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
I do not understand much the part “our country does not allow us to have a mailing address”. You probably mean setting permanent resident address (as mailing address is easy to get - you can use your family/friends/parents address to be mailed), so that you could prove your address to a bank. Actually, it is interesting. I am from Czech Republic and permanent residence is not at all connected with how long you stay there. If you are not staying for majority of year in the country (or you do not stay here at all), you are not even legally bind to pay taxes (or some of them), you do not have to pay social security/health insurance etc.
So what you mention might be some Netherland special thing. Actually, in Czechia you are obliged to get permanent residence due to law, so even homeless people can ask their municipality (or place they had permanent residence for the last time) and they just get permanent residence = address as their municipality (usually city hall address). Which of course does not mean they have right to live there. Right to live somewhere and permanent address (place of residency) are to different legal things in Czechia. I believe it will be very similar in many other countries. Did you really consult it with some lawyer in Netherlands? It might clarify things more.
It’s weird in the sense that if you are not in the country for 4 months a year that you have to unregister and you can not register on a mailing adress. It has very specific requirements and just not living here for 4 months is one of them too.
Homeless can register in nl for a mail adress but they live in nl and have to comply with certain things as giving there whereabouts like the shelters they stay at.
Health insurance is same in nl, when you deregister you lose your health care and don’t have to pay for it anymore and lose pension 2% a year you’re abroad.
I talked to multiple tax advisors troughout the year all giving conflicting answers :(