The only downside of US/Canada is that travel abroad is a bit of a pain. That’s the nice thing about Europe. So many travel options.
I think Malta still has their golden VISA up and running (buy €500k property or invest for residence). I do know Portugal has eliminated theirs (cousin of my wife moved there from Brazil to be able to use it). UK has also eliminated theirs as it was abused quite a bit (wealthy Russians, Chinese etc).
Still thinking about getting a British Passport (I am eligible now). More insurance than anything else.
Hopefully the UK can figure things out on the immigration front. My wife and I have discussed long-term plans for after her father is gone, and moving to Europe has been part of our discussions. I think if my wife and I are serious about relocating, finding a job that wants me is our best bet, but I would hope by the time we’re thinking about relocating, I don’t have to work anymore.
Loving one’s country is not an example of American exceptionalism: many people feel the same way about their country. It is just that Americans are more vocal and demonstrative about it.
Hard to argue with that. I have fond memories of many weekend trips to Europe when we lived in the UK. Living in Canada makes trips to the US easy but I have already seen everything I want to in the US.
Given my age, my only hope of spending much time with my new London granddaughter is to take much longer visits to the UK when we go, possibly go for a month or two at a time. If my wife and I didn’t have four grandchildren and three children in Vancouver, I would be happy to retire to the UK. The years we lived there were great fun.
This has been coming for a few years as real estate prices in Portugal went sky high and priced out local people.
As long as they had already started the process, and their property was their main residence, they will be grandfathered into the previous residency visa program.
The UK has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Not for the better in many areas. The London - Oxford - Cambridge triangle is still pretty much ok. Not so much the coastal areas down south (they are congested and run down).
I mostly go between London, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro now (thank god for direct BA flights). I have not been back to Canada in a long time now.
One area in the UK where I am seeing a lot of Americans and Canadians is Scotland. We usually go in July/August, and meet lots of them while moving about the central belt and highlands. My wife & daughter loved Gleneagles when I took them there for a few days. Scotland is a very pleasant area during the summer for families.
Scotland is where my wife wants to go. We had a multi-week trip planned a few years ago we had to scrap after a pet fell ill; I may want to re-up that next year.
I have always preferred Edinburgh to any English city. Took my 18 year old granddaughter there last September for a few days when she was taking part of her gap year in the UK. She loved the town and now wants to go to the University of Edinburgh after touring the campus.
I mean, it’s a’ight. Many worse places to be and most of the better places are more expensive. I couldn’t pick between the US and Canada. Your internet is expensive, however, you have poutine. America doesn’t have poutine, which is a good thing since we don’t have universal healthcare.
If internet cost was my overriding concern I should live in Ukraine or Russia according to this survey……Would be interested to see the ratings on the reliability of internet availability in those two countries.
Actually, poutine is starting to appear in New England.
There’s a diner a few miles from me that has real poutine (it’s run by a family from Québec), a couple of food trucks that reportedly have legitimate poutine, and a BBQ place near me has their own interpretation of poutine (but the basic version lacks cheese curds, so it isn’t really poutine).
But on the broader US vs Canada point – actuarial pay in the US is generally higher than actuarial pay in Canada, and Canadian taxes are higher than (US taxes + employee share of US health insurance).
However, I don’t think Canadians don’t have to deal with as much political/social tension as exists in the US these days. Whether that and other intangibles are worth the earnings hit is debatable.
I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Canada enough that I actually did crunch the numbers, and decided that even if I could keep my US salary, the effective earnings hit was too great to justify a move.
Actuaries have a very good lifestyle regardless of whether they work in the US or Canada. It was never about earning a few more bucks for me as there was nothing I wanted to buy that required higher earnings. I worked for a while in the UK for lifestyle reasons and was tempted to work in NYC early in my career but it would have been for the life experience not the money.
I work for a company that has operations on both sides of the border.
Work permit + living in a province for a few months = eligibility for medicare.
However, that does raise the question of what happens if you change employers / when you retire. If you’re young enough, transitioning from “living in Canada with a work permit” to “Canadian permanent residency” seems very doable. But in my case, I’d come up a few points short on the PR points system.
But can you work remotely from Canada if you are based in the US?
i.e. your employer is in the US and pays you there, and while you reside in the US, you are going to be working remotely in Canada (for up to 12 months).