Paraguay temporary residence - 0% tax income from abroad or not?

[JustAnotherNomad]

You're the one who tried to derail this thread by bringing up tax residency.
PY residency (not tax residency) is used successfully by many digital nomads who don't need tax residency because they move around so frequently that no other country has a tax claim against them anyway.
Some countries require a tax residency certificate from a new country for them to "let you go", but that's far from a general rule. Maybe that's your misconception here, difficult to tell.

 

[Mssquirrel]

What I dislike in this video: He claims it is possible to use N26 or Revolut bank as a PY resident, and one does not need any PY bank. That is wrong. N26 closes your account as soon as they know you do not live anymore in EU. Equally do all EU brokers. It is, however, possible to use US banks, particularly via US-LLC. Additionally, most PY banks do not allow you to receive international wire transfers due to AML regulations. So there is a full dependence on the US banking system (or maybe Switzerland), if you want to work internationally. I have no info regarding China banking

You can receive international transfers in PY, you can easy open an USD account but they will ask for proof of funds to know is legal money, you can sort it out. You can't use Revolut or N26 as a PY resident you have keep an EU address till they may or may not close your account. You can use Wise, Xapo bank, Payoneer, Advcash with Paraguay address.

I have checked with a local lawyer- the temporary residence ID card is usually received 6 months after you have applied in person for this residence. The guy on Youtube says you contact me and you apply for residence in person and receive ID card personally in 5 days, I wonder if this super fast positive decision for residence can get you in trouble in Paraguay afterwards.

The local ID takes less than that it took me 6 weeks no 6 months. You can get a tax ID a after you get your ID. That's not a tax certificate tho. I think a lot on this plan might work or not depending on your citizenship and your plans.

 

[meze99]

You can't bring your foreign income to Paraguay, if you do it will be taxed.
Did you get your Temporary Residence in 6 weeks through a lawyer? On your own it can be up to 6 months.
Advcash is useless in Paraguay. Xapo may accept you, but they can't receive USD wire transfers anymore, so also pretty useless for a US LLC. Payoneer may work, do they issue debit cards to PY residents?

 

[JustAnotherNomad]

I'm not a PY resident, but I know it's a popular option with digital nomads. You just get the residency and don't spend much time there, just travel like before. You only use the residency for KYC forms etc., since you can't use an AirBnB address for that.

 

[Mssquirrel]

You can't bring your foreign income to Paraguay, if you do it will be taxed.
Did you get your Temporary Residence in 6 weeks through a lawyer? On your own it can be up to 6 months.
Advcash is useless in Paraguay. Xapo may accept you, but they can't receive USD wire transfers anymore, so also pretty useless for a US LLC. Payoneer may work, do they issue debit cards to PY residents?

If you bring it as dividends you don't. If you do it as a freelancer/remote worker you get taxed 10% only, an accountant told me that as a remote worker you get taxed the months you are here, if you work from here 4 months a year and travel the other months you are not taxed because is territorial. I didn't bring any income into the country but even if you get taxed it will not be too much and you can write off pretty much anything.
Xapo send you a Mastercard is useful if you have crypto or receive money from UK. I think Payoneer send cards I personally didn't try but I chat with people that got it.

 

[Sols]

No posts deleted yet, but just a reminder that this thread is about Paraguay temporary residence. Discussions about tax residence elsewhere should be held in another thread.

 

[Mssquirrel]

You can't bring your foreign income to Paraguay, if you do it will be taxed.
Did you get your Temporary Residence in 6 weeks through a lawyer? On your own it can be up to 6 months.
Advcash is useless in Paraguay. Xapo may accept you, but they can't receive USD wire transfers anymore, so also pretty useless for a US LLC. Payoneer may work, do they issue debit cards to PY residents?

I did it with a gestoria yes,I paid a few extra hundreds to get the cedula faster tho if not it would have take me maybe a month more Some gestorias are slower and some are even faster but you definitely will get the cedula in less than 6 months.

 

[KJK]

This Pepe is selling hot air. Do not fall for it!
What he is doing: Mixing residency with tax residency. Just because you have a residence permit (in the case of PY not even a permanent one) doesn't mean that you can claim tax residency. If you do not stay 120 days in PY you are simply not a tax resident in that country.

To be honest, he isn't selling or claiming to provide tax residency. Noone can truly "sell" tax residency anywhere in the world - with the exception being maybe a bribed government worker who issues you a tax residency certificate.

He is selling a service - consult with you and help you to get residency in Paraguay (seems like before it was permanent, now it is first temporary and after a year or so permanent).

What you do with your new shiny residency is up to you. If you need tax advice, ask a tax advisor, not a Youtube guy selling some consulting service and helping you with residency paperwork.

I'm pretty sure the tax residency can be achieved even without spending 120 days there. I doubt it is fully legal and according to the law but it is possible. You just need to know the right people.

It is the same story with UAE, Thailand and other countries like that - you can get a residency permit easily but to be a tax resident you should meet certain criteria (spend days there, have documents such as long-term rent etc) to be issued a confirmation or a certificate that you are a tax resident there. Yet mysteriously, people exist, who have this certificate and spend only 2 days per year there. I'll let you guess how they achieve it.

Later, when you have this residency in a country that doesn't tax any income or taxes only locally sourced income, you should check what your situation in your home country is.

Do the countries have a treaty for avoidance of double taxation? If yes, make sure you meet the criteria to be the resident of the new country. If not, make sure you do NOT meet the criteria to be the resident of the old country.

There is a lot of misleading info and nonsense in this topic, some text in posts from JustAnotherNomad etc... but I don't have the energy to go into detail.
@backpacker don't get so angry evidently many people are going this route.

To answer OPs question "what problems can come up later if this setup is legal right now?": there is nothing illegal about this setup. If you truly don't live in your old country, you can become a resident of Paraguay. If you want to keep living in your old EU country and fake it, then a lot of problems can come up later. If you are an US citizen or US person, then none of this applies and you cannot use it.

 

[backpacker]

He is selling a service - consult with you and help you to get residency in Paraguay

Oh, really ... . Great to know that such a nice guy is out there

Yet mysteriously, people exist, who have this certificate and spend only 2 days per year there.

... Which, if true, should not be the basis of any discussion at all.

evidently many people are going this route.

... Which doesn't make it right.

 

[Cloudbanck]

What you write is correct but it all depends on your HOME country. In case your home country suspects you're not paying tax they can just ask you to show WHERE you are paying taxes. And if you can't show that you are tax resident elsewhere (be in Paraguay, UAE, etc) then they will surmise that you are still a tax resident of your home country and will proceed to tax you. If you're coming from an aggressive-tax-office Western country, prepare for possible trouble.

Getting a PY residency is just a way to obfuscate CRS and cause banks to report you to PY instead of your home country. As long as the banks believe you and don't 'accidentally' report you also to your home country, this will work. But if you have indicia of your home country (mobile number, address, etc) the banks may choose to report you also to your home country. Note that almost any bank nowadays asks for TIN - tax number. If you don't have a PY tax number this may cause a problem.

An aside here about home country. In most legal systems there is no such thing as "home country", there is just country of: citizenship, residence, tax residence or sometimes domicile.
If you are born with multiple citizenships and have grown up in multiple countries, the concept of home country becomes fuzzy - and there are more and more people like this.

Legally some high tax countries handle this by saying, if you have been a resident for 10 years in our country regardless of citizenship, you have the same hurdles to get out of our tax net as someone who was born in the high tax country, is a citizen of it, and have never been a resident anywhere else.

So more than home country, the question is if you are trying to get out of a high tax country's tax net - then a residency in Paraguay may or may not be helpful - depends on circumstances.

If you are already out of all high tax countries tax nets, then a Paraguay residency could be useful as a place to actually reside - to keep staying out of tax nets - and/or to have a fixed address to use for bank/broker accounts and stuff. If you travel around and don't stay long anywhere, it is really useful to have a fixed address somewhere in a country that will not tax you (or tax you minimally), and Paraguay is a good choice for this.

 

[jafo]

Legally some high tax countries handle this by saying, if you have been a resident for 10 years in our country *AND are rich enough* regardless of citizenship, you have the same hurdles to get out of our tax net as someone who was born in the high tax country, is a citizen of it, and have never been a resident anywhere else.

There! I fixed it for you!

PS. Nobody in government gives a rat's *ss about some homeless or another poor person who is a net negative on the state's coffers moving to UAE, Panama, Paraguay, or any fiscal paradise and be a net negative there. They couldn't care less if that person disappeared "yesterday".

No different than a wife who is wealthy and a husband who is broke. If the husband wants a divorce, the wife will NOT bring up the issue of splitting the marital assets!
Confirmed #FACTS!

 

[BarleyMalt]

I'd recommend reading the other threads about PY. Maintaining residency seems a bit more complex than it seems, as, if I remember well, you need to have neighbors testify for you that you're living there and not a nuisance on society. Of course, it's nothing a local fixer can arrange, but it means that the setup isn't so stable.