Six Things I Noticed About Uruguay

for years you've been asking me for my thoughts about one of the most southernmost and tax friendly countries in south america and fresh off of my trip there today i'm going to share with you six observations that i made while in uruguay [Music] hi i'm andrew henderson this is nomad capitalist where we help seven and eight-figure entrepreneurs and investors legally go where you're treated best and for a number of people in south america argentina in particular uruguay has long been the country where they have gone where they're treated best and the reason is very simple uruguay has a multi-year tax exemption that basically allows you to pay either very little or even no tax in the country it's been a safe haven for wealth among many people in south america a continent that really doesn't have a very well-defined destination for private banking and private investment that is often left to miami for example or panama which is often more difficult to deal with these days and so this has been called the switzerland of south america and we have talked about uruguay before in the sense of my belief that getting citizenship there is more difficult than some people talk about i've been pushed back on for that by people who live full-time in uruguay i think if you live there all the time and you learn the language and you develop connections with the country you probably have a decent chance of getting citizenship in three or five years the fact is that uruguay grant citizenship differently probably from the country where you're coming from and so the idea of just setting up residence and then barely being there and expecting to get citizenship is something i have been pushing back on for about five years so if you're just looking for an easy second citizenship uruguay is not it because it has a high class reputation again they've called it the switzerland of south america it has one of the best passports perhaps the best passport next to chile in south america it just has a reputation so what are my thoughts if you want to go there if you want to get the tax savings if you want to work towards residents and possible future citizenship what are my thoughts so one of the first things i noticed when we arrived in uruguay recently was it's relatively affordable but yet i wouldn't say it's a great value uh look at montevideo look at punta leste essentially the two big places that people go um the hotels there are not extraordinarily expensive um they're certainly more expensive than what you would get for a comparable quality in a city like a bogota and a panama city but it's it's not extreme this is not switzerland that we mentioned uh but that said the quality of the hotels i mean we really struggled to find a place we ended up staying at uh the hyatt centric which is not a high in and of itself it is kind of their up-and-coming like youthful uh alternative to other brands like an aloft or or something like that and so for about 150 bucks a night we stayed at that hotel which was a bit outside of the city center uh just kind of in this kind of quiet beach area so i wouldn't say wow that's really expensive but i would say there's not really a lot going on around there it wasn't like a top-notch property i really are no top-notch hotels in the country so even if you wanted to spend more money you really would have a hard time doing that there's a sofa tail hotel which is even further outside of town which is closed so for visiting obviously if you're living there you're not looking at hotels but you know from hotels to food to everything else i said to myself you know okay i did expect it to be more expensive but i can't say it's a great value um you know the food quality itself i don't think i really had a meal that i was like wowed by on the very last night in punta este we had a meal that i was pretty happy with um and again nothing was like extremely expensive it wasn't like oh my goodness it was just like you know there's a lot of other places in this part of the world where you could spend less and you would get more so it's not about being too expensive because again i was kind of surprised i thought maybe it'd be a bit more outrageous but it's just you know where's the value the other thing that i noticed was the country is workable things do work i mean certainly there are some countries in south america where just you know nothing really works very well you come into the country you know immigration relatively works there's a lot of requirements right now there's a lot of red tape but when you get there things move pretty smoothly a lot of forms to fill out so you know things are workable the bureaucracy while intense as in any country in latin america for the most part it works but yet it's also not that workable you know it's not uh you know what people think of as the kind of the banana republic nor did it ever reach the level did it feel to me of a singapore or switzerland where the bureaucracy is just totally efficient and totally workable um what i did notice is that overall the country just doesn't really have a lot going on in fact i would even call it boring quite frankly i mean again we started a montevideo we spent a couple days in montevideo one of the other things that we would find are that things are often closed and so you've got this siesta in many parts of both montevideo and punto de este and other surrounding areas where you know from four to eight everything's closed or things will be closed mondays tuesdays and wednesday we got it in montevideo um which i would say this is not the place you want to live if you're going to uruguay and i think most people who live there would probably agree with that it's interesting but we kind of walk through the entire city starting from the hotel walking through some of the different districts along the beach and there's some very nice houses there's some very nice cafes but what we found even on a saturday was a lot of things were closed we would literally walk for blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks in a relatively central part of montevideo everything's closed uh we finally said oh okay we went to a great tea cafe which was very nice their hours were a bit more flexible then we're walking it's like let's get a coffee uh oh there's a starbucks and we go in at like five o'clock they're like hey you're taking us to go right because we're closing up shop sundays were even worse so in terms of accessibility in terms of going out i didn't really see many people out quite frankly in montevideo um now punto este we were there a little bit before the season started i didn't really see any people out there either so definitely this is a country where you've got a relatively decent sized area for only several million people um the only time we really saw a lot of people out was when people were riding their bikes along the streets of montevideo along the beach when they closed those down for bicycles on sunday and we did see more volume then but for the rest of time it really in many ways felt like who who lives here like what's going on is this are we on candid camera so i did find it a little bit um boring quite frankly i found that things were closed you definitely have to adapt and so if you're looking for this kind of consumer culture where just things are always working that's not really what you're gonna get at all you really have very few convenience stores one day i think we needed to get some aspirin and i went to a uh a store said oh listen there's a place right across the street the grocery store they call it a supermarket i go into this supermarket and i'm like kind of like angling my way through the different aisles uh up and down like every aisle is a dead end trying to find like aspirin and then i finally go to the front i'm like do you have aspen they're like no i'm like okay and so we had to find one of the pharmacies and actually those did work reasonable hours but it just seemed odd to me that you know um you know what a supermarket would be there just there wasn't a lot of selection in terms of wrestlers i'm just not a lot of selection um and so what i think this is a place where if you want to live and you want to have a home i think you probably want to live in punta del este or somewhere along that beach area you want to get a home potentially you want to get a staff or you just want to you know you want to get a car you're going to cook at home you're going to go to you know one of the grocery stores there are some grocery stores they're not as conveniently located but there are some grocery stores where it's like all right they do have decent selection they're like a couple that i saw kind of spread out between between both cities you're going to go and you're going to stock up or you're going to have someone go out and stock up for you and you're just going to cook at home um certainly uruguay is known for its beef almost 100 of the land in uruguay is private property there's very few like national parks for example we poked our headed into one it's kind of unimpressed the beef i guess is good i don't really eat that much beef i can't say that given what i was expecting it lived up to the standards but there were some nice restaurants um you know the wines uh i think you know there's probably a reason like here in colombia for example you see a lot of argentine wines a lot of chilean wines you don't really see a lot of uruguayan wines um so i would say it was decent my entire overview of the place is decent this is fair but you know not really amazing what i also noticed is uh it's rather middle class which is certainly a positive and i think some people uh they really like that i mean compared to a lot of countries in latin america where you've got this great income and equality what you have in uruguay is you have a middle class you have people who are very proud to be of european origin they'll tell you that a number of them have citizenship by descent in places like italy or spain but they choose to live in uruguay and so you have a middle class you have a more functioning government than in some other parts around there you don't have the chaos that you have in argentina you don't have the the moodiness of the government that you have in next-door argentina um but nor do you have the excitement um you know buenos aires is an interesting city bogota where i'm at you know interesting city montevideo i mean just really doesn't compare and so you've got all these elements of uh a much larger version of let's say a a lichtenstein or an andorra but quite frankly i enjoy spending time in some of these those places in europe you know uruguay just really um in a sense was very underwhelming for visiting i think for living it's going to be a very quiet lifestyle one final thing that i noticed was you do have more english spoken this is a place where they don't like your spanish they're just going to go and start speaking english to you in many areas and the spanish is very interesting because it almost has a number of elements of brazilian portuguese with jesus and different pronunciations where a lot of a lot of separate words were like what is that oh that's an avocado what's that that's butter and it's like well that's not the word that we use everywhere else and so they've kind of got their own you know verbiage down there that said english is pretty well widely spoken because again the first morning we go to this cafe uh the lady's nice it's really nothing to write home about uh again not expensive not cheap just everything's just very mediocre and she's like don't worry i speak english i'm german it's like all right when did he move i've lived here for 100 years you know but i'm german and so i think that for someone who just wants a very laid-back lifestyle you like the tax incentive which if you're a u.s citizen obviously is always going to be a bit more difficult to navigate um you know you want a place where you have this middle class you have perhaps a bit more rule of law uh you're not going to totally break the bank um but you're not going to get the best value and you just want to kind of hang out and let's say live in a punta de este or one of the areas to the west or east of that along the coast and just live a very tranquil life you can do that there are a lot of places where you can do that with a tax incentive um there are a lot of places you can do that with with you know without a tax incentive with just low taxes so overall there was really no great impression that it left to me the airport is i suppose a relatively efficient airport not a lot of gates you know seems pretty smooth to get in and out of um but other than that you know it's a country that i think for most people watching you could probably replicate somewhere else interesting tax incentives but again probably something you can replicate somewhere else don't stop now we've got well 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Channel: Nomad Capitalist

Views: 150,478

Keywords: nomad capitalist, go where you're treated best, second citizenship, dual citizenship, second passport, uruguay vs argentina, uruguay, uruguay 2021, travel vlogger, travel channel, virtual tour, 4k walking, uruguay documentary, travel to uruguay, travel around the world, latin america, latin american countries, living in latin america, english speaking countries, life onboard, best food, best countries to live, boring country, how to decide where to live, food, taxes

Id: xS9PRoODZTw

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021