Lucky Maillard 🍀

You did not choose your country. You inherited it. 95 percent of humanity lives in a country that scores below 7 out of 10. I scored 232 jurisdictions on the 18 dimensions that shape a life. Safety, rule of law, healthcare, taxation, mobility, cost of living. Only 67 clear 7 out of 10. They hold 5 percent of the world's population. Just 7 clear 7.5. Home to 0.2 percent. The top of the table is mostly small jurisdictions. Islands, city states, places almost nobody is born into. The rest of us start in large countries that rank far lower, and simply stay. Not by choice. By default. The place that fits your priorities almost certainly exists. It is just unlikely to be the one you were assigned at birth. Where you live is the highest leverage decision most people never make. What is keeping you in your country right now?

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🇺🇾 Uruguay did not raise the price of its tax holiday. Until this year there was no price. Between 2020 and 2025, any new Uruguayan tax resident could elect to pay nothing on foreign movable capital income for the year of arrival plus ten. No purchase. No minimum stay. Article 24 of the income tax code. That option closed on 31 December 2025. Article 24 bis replaced it for new residents. Same eleven years, now with conditions. More than 183 days in the country, in every year of the run. Or property above UI 12,500,000, near 2 million dollars. Or UI 625,000 a year, near 100,000 dollars, into productive, research or innovation funds. On any route, two fiscal years of prior non residency, and no earlier use of the old option. Foreign capital gains became taxable in January, on assets whose yields were already taxed. The holiday covers them too, so the law that widened the base widened the shelter with it. Skip the holiday and that income sits at 12 percent in most cases. So the exemption got harder to reach in the same text that made it worth more. My read is that a country writes that sequence when it has stopped competing for mobile capital and started charging it. Ten of the 233 jurisdictions I score clear my bar on tax freedom, courts and civil liberties at once. Eight of those ten are micro jurisdictions. Uruguay is one of the two that are not. Uruguay now takes payment in dollars or in days. Until this year it took neither.

Where a base actually leaves you is a scored question, not a rate question. GeoCompass Signal is the free 6 minute structural diagnostic, same engine as GeoCompass, run on your own profile. luckynomads.io/geocompass-sig…

🇰🇾 Your Cayman holding gets asked yearly what it does on the island. 🇫🇷 Your French one, standard rate 25 percent, gets no such question. Same assets. Same owner. Of the 74 jurisdictions where I have coded the corporate substance rules, 11 run a standalone economic substance act. Every one of them sits at a zero or near-zero standard corporate rate. 46 have no test of that kind. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United States. No employee floor, no premises test, no substance return. What the 11 ask for is physical. Directed and managed on the island, core income-generating activity performed there, qualified staff present, premises, local spend. A pure equity holding gets a lighter version, and still files. Miss it in the BVI and a second determination runs to 200,000 dollars, 400,000 for high-risk IP, and the company can be struck off the register. My read is that this was never an anti-fraud measure. It is the invoice these jurisdictions were handed to stay off the EU list. The headline rate did not move. The price moved into payroll, rent and filings. And the burden inverts. A passive holding leans on its registered agent for people and premises. The IP company, the financing vehicle, the group headquarters have to show core activity performed on the island. Onshore the pressure is real, and it arrives from elsewhere: place of effective management, CFC attribution, anti-abuse doctrine. No substance return is filed, and the exposure has no ceiling. I code these regimes jurisdiction by jurisdiction for GeoCompass. If your holding sits in one of the 11, which test applies to it, the full one or the reduced one?

@MozartCultures On tax, Tallinn 🇪🇪. Flat 22% on everything against Riga 🇱🇻 at 25.5% climbing to 36% at the top.

Riga or Tallinn?

@hispanicnomad A Plan B is only worth what you can bank and move out of it. On both, Bolivia 🇧🇴 is about the weakest in Latin America. Paraguay 🇵🇾 is not.

Bolivia 🇧🇴 is being sold as the new Plan B residency and most of what you're reading about it is nonsense Yesterday I spoke to an actual Bolivian immigration attorney about this. Here's what she actually said, against what the internet says:

@stuckinbrazil Brazil 🇧🇷 is a place to build a business, not a life. Connectivity is world class. Personal safety is among the weakest on earth.

The internet describes Brazil as a place to visit. I think that misses the bigger opportunity. For the right person, Brazil is a place to build a life: relationships, family, health, community and a business that is not tied to one location.

@itsolelehmann Andorra 🇦🇩 breaks it. Low tax, one of the safest places on earth, real civil liberties. The catch is getting there, not living there.

there are 0 tax haven countries that don't have some kind of massive downside they have low tax for a reason

Passport first is right. Then move fast. Once you have spent five years as both a German citizen and an unlimited German taxpayer, §2 AStG can keep certain German-linked income within the German tax net for up to ten years after a low-tax move (provided you retain substantial economic interests in Germany).

In 1 year and 2 months, I'll be eligible to apply for German citizenship 🇩🇪 After that, I'm thinking about moving to another country that offers: 💰 Lower taxes 🌞 Warmer weather 🫰 A lower cost of living Which countries would you recommend?

@PeterMcCormack That 442,000 figure counts sterling millionaires in constant 2025 pounds. On UBS’s standard nominal US-dollar measure, the UK 🇬🇧 added more than 43,000 millionaires in 2025.

A 60% drop in millionaires in the U.K. This should scare the living shit out of people. It’s utterly insane. It’s going to get worse too.

@MichaelAArouet Low taxes did not build this. Poland 🇵🇱 took a record 36.6% of GDP in tax in 2024, above the OECD average of 34.1%.

Everyone has heard about the amazing Polish economic wonder. Poland did many things right, the eight below explain that. Other European countries stagnate because they choose the opposite path of big state, bureaucracy, lavish welfare and high taxes punishing entrepreneurs.

@TheJerzWay The €5,000 is a floor, not a ceiling, for non-domiciled residents with at least €35,000 of foreign income. Work actually performed in Malta 🇲🇹 is generally Malta-source income, taxed at ordinary rates of up to 35 percent.

German girlfriend told my client she was leaving if he didn't stop working 80-hour weeks. He was grinding that hard because after German taxes, he only kept €180K of his €350K. He felt like he had to keep pushing to get ahead. We moved him to Malta. Total tax: €5K. He realized he could work half the hours and still keep more than before. New take home with reduced hours after tax: €245K She stayed.

@Gonzohall New-build prices in Montenegro 🇲🇪 rose from an annual average of €951 per square metre in 2020 to €2,200 in 2025. In Q1 2026, they reached €2,445. The move has already happened.

Buying a house in Montenegro may be the best thing you can do right now.

@tessiermaurice Air links are the one thing you downgraded, Czechia 🇨🇿 is average there. On tax and rule of law you beat every stop you made.

After 3 years of gypsy nomading around Southern Europe, Brazil, Colombia and the great State of Texas, I now finally got a stable home in... Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic 🇨🇿 who would have thought? Haha I landed here all because/thanks to the business. Met some cool people through online solopreneur communities, started developing apps for fun w one dude; then vibe coded aome mvp on my own; and now that I am finally getting good traction from Enterprise accounts, I decided it was time to go all in. Time to stop remote nomading. Time to work with real people, physically. Time to be an "adult", lol Feels strange to know I now have a real place, an empty house where to leave my belongings for long term. It feels good. Ok. Let's go back to work

@thekevinjon Poland 🇵🇱 does edge Germany 🇩🇪 overall in my data. Tax and cost do the lifting. On courts and open society Germany is still miles ahead.

Poland is overtaking new Germany. Actually, Poland is better than Germany. Politically, economically, socially. And I say that as someone who was born in Frankfurt. Germany is contracting; 2025 was the second consecutive year of negative GDP growth. Energy costs are destroying manufacturing, and bureaucracy makes it illegal to move fast. On top of that, there's a cultural allergy to ambition where making money gets you side-eyed at dinner parties. Poland meanwhile, hasn't had a single recession in the last 30 years, and their GDP is growing at 3.6% per year. But those are just fugazzi numbers, when you come here, you can feel the Young, hungry, pro-capitalist, anti-bureaucracy sentiment.

@TheJerzWay Paraguay 🇵🇾 taxes where the work happens. Sit there with the laptop and that 200k is Paraguayan-source, 10 percent IRP, not zero.

Same €200K online business income: 🇩🇪 Germany: €94,000 in taxes 🇫🇷 France: €110,000 in taxes 🇪🇸 Spain: €94,000 in taxes 🇵🇾 Paraguay: €0 The laptop doesn't care where you file from. Your bank account does.

@explore_nica Singapore 🇸🇬 and Taiwan 🇹🇼 sit at the top of almost every liveability read I run. Losing both over a dress code is a steep price.

If you ask me why I never considered moving to Asia. People running around in face masks for no reason. It's utterly dumb and looks stupid. It has zero medical value. All you do is collect bacteria near your mouth and deprive yourself of oxygen.

If you are working out where your own file actually lands, the free 6 minute diagnostic scores your fit and top 3 jurisdictions on the same engine as GeoCompass. luckynomads.io/geocompass-sig…

This year's crypto trades are already being logged for a report. You are not the one who receives it. The mechanism is the CARF, the crypto twin of the bank account standard that started exchanging in 2017. Platforms in scope record your country of tax residence, your TIN where issued, and for a passive entity account, the controlling persons they have to report. They file it with their own tax authority, which passes it on where exchange is activated. On the Global Forum list of 23 June 2026, 46 jurisdictions send their first crypto reports in 2027, on 2026 data. Another 29 follow in 2028. One waits until 2029. That one is 🇺🇸 the United States, which signed the 2023 joint statement targeting 2027. Moving into self-custody does not sit outside this. Transfers out to a wallet with no service provider behind it are reportable in their own right, in units and in value. Moving coins off the exchange records the move. Of the 75 jurisdictions I have coded on transparency, 73 exchange financial account data under the CRS. The two that do not are the United States and a US territory. My read is that this is not lag. The country that made the planet report on its citizens sends back income data, not balances and not beneficial owners. Its own Congressional Research Service says closing that gap would take new legislation. That is not an edge to use. It is a design, and most people reading this are the ones being reported. CARF is reporting, not a new tax. What changes is that your tax authority gets its own copy. Data from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer I build at Lucky Nomads. If you moved country this year, does your exchange still hold the tax residence you left?

The 7% rate on foreign-source income is real. But San Marino-source income falls under the ordinary tax scale, which tops out at 35%. So the regime is particularly attractive for people living on foreign investment income, and less straightforward for those actively running a business from San Marino.

🇸🇲 San Marino is a hidden gem in Europe.