After living in different cities in different countries and experiencing different cultures and environments eventually I moved to Budapest in Hungary, after a long marathon managed to get a work permit and now can focus on my dream job. There are some reasons that I chose this city, One of them is I have family here and also I traveled here before a lot and fell in love with the city, and while I was in the Hague and during the pandemic and living in a tiny room in a small flat shared with other flatmates and staring at the monitor for long hours, and panicking to go out because the virus, I decided it is better to live close to family members. So I moved to Budapest and I met lovely people and I am enjoying it. By looking at my journey in the past two years, I started it individually with a blog and I named it rezgamedev, now it calls REZGAMEDEV KFT, KFT stands for LLC, and at the moment we are making some prototypes that will announce later, but for now we started a clothing campaig...
During the lockdown while everyone started working from home, Estonian E residency and digital nomad lifestyle started to pop up, I said well let’s give it a try and see how it works.
From the link below can apply for an Estonian E residency
card.
https://e-resident.gov.ee/become-an-e-resident/
it requires some documents such as a Passport, some details such
as why you are interested to apply for this card, and a proper photo with their
standards and payment of 120 euros. Also have to choose a pickup location,
which I found out it is not available in some countries.
The process in total was smooth and after 3 weeks I received
an email to go and collect my card from the embassy, while I was living in the
Hague, the embassy was close to me and I made an appointment and at the embassy,
they collected my fingerprints and it was ready.
What can we do with this E Residency?
In simple words, if you are interested to have a company
inside Europe, with this E Residency card you can register a company through one
of the available firms inside Estonia. So I did lots of research which firm is
the best, I found out Xolo is offering decent services, and it costs between 850
euros to 1500 euros per year, which you pay based on monthly subscription, so I
filled the forms for Xolo Leap and submitted my application about a game and
software company.
The next day I received an email and it said NOPE. I applied
again and they rejected me again.
So, I briefly looked at the other firms and how does the
banking system works. So, one thing I found is you cannot walk to a bank in
Estonia and open a bank account with your E Residency card and you cannot open a
bank account remotely. You should open an account via your firm, for example, Xolo
helps to open a bank account with LHV bank. But you need to be physically
available in the bank to sign some papers. So, if you are young and live
outside of Europe and you have a nationality that it is hard to get any sort of
visa especially Schengen Visa, this plan is not promising at all for you.
They are other banking services such as Transferwise account
or Pioneer that offer some sort of accounts that can be useful for some people.
But they do not offer an IBAN from Estonia so if you want to get paid with Adsense
from google you cannot use these accounts.
Another thing about this E Residency does not provide tax
residency and you need to pay taxes in the country that you have tax residency.
Is this whole E Residency worth it?
It might be a good solution for some corporations or
individuals living outside of Europe that wants to enter the European market,
or it can be helpful for some British companies after Brexit to stay in Europe.
In the end, I am an Estonian E Resident and have a nice blue
card that I won't use it at all. I decided not to pursue the plan of
registering a company in Estonia because I was not interested to travel to
Estonia for a bank account in the middle of the pandemic And other firms need
to have a better UI system to be more convincing. Maybe in the future, I give
it a try.
Nice story.
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