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Field notes on residency, tax and mobility from the desk behind Lucky Nomads. Short, sourced posts as they go out, browsable by hashtag and by jurisdiction.

XJune 11, 2026

🇨🇷 Costa Rica's tax welcome package dies in 33 days. Law 9996's incentive window closes on July 14, 2026, and no successor is announced. The Investor, Rentista and Pensionado residency tracks survive. The tax package attached to them does not. What closes is the right to elect the package. Opt in before the cutoff and, once granted, you keep it for 10 years: A one-time duty-free import of household goods, within reasonable and justified limits. Up to two vehicles, cars, boats or aircraft, free of all import taxes and VAT. Import taxes on a car in Costa Rica can run past 50 percent of its value, so this line alone is worth five figures. Income tax exemption on the income you declare to qualify. Costa Rican-source income remains taxable. Up to 20 percent off the real estate transfer tax on property bought while the law is in force. Entry tickets are modest by regional standards: 150,000 USD invested for the Investor track, 2,500 USD a month for Rentista, 1,000 USD a month for Pensionado. Two fine print clauses that matter. Exempted assets must be held for 10 years, offload the car early and the waived taxes can come due. And the package does not make you a Costa Rican tax resident by itself, immigration status and tax residency are separate tests. The strategic read: Costa Rica priced its post-COVID recovery as a 5-year promo window and is letting it lapse on schedule. Jurisdictions increasingly treat residents like customers, and promotional pricing always ends. Opt in before July 14. After that, the 9996 package is gone and new applicants fall back to ordinary tax and customs treatment. Which country quietly retires its incentive next? Data from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer I build at Lucky Nomads. #costarica

Costa Rica

XJune 10, 2026

Your tax bill on worldwide income in 🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda: 20,000 USD a year. Flat. 30 days on the ground. The Permanent Residency Programme is one of the simplest tax residency products on the market. Keep a home on the island, spend 30 days a year there, pay the flat 20,000 USD, and you receive a residency certificate plus a Tax Identification Number. On worldwide income, that flat payment is the whole bill. Antigua abolished personal income tax in 2016 and levies no capital gains, wealth or inheritance tax. Local taxes still apply if you consume, own or operate there: 17% ABST on goods and services, property tax, stamp duty on transfers, and an unincorporated business tax of 0, 8 or 25% on local business income. Here is what most websites selling this programme will not tell you. The 2021 amendment to the Immigration and Passport Act raised the minimum annual income from 100,000 to 500,000 USD. Five years later, the majority of agency pages still advertise the old threshold. We read the gazetted text. The other catch is in the OECD. The Permanent Residence Certificate sits on the OECD list of high risk residency schemes for CRS purposes, so banks apply enhanced due diligence to holders. And a 20,000 USD certificate does nothing against your home country residency tests. If your centre of vital interests never moved, neither did your tax residency. For a genuinely mobile profile with clean substance and a 500,000 USD income, this is one of the cheapest full tax residencies in the world. For everyone else, it is an expensive piece of paper. Would a 30 day a year residency survive a centre of vital interests challenge from your current tax authority? Sourced from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer behind Lucky Nomads. #internationaltax #residencyplanning #antiguaandbarbuda

XJune 10, 2026

Most jurisdictions cap your deductions. Four British ones cap the tax itself. 🇮🇲 On the Isle of Man, income tax legally stops at 220,000 GBP a year, whatever you earn. 🇬🇬 On Sark, the one direct tax on residents tops out at 12,619 GBP. Not minimums. Ceilings. A tax cap is not a flat tax. You pay normal rates until you hit the ceiling, then your marginal rate on everything above is zero. The full ladder, 2026 figures: 🇬🇬 Sark: no income tax, no capital gains tax, no inheritance tax. The Personal Capital Tax, the only direct tax on residents, is capped at 12,619 GBP (about 16,900 USD). Property taxes run separately if you own. 🇬🇮 Gibraltar Category 2: tax charged on the first 118,000 GBP of income only, maximum bill 42,380 GBP. Requires 2M GBP net worth and 5 years of prior non residency. 🇬🇬 Guernsey: 160,000 GBP cap on non Guernsey income, 320,000 GBP on worldwide income. No time limit. 🇮🇲 Isle of Man: 220,000 GBP (about 295,000 USD) on worldwide income, via an irrevocable 5 or 10 year election. You pay the cap even in a bad year. Advisers put the breakeven near 1.05M GBP. The math is the point. On 5M GBP of foreign income, the effective rate is 4.4 percent on the Isle of Man, 3.2 percent in Guernsey (6.4 if the worldwide cap applies), under 1 percent in Gibraltar. Next door, the 🇬🇧 UK marginal rate is 45 percent. A cap turns income tax into a fixed cost. The more you earn, the lower your rate. It is the mirror of entry priced regimes like 🇮🇹 Italy or 🇬🇷 Greece, which charge you at the door instead. One watch item: Sark is consulting on replacing its system with bands on worldwide assets. Ceilings can move. Caps reward scale. Flat fees filter at the door. Above 5M a year, which model actually wins? Data from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer I build at Lucky Nomads. #sark #gibraltar #guernsey #isleofman

XJune 9, 2026

🇮🇹 Italy just tripled the price of its tax deal for wealthy new residents. In 2017 a new resident could opt in for €100k a year, flat, on covered foreign-source income. From January 2026 the same deal costs €300,000. And that may not be the deterrent it looks like. Under Article 24-bis of the Italian tax code, a new resident owes no further Italian income tax on covered foreign-source income, however large, for up to 15 years. One carve-out matters: capital gains on qualified shareholdings sold in the first five years stay taxed at the standard 26 percent. The sticker price is what moved. €100k in 2017. €200k in August 2024. €300k from January 2026. The family surcharge doubled to €50k per person. Here is the part most headlines miss. The €300k tag deters. The question is who. The break-even depends on how the income is taxed. Against Italy's top ordinary rate, past 45 percent once regional and municipal surtaxes load onto the 43 percent national band, €300k pays for itself around €670k of foreign income. Against the 26 percent on most financial income, closer to €1.15M. Below that you overpay. Above it the flat tax wins, and the effective rate keeps falling: 6 percent on €5M, 3 percent on €10M. So the hike does not close the door. It raises the velvet rope. It prices out the merely affluent and keeps the regime aimed at genuine ultra-high-net-worth households, the ones who barely notice the jump from €100k to €300k. Less a deterrent than a filter. Anyone already enrolled stays grandfathered at their original €100k or €200k rate. Italy raised the price without touching its existing base. It is no longer the cheapest deal on paper, Greece runs a comparable lump sum at €100k a year with a €500k investment attached, but for large foreign incomes Italy stays one of Europe's most competitive options. That is not a country retreating from tax competition. That is a country discovering its pricing power. Smart price discrimination, or the first crack in a regime that ends the way the UK non-dom did? #Italy #TaxOptimization

LinkedInJune 9, 2026

Italy punishes the undecided. Its headline tax position sits among the heaviest in Europe. A 43% top income tax rate, close to 47% in Rome once surtaxes apply. Yet two opt-in regimes change the maths entirely. A EUR 300,000 annual lump sum shields all foreign income for up to 15 years. A 7% flat tax covers foreign pensioners settling in the south. Regime-in versus regime-out is one of the widest practical gaps in Europe. We scored Italy across 18 dimensions. Overall: 6.87/10. City Comfort 8.8, Healthcare 8.6, SafetyShield 8.4. Tax Freedom 4.4, the weak point the right regime can neutralise. Swipe through for the snapshot, the full tax system, 4 special regimes and 4 residence routes. Built with GeoCompass, the jurisdiction scoring engine by Lucky Nomads. #italy

LinkedInJune 8, 2026

Singapore's GDP per capita is nearly 10 times Georgia's. On the jurisdiction index I maintain, the two sit 0.0005 points apart. Same tier. Wildly different countries. Here is what pulls a small post-Soviet republic up to a Singapore-grade score. - 1% personal tax on business turnover up to 500,000 GEL, roughly 185,000 USD, for registered sole entrepreneurs. The standard rate is 20%. - A territorial system. Resident individuals are not taxed on foreign-source income. No wealth tax. No inheritance tax. - 365 days visa-free for citizens of more than 90 countries, including the US, UK, EU, Canada and Australia. No advance visa, only proof of health and accident insurance for the stay, required since January 2026. - Tax residency reachable by high-net-worth applicants without the usual 183-day presence rule. The catch the agencies skip: a work permit regime landed on 1 March 2026, though April amendments carve out purely remote work billed to clients outside Georgia. And 183 days on the ground makes you a tax resident. Visa-free is not tax-free. And the index prices the real cost. Georgia scores 5.4 / 10 on geopolitical stability against 8.8 / 10 for Singapore. Around 20% of its internationally recognised territory has been under Russian occupation since 2008. So the money cost of getting in stays low. The standing cost is geopolitical, and it never shows up on a tax table. If you were choosing a second base purely on after-tax yield, how many points of geopolitical risk would you trade for a 1% turnover regime? Sourced from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer behind Lucky Nomads. #internationaltax #globalmobility #residencyplanning

LM