you see what I mean?
DO NOT FEED THE BEAST.
You surely could live well there. As I said it's cheap in many areas. If you got a decent amount of money and can find a way to pay a fair share of taxes is not that bad, as long as you don't have to rely on state. And you will enjoy it for a while.
I mean go there on holidays. Explore it, it's great.
But do not start a business there if you don't know how things work.
You'll get burnt. Another thing is they don't pay for their mistakes. Be it a judge, tax employee, council employee.
If you pay more taxes than due by error, they'll never acknowledge it and will be hard fight to have it back. They'll not answer and you'll have to sue them, that'll cost you time(years) and money(thousands).
It's not conspiracy, the rules are scripted to keep you at the "barely scraping level", to rely on the state. Self-realization as individual through entrepreneurship is almost forbidden, unless you feed the system, politics, mafia. Every smart ones with a big business idea ran away.
That's why everyone's dream in Italy is to become a "public servant". It's like winning the lottery.
If you're sole trader, anywhere past ~50k gross per year you are in the
rich tax bracket (
), and they'll start to hammer you to death either with taxation or bureaucracy or pension contributions (probably you'll never anything past the minimum pension, public servants get better pension laws too, plenty of sick days, should I say months... etc).
You'll end up working your a*s for less than what a junior public servant makes.
There are new tax regimes for new sole traders, like 5 or 15% of
income tax for a few years. But they are like a gateway drug, after those few years, you'll go into regular regimes and if you're not "creative", you'll be taxed to death.
These low taxes were just put in place a few years ago. Now they are already talking about upping it back to at least 23% (you still have to add pension etc).
It's not impossible to do it. But it'll be much much harder than UK.
I know brits living in italy. They all say yeah good food, good weather but nothing works, and I still don't know why.
I know italians living in UK. They say shitty weather, shitty housing but stuff works and I was able to start a successful business.
I lived in UK too years ago. I have the whole vision. I know UK these days is going south too, but you get the gist.
All the deep pockets Italian entrepreneurs have inherited the company from their parents, and grandparents and so on.
The "self made man" through business in Italy is almost impossible these days.
Unless you scam people
). the queues are huge for anything non life threatening (months for exams), and many still prefer to pay and go to the private clinics. Private healthcare is great and not that expensive and everything gets done quickly.
), sardinian beaches, arts(fashion and the likes), coffee, the "your not going to jail" unless you really kill someone... if you are ruthless you'll profit there.
