My gf and I are both dutch citizens nomadding in Europe for 3 years now. We fell into it when we moved for a job opportunity that didn’t work out and decided to be nomadic from that point onwards.

I love this lifestyle, and really don’t want to stop but we have found ourself in a predicament. Our home country doesn’t allow us too have a mailing adress if we don’t spend 4 months of the year in the country(we spend 0 days). So we are registered nowhere. A home base elsewhere is something we can’t afford and keep living this lifestyle.

Traveling in europe is expensive and troughout the year we break about even(we know it’s not ideal but we are fine with it for now) if we had to keep a homebase year round and pay taxes we wouldn’t be able to afford living like this anymore.

The problem now is however that banks require some form of adress and recently wise started asking questions and we are scared our bank account might get frozen and leave us without money somewhere and have no access to it.

Also, the rules for digital nomads in the Netherlands are a bit iffy. It’s not 100% transparent if you need to pay taxes even tough we spend 0 days here and the last 2 years we were in contact with the tax officials and didn’t even have to file.

I’ve been scouring the internet recently and found a few things such as Estonia e residency that might help with opening bank accounts but won’t fix the residency issue and same with opening a American llc but still no adress or residency.

The cheapest option for residency it seems is bulgaria with low taxes and not too high col but like I stated in the beginning, this would crush our digital nomad life as we could not afford traveling around anymore with the added costs. And we would have to stay 183 days there and my gf doesn’t like bulgaria whatsoever.

Tldr; do we need to stop nomadding for now in order to have paperwork in order and get life sucked out off us or is there a way we can continue

  • david8840BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago
    1. You need to pay taxes. The question is where. It’s not as easy to determine as one would think. If you work for a Dutch company as an employee then you owe income tax not to the Netherlands but rather to the countries where you do the work. On the other hand if you have dividend or investment income you will likely owe income tax to the country where the investment is based. The fact that you don’t spend 183+ days in any single country during the year doesn’t mean you owe zero tax.
    2. The best solution is to find a bank that knows you are a non-resident and supports that. It doesn’t really matter what address they have on file for you because everything is online these days and you won’t be getting statements in the mail. Use a friend’s address if you can.
    • GuusssssssssssssBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      yeah but what oif youre like you know, nomagic, and dont stay in one country very long. I think theres a lot more people who live this lifestyle and the system hasnt really made a sitisfactory option for nomadic people to pay taxes. It will eventually I suspect as more people start doing this - in the meantime there seems to be lots of grey areas and little international consensus or uniformity legally or otherwise. Im just declaring my income back home - without having updated my adress - which is now basically planet earth. But they dont make paying taxes easy - and I personally want to pay taxes for ethical reasons.