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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

If you are able to work remotely, Spain is fantastic at the moment. Relatively low real estate rent/purchase prices. You can still get a nice 3 bedroom house with a pool under 200k by the Mediterranean sea (of course well, not in Marbella). There are some surprisingly high-tech jobs locally as well, the space industry is booming right now. Lots of programming jobs in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia even if you don't speak Spanish. Just had two acquaintances move over and they both found tech jobs within a month (in English). There is startup culture and events as well. Surprisingly, Spanish companies are really hiring at the moment unlike most of Europe. It's not been hit as hard with inflation either. Plus, government and population are for the most part pretty grown-up and progressive. Universal base income, focus on equality etc...

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Anecdata, but the vast majority of European new hires I'm seeing in my team are from Spain (though they are Spanish) and work remotely from mid-sized cities or islands (like Mallorca). It feels like Central Europe is slowly losing steam while Spain is, unexpectedly, gaining some steam.

Central European salaries are getting high enough to not make remote work for abroad companies as atractive. $80k+ per year is becoming more and more common for Seniors in Poland.

Central Europe is also under the renewed threat of Russian invasion. I know a few businesses that were hit by Herr Putin's latest adventure.

Why are you comparing Putin to Hitler instead of Stalin.

Because his rule and values look more similar (at least from what I can see from outside the country) to the ones in Nazi/Fascist regimes than in Soviet ones. Stalin wasn't Russian, his rhetoric was about transnational collectivism; whereas Putin is firmly in the traditional nationalistic mould, "my nation first".

Also, Stalin organized his underlings and allies in a monolithic fashion, inside the party; punishments were mostly distributed with demotions or convictions, as internal to the system. Putin keeps his oligarchs at arm's length, in charge of companies and institutions that are nominally independent, occasionally even abroad; punishments are inflicted by "fall from balcony" and indirect ostracism, again closer to the Nazi model than the Soviet one.

I know this is not what you meant, but it's a really sad answer.

Not because of Spain, which is a great place where I hope to live again one day, but because the answer to a question "how can I live a comfortable life and save money" is "move 1000km away from your family to a place where you don't know anyone, and don't even speak the language".

It shows that something's really, really wrong with the system if people making significantly above average salary struggle to have a sustainable (in financial sense) and comfortable life in their own country.

The flip-side of this is that all the "expats" (not immigrants :)) and "digital nomads" are outbidding the locals and pushing up prices for them.

If you think it's bad renting a house in Munich on a German salary, imagine renting a house in Lisbon (similar or higher prices) on a Portuguese salary.

The solution to this is of course land value tax, distributed to citizens in a dividend. The gains from the land value go to the citizens of the country, not the private speculators who add nothing.

I'm not sure it would be "the" solution, but it would certainly come a long way to make market-based economies live up to their theoretical promise.

In a way, getting rid of all rent-seeking is probably the single most important economic measure that a "free-market" country can take.

I'd argue Spain doesn't have a property crisis exactly because speculators and developers. There is lots of housing stock available. I don't know any single EU country which has ready to live in apartments listed at 20k EUR. The problem is everywhere from the US to Europe, is that there is simply not enough housing available. Blaming speculators is blaming a symptom.

> government and population are for the most part pretty grown-up and progressive. Universal base income, focus on equality etc...

This may well have an expiration date on May 28. Voting intention polls currently predict a shift to a right-wing majority (and this has been so for long), and the right in Spain is not moderate as in e.g. Germany. Although Pedro Sánchez has proven to be a tough nut to crack with a tendency to resurrect when everyone thinks him dead, so let's see what happens.

Sorry, I've just noticed that May 28 is the date for the municipal and regional elections. The general election (which is what I was referring to) will be later in the year, no later than December 10.

Spain has famously low tech salaries. Which I guess is okay if you work remotely.

The same could be said for Germany too :-)

Yea, but still better than Spain

I’ll put my own add in. Come to Asturias, you got mountain and sea right at your doorstep. Affordable, safe and welcoming. Also very temperate summers.

What are the salaries and taxes like?

Difficult to make a direct comparison, but taxes are very similar to Germany, salaries are pretty much the same for white-collar IT work. But IT is not terribly well-paid in Germany to begin with. I've seen people earning 3k per month in a senior IT position for a bank. But the same money goes a lot longer in Spain, especially outside big cities. The sweet spot is to freelance for foreign companies and spend the money in Spain. What skews the comparison is Spain is surprisingly empty. 70% of the country the same population density as northern Sweden. But a lot of people live in these small remote places where there are basically no permanent jobs apart from odd jobs, fruit picking and working in the post office. Think of a remote US mining town, without the mining :)

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