What about Turkey now? Looking for expert and insider's advice....based on the following Tweet.

You beat me to it; I was about to post this. I am curious how many snags there are involved (think of bureaucracy).

I was in Istanbul last summer and it was no fun. Everything has become incredibly expensive, a funny side effect of that is that you constantly see Bitcoin advertisements everywhere. I felt that the lack of maintenance was becoming more evident, from hotels to museums. While Turks used to be quite friendly, I also found everyone to be very stressed and the overall atmosphere has changed. After I ended up in a (minor) car accident caused by an inattentive taxi driver and was constantly harassed by days-long earthquakes I decided to leave earlier than I've planned. Turkey isn't in a good state at the moment.

The new regulations will surely attract some people, but Turkey is going through a difficult time. That is one thing for sure. And I don't think it is the best place to live and/or do business right now.

I too was in Istanbul last summer. That visit soured me on ever pursuing Turkish CBI. That is an attractive proposition from a lot of aspects, except for one: Turkey is full of Turks. The passport is complimentary if you are adding it to a Western one, the location and accessibility of Istanbul is appealing, there are some potentially useful tax, banking and legal benefits, and the terms of the CBI investment are not too difficult to turn a profit on. I was in the process of confirming if foreign currency denominated Turkish government bonds were an acceptable investment (I believe so) at the time of my visit. Needless to say, I decided the benefits were not worth having to deal with the Turks and abandoned my investigation. If you are really hard up for something, it might still be worth it. I think there are better options, though, if you just want something to give to banks.

I can share my half-completed research if you are interested. The short takeaway is that it’s easy enough to get a short-term permit, but to get it renewed you might need to have established some business or other ties. The minimums on property ownership, if that is your basis for application, are such that you might as well go ahead and do CBI (which comes with a short term permit). There is no standard residency requirement to maintain a permit and I doubt they’d complain if you paid taxes to them. Banking and moving money in and out seems fairly smooth (caution: this is where my research stopped and I have little first hand experience with Turkish banks) if you can stay away from the Lira. They have Euro-denominated accounts available and all the standard transfer methods seem to work for non-residents, but I believe residents face some restrictions. I also heard that Turkey would soon tighten up on money transfers but don’t know the details or if it ever happened. I think this announcement is new and they have yet to publish the details of the policy of the tax exemption. The devil is in the details.

If you work from home and live in a place like this properties.lefigaro.com/announces/house-real…ey/70431482/ (even though the architecture is questionable) it could be a great option, especially for those who want to remain close to Europe.
Plus, Turkish is not too difficult to learn, with just one irregular verb. People become fluent in 1 year.
As it’s a real country and not a lunatic Beduin’s fantasy, it has all the pros and cons of any real country, with good and bad places, good and bad people etc.
0% taxation for 20 years is a sweet and unique proposition.

As a paper residency though, I agree with @Paratore, there are better and easier options.

I was making quite rapid progress with my Turkish until I experienced the place and flushed it all out of my mind. It’s a bit different in that it’s very agglutinative but once you get the hang of the rules for that it is very regular in how they are applied. If you can learn Hungarian then you can learn Turkish.

It’s a bit trite, but Turkey’s main advantage is that it is a bridge between Europe and the Middle East/Central Asia and is fairly accessible to and open to both regions both in terms of geography and infrastructure. The main disadvantage is that it’s an economic basket case of a dictatorship with all the instability that implies and also populated with assholes. You’ll have to rate it according to your specific wants and needs.

Paratore said:

I too was in Istanbul last summer. That visit soured me on ever pursuing Turkish CBI. That is an attractive proposition from a lot of aspects, except for one: Turkey is full of Turks.

You should emphasize: “Turkey is full of Turkish men”... the women are fine - the men are emotional lesbians.

The reason for their bratty nature is that boys grow up never being disciplined in the family. It’s a patriarchal society, and mothers will oftentimes not call out bad behavior. Instead, they may even boast to their friends: “Oh, you wouldn’t believe what my little Mehmet did last Sunday…”

A Kurd once opened up to me that when he was a boy, his friends and him would torture dogs (there are a shitton of strays in Turkey), and not once was he called out for it or disciplined by his family.

Basically, they reasoned that it was just “boys being boys.”

I’m not saying they’re monsters. They just haven’t been put in their place with a father’s smack over their spoiled baklava cheeks for their whole lives. So naturally, it comes out in their public behavior.
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On a practical note, an acquaintance of mine told me that Erdogan is trying to consolidate power for his son to take over. So he’s jailing the owners of a bunch of those “unofficial kiosks” - the crypto OTC desks that you used to see left and right at the Istanbul bazaar… who ain’t in the club.

… and to get back your license, you have to pay a bribe to Erdogan loyalists.

That’s also why Turkish banks, which used to be very crypto-friendly, are now way more cautious about crypto cashouts. The “official” reason they’re giving for the crackdown is crypto reporting rules such as MKK and TUBITAK. That’s a load of bullshit, because those regulations have been stayed and delayed for years, with no end in sight.

The real reason is the current Erdogan power struggle.

Same thing with crypto taxation. Everyone in town trades in their personal name because personal gains aren’t taxed (it’s basically the gray zone) but corporate accounts are. So the wealthy folks from Kadikoy or Bebek use “construction workers” to open crypto accounts, and the same thing applies to bank accounts.

They are floating trial balloons though, so I guarantee that the gray zone will end and they’ll come out with capital gains taxes at some point, once they’ve squeezed enough out of the CBI programs and the import/export business with black-market Russian trade to prop up their foreign reserves.

I mean Erdogan’s whole schtick with crypto is to make sure that the U.S.-provoked currency collapse from 2018 doesn’t happen again. But since the world is at war, he’ll probably have to pick a side.

Machiavelli pretty much summed it up in The Prince: you can’t imagine that neutrality in wartime will save you, because if Erdogan keeps playing both sides and does nothing, Turkey will become the prize of whoever wins.

@chicharito and @Paratore you clearly know Turkey well. But don’t forget that smart people can adapt to the environment.
Whatever (real) country gives a tax break is worth of consideration. The important thing is to remain flexible, so if rules change in the future, moving elsewhere doesn’t become too inconvenient.

@jafo could have a happy time in Bodrum while doing business in China and managing his crypto in a third country. Certainly for him it would be a better choice, logistically, than the Caribbean or South America.

Fast forward one year from now: @jafo invites everyone to his Bodrum mansion for his graduation (from a Turkish university) party 😬with Russian girls attending too.

This sounds good, just keep in mind that Turkey is desperate for some EUR/USD, I wouldn't keep any foreign currency in that country.

But this can also be good for your business, their developer incentives are insane, the reason there are lots of Turkish companies developing mobile apps, because companies can receive rebates on their ads spending, they get % of that spent money back in TRY from the government.
So they spend a lot on Apple/Google ads, if they can clone your app, you have no chance against them.

jesuschrist said:

This sounds good, just keep in mind that Turkey is desperate for some EUR/USD, I wouldn't keep any foreign currency in that country.

But this can also be good for your business, their developer incentives are insane, the reason there are lots of Turkish companies developing mobile apps, because companies can receive rebates on their ads spending, they get % of that spent money back in TRY from the government.
So they spend a lot on Apple/Google ads, if they can clone your app, you have no chance against them.

Cheap tech talent I can confirm. You can hire solid senior engineers for what a junior makes in Lisbon.

The downside of living in Turkey entails you’ll be dodging emotional, half-fascist Turks on a daily basis. This is not a “flash your watch” kind of country as the state and street mafia have a beautiful symbiotic relationship when it comes to anyone who looks like they have money.

The upside? Once you realize the whole system is already gamed, you can start gaming it too.

@JohnnyDoe nailed it: Turkey is what the UAE wishes it could be if it had real nature and less sand.

I was about to write that at least there are no psycho Bedouins… until I remembered Erdogan opened the gates and welcomed half of Syria, Bedouins Light. Europe’s immigration complaints look adorable in comparison.

Dating scene is wild though. The women are emotionally 12 years old (maximum drama, zero chill), but your competition is metrosexual Turkish dudes and you have the benefit of growing secularism. With the current exchange rate, you have a lot of cheat codes at your disposal.

jafo said:

This was very insightful! Please do. You can choose here or by DM. I'd really appreciate it.🙏🙏🙏

I’ll pull it together off my old laptop and post it here this weekend.

I was in Turkey last summer as well. It seems to be a perfect place to meet so many great people from here 😅 Even though I didn’t spend much time in Istanbul, and it was my first visit to Turkey in the last 10 years or so, I managed to connect with some nice people and discover interesting business opportunities.

Not forgotten, just preoccupied and away from the laptop in question.

Looks like it's happening

View on X

They are doing another asset amnesty as part of it.

imidaily.com/tax/turkeys-parliament-passes-2…ay-into-law/

If I'm not mistaken you can get Turkish residency by opening up a company there? They'd have to do something about banking, because it's even a pain in the ass to open an EMI account there, and it might become a great option

Fiscal said:

If I'm not mistaken you can get Turkish residency by opening up a company there? They'd have to do something about banking, because it's even a pain in the ass to open an EMI account there, and it might become a great option

Considering the law is now official I spoke to different attorneys out of curiosity.

It seems that setting up a company is sufficient for a residence permit and that the process is straightforward to go through. However, I do think it is important to choose your lawyer and accountant carefully, as this seems to me to be one of the countries where this could cause trouble if you don't. And by trouble I mean it can become a pain in the ass to wait and you're stuck.

I think it currently makes Turkey one of the most accessible and attractive options if you only want to pay 0% tax. Most other countries and set-ups require a hefty investment.

The only thing I haven't figured out yet is banking, how difficult it is to open an (EMI) account, and whether there are any bans on holding foreign currency (given the massive inflation). When I spent time in Turkey myself, I noticed that many parties maintained a Payoneer account. The Turkish economy is not doing too great.

If anyone has any info and knows more, that would be very welcome.