3 Ways to Move to Greece (and Why You Should)
“You remember that little restaurant we went to in Athens, just below the Acropolis—I think it was called the Cave?” I asked my wife Yulia.
“So good,” she replied instantly.
“That lamb was amazing. I still remember it.”
“I miss Athens. I loved it there. So warm.”
“Maybe we should go back?”
I can’t tell you how many times Yulia and I have had that conversation, or some variation of it, since we spent some time in Greece a few years back.
But that’s the thing about Greece—It’s addictive… more so than any of the other 76 countries I’ve visited.
The climate. The sea. The people. The culture. The food!
I mean, there are lots of places I would return to, but Greece is the place I most want to live in the world. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m currently pursuing a new D8 digital nomad visa in Portugal, which seems odd… but I’ll come back to that.
First, the good news for everyone else…
Greece is one of the easiest places in Europe to get permanent residency thanks to its excellent Golden Visa program. This visa is the best way to gain immediate rights to live in one of Europe’s most picturesque and affordable countries.
To qualify, you need to spend at least €250,000 ($275,000) on a Greek property… except in Athens, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, and Santorini, where the minimum is €500,000.
That €250K is not an insignificant sum, but it’s half the cost of Portugal’s Golden Visa, and there are a few caveats that make it more accessible and more desirable.
Greece’s Golden Visa is one of the most unique in the world. You can pool your money with friends and family and you’ll all qualify for the visa. Moreover, you can invest in multiple properties to meet the minimum investment threshold.
Once you have Greek residency, you gain full rights to the Greek healthcare system. And you can travel throughout the 27-member European Union for as long as you like without having to obtain any other visas. Combine those benefits and you could, for instance, buy an apartment on the spectacular island of Corfu to rent out, and another on the equally beautiful island of Crete to live in, and so long as the combined valued tops the €250,000 minimum, you get your Golden Visa.
There’s a reason I’ve highlighted those two islands in particular…
Corfu is gorgeously green and the main town is a fantastic Old City sitting right alongside one of those famously blue Grecian seas. Yet it’s small enough to feel manageable.
On Crete, the little harbor town of Chania dates back millennia and looks like something from a Disney movie set. I honestly can’t imagine a better lifestyle than wandering the narrow and winding alleys of Chania and plopping down for an afternoon of beer and Greek snacks in a back-alley, open-air pub.
Clearly, I’m not the only one who sees the appeal of this lifestyle…
The chart below shows the number of foreigners obtaining Greek residence permits, many of them through the Golden Visa process. Obviously, COVID mucked up the figures a bit, but the upward trend tells its own story…
Broken out by country, Americans are #9 on the list. And for good reason: Living in Athens, Greece, costs just about the same as living in Athens, Georgia.
No offence to the great state of Georgia, but the original Athens is far superior in too many ways to catalog.
And if you compare Athens (Greece) to Atlanta, you’d save about $1,000 month by living a big fat Greek lifestyle. Choose to live on Crete or Corfu or Kalamata, and your cost savings skyrocket even higher.
Moreover, the Golden Visa is far from the only way to unlock a new life in Greece…
If you’re not ready to buy property, you can also apply for what’s called the “independent person of means” visa. For this pathway to permanent residency, all you really need is to prove monthly income of at least €2,000.
There’s also a separate digital nomad visa.
The income requirements for that are higher, but Greece gives you a 50% reduction on your tax obligations, meaning that at most you will owe local income taxes of 22.5%. (And if you’re a self-employed digital nomad, you have a huge tax break from Uncle Sam called the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion that allows you to earn up to $120,000 in 2023 and pay 0% personal income taxes.)
The only downside of moving to Greece—and this is entirely personal—is that Greek citizenship and, thus, access to a Greek/EU passport, requires living in-country for seven years.
Personally, I would be totally fine living in Greece for seven years. But I can obtain an EU passport through Portugal in just five years, which is one of the primary reasons I’m pursuing that path now.
That’s a better option for me given that my wife is Russian/Ukrainian and unlocking an EU passport sooner rather than later makes sense given our circumstances.
But once I have my Portuguese citizenship and passport (which gives us the right to live and work anywhere in the EU), you can bet that Yulia and I will be back at the Cave in Athens, noshing on that lamb, before we head back home to an apartment on an island somewhere in the Aegean.