Iceland long term visa for remote workers
island.is
island.is
I was delighted by the whales off the coast, and the northern lights felt like a spiritual event, but (at least according to lore) the Vikings invented the modern new year celebration by considering it a good enough time for everyone to dispose of their old flares and replace them with new, and so new year's in Iceland was better than the greatest fireworks show I'd ever witnessed, despite exactly 0% of the fireworks having been municipally provided. It felt like every member of every home had spent their life savings on fireworks and were setting them all off for hours. Impossible to describe, but here's some drone footage (not mine) that captures about 10 minutes of what went on for hours, and the experience from the city center on the ground was even more encompassing.
The first day there I had a hard time, thinking that my casual cold-weather gear would keep me comfortable was a mistake I learned the hard way tracking the northern lights on a mountaintop at 2 in the morning on the coldest night they'd had in 50 years.
But, the next day I picked up a pair of (expensive) sweatpants to act as a third layer, and I was just fine. Toasty enough that at night times I'd casually take off a hat or some gloves.
If you absolutely hate cold weather, maybe check it out in summer time. If you're willing to layer (and not just throw on dumb layers like I did) then it's totally manageable.
I found the magic combo to be:
* Thermalsilk top and bottom base layer
* An intermediate layer for very cold nights (https://www.icewear.is/us/fodurland-wool-underwear-baselayer)
* I got away with those two and a pair of Amazon Basics chinos, but a hard shell outer layer is probably smarter if you're trekking through snow
Generally, they issue weather advisories for that sort of thing, but that would have been handy to know in advance to check for.
January is the coldest month with average highs of 37° F and average lows of 27° C.
That's quite warm for Iceland, I'd have thought. Presumably that's 27ºF.
Some highlights:
* We saw geysir, the first geyser known to modern Europeans and the source of the name "geyser" [0]
* We went inside of a volcano [1]
* We did not get fooled by Icelandic polar bears [2]
* We (well, I) ate an average of two hot dogs per day [3]
* We saw a viking home which they unearthed during construction and then built a museum around [4]
* We boiled ourselves like happy lobsters [5]
* We had te og kaffi, which smelled and tasted like the best cafe I'd been to in years [6]
We went in April and were really glad we'd bought sleeping masks for the flight as the midnight sun did throw us for a loop. We were walking down the street one day wondering why all the stores were closed already, then saw a group of young women in glittery dresses and platform heels walking down the street. Checked my phone and it was 11 PM on a Saturday. Oh, okay, clubbing. Right, it's bedtime. Okay.
When we got back from Iceland, my wife was starting a new position at her company where she had to show up at 6:30 AM, so we ended up keeping the same sleep schedule and getting up at 3:30 every morning to have breakfast and commute together. Working in tech meant I had about six hours alone in the office before anyone else really showed up, which was quite peaceful.
Highly recommend Iceland, even if you don't go for New Year's!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geysir
[1] https://insidethevolcano.com/
[2] https://fooledbyiceland.tumblr.com/
[3] https://theculturetrip.com/europe/iceland/articles/how-this-...
[4] https://reykjavikcitymuseum.is/the-settlement-exhibition/exh...
Dill and Ōx were phenomenal. One of them has a Michelin star, but I can't remember which. Kol was also pretty great. Otherwise, it was great snacking on stupid gift-shop snacks like smoked salmon and capers as a dramatic contrast to the typical American gift shop snacks of corn chips.
The settlement exhibition we saw as part of a walking tour, and absolutely adored, but somewhat overshadowed by the "Bureaucrat" statue across the street from it[1].
Didn't have te og kaffi, but did enjoy Skyr (which is a cheese that you can DRINK).
On the whole, I enjoyed it more than I could have thought possible. You mentioned Iceland Air, and one thing I thought was really smart was that they've positioned themselves as a destination layover going from North America to Europe. We usually travel to Europe for vacations, but this time we "punted" and chose Iceland as our preferred accommodations in London were unavailable, and now I am keen to make a tradition of stopping over in Iceland everywhere I can.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monument-to-the-unknown-...
Most beautiful country in the world. Even though the winter was harsh. Perfect if you love photography, the whole day Golden Hour basically.
I used to live in Dubai, which is considered pretty expensive place, and never spent over 2500 per month, despite dining out almost all the time. Maybe 3000 if I needed some purchases like clothing or hobbies stuff. I get it, Numbeo says Iceland is 13% more expensive, but 7k? What exactly kind of lifestyle are they expecting from humble nomad?
Not all nomads work remotely for FAANG. Some live happy nomad life with much lower income.
Beyond that though, they want you to spend your money in Iceland - why else?
Presumably you aren't paying any income tax. So the only advantage to letting you into the country is that you'll spend money on goods and services.
Still the requirements are less strict than Thailand's remote work visa [0] but that lasts for 5 years renewable for another 5.
In Thailand's case the existence of a work-from-Thailand visa also clarifies that working remotely on other visas (Tourist, Non-O, Non-B) is not permitted.
[0] - https://kpmg.com/th/en/home/insights/2022/11/legal-news-flas...
Overall I agree. DNs would use Portugal's D7 to move in (in an exception of what the visa was originally intended to), but then Portugal introduced a DN visa which now requires a much higher income than what D7 requires, I think 4x times more than D7.
I had an awful experience applying for D7, so I am now happily living in Dubai instead which has the best residency process I have seen for ANY country.
I don't think you understand how ridiculously expensive Iceland is. Practically everything has to be shipped/flown in.
Just to give you an idea, a small completely unremarkable burger at a fast food place will be around $20-25. It will not make you full.
7K a month is realistic. Our vacation was still fantastic despite the cost.
Staying in hotels and eating out daily, we didn't spend 7k when extrapolating our two weeks to a month. Heck, it's still below 7k if you include all one-time purchases like the way there and back, clothing, new expensive hiking boots, etc. I've got a problem with most waterproof fabrics so I didn't have a raincoat, but reading about Iceland, I figured it's worth finding one that works for me, so that's another purchase I count towards my Iceland expenses. All in all still below 7k after extrapolation. (Edit: oh and I forgot that this is for 2 persons. You can't divide by two of course, but some correction factor should be applied.)
I fully agree with anyone saying Iceland is expensive, but if you stay in an actual apartment instead of hotels, don't do a number of guided tours every month, don't rent a vehicle for the whole time you're there (and drive around, though fuel was a surprisingly small part of the final expenses), you'll definitely not need 7k per month.
If you live in a low tax country, you would ordinarily have a lot to spend and be rich, and also have enough money to live off of in Iceland potentially, but might not meet that requirement by even half, whereas someone from a high tax country loses roughly half their income on them and would meet the requirement. Not the fairest method but, as you say, this clearly isn't geared toward charitableness in the first place.
Please, typically those taxes go (not completely) to stuff you’d otherwise be paying for from your after tax cash.
One obvious one is health care (which Americans pay much more for than Europeans, just not via their taxes). Less spent on roads: more car maintenance/shorter car lifespan.
One can have a reasonable argument over which should be bundled and which should be unbundled, but to say broadly that one “loses” on taxes is either lazy or ideology.
If you’re in Iceland for six months you might not even owe taxes in your home country for that period.
Interesting ignored fact: the US government spends as much per capita on health care as socialized systems. We also have to match that amount out of pocket, but that's because healthcare in the US costs twice as much, not because less tax money goes to it.
That's no excuse. Burgers in Fiji cost a quarter of that, and everything is shipped in from far further than it does to Iceland.
Does the nation subsidize costs? I went to a couple of countries where staples were remarkably inexpensive and later learned that most of them were subsidized by the national government.
Of course at McDonalds and Burger King, everything is imported and they cost about the same (or less) than what a burger costs at a local joint.
I believe Iceland also generates its own electricity from geothermal energy.
Import is super cheap unless it's something perishable like fresh fish and salad and needs to come over via plane. Local delivery normally costs much more.
In NZ right now a kilo of tomatoes is on par with one kilo of chicken.
We can't produce our own tomatoes in the hot months. Prices should drop massively come July.
So in some ways it's a really bad place for fully remote workers to choose to live: a bit like moving to Seattle! Or at least it can be said that you'd be using your freedom of movement exclusively as an opportunity to party down (or maybe to raise children somewhere nice) and not at all as an opportunity to save any money. On the other side of the ledger, I suppose that if you really must leave the US and Canada (or can't get in) and you want to live as close as possible to the US Eastern or Central timezone in a nice fully-developed country which is very easy to navigate using only English there aren't many other options. The UK doesn't seem to welcome digital nomads and its Home Office is no fun to interact with, anyway; Ireland might not be that much cheaper these days and it's certainly not as glamorous a playground as Iceland. Honestly I'd look into finding a posh, safe neighbourhood in Barbados first, though. https://www.visitbarbados.org/barbados-welcome-stamp I suppose one other advantage of Iceland might be the chance to network with other people in tech, but maybe you'd have to at least get conversational in Icelandic to really pull that off?
Sounds like they've captured the authentic San Francisco experience.
Wages here have grown ~25% (for the whole country) over the last ~4 years (if my memory from the reporting on this is correct).
Everything has to be imported, and what little that isn't is heavily reliant on imported goods.
Living here is mightily expensive.
Ofcourse you could live more frugally, and obviously most here do. Tech workers here are in the top income bracket like in most other places.
Not sure why digital nomad visas should have lower restrictions though. We want foreigners that come here and spend their money. No need to make it easier for the frugal tourist to come here for longer.
I'm not familiar with the reasoning for Iceland specifically but in another country (Switzerland) I was in the position of having to apply for long-term work visas for myself and some of my employees. There they justified the high income requirement because they wanted to know you weren't going to bring in cheap foreign labour and thereby undercut local wages. So you had to show that the wages were high in absolute terms and that you weren't paying less than the national average.
Edit: apparently the average income in Iceland is close to $6k per month so 7k is not even "high value", it's just making sure only people who earn at least an average income qualify, which makes sense.
If it weren't the fact that US cities cannot restrict the free migration of individuals, almost all of them would ban anyone moving there who didn't make above the average income for the area. Hawaii's last Republic governor tried every possible step to kick out the Marshallese, which is fucking hilarious considering how few of them there are globally.
If it wasn't for the US constitution you'd have giant slums in the interstitial space between cities, with a few zones stylized after the Jewish Autonomous Oblast here and there as well.
The US is and always has been a place where the poorest can make something for themselves. No matter what rhetoric you spout, this is still demonstrably true: 40 million Americans are first generation immigrants. Another 40 million second generation.
So when I, as an American, see these heavy restrictions, it highlights a couple things for me:
1) Just how different US immigration culture is from anywhere else. And how despite all the anti-US rhetoric, all the political nonsense, we are still the most welcoming place in the world for immigrants, and it isn't even close.
2) How unwilling other nations are to provide opportunities for people outside their borders. I want to go a little further and say these nations don't have much interest in being a part of the world if they can't exploit it.
It’s in the top quartile of both criteria, though.
Haha, hardly. I've seen Indians genuinely discussing that if your life plan is to move permanently to the US the best way to do it is to first move to Canada and get citizenship there.
Yes, the US is more welcoming of immigrants than a small, wealthy, tight-knit island with extensive (and expensive) social services, at least on some measures (OTOH one could argue that Iceland not providing healthcare to immigrants shouldn't count against it when the US doesn't provide healthcare to immigrants either). But Iceland is hardly representative of non-US countries in general.
Is the implication here that the US is not busy exploiting the rest of the world, starting with the fundamental economic reliance on migrant workers that aren't good enough to actually be working there legally?
Population wise and urban area wise, it's miniscule.
Edit to expand: 37 of the 50 United States have a greater land area than Iceland too. So Iceland is pretty small in both regards.
Also FAANG aren't particularly flexible for nomad work.
They give you a visa in exchange for the money you will spend in the country. That's it.
I know tech salaries outside the US can be much lower, but the requirements Iceland is putting up are basically enough (pre tax) for almost any tech employee in the US. Not just FAANGs. Not sure if Iceland is counting gross vs net pay but even if so, it’s enough for a very large portion of us tech employees still
And almost nowhere else. Hell, it’d be too high for most tech workers in Europe.
I moved to the UK under the same rules (before Brexit) - never moved back home to Iceland :)
Your money will stretch 3x-5x further in Europe unless you plan to build yourself an igloo and catch fish lol. Europe isn’t known for being cheap either.
- Digital nomads (Official) [1]
- ‘Digital nomads’ can now live in Spain with their families — if they earn enough [2]
[1] https://prie.comercio.gob.es/en-us/paginas/teletrabajadores-...
[2] https://www.immigrationspain.es/en/visa-for-digital-nomads/
No matter what is the carrot being hung, I would not wish to be in this land.
Would I like to live there forever? No way. Would I work remotely there for 3-6 months to explore a unique,bio diverse island? Hell yea!
Things I love about Iceland compared to the US
- Almost zero crime
- Police, I only saw three cars in nine days
- No one can carry a gun
- All citizens (free healthcare) well paid compared to US
- Hot water from a faucet comes directly from the ground
- Geothermal govt run bathhouses in each neighborhood for after work socializing.
- Hike to an active volcano or to a hot river to bathe in
- Beautiful outdoor scenery
- The Northern Lights
One negative is it's expensive i.e. a large pizza from a pizzeria here in the states will run you $12 to $15 while there it's $21 to $25.
Iceland is one the more expensive European cities for food at least.
- There are still crimes, particularly against women during the nightlife which isn’t investigated and reported in crime statistics.
- Police just acquired permission from the minister of justice to carry stun guns. There are recent cases of racial profiling which are particularly worrysom
- Gun laws are increasingly un-enforced and gun crimes are on the rise. Iceland has one of the largest per capita gun ownership in Europe.
- The healthcare system is increasingly underfunded, wait lists for healthcare are getting longer. A recent immigration bill denies health care to asylum seekers.
- Hot water is a plenty so this is mostly true.
- The swimming pools are amazing places to socialize and still relatively cheap... So this is also true
- The volcano has stopped erupting, this last one was indeed very approachable. More likely volcanoes form way in the highlands and are not approachable unless you can charter a plain or a helicopter.
- The outdoor scenery is relative. I much more favor the trees in the pacific north west where I live now over the mossy lava-fields where I grew up.
- The northern lights are cool but light pollution is a problem in and around the city or any town and village.
There are no school shootings yet here there's almost one a day it seems.
Seemed as safe as Norway where moms leave their babies out in their carriages bundled up for fresh air while they go into their house to clean. A mom who did that here would be possibly arrested
So Iceland is paradise if you are a tired of seeing all the crime in America. I didn't know it was that bad here til my dates (locals) I met and talked with at one of the neighborhood family bathhouses pointed it out. How scared they are of going to the US. Which I replied it's not that bad not everyone has a gun yet once I was home I had a crazy gunman who shot police hiding in the woods of my backyard and we were told to shelter in place. Sure that's not happening in Iceland cause even and only police only have stun guns!
I promise you it's very easy to find sub-400k person communities in the US that have never had one either.
This video from American idol where a contestant went thru a school shooting further hits home for me ..school shootings are a pathetic part of American life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slhz5ZM2x94&t=310s
Iceland is indeed tiny, and that's a benefit… Too many people in America with too many conflicting views to ever make it safe like Iceland
I have never been out of the US and experience another culture… It was eye-opening
To those saying "but Iceland is tiny" and "there are 400k-person communities in the US with no history of school shootings", here are the stats for countries with the most school shootings (total incidents Jan 2009-May 2018)[1]:
United States — 288
Mexico — 8
South Africa — 6
Nigeria & Pakistan — 4
Afghanistan — 3
Brazil, Canada, France — 2
Azerbaijan, China, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kenya, Russia, & Turkey — 1
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...
Yes, although don't let the bus out from Keflavik fool you, the south west tip of the island is lava flats and it does look a bit like the moon. The rest of the country is a lot more interesting than that.
However you _never_ go to Iceland for the biodiversity, same way you don't go to Bangladesh for the diarrhoea. You go for the pristine wilderness, the ice and glaciers, the volcanism, the aurora borealis, the perma-day in the summer, the people (they're amazing!), the partying, the new year celebration (most households fire a firework at 00:00) or the language which is as close to ancient norse as you can get.
Also what is unique to Iceland is its size and culture, it is very Anglosphere, and a curious blend of European and American in culture (due to the legacy of the US base) Reykjavik has elements of both city and village life in a single spot and its an interesting test bed for services or products as a consequence.
Which is the incredible thing about this life. You are free to decide not do participate in things you don't want to participate in.
Of course, there are about 10 billion things you don't want to, and that's cool!
And your employer is fine with it, or willing to turn a blind eye. That rules out lots of people working for large companies, particularly in highly regulated industries.
I would have loved to work remotely from Thailand in my previous job, and my previous employer would have been fine with it, had I been able to show them a work visa. Unfortunately, the Thai SMART Visa would have required my employer to have a Thai subsidiary. I could have created my own Thai single proprietorship and perhaps gotten my employer to hire me indirectly via that Thai entity, but at a minimum, that would have required lots of high-level approvals.
I got an email from the Ukrainian authorities (pre-2022) saying they didn't care if I worked remotely for a foreign company on a 90-day on-arrival tourist visa, and that was sufficient for my employer (as long as I didn't visit post-2014 conflict zones). (The Ukrainian ministry's email reply was along the lines of "Why are you asking us? Why would we care if you work remotely as a tourist, as long as you aren't doing any labor that requires a presence in Ukraine?") I worked from Kiev for a couple of months after a couple of high-level approvals.
Here's hoping more countries adopt digital nomad-friendly work visas. Lots of countries currently turn a blind eye, but it's much better to have everything explicit and above-board.
Of course, people who don't require special business visas to enter a country for, say, an event routinely do work when traveling in many cases. I've never done months at a time but I've certainly had ~1 month trips in Europe that were some combination of business and pleasure.
I considered the Thai visa which has crazy requirements. My income makes me eligible (I believe), but the visa costs $1000+ and you're not even sure to get it.
Personally, having yet to visit Iceland, and hearing from friends who have that it's not the cheapest place, plus its northernly latitude, 90 days for me to first scout it out is more than enough for me.
UK for example has a fairly explicit line: “The applicant must not receive payment from a UK source for any activities undertaken in the UK.”
The idea of someone working fully remotely gets tricky as for example the US wants you to pay US taxes if you’ve made more than 3k/year while working in the US.
> you can show a foreign income of ISK 1,000,000 per month or ISK 1,300,000 if you also apply for a spouse or cohabiting partner.
> you do not need a visa to enter the Schengen area
Unfortunately this ^ disqualifies me, despite meeting the income requirements, since I need a visa to enter the Schengen region. This seems to be an odd requirement, they are already issuing a visa, why require people to have powerful passports as well ?
It's not a cheap country but 7k/month as "minimum income" is not a requirement out of necessity or kindness.
FWIW, the origin of "third world" is political, being the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries the first and second. The poverty implication came later.
Is a visa needed to enter Spain from any Spanish-speaking country? (Spain is in Schengen)
Contrast this with Spain's digital nomad program, where they don't require someone to have a powerful passport, all they seem to care about is having a job outside spain.
https://prie.comercio.gob.es/en-us/paginas/teletrabajadores-...
Contrary to popular belief, at least within the Schengen-area, it's hard to immigrate into the Schengen-area from the outside.
As an Indian national, you are not eligible for this visa program.
One of the requirements is:
> you do not need a visa to enter the Schengen area
This is why the minimum barrier to entry into this program is having an income of ISK 1,000,000 per month, which means that you need a salary of over €80 000.
Additionally, they also don't want foreigners to actually settle in their country, which is why there is a 180-day ceiling. The purpose of this program is to have rich foreigners come for a spell, spend lots of money, then go away. They're being very transparent about this.
Yes.
> That’s less than the median household income in a half-dozen states.
That's nice. Can you guess how many states there are in the world?
The fact that you're using the claim that a minority percentage in a single country makes a large amount of money as an argument for the claim that an 80.000 salary is not rich, is a stereotypically American myopic outlook at the world.
Yes, 80 thousand Euros per year wages is rich by most EU standards.
>18% of Americans make over $100k/year.
Wow, America, the richest country in the world, has many rich people. The more you learn.
(1) EUR 80,000 > USD 80,000 (about USD 86,700)
(2) We’re discussing individual wages not household income of households where the average is >1 wage-earner.
(3) The highest US state median wage is a little over USD 80k, and less than EUR 80k.
(4) The US is a rich country, so, yes, median wage earners in the US as a whole (much less the median wage earner of the state scoring highest on that metric) are rich by any non-US-specific standard.
In a way, they're pretty japanese.
Eventually your retirement system will crumble. Not tomorrow, not next year, but maybe a couple decades from now. And it's not something you can fix in a year or two.
It's so easy for them just to attract high-skilled labor everyone is fighting for. But nope, they pretty much say: "We know you're skilled because we have requirement of 90k/year, but we don't want skilled workers to be able to stay here, because go somewhere else". Well, ok, Iceland..
Correct. It's not a difficult concept to grasp, especially as they are being very overt about it. They don't want foreigners settling into their country. They want foreigners coming in for a short time, pumping money into it, then buggering off.
I don't think in US it would be different.
One thing you'll find out is that the EU member states (along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) are really not very friendly or welcoming in terms of "path to citizenship".
One thing I'd like to see actually is open immigration and potentially more free trade between the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. I'd add Ireland but I think EU status would be a problem.
About 30% of New Zealand and Australia’s populations are immigrants. I don’t think we could let many more in! As a comparison, the US is about 15% population of immigrants - and look at the stink over there about there being too many! The places with more immigrants than NZ/Oz by percentage are mostly either small island populations, or Arab states (where you are not actually an immigrant, since you don’t have citizenship rights, and slave labour conditions are rife).
One resulting issue is that some major parts of the NZ/Oz housing markets are already some of the most unaffordable in the world (think San Franscisco, but earning less so even less affordable)! The five most expensive cities in the world by unaffordability are Hong Kong, Vancouver, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto : e.g. Sydney: average monthly income of $6,100 with median house price of $1.4 million. Auckland median house price is $1.1 million, whereas the average individual monthly income is $4,269. We have the land, we just need to build a lot of houses to keep up.
[0]: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/98...
Downright hostile attitude towards "path to the citizenship" if you ask me.
Slavers used to defend the trans-Atlantic trafficking with the argument that the American natives were too few, didn't produce enough and didn't breed enough. I hear a lot of similar arguments being used against native European peoples today. Should we always repeat history?
Every country having open borders would be cool though.
Did you expect something different?
That's literally the goal of every "DiGiTaLnOmAd" (you're a migrant worker, dickhead) visa scheme everywhere in the world. They want short-term renters eating out every night and racking up airport fees.
edit: unless you're super-wealthy in which case "Velkominn, Willkommen, いらっしゃいませ, Bem-vindo, 欢迎, Bienvenu, Tere tulemast, etc...."
https://northstack.is/2023/03/13/the-icelandic-government-in...
"Hank and I used to go to Mexico every time they devalued the peso!"
"Yeah, that got old fast..."
the idea is that America uses its power against the third world Nations to coerce them to throw up restrictions to moving easily overseas
Having dealt with various nations’ bureaucracies, I’m more inclined to believe most simply haven’t been convinced it is worth their administrative overhead trouble to capture the financial benefits of welcoming digital nomads for longer stays. They’re quite well aware digital nomads exist and many desire longer stays. It is still considered a pretty niche population compared to regular tourism and likely not worth catering to yet. With RTO spreading, it likely will remain so until WFM becomes more mainstream in the future.
Don't forget many third world countries are former colonies of western countries and don't necessarily want large amounts of westerns residing there again.
> it would financially benefit third world countries to allow Americans with money to move in easily and without restrictions without Visa time limits and so fort
It financially benefits third world countries when Americans with money _try_ to move in. Via bribery etc. Also many of these countries have high end hotels where they can get the same money from somebody who stays a week or two and leaves and never makes a fuss about local issues!
You should see what "bureaucratic obstacles" exist for people in third world countries that want to visit USA. The US tourist visa has no publically-known requirements beyond "shows intent to return home after trip". This is quite arbitrary and the visa officers at embassies abroad are given the final say in visa issuance. (To be fair, if there were bank balance requirements, people would both photoshop their statements and ask for friends/family to borrow the amount to pad their account before their visa interview). If you are rejected, they only tell you to "try again later" without ever telling you the reason of rejection. People who can afford to visit relatives and intend on returning at the end of their trip will have their visa applications denied on a regular basis. There's just so many applicants to be more through.
The only way I can think of that America coerces its citizens to stay, is that you still need to pay income taxes regardless of where you live.
I think the biggest hurdle is the Americans themselves, thinking that living in South America would be like living in a slum, or in the middle of the jungle. I assure you, you'll find a great life living in Buenos Aires, or in many cities within Argentina, that have nothing to envy from many American small cities.
It's not NYC or Dallas, of course. And you'll have to do without many gadgets, and learn to live in a turbulent economy, which can be tough for some people. But the reward is that if you earn USD and spend in ARS, the economy won't touch you at all. It might even make it easier.
All of the above assumes US country of origin, but I'm sure it'd work the same with many countries.
In what country is this the case? For countries in the Schengen area, the rule is 90 days out of any 180 day period.
I wrote about my experiences here: https://ozar.me/tag/iceland/
I see a lot of people saying Iceland is expensive - well, if you're coming from California, it's not that bad. I'd say it's comparable, aside from the gas/diesel prices.
If you have any questions about the process or living in Iceland, I'd be glad to help. Email's on my profile.
Icelandic flora is very vulnerable and driving off roads will cause sever damage that will last for decades. It is highly illegal to drive off roads except for glaciers and beaches. In fact there is a huge social stigma against off road driving. Tourists that get caught regularly get ridiculed on national television, and rightly so.
awwww that's ridiculous.
> visa for remote workers
> remote
> Applications can only be submitted in paper form.
What a fantastic way to attract people who will work through the internet: by having them submit paperwork through well, paper.
20,000 ISK says the forms get scanned as soon as they arrive too.
I assume one can be working remotely and at the same time applying for permanent residence. What is the problem with that?
People are lovely and awesome but the place is barren, cold, windy and desolated.
I'd take a lot of places in southern Europe, instead.
Desolated: I wouldn't say that, but then we went at a time where the F-roads were closed so we didn't go into the interior. When driving around, it was very rare not to see another soul for so much as an hour even in late autumn. For the country with iirc the lowest population density of Europe, this surprised me a lot. I thought that it was a Dutch and Rhine-area feature not to be able to get away from other humans.
Bare nature and ice features (cold): that is what you go to Iceland for! If you aren't into that, either you picked the wrong place or you've picked an expensive place to pick up on that! I can definitely accept the wind for how cool the nature is in Iceland.
Southern Europe, on the other hand, is where I'd not want to go, at least not outside of winter! Heard of the first forest fire in Spain last week already, no thank you.