Discover why obtaining a Montenegro Residency Permit is a beneficial choice. Explore the advantages, including low taxes, favorable business regulations, affordable cost of living, and attractive property market. Learn about the ease of setting up a bank account and the appeal of Montenegro’s coastal regions. Consider the opportunities and challenges of living in this peaceful and budget-friendly destination for residency.
Today we’re going to dive into the possibility of residency programs in Montenegro and show you why Montenegro’s Residency Permit is a good option for you.
The reasons we’ve listed here to move to Montenegro are:
- Low flat tax
- Easy company rules
- Easy to start a business
- Cheap cost of life
- Cheap rent and property market
- Decent English
- Easy to set up bank account
Montenegro as a place for residency actually is a pretty good option in a couple different regards, so, the first regard that’s really good is it’s quite easy. You can fairly easily form a company in Montenegro and get residents here, pretty quickly, pretty easily, pretty inexpensively, so that’s nice. At the same time, it’s quite nice because it’s pretty attractive in certain aspects, specifically the tax system here is very fair, they have a 9% flat tax. Both at the corporate level and at the personal level, they don’t have controlled foreign companies rules, it’s quite easy to do tax planning and end up with a pretty low rate of tax. In that sense you can be paying something, some people like that these days, they like to be able to show that they paid taxes fairly on their money but without having to go and to give up 40% or 50% of what you make, like you might in Scandinavia, the U.S, Canada, Australia or Germany.
Reasons to Move to Montenegro
That is a decent reason to come, in addition to that, summers in Montenegro are quite nice, you can see that it is beautiful, you’ve got all kinds of water sports, you can go out to Budva, normally it’s a pretty lively part of the world in the summer, overall, it is quite nice. It’s also pretty affordable, so not as cheap as Serbia, not as cheap as Bulgaria, but fairly inexpensive,
It’s not like amazingly cheap, if you want to taking a trip to the airport, depending on which airport you go to, to go to Podgoritza it’s like 90 euros, if you want to get somebody to take you to go up to the airport in Dubrovnik is maybe like 40 or 50 euros.
Cheap rent, nice people and decent english
So you’ve got that, rent is fairly inexpensive, property is fairly reasonably priced and things work so so, i would say. People are quite nice, so that’s pretty good. I find that in the coastal regions for sure people speak pretty decent English, so that’s great like it’s kind of a service culture because they care to tourists in this part of the world. I think to get to know Montenegrins is easy. The people here are in in some parts of the countries in eastern Europe, you can get a little bit of a scammy culture and i find there’s a lot less of that here.
That being said, it is a small place and the number of opportunities is quite limited. Your infrastructure is kind of mediocre, you’re not typically going to get well certainly the roads here, although they’ve been improving them, are not fantastic. I talk quite a bit about how the airports here are super small and not well connected so that’s something that’s a bit of a trade-off. About water infrastructure, there’s a little bit of a debate, they say that it’s safe to drink the water here but then again, my friend who’s from here never drink the water.
I think from that standpoint you’ll definitely notice like when I first came here, i’d been in Croatia first then i came down to Montenegro, i definitely noticed it was a little more run down, not quite as well kept up as in Croatia, probably a reflection of the EU money that they have in Croatia. But afterwards, Montenegro still certainly a nice place you should come as a tourist like me.
If we were to go down here there’s the bay of Kotor which is just spectacular, i think it’s one of the most beautiful areas of the coastline on the Adriatic Sea and perhaps the Mediterranean Sea as well. So really definitely worth coming and checking out regardless of where you’re going to live, but the fact that you can form a company easily, it’s not too expensive, you can set up a bank account personally and for the business quite easily. You can’t as a foreigner opening a bank account for a foreign company, is basically not going to happen anymore. They used to have that as an option but not so good the banking services. So this comes back to the infrastructure thing.
There is Paypal in Montenegro?
They basically don’t have paypal in Montenegro, not to receive money anyway. Payment processing virtually non-existent here, very difficult, the banking system is not so good. It’s okay for keeping a small amount of money for doing your transactional banking day to day, but if you want to have large amounts of money, if you were to live here you should probably set up bank accounts somewhere else for wealth management or for corporate. Typically, if i was to be living here I would set up foreign companies which I would run my business through and then I would just pay out to myself locally, that’s kind of something to consider. But the good news is you don’t have to do anything sophisticated in order to get into these situations.
The Downside of Living in Montenegro
Montenegro is a pretty good option if you’re willing to spend the time here, so this is kind of the downside. I told you kind of a few things that are good, now let’s talk about the downside. The downside is they do at least on paper have fairly stringent minimum stay requirements and you’re supposed to inform them if you leave the country, which is a little bit bizarre and annoying. I don’t know whether in practice they’re really going to check on that, it’s not really that type of country, but that being said, on paper that’s the way it is and the way that i always look at these things. There is on paper and there’s reality, and yeah maybe i can get away with what there is based on reality rather than on what’s on paper, but if things ever go against me the paper is clearly on the other side, so i try to avoid that where possible. Anyway, if you’re looking for some place that’s a little bit more calm, a little bit more peaceful, you want to maybe buy some real estate that’s fairly inexpensive, it’s possibly a good investment. Easy place to come, it’s a place that affords a pretty lifestyle if you were to compare this to Greece, there are lots of reasons to come here as opposed to Greece, although there’s some new programs in Greece that make it a little more attractive as well.
