How we decided to live abroad and how it changed our lives.

Now this is a story of all about how,

Two middle aged peoples lives got flipped upside down,

We'd like to take a minute so sit right there,

Let us tell you how we decided to sell up and travel everywhere.

Have you ever dreamed about retiring abroad to somewhere sunny? Spending your days drinking a cold beer or a glass of wine looking at the sea. Then what are you waiting for?! The fact is that by the time you retire you are likely to be less agile than you are now and will have less income.

Lisa and I were out one day walking our dog Charlie (our labrador/collie cross who you'll meet later) during the Covid lockdown in the summer of 2020, and we discussed where we would like to live when we retire. We both agreed it would be by the sea and probably overseas and then I looked at Lisa and said why are we waiting to retire. We were both working remotely as was most of the UK at that time so what difference did it make which country we worked from. We both love to travel so it seemed the perfect thing for us to do.

Around that time the phrase "Digital Nomad" started to trend and so seeing as we both loved Italy, I started to see what it would take to live there and what a "Digital Nomad" was. This was pre the full impact of Brexit so at this point if we could move before 31 December we could reside for 5 years in the country of our choice in the EU. We began to look at properties south of Salerno as we had just returned from a holiday in that region but our search ground to a halt when we found out that the Italian tax system wasn't favourable. In a nutshell, if you were of working age and wanted to work in Italy you had to set up a company and then have your already taxed income from the UK paid into that company and then pay yourself from that company so the Italians could tax you as well!

So it was back to the drawing board and around that time a genius of a Dutch man called Jan De Jong, who lived in Croatia, had written an open letter to the Croatia Prime Minister about how Croatia could extend its tourism by offering a residency permit for digital nomads. We had visited Croatia a few years before and loved it and as I already had connections there we dug a little deeper.

Croatia's deal put simply was as follows:

You work for a foreign company and pay your tax in your home country and spend your disposable income in Croatia and for that they would grant you a residency permit for 12 months. We were sold!

So we made some calls to our employers and asked the question as to whether they would have a problem with us living overseas. Lisa's company was fine as they already had offices in Prague but the mortgage network I was part of said no.

Undeterred by this I set about finding a company that would let me work overseas and started to search potential properties in Croatia for us to rent.

Now the first challenge you will have when looking to move to a country that derives most of its income from tourism is that their mindset might be different to yours. We ideally wanted to be on the coast and as those properties command a premium rent in the summer but don't rent out in the winter we struggled to find a landlord that would work out what they would earn in a year and divide by 12 months. They were fixated on the large amount of money they would earn in the summer.

Finally we found an astute business woman, Dolores, who owned a lovely house in a picture perfect fishing town called Novigrad pictured below.

Novigrad which is around 30 mins outside of Zadar about halfway up the coast of Croatia. She was happy to rent us the property for 12 months and so we started to plan our move from the UK.

Novigrad is ideally placed for exploring the whole of Croatia as all areas of the country are accessible from here.

In our next blog we will tell you about the journey to Croatia and those first weeks in a new country.