In North America I would vote Montreal. It's 1/2 price of most American cities and 2x funner and cooler than almost any of them. LA and NYC have tons of cool, but they are expensive and doing fun stuff is generally expensive. Not so Montreal. Mtl has way more going on than even SF ever had back in the day, and it's much bigger than Austin, Boulder/Colorado Springs etc. etc.. During the summer, Montreal has an unbelie…
How easy is to get a job in Montreal if I am not from North America and don't have a Visa or PR?
Canada has an age pyramid problem: that means that young skilled people have an excellent chance of being selected for immigration.
Depending on your ability to work remotely, I would make the "case" that you should consider Portugal . Lisbon and Porto are super popular with ["digital nomad"] remote workers who work for international companies so earn in USD but spend [much less] in Euros for a superb lifestyle. There's a reason @paddycosgrave moved Web Summit to Lisbon. It's one of the cheapest cities in Europe and [unlike Barcelona] everyone sp…
Yes Portugal is a good choice now, I moved here 1 year ago from UK because of various factors, Brexit, tax, quality of life etc also because I believe it will be a great location to recruit IT talent to.
I live in Cascais which is a bit expensive, (still much cheaper than San Francisco of course) but has wonderful quality of life for family, Capital city amenities next to beach. Great infrastructure, motorways, ultra fast cheap fibre to home, good IB school for kids, quality cheap fresh food, esp fish and veg. Retail items are expensive, high VAT, no Amazon (yet rumers will come soon) Services cheap, private medical cover including dental, for family of 4 unbelievably cheap, less than 200 Euro pm, i paid nearly that much for just dental in UK, the free public healthcare and schools are also apparently good.
Property prices going up v fast, many Brazilians moving here to avoid crime and Scandinavians to avoid Tax. Dividends are Tax free from the UK for 10 years, 20% on local income.
EU passport if you spend 500k on property - 1 or more units, inc home or investment - is booming as a result - they collect lots of VAT so is good strategy for Portugal considering it was like Greece 4 years ago.
1 downside is insane price of large or fast cars, so lots of dangerous small old cars, also they are totally inept drivers for some strange reason, you see accidents nearly every journey, feels 100 times more often than UK, though stats show only 10 times worse, similar to US apparently - apart from that feels like a very safe country, locals are v friendly and welcoming and most speak English.
Oh and I forgot to mention nearly 300 days sunshine pa vs 120 in Wales is so nice, hard to feel down in Estoril with Azure sky and ocean, sea is a bit chilly but stops it getting to hot.
There are some smaller German cities like Göttingen which have - in my opinion - a high intellectual atmosphere because they are so called university-cities: lot's of students and academics in a rather small city. And, in comparison with big cities like Berlin or Munich, the rents are much cheaper: from what I know you pay 2/3 to half of the price for the same amount of space. Example: a flat with 55-60 qm is about 6…
This is true. Lots of other mentions of Germany in this thread with good points. The downsides to Germany that Americans and Canadians (and to a lesser extent British) might perceive: - Constant store closures. Almost all Sundays and numerous holidays, almost all stores, including groceries, are closed. Don't forget to get milk or you have to trek to the central train station. - Very bad international food. Even in m…
Just to add my bit here:
- Public smoking in public indoor places is completely banned in Bavaria, including pubs, restaurants and bars.
- No one will forbid you to buy your own dryer in case you're not happy with hanging your clothes on clotheslines. We do have a dedicated clotheslines room in our building thus I never needed a dryer myself (and my clothes are getting dry within 2 days even in the winter)
- ACs are recently getting popular in offices, they're rare in private homes due to too less days we'd have to use them. I thought it was odd what I experienced when working in the States: cooling to 16C in the summer months whereas my colleagues would heat up to 22C in the winter months. I prefer sweating over getting a cold in the summer ;)
- Driver's licenses are valid for a life time and don't need renewal every now and then. We are not allowed to drive with our parents before we do the test. If you're an experienced driver, your (European) driver's license will cost you below the above mentioned # since the price depends on how many driving lessons you will need to do.
- Store closure times depends on which part of the country you live in. Berlin is quite liberal with opening hours whereas the south (especially Bavaria) is quite strict. You get used to it and learn to organize yourself better.
I currently live in Munich which offers a lot of cultural and technical inputs. Meetups are happening frequently and the community is quite active. Housing is quite expensive (if you're in an urgent need for a place to stay) but you can still find affordable housing if you look long enough.
Salary when working for local companies is way above the German average.
Cape Town is exceptional value. Lived there for 12 years. I would recommend you try and work remotely from there earning a foreign currency like USD, GBP or EUR. You will then find it very cheap. Pros: Excellent quality of life (for your demographic). Beautiful outdoors, quick to get around. Cheap compared to SF, NYC, LDN, AMS, BLN. Great food scene. Not oversubscribed like SF, LDN etc. You can usually just walk into…
Cape Town feels like SF away from SF. Considering m all the interesting neighborhoods, the beaches, Hwy 1 like roads, proximity of wine country in Franshoek, great coffee, and all the beautiful little artsy towns nearby, it might just be the Bay Area. I don’t know what the tech scene is like though.
12-15 euro for a kebab. They must be seasoning everything with gold there. But it's a nice city if you manage to live there and its expensiveness works generally as a quality filter so most people are educated and smart.
The expensiveness is as well an oligarch-, and is-family-of-a-dictator-filter.
That cold-cheap bit is decidedly not applicable to Europe, by the way. Scandinavia is overall among the most expensive places in Europe. I'd imagine Switzerland is more expensive by a bit, but Oslo and Stockholm are brutal as well.
The cost of housing / income ratio in Stockholm is so out of whack that it’s basically impossible to enter the housing market without at least €50k-75k in savings to have as a down payment for an apartment anywhere nice.
It's the same in Switzerland. There is just almost no way to be able to afford a house (or just an apartment), because most of them start at 1 million and I am not even talking about apartments in Zurich.
I'm actually a Durbanite living in Westville but I can't recommend Durban having lived in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Mumbai and Berlin. Spend too much time in Durban and I end up feeling like I'm intellectually frustrated. A lot of it might have to do with my race group and the fact that it is a minority nationally with a high concentration in KZN. You probably know what I'm saying ;) There's implicit racism in Durban…
Having lived in Durban my high-school years… I can't recommend it. I hated every second of it. I found the place to be utterly corrupt and demoralizing. It takes a toll on you to have to rely on private drivers and gated communities only to feel remotely safe. It's like living in a prison. Seeing the decline of the country via Jacob Zuma's rise, and the breakdown of infrastructure while I lived there was another leve…
While I can see where you’re coming from with the other points, private drivers are not really a thing (you do need a car though).
Traffic is also basically non existent if you have lived in any other major city in the world. Like 15-30mins max in peak times and the max commute is 15mins anyways to get from most places to anywhere else.
https://originalshrewsbury.co.uk -- it's the birthplace of Darwin, home to a newly formed independent university, it's day-trippable to all major UK cities and it's insanely cheap and nice.
Depending on your ability to work remotely, I would make the "case" that you should consider Portugal . Lisbon and Porto are super popular with ["digital nomad"] remote workers who work for international companies so earn in USD but spend [much less] in Euros for a superb lifestyle. There's a reason @paddycosgrave moved Web Summit to Lisbon. It's one of the cheapest cities in Europe and [unlike Barcelona] everyone sp…
I have had my eye on Portugal for a number of years, but there are a few things that seem less than ideal.
* Cost of living for a good quality of life still being relatively high or rising, especially in Lisbon and other tourist/expat areas. And a second tier city in Portugal is much less of a clear choice since that is comparable to a lot more places.
* The tax system being very complicated. One can always argue about how much tax to pay, but few people want a complicated tax system, especially not as a foreigner. (And is usually an indication that other systems are complicated as well).
* The tech scene not really happening. Despite the usual "next Silicon Valley" it doesn't really stand out from anywhere else as far as I can tell.
There might certainly be things I don't see, but at least initially it doesn't seem like Portugal rise above the competition to the extent that you wouldn't have to consider quite a few other options.