The Easiest EU Schengen Residencies You Can Get

welcome back everyone michael here with offshore citizen i am speaking to you from the beautiful city of paris and today we're going to discuss the subject of what are the easiest countries to immigrate and or get a schengen visa for so why am i talking about this i'm talking about this because of the fact that a schengen visa gives you not only access to that particular country but to all of the schengen zone typically about 24 countries and this is also going to give you freedom of travel throughout here so as we're in this kind of corona period right now as i say this they're supposed to be going into lockdown here in france in like two days or something this will give you a lot more uh potential freedom which is pretty great not to mention potentially leading to a citizenship all right before i dive into that subject which we will cover you know also some that you don't have to be citizens or residents like you don't actually have to spend much time there at all cover that at the end uh before we get into that click the subscribe button click the notification bell and if you like the video please click the like button now if you're interested in help with getting residencies for shane gun zone getting citizenships for the eu for any part of the world really but you know the ones that are actually possible to you then please reach out to us we're happy to help you with international tax planning asset protection company formations running your business lowering your tax uh all these types of things you can book a call with me clarity.fm4michaelrosmar or you can check out our website offshorecitizen.net offshorecapitalist.com so let's dive into it all right so for me personally this is an important topic now there are some places that you can get residency fairly easy that are not in the shin gun zone for instance i've put a bunch of content out of bulgaria bulgaria is pretty easy for somebody abroad to come and to get a residency within europe and the good news is that can lead to citizenship which can then give you pretty decent citizenship and access to a bunch of the world you can do that either by coming under a normal visa or there is an investor visa that kind of gives accelerated citizenship which can also be good but today we're not going to talk about that because i want to focus specifically on the schengen zone and this specifically because the schengen zone is kind of borderless travel right once you're in one country you can travel to all the others so for instance it is not uncommon for somebody to have a schengen visa somewhere else and to live in spain right and so maybe the person doesn't want to actually go through the process in spain although there are some programs in spain that you may want to take advantage of but those are not going to be the ones that you're particularly interested in for whatever reason right this is going to be about what are the ones that you can get it pretty easily pretty inexpensively fairly quickly that will give you all that travel freedom and this is a great way for you to work towards a second citizenship like a good quality second citizenship right a second citizenship that will not only grant you a lot of views of free travel but the ability to work and live anywhere in the eu which is kind of a secondary power that's not reflected in a lot of the indexes so i like to kind of appreciate that and and in this time of corona like i said during the introduction you know once you're in the schengen zone your ability to travel around is much greater than coming from outside into that area okay so let's dive in the thing that we're going to be focusing on here are at first until the end i'll get into like the really easy ones later but you know some investment required is to do with uh typically either setting up a business okay so you have some sort of a business that's employing you or alternatively there's some retirement visas okay now what we mean by our retirement visa is not that you're necessarily retired that's not what we're talking about here but that you can prove that you have income to cover yourself okay and we're going to go through the top so the first that i want to mention which is perhaps one of the easiest or one of the the top two easiest is slovakia okay slovakia has a pretty easy program in terms of being able to get residency there by setting up a business so you can get a if you're willing to set up a business and invest enough money and employ people most places will give you some sort of a visa but this is a pretty easy one to take advantage of if you have questions about it you can reach out to us but for a fairly modest investment into your company which is money that you can actually spend and for you know relatively low in terms of the cost of getting set up the legal fees etc you can get a slovakian residency and that can carry you quite far the number two which is pretty similar to slovakia in terms of kind of the requirements etc but i would say a little bit a little bit more challenging in a couple other ways is you have czech republic okay so czech republic in slovakia interesting used to be czechoslovakia have some similar programs and so there's a reasonable path there and both of these by the way are paths that lead to citizenship so if you're willing to go through the process it takes you know a number of years and you have some requirements to fulfill but if you're willing to go down that road these are options for you okay what's the next one the next one to look at is lithuania now lithuania again pretty easy not too expensive okay you have to be willing to you know get yourself set up and you know show up and connect to the community and things like this in terms of having a business but for relatively little money you're able to go and to uh to get that taken care of so good good option for a bunch of different people the next one that is the one that i want to kind of really emphasize uh here as being i don't know that i would actually do it is spain okay so spain has a couple different programs both on the entrepreneurial side and on kind of the retired person side the problem i have with spain is it's pretty uh pretty aggressive on the tax side so i have some videos you can check out previously where i've talked about tax structuring for residents of spain but spain is a little bit concerning in that regard although i love spain it's a beautiful place there's you know it's a great place to be during a lot of the year the weather is good it offers a lot etc spain is not necessarily a place that if you're looking from a tax friendly standpoint it's just not so great so you know a lot of people maybe aren't planning on being there the whole year anyway so it would work for them to get something like a slovakian or lithuanian or a check visa and spend a bunch of the year in spain right that would be a perfectly reasonable option for them so there's that in my opinion probably the best if you're not talking about an investment we're going to go to the investments in just a second but if you're not talking about an investment probably the best in terms of ease and kind of the path to citizenship is portugal okay so portugal is our number five all right so our fifth and i would say maybe our best is portugal okay so portugal you have two basic paths that we can use the one is this retirement path right what's called a d7 visa and the other is an investor visa now why do i like portugal as compared to some of these others now normally you have a minimum stay requirement of six months okay so you're like all right great i have to be in the schengen zone for six months now technically you're supposed to be in that country but in reality because there's no borders you can potentially not spend all that time in the country and this is you know a beneficial thing for you from a lifestyle standpoint if you say are interested in the program in slovakia but you don't necessarily want to live there you know even half of the year right in fact maybe very little of the year you can kind of have some freedom to roam that's kind of the in practice versus the on paper side of it the problem is because you're required to maintain your residency there at least six months you're definitely going to be tax resident there and if you're tax resident there you have to look at what are the tax consequences which are not amazing right so lithuania is certainly better than uh than slovakia i would say even check is better than slovakia so you've got that plays out but portugal you can qualify for the non-habitual residency program which gives you a pretty good tax structure for 10 years provided your income fits into the brackets that they offer so that's pretty cool okay so in my opinion that's the best out of them however all of those five might be worth looking at depending on the path oh the other thing about portugal is the path to citizenship is pretty easy and that's also really compelling so what's the like hey i don't necessarily want to spend the time there i want to have the flexibility the freedom et cetera well the easiest way is actually through these golden visa programs okay so the golden visa programs i'm going to do them in kind of what i would consider to be the uh reverse order of what's good okay so i think the worst is spain spain you typically have to invest uh half a million euros and i've already given my comments on you know some concerns that i have with respect to spain uh it's not it's not bad but if you're doing that program i think that's better than going these other two ways although there is a program that if you're doing the entrepreneurial side you can potentially reduce your tax over about a six year period so there's there is that so that's one one option the next options you can look at is latvia so latvia has a program where you can invest 250 000 euros now there are some really cool things you can do with this program that are you know not advertised etc but if you're willing to entrench yourself in the business community and be involved etc you can accelerate your path to citizenship so that's pretty cool right latvia also has a pretty interesting tax system so there's there's some freedom there the next one is greece okay so greece came in and kind of undercut a lot of the competition and that's good the problem that i have with greece is that gareth's past to citizenship is not so clear although on paper it looks really good in practice they don't really like giving their citizenship away and this brings us back to what i think the best option right now which is portugal so portugal you can invest as little as 280 000 euros it does depend where you invest and so you know whether that's going to fit for your circumstances or not sometimes it's 350 could be as much as 500 but you can make this investment that investment can be secured and protected and things like this it can be you know in property of your choice and it can lead very easily to citizenship with very minimal stay requirements so personally i think that you know you get a nice climate you get a country that's pretty easy to deal with you have some tax favorable consequences you have an easy path to citizenship you have a relatively low barrier to entry in my opinion that's kind of the best way to go but you know each of these other ones offer a really quick way so anyway those are at the moment probably the best ways to immigrate to the schengen zone to get yourself that freedom pretty quickly pretty easily pretty inexpensively and all potentially can lead to citizenship so that's pretty attractive if you're looking to go down that route for yourself for your family for whoever if you'd like some help with all that like i said reach out to me you can book a call accordion.michaelrosmer we can talk about other options as well for those of you who haven't already click the subscribe button click the notification bell and if you liked the video please share it with your friends would really help us out click the the thumbs up the like button it's a great thing when you smash the like button as they say and uh yeah check out our website offshorecitizen.net offshorecapitals.com put a note in the comments if you have some questions if there's another program that you think is really interesting and i'm going to see you guys on the next video you

Channel: Offshore Citizen

Views: 37,076

Rating: 4.8033333 out of 5

Keywords: schengen visa, EU residency, Easiest EU visa, Easiest Schengen visa, Schengen Visa, Schengen Countries, Easy Schengen Countries, How to apply for Schengen visa, Schengen Visa Rejection Rates, Residency in EU, Schengen Residency visa, Schengen residency, how to move to Europe, Move to EU, how to move to EU, live in EU

Id: rticyTwSlF4

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020