How To Live in Spain Without a Work Permit

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Kristin Wilson, Host:    00:00:20    Hello. Hello. Good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you find yourself today, Kristin, from Traveling with Kristin here, and welcome to episode 125 of Badass Digital Nomads. By the time this podcast episode is published, it will have been one week since enrollment opened for my new course, Ready to Relocate, which is an eight-week program to teach you everything you need to know about moving overseas. And so if you are listening to this podcast when it comes out, spaces are filling up quickly, but there are a couple weeks left to enroll in the first group For 2021, you have three ways to apply for a free call with me. You can send an email to info@orbisrelocation.com, O R B I S with the subject line Ready to Relocate. You can also apply directly at the link in the show notes, or you can go to travelingwithKristin.com/apply to sign up for a free call.  

Kristin:    00:01:33    This is the first time that I am teaching my method for relocating to another country to anyone else, although I have been planning relocations for people for the past 10 plus years. Typically, I'm always doing this process behind the scenes with my team, so I'm so excited to be teaching it, and then you can take that with you throughout the future, moving to different countries, whether you're slow traveling for a few months at a time or relocating to one place for a year or more, or even applying for long-term residency or citizenship status. This topic of relocation and living abroad is always on my mind. Of course, this is what I live, eat, sleep, and breathe on a day-to-day basis. And you know that if you are listening to this podcast or if you've watched any of my YouTube videos living abroad, once you've done it, not to be cliché, you know, the whole global citizen thing, but it really does become a part of who you are because as human beings, you know, we're so multifaceted. 

Kristin:    00:02:43    We're partly who we were when we were born, partly a product of our environment, how we were raised, which countries we're from our career paths. There's so many different aspects of your identity, but living in foreign countries just adds another layer to that, and I truly don't even know who I would be today if it weren't for my time spent abroad. So I'm so passionate about sharing that with all of you and sharing ways that you can make that happen sooner and more seamlessly and stress-free rather than going it alone. Before we get started, I would like to give a warm welcome to my newest patrons, Kathleen Chip and Shelly. We have reached a new record of 50 people in our Patreon community. You can join us for $5 a month at patreon.com/travelingwithkristin. Our monthly Zoom hangout is coming up soon. Also, thank you to Dave Nico and Expose and Sub Faruki esquire for the coffees this week.  

Kristin:    00:03:53    Much appreciated. I thought we would do something different today and answer a listener FAQ. Now, if you have a question for the podcast or a YouTube video, you can use my video request form that I will link to in the show notes. But today's question comes from Andrew and he says, any advice for an American in their thirties who wants to live in Spain indefinitely and can't get a work visa? So for any of you who are non EU or Non-EEA citizens, then this question is for you, Spain is one of the most popular places for people to live or retire abroad. So I wanted to address this, especially as we have some news from Spain that they are planning on launching their own digital nomad visa. So if you are a non EU or EEA resident that wants to live in Spain indefinitely but can't get a work visa, what can you do?  

Kristin:    00:04:56    First, let's look at the word indefinitely. So to live in Spain indefinitely would mean that you somehow acquired citizenship. And the only ways to acquire citizenship in most countries as a general rule is either through your heritage. If you have a family member, uh, who was a Spanish citizen, you may be able to get citizenship through your family tree. There's also usually a path to citizenship in a country through either having children in some cases or through marriage. Both of those options are quite expensive, I might add, and those are very long-term commitments. But then a third way to acquire citizenship is through a type of golden visa program or through investing in a business or investing in real estate where you're basically buying a second or third passport. But that came with a hefty price tag of about half a million euro through a real estate investment.  

Kristin:    00:06:02    You could also invest in a company in Spain and starting a business deposit a cool 1 million euro into a bank account or 2 million in government bonds. And so this Spain golden visa programs or residents buy investment program has a steep price tag and is not realistic for a lot of people. If any of those are possible for you, Andrew, then those are some options, albeit usually on the pricier side. And then another way to live somewhere indefinitely is after acquiring permanent residency. So there's usually a path to citizenship in a country, Spain included, where after you've gotten either a study permit or a work permit, and maybe you've even extended that permit one or more times that usually after around the 10-year mark you can apply for citizenship, but nothing lasts forever, as they say. So if you're thinking of living in Spain for one, two or three years, then you also have some options.  

Kristin:    00:07:07    So until now, some of the most popular ways to live in Spain were either as a tourist with your passport, which you can only do for up to 90 days. So that's definitely not indefinitely. There was also the non-lucrative visa option, which was pretty much reserved for people who were retired. It wasn't created for people to work remotely. And actually in the last few years, there has been some controversy and some differences in how that visa was being awarded and also how it was being enforced because it wasn't meant for people to work remotely, but that's what people were using it for. So then there were people that were applying for that visa, but not saying that they were working, but they were working anyway. And so it just created this whole issue. But that non-lucrative visa was for people that had a reliable source of income coming in that was not work related.  

Kristin:    00:08:03    They weren't planning to work on their laptops, and they weren't planning to work in Spain. So mostly if you had passive income streams or if you were a retiree. And then there was also this Spain self-employment visa that a lot of people applied for, but that could take months to get approval for. It was just a lot of paperwork and red tape, and that can give you, uh, the ability to live in Spain for up to a year, extend for another two years and then up to five years, and then after that, you could find other ways to stay in Spain long-term. Now, Andrew says that he couldn't get a work visa, and I'm gonna assume that he also couldn't qualify for the non-lucrative visa. But the good news is for all of you who would like to live in Spain for more than just 90 days with a passport, and that is that in July there was this Spain Startup Act.  

Kristin:    00:09:01    So it's in development right now with the goal of attracting digital nomads to help repopulate the country's rural villages. So in a lot of cities throughout Europe, they have a depopulation problem where locals are leaving for better op-- economic opportunities in other places, or there's just all of these dying little beautiful towns and villages that used to be thriving but are just too small to sustain themselves. So this will fill in the gap between a golden visa, the non-lucrative visa, and also the self-employment visa, because this one will be specifically for remote workers, and I'm assuming that retirees will also be able to qualify for it as well, but hopefully with easier, more streamlined, and more affordable requirements compared to the current alternatives. I'll definitely do a video on this one as well because I think it'll be so popular for people to live in Spain for up to three years, potentially.  

Kristin:    00:10:08    So Andrew, I hope this answers your question. This, the short answer is that without buying your way in short of applying for Spanish citizenship, if you get married in Spain or if you have a relative from Spain, and you can acquire nationality through your heritage, the options to live in Spain are limited, but keep an eye out for this new Spanish remote work visa, and it could be just what you need.

Ready to Relocate:

Kristin: And if you're planning to relocate in the next year or so and you'd just like some support and guidance along your journey, then I would like to invite you to apply for my new relocation program Ready to Relocate, where I'll be teaching you everything you need to know to successfully move or slow travel overseas. Ready to Relocate is an eight-week mentorship program. You'll learn how to move to any country in the world in just 60 days so you can spend your time actually living abroad, relaxing, working, doing whatever it is you want to do, rather than spending countless hours researching online how to make it happen, only to be left with uncertainty that what you've read, researched or watched is even accurate or up-to-date in Ready to Relocate.  

Kristin:    00:11:33    I'll be simplifying this complex process for you, sharing with you my exact framework for how I've been able to help more than a thousand people relocate to different countries in the last 10 years. I'll be sharing with you all of my templates and checklists for budgeting, packing, and planning. You'll get a guide to create your own custom relocation plan, and you'll learn step-by-step what you need to do and strategies for everything from getting started with your journey, where to move, how to find housing abroad, what to do to prepare for your departure with all of the logistics, and then what happens after your move from how to handle daily life and integrating in your new country overseas to adapting to life abroad, learning the language, what to do about healthcare, opening an offshore bank account, food, shopping, utilities, Wi-Fi, and more. It will help you overcome culture shock, deal with reverse culture shock and fit in with the locals, meet people abroad, everything you need to know to travel overseas and sustain this lifestyle long-term.  

Kristin:    00:12:49    This relocation program is truly my life's work. It's everything that I have been studying and implementing since 2003, and it's a lot different from my individual relocation services, which are done for you. This program is to be done with you, so you'll have plenty of support from me and my team. You'll have unlimited daily access to private messaging, weekly live group q and a calls, and lifetime access to all of the modules, downloads, and video trainings in the course, plus recorded weekly live q and as. You'll also get access to updates on the information because let's face it, the world is changing fast information is changing fast, whether it's visas, paperwork, immigration regulations, covid, travel restrictions, things are always changing. So you'll have that lifetime access for updates, and you also have the option to follow all of these steps in order, make your relocation plan now or come back to it any time in the future if you need to check in on anything or apply this process to another move. 

Kristin:    00:14:05    So maybe you wanna go to one country first, stay there for a few months, and then go somewhere else. You'll have the tools that you need to be able to repeat this process seamlessly and stress-free every time. My hope is that if you've ever struggled or hesitated with facing the overwhelming process of handling all the logistics of moving abroad on your own, especially while working full-time, maybe you're working remotely, or if you're retiring or you're semi-retired and you wanna be able to enjoy your life more than worrying about all of these things on your to-do list, then this program could be right for you. Or maybe you've spent a year or three or four mulling things over, poking around online, and you're right back where you started with just as many questions as ever. Or even if you've been abroad before, even if you've traveled long term, but you knew that there were things that you, that you were missing, some things that you were unsure about some holes in your strategy, then I invite you to reach out and book a free call with me.  

Kristin:    00:15:17    I'll put the link in the podcast description, or you can also send an email to info@orbisrelocation.com, O R B I S, or at travelingwithkristin.com/apply. This call is just to get to know you a little bit better, your situation, your plans for travel in the future, answer some of your questions about relocating and see if this program is a good fit for you and also good timing for you. If it is, then we can talk about next steps and how to join. So if you're thinking about moving or traveling in the next year or so and getting support and guidance from me through the process would make life a lot easier for you, then feel free to reach out. And on YouTube this week, I just published a video on 65 Ways to Save Money on Travel. So make sure to go over there, check that out, let us know your favorite travel tips in the comments, and see you all again next week.