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Comment by danayfm | Hacker News Reader

I've been pulling it off, but I have dual citizenship with EU/USA but still get paid in the US because it saves me 2k a month in taxes. There are also workarounds in avoiding paying the higher EU taxes.

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> it saves me 2k a month in taxes. There are also workarounds in avoiding paying the higher EU taxes.

Interesting how in a different comment you say

> I want the same for all Spaniards and will gladly pay high taxes if my family, friends, and my neighbors can also have that same opportunity.

When the justice system gets fixed in Spain maybe I'll pay the taxes there again. It shouldn't take more than a year to get an okupa out. It's too slow. I milked that cow already. But thank you Spain for the free education and the scholarships!

I hadn’t realised that’s a thing (although I probably shouldn’t be surprised) -- I thought all these dual-citizenship tax agreements worked such that you aren’t double-taxed, but the total amount paid needs to meet the minimum for each country.

For example, I thought if you’re resident in the US you might pay your main taxes there, but you’d need to “top up” in the EU.

What’s your specific workaround?

It helps to travel with different legal names and different passports.

I tried to be generous and phrase my question in a balanced way; your answer isn't exactly making it sound super legal.

If it were completely above board, presumably you'd be willing and able to explain it clearly.

If you're living and working in California or New York, as I suspect a large number of hacker news readers are, EU taxes on income are generally not prohibitively more expensive, especially relative to increase in quality of life. 'Native' salaries are considerably lower, however, and tax treatment of equity-based compensation is very much not in favor of employees...

So you want to take advantage of European quality of life, social nets and infrastructure, but you don't want to help pay for it? How very American.

I've met a few Americans living like that in Portugal, there are communities that formed in some villages away from the main cities where real estate is very cheap since most villagers had died or moved out. They were proud of not paying Portuguese taxes, I couldn't understand how you can be proud of taking advantage of a society while not contributing financially to it to support the services you enjoy.

It's hard for me to understand this mentality...

The real question is why the Portuguese government is allowing this to happen?

NHR (the tax scheme that the parent is discussing) ended. If you didn't already move to Portugal under it, it's no longer available to you, so your question should really be in the past tense.

NHR 2.0 offers much reduced benefits and in a much narrower scope.

Once you get used to paying less taxes you don't want to go to paying more and getting the mostly the same. Healthcare costs is different. Also there's the high EU VAT taxes which are taxes already.

Sure, just don't live at a place where you are defrauding the tax system while extracting the most expensive benefits from it: education and healthcare.

Sounds smarmy as hell.

How much do you pay for health insurance in the US?

Very low, minimum amount that covers only emergencies. I use Europe for cheaper healthcare.

Wait, are you living in the EU? but you are being paid, and taxed in the US? You are not paying taxes for the public services you are consuming in the EU?

Do you spend more than 6mos in the EU?

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