grounds for denying his relinquishment. However, because the State Department hadn't yet approved his relinquishment, he was legally obligated to use his US passport. Now he's forced into the long, tiresome process of renouncing his citizenship formally (see the difference between relinquishment and renunciation). Thus, he's not yet counted as an ex-American.
Other ex-Americans are reporting that they're not showing up on any reports as having given up their citizenship, despite receiving their CLN (Certificate of Loss of Nationality).
On top of that, I've spoken to several Americans here in Europe who want to renounce, but are afraid to do so due to the heavy punitive damages the US often places on renunciants (and some Americans abroad simply can't afford the $450 renunciation fee or the exorbitant cost of getting their international taxes in order).
Then there are Americans like myself. I don't have plans to give up my citizenship, but I am painfully aware that there's a time in the future where I may not have any choice, due to financial considerations. Having expats like myself worried about their financial security due to US tax laws impacting us helps to turn an estimated six million Americans abroad from informal ambassadors abroad to walking advertisements about why you don't want American citizenship.
Another annoying aspect of that Bloomberg article is this misleading quote:
“With the looming deadline for Fatca, more and more U.S. citizens are becoming aware that they have U.S. tax reporting obligations,” said Matthew Ledvina, a U.S. tax lawyer at Anaford AG in Zurich. “Once aware, they decide to renounce their U.S. citizenship.”While that may appear to be technically correct, it sounds like Americans are renouncing to avoid paying taxes. From my experience, this is generally not the case. Americans are renouncing due to the incredibly punitive nature of the US tax system vis-a-vis expats. For example, let's say you're trying to save for the downpayment for a home. You could well have over $10,000 in your bank account. Even if you've faithfully filed your taxes every year and paid all you owe, you could easily face five figure fines and possible criminal charges because you didn't know about FBAR reporting requirements. What's FBAR? That's the Foreign Bank Account Reporting act which was passed many years ago, but not well-advertised until a couple of years ago. Thus, many Americans are 100% in compliance with their taxes, but face huge penalties for not knowing about this law.
Or maybe you've been living overseas most of your professional life and you've been working for a non-US corporation which has no business in the US. If you have signing authority or significant shares in that corporation, under the new FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) law, you now have to file corporate financial reports with the IRS for this non-US company. I was rejected for one position here in Europe because the company in question didn't want the expense of preparing financial information for a country they don't do business in, but if I took that position and didn't report, I could be facing fines up to $50,000 and possible criminal charges.
I was also in Metz, France a few days ago and spoke with a lawyer from Luxembourg who told me that when he gets a potential US client, as a direct result of FATCA, he often turns them away, saying "I can't help you." With foreign banks now starting to turn away US clients, you have the problem of not even being able to have a bank account to pay your bills! In fact, many companies here pay employees via direct deposit; if you can't get a bank account, the company can't pay you.
Americans abroad giving up their citizenship aren't traitors. When I speak to them, they generally tell me they don't want to give up their citizenship, but they feel backed into a corner. Being denied bank accounts, jobs, or facing bankruptcy-inducing penalties for not filling out the correct paperwork (or making a mistake on said paperwork), is what's driving the renunciants I talk to. We still want to return to the US, visit our family and friends, perhaps even retire their one day, but then we face the harsh reality of US law and have to make a tough decision.
Bloomberg did US expats a disservice by not getting the real facts behind the renunciations.
Monday, August 19, 2013
A Trip to Kiev (with photos)
As usual, click on the photos for larger versions.
I've had trouble updating lately because I've been traveling quite a bit, including trips to La Rochelle, here in France, Kiev, Ukraine, and Metz, France. Below are a few photos of my trip to Kiev. For some reason, my phone and computer have conspired to subtly alter the timestamps on many photos and they were added to my computer in a vaguely random order, thus meaning that it's very hard for me to know exactly when most of these were taken and making it much harder to provide a narrative.
We were only there for a few days for a conference, so this was very much a business trip and we didn't have much time to go sightseeing. The city itself looked lovely, though many places were in a curious state of disrepair. Fountains, streets, buildings — all seemed to have bricks missing, grass growing through the sidewalk and innumerable individuals hawking individual packs of cigarettes (for €1.50 a pack!), guessing your weight for money, or trying to get you to pose with tame pigeons for photos. So much of Kiev was a curious mixture of rich and poor.
The conference itself was lovely and they even arranged a river cruise on the Dnieper River for us. It was several hours of food, alcohol, and sight-seeing.
My lunch on the second day was curious. I had pot and beer for lunch. Literally. The menu listed the beer as "Dark beer" and one item was called "pot". It was described as a small and tasty miracle, so naturally I had to try it. Potatoes, dill, mushrooms, cheese and some unidentifiable meet.
That last photo above was luggage handlers wrapping luggage in brightly colored plastic. If you don't travel much, you may not be familiar with this practice. The idea is that it's still easy to get into your luggage if security needs to do so, but you will see instantly that this has happened. Further, it makes opening your luggage just difficult enough to stop baggage handler thieves.
Who are these thieves? Airport employees! Can you name for me any other industry which charges a premium for your service and then you pay extra to help minimize the chance of the industry's employees stealing from you? How has our society gotten so messed up that this is considered normal? Instead of the airlines figuring out a better way of protecting your luggage from their theft, you get charged a small, extortionate fee to help minimize the chances of you being stolen from.
If you have the chance, I would definitely recommend Kiev. My wife and I stayed at a the Dnipro Hotel, a four-star hotel in Kiev. We had a small suite for the cost of a regular hotel room back in France. The staff were very friendly and the city in general was inexpensive. Pleasant restaurants offered steaks starting at €6! The mixture of Soviet-style "we have no personality" architecture along with some beautiful Ukrainian architecture, along with a fascinating history make Kiev a very interesting city. I only wish I had more time to explore it.
I've had trouble updating lately because I've been traveling quite a bit, including trips to La Rochelle, here in France, Kiev, Ukraine, and Metz, France. Below are a few photos of my trip to Kiev. For some reason, my phone and computer have conspired to subtly alter the timestamps on many photos and they were added to my computer in a vaguely random order, thus meaning that it's very hard for me to know exactly when most of these were taken and making it much harder to provide a narrative.
We were only there for a few days for a conference, so this was very much a business trip and we didn't have much time to go sightseeing. The city itself looked lovely, though many places were in a curious state of disrepair. Fountains, streets, buildings — all seemed to have bricks missing, grass growing through the sidewalk and innumerable individuals hawking individual packs of cigarettes (for €1.50 a pack!), guessing your weight for money, or trying to get you to pose with tame pigeons for photos. So much of Kiev was a curious mixture of rich and poor.
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| Maidan Nezalezhnosti |
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| The view across from Maidan Nezalezhnosti |
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| Mother of the Motherland, Kiev |
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| For the geeks: yes, that's Larry Wall |
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| Near the end of the cruise |
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| Me (on the left) and a friend |
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| Walking in a park in Kiev |
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| At the Mafia Restaurant in Kiev |
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| Walking around in Kiev |
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| Lunch, day 2: "pot" and beer |
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| My wife and my daughter at a fountain |
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| A restaurant we ate at. |
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| Lunch time at the conference |
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| The entrance to the conference venue |
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| At a park in Kiev |
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| My daughter riding a pony. |
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| Luggage handlers wrapping the luggage |
Who are these thieves? Airport employees! Can you name for me any other industry which charges a premium for your service and then you pay extra to help minimize the chance of the industry's employees stealing from you? How has our society gotten so messed up that this is considered normal? Instead of the airlines figuring out a better way of protecting your luggage from their theft, you get charged a small, extortionate fee to help minimize the chances of you being stolen from.
If you have the chance, I would definitely recommend Kiev. My wife and I stayed at a the Dnipro Hotel, a four-star hotel in Kiev. We had a small suite for the cost of a regular hotel room back in France. The staff were very friendly and the city in general was inexpensive. Pleasant restaurants offered steaks starting at €6! The mixture of Soviet-style "we have no personality" architecture along with some beautiful Ukrainian architecture, along with a fascinating history make Kiev a very interesting city. I only wish I had more time to explore it.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
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| The beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer |
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