Nordic countries have high VAT but that's hardly going to hurt you.. On the other hand Sweden has less property tax than the US.
I guess if you consume services then that will be more expensive in the Nordics, since tax on salaries is high.
"A few millions in the bank" for hundreds of thousands or million of people would already make a nordic country the king of lesser inequality - unless (as the parent says, don't know it's true) it's tied up in company assets (and perhaps they use them as company perks even in one-person companies, to avoid the tax, thus masking better equality at the individual level).
If you have a 1.5M balance sheet, you can pay yourself 120k euros in dividends annually at an effective tax rate of only 7.5%.
Let’s just say that small businesses and professionals have very good lobbyists. An employee making 120k / year pays over 40% tax.
This creates a tremendous incentive for professionals to incorporate and use every trick in the books to build up a larger balance sheet on paper.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Finnish companies are also an outlier in paying extremely high dividends.
https://www.skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/eng...