I was looking up places where I can set up my shop and came across Slovenia. Beautiful country with convenient immigration laws. So for e.g. for an investment of 50K Euros they give you a work and residence permit as the business owner. After 5 years of residence you can apply for their PR - I am told no language requirement. Ljubljana anyone? 🙂.

Is investment here like donation? Or can you actually get back that money after some time?

Yes it basically can be your paid up capital deposited in your bank. This sum can be used to pay for your business activities too like paying for your salary, rent, etc.

Awesome. Didn't knew investments in country worked like that. I will have to do the research all over again. What are the other options you found?

Had a power cut but am back on. Yes this one was by far the most convenient. There are other places too like Estonia, for instance but the naturalisation process requires to gain a degree of competence in their language. Ditto for Germany.

Thanks. I have heard about Estonia a lot in immigration and PR discussions. Since changing residency is a lifetime affair, learning another language is not a big deal, no? I would also look at passport strengths of these countries, do they allow dual citizenship or not, compatibility with US timezones to make those $, living standard of the country, and future prospects.

Yes I am not too concerned about dual citizenship - I will happily renounce mine. I agree with the living standard which is why off late have focused my attention on the EU. The points system with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand unfortunately doesn't work in my favour.

Slovenia in general is an interesting country. From a language perspective, their population is so low that they don't really get Slovenian dubbed TV shows, so they pretty much all learn English.

@careful-petabyte-17641 Yes Slovenia shouldn't pose a language problem. From what I gather, most of the younger folks can speak English. The population itself though is pretty homogeneous and maybe as the country matures we will see the capital city develop its own unique character.

@most-pillow-36362 brilliant idea, any links or places where you read about this or know people who have done this before properly from start to end?

Yeah, dual citizen is not super important if you have a strong passport. EU timezones are also okay with US. You can easily manage 4 hr overlap in EU.

yeah, EU is more than good, I manage 2-4 hr overlap from IST 🙂

@swift-pilot-25722 I could only gather a couple of online resources that point to this but the search for more data points is on :): https://data.si/en/blog/start-business-in-slovenia-open-company-and-get-residency/

15K$+ is definitely possible over a year or 6 months - just break it down eg: 300$ per week * 52 - and if you charge 50$ / hr that's just 6 hrs per client per week Now you need to make sure you are adding enough value that they you can use it well and/or have a team that does work that justifies such amounts I do a combination of both and have consistent work - so it works out well for now

Great so you advise billing @50$/hour is it. I was thinking of ramping it up since this will be R&D and since will be working on projects that are on the back-burner for the client will be able to showcase an incremental revenue stream for my efforts. For now, mine will be a one man show with maybe a Fractional VP of Sales thrown in to help me with client acquisition.

Yeah, I can't decide your rate, you do that 🙂 This is just math I did above for you

Exactly - thanks for a guiding number though. I will drive this from the top as well. I want annual revenues of >$120K and so it roughly works out to $75/hour