Modern Vespa

Breaking this into its own thread for forum hygiene. Continued from Hamonshū…

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Google Voice has been my primary phone number for over a dozen years.

When I'm in the US, it rings my US SIM. I honestly don't know the phone number for my SIM and neither do any of my contacts.

When I'm abroad, I can send/receive calls over any data connection (wifi or cell). It's basically seamless, especially on Android. You can also make wifi calls from iOS or on a computer.

Intuit and Credit Karma don't accept Google Voice numbers for MFA, but everything else I've tried does, including Schwab.

It's also handy because I can reply to texts on my computer.

Of course, you will appear as a green bubble (or whatever the non-Apple one is) to your iOS friends, which means you get rough edges like the text "Jim liked this photo" and videos come over at ridiculously poor resolutions. Nudge your friends who like to send videos to use another app, like Signal.

Saw this in my news feed this morning:

https://fortune.com/2023/10/14/portugal-tax-for-expats-changes-sparks-digital-nomads-rush/amp/

Yep. The NHR (Non Habitual Residence) tax break is going away.

That said, The NHR really benefits digital nomads from every other country but the United States.

The US government taxes its citizens regardless of where they reside, in contrast to almost every other country on the planet. So even if we are living in Portugal, we will still be paying US taxes, and the dual-taxation treaty between the US and Portugal will mean that we pay full taxes to one country and then deduct that from what is owed to the other country.

So, it's mostly a wash for us. There might be cases where Portugal taxes something higher than the US, and that might have been forgiven under the NHR, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge impact.

Even if we were to renounce our US citizenship (which we aren't likely to do) we would still owe the US an "exit tax" as part of that process. That would mean an immediate taxation on my deferred-tax retirement account. And that's a non-starter.

A friend of mine is Singaporean with a US green card. Understanding the tax obligations of having US ties and the exit tax have given him second thoughts about his whole financial situation.

I didn't realize that green card holders were subject to taxation, even while abroad. That's… really unfortunate.

I believe it's worldwide and communal, so if his wife sells property in Singapore, his taxes in the US are affected.

The online people are definitely related to my portuguese neighbors lol.

There's what they say to us in english with smiling faces, and then there's what they say in portuguese on their side of the fence not knowing I can understand most of it (grew up italian, dated a portuguese girl for five years).

I've kept this from them for five years. It's way more fun like this.

You know, I'm a little tired of you hiding behind your lols. So I'll just come out and say fu to your racist remarks, lol! Great to hear about your Portuguese neighbors, lol! Also great to hear how much more fun you've had, lol!
Why your still here, I've no idea, lol!

FWIW, I didn't take his remark as racist, and I'm generally pretty quick to denounce racism.

Feel free to articulate your thoughts to me via PM if you like.

Wow... Sigh...

I'm on my second house in a very Portuguese neighborhood. The first one was a few blocks away, and I had Portuguese neighbours on both sides there. If I really was the type to paint everyone with the same broad brush, like you accuse me of, I would have lumped them in as well.

I didn't because they were just normal what-you-see-is-what-you-get people. My current neighbors aren't.

Also, no hiding here. Other than Bob Copeland, I don't know if anyone's putting their face and personal info out there as much as me... Thank you I appreciate that. Good on ya.

Don't be sad, Jess...

South Africa also taxes us on world-wide income.

world-wide income, but what if you're not actually living in SA? Are you still taxed?

You have to 'financially emigrate' to stop paying taxes in South Africa.
There is a process, forms and duties to pay.

Many South Africans are working on contract in foreign countries.
They still have to pay the taxes in their home county.

Previously, you had to be resident in the country for over 6 months to be a resident taxpayer. Now it is 3 months.

There was an article about Porto, Portugal in the NYT magazine last weekend. Apparently, the city is enjoying a renaissance of sorts.

So does this mean we are going to have to learn to read and post in Portuguese?

I read that. And there's a reason I picked Porto as the city I wanted to live in. Actually, I knew within 15 minutes of setting foot in Porto.

Unlikely.

A few photos to give you all a taste of things in Porto:

At least you won't have far to go to visit the beautiful city of Lisbon.

Jealous and happy for you.

You could probably make up the tax difference with a youtube channel.

All of this might be premature. My wife and I have been in the process of getting a long-term residency visa for almost 2 years, not counting the two years of planning that led up to that. So, about four years in the making so far.

At this moment in time, my wife has received her residency visa. Notably, I still have not. The whole plan is a non-starter if we don't both have a visa.

It turns out that Portugal has just as much bureaucracy as Italy does.

When and if it happens at least you will know the 'lay of the land'
I'd guess the people that move Portugal and it doesn't workout for them go in uninformed

I was thinking about this too. My ex made me promise her we'd go there after she fell in love with the city. Then she fell out of love with me lol.

Jess - if you've been to both, any thoughts on the pros/cons of o Porto vs Lisboa, both as a tourist and as someone looking to live there?

Portugal is where I intended to spend the summer until I got hit. Looking forward to seeing it someday, maybe next year.

When my wife and I decided that we might like to live in Portugal, we did a tour of Lisbon and Porto, plus Madrid just for contrast. We liked visiting Lisbon and Madrid, but Porto I just knew as soon as I set foot in the city.

Since then, we've been back to Porto and Lisbon several times. Here are my (probably controversial) opinions.

Lisbon is an amazing city as a tourist, full of vibrant sites and sounds and tastes. But I would absolutely, positively despise living there. I have a variety of reasons for this, but many of them come down to the same reasons that I don't ever want to live in San Francisco (note that I live in the SF Bay Area, not San Francisco proper).

- Lisbon is woefully over-touristed (much worse than San Francisco).
- The streets are in a miserable state of repair and smell just like they do in San Francisco (and not in a good way).
- The topography is nearly identical to San Francisco, with the same very-steep hills everywhere you go.
- There is a housing crisis that probably beats the one in San Francisco (with prices to match).
- Lisbon has a pretty bad homeless problem, much like San Francisco.
- Lisbon has a pretty awful panhandler problem, much like San Francisco.

(Those last three items are probably all tied together)

And finally, Lisbon is so over-run with insufferable "digital nomads" and "influencers" that it is on the verge of completely losing its Portuguese identity -- instead becoming just another tourist destination like the Algarve, devoid of any Portuguese people except maybe the wait staff.

I really really genuinely do not like the vibe in Lisbon. Would I refuse to live in Lisbon if someone gave me a fabulous apartment? No, probably not. But it's far from the top of my list of places I want to live.

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Porto, on the other hand, is on a much smaller scale. The city is just plain smaller, the tourism is confined to a few specific places in the city, and it still has most (though not all) of its Portuguese identity. And, as mentioned, Porto is undergoing a bit of a renaissance.

But mostly, I just really dig the vibe in Porto.

Re: San Fran, good analogy. I've been and could happily do a year there, but, I'd be cool with somewhere more chill and cleaner after that.

I was in Tamarindo in Costa Rica and it seems similar... more english in the streets than the local language. The locals call it TamaGringo It's also resulted in the real estate in town being nuts by Costa Rican standards.

I got a similar "nope" vibe in Florence, which... forever stunning, but there was so much English in the streets that, for so much of the city I walked through it felt more like I was walking through a Disneyland or Universal Studios Italy set, rather than the real place...

A high school friend of mine just moved to Costa Rica in the spring, they are spending their first year in Tamarindo, specifically because the volume of english spoken in town will help ease the transition, but, even for them, it's just the pit stop on their move, not the final destination.