Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

politico.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 184 posts

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#71

Post by dzhiurgis »

stanislavb wrote: post #52
user_named wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy. It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.

Well, that's not exactly always true. I've had zero problems with bureaucracy since moving to Australia. My case has been that everything just works - minimal human involvement, and when it's present - it's pretty optimized. I think that due to the high cost of labour (highest minimal pay in the world) and lack of labour due to higher speed of development - whatever that can be automated has been automated.

Same experience in NZ - you only start to see how hopeless europe is when you come back. I had 0 interaction with gov clark in nearly a decade in NZ, while in europe any sort of errand would require in face meetings. Even some digital forms would just email the form to a person in ivory tower for validation, who’ll tell you to visit office anyway…

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#72

Post by alvah »

avmich wrote: post #35
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be a lot more long-term rentals available if there was no airbnb (because airbnb is the reason that you were unable to find a long-er term rental in the first place). Limit the rentals to 1 month (or 2) minimum and you have all the bases covered.

How come in so many markets suppliers seek the demand and glad to have it, but in real estate market instead of cheerfully increasing the supply there are complaints, proposal to limit and in general offers to do something unusual where the goal could seemingly be achieved by more housing...

Because one of the greatest cons of the last ~50 years has been convincing the middle class that housing is an asset, so now the price level in most Western cities has been bid up to insane levels, and asset owners will do whatever they can to maintain the value of their "asset".

Also because real estate may resemble a market but it's very far from a free market, with lobby groups, regulations and intervention everywhere you look.

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#73

Post by yieldcrv »

> Critics “have to understand there is not a dichotomy” between drawing in outsiders and caring for locals.

Can confirm, I’ve stayed longer than short term in many cities and am a transplant in all cities. Some places handle it better than others, every place points fingers at a the nearest most visible externality. What they all hardly consider:

- their neighbor could have set the rent super high at any point in history, and didnt gamble on doing that then and didnt have to gamble on doing that now. the rent doesnt have to be that high and you can likely peer pressure them into not raising it to its highest acceptable threshold

- I dont care what the rent is anywhere, more on this later

- anyone that can afford the current rent, set unilaterally by a gambling landlord, is usually paying more than everyone else

- and circling back, any unit in any city would satisfy me, so even if I would pay $6,000 in Miami and thats super high, the $1500 place in Austin would remove me from the market, even though thats high to people in Austin (example, I dont actually know, or care)

- all together this puts it more so on the gambling landlords in all places, yes there are some tenants that ask for higher rent just to skip the application queue but I would need that quantified

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#74

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

fy20 wrote: post #43
user_named wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy. It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.

I'm not sure about Portugal, but a few years ago my wife was studying in Spain on a study abroad program. She is from another EU country, and we'd visited Spain a few times, so figured it would be easy. Pretty much every step of the way we encountered so much more bureaucracy (I am an immigrant to her country) than we could even imagine. She spoke Spanish, but if she didn't it would have been a million times harder.…

Oh, I had lot of negative experiences with BBVA in USA. Those guys has no clue how to do SEPA payments, declining regular debit card payments on e-shops like DigiKey as fraud (according to them I am suppose to train their systems so it will stop doing that) and in general their support sucks.

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#75

Post by deanCommie »

fy20 wrote: post #43
user_named wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy. It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.

I'm not sure about Portugal, but a few years ago my wife was studying in Spain on a study abroad program. She is from another EU country, and we'd visited Spain a few times, so figured it would be easy. Pretty much every step of the way we encountered so much more bureaucracy (I am an immigrant to her country) than we could even imagine. She spoke Spanish, but if she didn't it would have been a million times harder.…

This is a fairly long story but only one part of this seems like genuine "bureaucracy":

> We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do.

That's an absolute nightmare (though I don't understand how you weren't notified, or what the recourse typically is for accounts closed due to "suspicious activity".

The rest can be summarized as:

* A business wants billing from a local bank account (not universal, but not unusual)

* Opening a local bank account needs some information confirming your identity, which the police can do.

* Getting these forms isn't instant

* Banks don't have long opening hours

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#76

Post by Izikiel43 »

ggambetta wrote: post #54
user_named wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy. It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.

No. I'm an expat in Switzerland and dealing with the government and other institutions has been great - can't even call it a bureaucracy. For reference, I found the UK pretty sensible, Spain frustrating, and my native south american country a nightmare.

Argentina!

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#77

Post by vkou »

8ytecoder wrote: post #44
user_named wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy. It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.

Slightly off topic but I see this often enough and I’m curious to know, when do you call someone moving to another to work an expat instead of an immigrant.

Someone moving from a wealthy country to a poorer one is an expat.

Someone moving from a poor country to a wealthier one is an immigrant if they intend to stay for life, and a migrant if they don't.

That's why you have American expats living in Thailand and Mexico, but Thai immigrants and Mexican migrants living in America.

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#78

Post by louison11 »

user_named wrote: post #31
alzamos wrote: post #16

Currently living in the Algarve after moving to Lisbon with my partner for her studies years ago. I know a few non-crypto entrepreneurs who came here for the NHR (non habitual resident scheme - the scheme mentioned in the article which allowed for the 20% tax cap on foreign income). I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered, not just when dealing with the govern…

Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy. It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.

No, Portugal is different. To give you perspective: it takes 2-3 years to exchange a foreign driver license (most foreigners I know drive illegally by now), a lot of administrations frequently “lose” applications and ask you to do it again when they have too much backlog (this cost me hundreds of dollars in back and forth, certified documents etc in the past).

It’s also very common for administrations to have no one answering the phone/email. And most administrations are appointments only. So often, you kind of have to drive to different places, maybe different city halls, and hope that someone has a contact with an internal e-mail address and can hook you up. That’s just how it works. It’s the most barbaric administration and closest to a third world country I’ve experienced, and I’m French, so I know something about red tape.

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#79

Post by vkou »

alvah wrote: post #69
pjmlp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be common, but then many cities got fed up of it, and now many municipalities have local laws to take ownership for the city if the owners behave this way.

-can't get permission to build due to massive amounts of red and green tape -the only economically sensible option is to let the building fall into disrepair bad enough that the government lets you demolish -governments close this "loophole" by seizing your property and the problem is "the owners behave this way"? FMD.

It's entirely possible that there's non-loophole ways to solve this problem, but when a lot of money is at stake, why would landlords (or anyone else) make effort to be compliant with the spirit of the law, when they can cut corners, and abuse the letter of the law?

Re: Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

#80

Post by Beltalowda »

smueller1234 wrote: post #64
Beltalowda wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved back to my native Netherlands after several years abroad and encountered significant problems with the bureaucracy, more so than in any foreign country I've lived. I don't think it's an expat problem, rather it's a "if you fall slightly outside of the happy path then you can expect to run in to a lot of trouble"-problem. It's just that expats are a group of people that fairly frequently tend to fall outside o…

This is it, 100%. Anything non standard and you get the long forms instead! By the way, I've lived in a few European countries and researched many others. The Netherlands was by far the easiest/most efficient in terms of bureaucracy.

> Anything non standard and you get the long forms instead!

If only. Instead you run in to catch-22s and simply get a shrug and "it's not possible".

The big downside of being the "easiest/most efficient" is that it deals with exceptions poorly; once you fall outside of the "efficient" workflow you're screwed. Lots of people run in to problems with this and people literally become homeless because of this. Ironically, it's easier if you're actually homeless and sleeping on the street – as opposed to being homeless and having enough money to stay at hotels or are temporarily staying with friends – as there are some special exceptions for people registered at the salvation army and such.

Post reply on HN