Optionality Report

If your business requires you to answer every important question personally, changing countries won't make you free. It'll just give you better weather while answering Slack.

In poor countries, the uniform is the only power most people will ever get. So they use all of it. Where you sit. When you speak. Whether your paperwork is "complete" today or never.

One of the biggest mistakes is optimizing for the country. You should be optimizing for the life. The country is just infrastructure.

Sometimes you arrive somewhere, fall in love with it, and just want to own a piece of it. That’s what happened to me with Dalmatia - Croatia. Did the research, bought the seaview land. Prices have roughly tripled since. I promised myself I will never sell it.

Not many things can surprise Argentines back home. They’ve been through it all. Yet this guy is shocked by what he sees in Oslo - Norway. People in developing countries still see Europe as the promised land. A growing number of Europeans now see Latin America as the utopian alternative. Both places have real strengths and real problems. You don’t have to pick a side. Summer in Europe, winters in LatAm, money from American customers. Doesn’t get better than that.

Poland will take over your feed again today. Biggest patriotism display on the planet. Happy Independence Day, Poland! 💪❤️🇵🇱

My daughter is under 6 months old and just got residency in Croatia. That makes three countries so far. She’s getting her fourth in April. A lot of people ask why you’d bother getting residence in another Schengen country when she’s already a Schengen passport holder. There are a few reasons. During COVID I was a resident, so I could still come and stay here, which had some of the most relaxed rules in Europe back then. Foreign neighbours without any paperwork confirming the right to be there got stuck. Countries like Austria and Germany wouldn’t let them drive through, and Croatia wouldn’t let them in either. Yes, even Schengen “citizens.” I’m also starting her clock towards citizenship. I’ll be eligible for Croatian citizenship in about 2.5 years. It should be easier to get hers along with mine. If that doesn’t work, at 18 she can claim it on the basis of 8+ years of residency. A very strong path. Total cost was €7 for ID pictures, €5 for birth certificate, €13 application fee and my time filling out a 4 page form. Time will pass anyway, so use it to your advantage. Rules may change for the worse or for the better, but she’ll have a very good shot at citizenship with 18 years of residency and fluent Croatian since we spend time here. The biggest gift you can give your children is options.

Your citizenship is your parents' decision. Your Tax residency is yours.

Don't expect the country to change, or things to be done your way, just because you moved there.

You don't really know your bank until you try to move a larger amount abroad. Suddenly they want: a reason, a source of funds, an invoice, a phone call, and five working days. It's your money. You still need permission to use it. One bank, one country, one compliance department deciding what you can do with your own money. One bank account is a single point of failure.

One of the few things that actually annoy me when I visit Poland is Ukrainians blasting speakerphone calls in cafés and on public transport.

Europe taxes success. Latin America taxes patience. Pick the one you can afford.

I respect the commitment of people who move somewhere entirely for tax reasons... then spend ALMOST half the year in the places they actually like.

My home country Poland is an unbelievably resilient nation that takes no shit from anybody. Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of noise about the tribunal mess, the shootout, and how Poles reacted. Here’s something that helps understand the country and why Polish people behave the way they do. For 123 years Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Education was deliberately restricted in the Russian and Prussian parts. Then the WW2. The Germans and Soviets both targeted the Polish elite on purpose. In Katyn in 1940 the Soviets killed around 22,000 Polish officers and professionals, many of them reserve officers, specifically chosen because they were the country’s doctors, engineers, lawyers and leaders. The Germans also systematically killed Polish elites, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The Holocaust wiped out most of Poland’s Jews, among them many who were heavily overrepresented in trade, medicine, and universities. After the war the communists kept education weak, and in 1968 another campaign forced out roughly 13,000 remaining people of Jewish origin. These were fully integrated Polish citizens, many of them academics and doctors, again targeting the remaining educated class. Poland had a large share of its elite deliberately killed or driven out. As bad as it sounds, it also lost a lot of good DNA material. And yet it still built a strong economy from a low base and keeps performing well above the European average in education. Poland was the first to face and fight back against the Germans in 1939 and the first to collapse the Iron Curtain. We are fighting hard to defend European culture. The resilience is obvious. The question is what the baseline would have looked like without those repeated hits. When I was a kid I blamed God and the world for being born in a shithole country. Over the years Poland made me proud. I’m proud to be Polish every day.

Western Europeans visit Argentina and say "how do people live like this?" Argentines visit Berlin and say the exact same thing. Both are right about different things.