Hacker News Reader

Comment by traveler01 | Hacker News Reader

As a portuguese it blows my mind that "digital nomads" are choosing the country to live in. Surely the country has great weather, food and you get an hefty tax discount that the natives can only dream about (20% of income tax is wayyy lower than a living wage in this country pays). But if you investigated a bit more you would see that the emigration rates of the country are going through the roof.

It should be a huge red flag that one "nice" country has more than 20% of it's population living abroad: https://poligrafo.sapo.pt/fact-check/cotrim-de-figueiredo-po... (you might want to use Google Translate on this one).

I also saw some comments blaming the tourism for this "bubble" bursting. The portuguese can't complain about tourism since it's a huge part of our PIB.

View on HN

> Surely the country has great weather, food and you get an hefty tax discount

Sounds like you have it figured out why people are moving there :)

I think it's always hard for natives to figure out why people want to move to their country, where they see mostly problems and not how much better it is than where the people come from.

I'm an immigrant as well, and wouldn't understand why people would move to the country I was born in, but people who are from the place I currently live in feels the same way but vice-versa.

Good weather and good food is surprisingly convincing, at least for me, in deciding where to live.

And if you come living here with a foreign wage, sure makes sense to me. But if you have a "native wage", it's a no go.

Even with a salary from a Portuguese company, the cost of living is relatively low (compared to other South/Western European countries, and not including Lisbon obviously as it's a outlier [like all metropolitan areas]) so makes sense even with a "native wage". Especially if you work in the IT industry.

The cost of living is not low at all. Don't know where you got that idea from.

Of course it depends on what you compare it to. But compared to its South-Western European sisters, it is quite low. Mainly getting it from living in a bunch of European countries (including Portugal, and others outside of Europe, but not as relevant).

Besides Lisbon (and probably Porto nowadays), it's hard to find a place with good weather, good food and low cost of living compared to Portugal. Or maybe you have some counter-examples you care to show me?

In order to add some facts to the discussion, here are two links showing some comparison between cost of living in different countries in Europe:

- https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/cost_of_living_wb/...

- https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...

Probably other portuguese are going to hate me for saying this but... you have Spain. Their cost of living is a bit higher but their wages are higher as well and in some key stuff they have cheaper stuff than us. I went to Barcelona last year and I actually purchased there stuff to bring to Portugal because it was cheaper.

Also, I get why people get the idea that Portugal is "cheaper". Most come here in a trip, eat at a restaurant and pay a lot less than they're used to and they think the country is cheap. Well, that only happens because the wages are very low (our minimum wage for 2023 is 740€ and even though it raised a bit, the remaining wages aren't raising accordingly).

From personal experience cost of living in portugal is in line with germany.

I'm not sure Germany is famous for its good weather nor good food, but I've only visited a couple of times, never lived there, maybe I missed out on something obvious?

Please enlighten us. Why are 20% living abroad? What are they running from?

Wages are very low considering the cost of life here. Rents in the main cities of the country are going through the roof and there's little to no choice (if you're a digital nomad you can always choose to live in other areas, since it's clear you don't need to live close to where you work, but the issue there isn't much better).

About 26% people are living abroad (emigrated) and many of the ones who are staying in the country end up working for portuguese companies who mostly also work abroad.

So, if those people fled a country with such great good, weather and specially their families, it should ring some red flags no?

Digital nomads are probably not working for local wages. So those bad things are irrelevant for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com