Digital Nation
We are now officially eResidents of the world! The Republic of Estonia is the first country to offer eResidency, a government-issued digital ID available to anyone in the world, which offers the freedom to easily start and run a global business in a trusted EU environment.
A big part of why we are embarking on this adventure is to gain flexibility of our income and work pattern. Our cost base will be significantly reduced from our life in Singapore, and this is inevitably going to offer us an ability to approach the means to live in a different way. For income, this means not necessarily earning from one company as employees, but potentially having diverse income streams and growing our ability to monetise our passions. We are excited to not have to look back at our prior experience as a way to calculate a fairly linear career path. Nothing (short of needing to be physically constrained to a location) is off the table.
For the way in which we work this includes substantially more flexibility on when, where and how we work. For example, we can envisage potentially working close to full-time in winter and close to nothing in the summer. We can also envisage working 4 hours every day, or 12 hours for 3 to 4 days, and everything in between.
Given we have time ahead of us and most of the “what” we will do is unknown, we felt it important to put the mechanics in place to facilitate the “how” and partly “where” we can do it. Being able to freelance/consult (as well as run our own businesses), was top priority, so we set about working out the best way to achieve this.
There were two priorities which seemed logical to us:
We must be able to administer the setup (business/banking) completely remotely.
We want to pay our way through legitimate and well-respected government initiatives.
We could have started businesses in our home countries, however given the requirement of point one, this narrowed the options to something much more tech-focussed. Point two rules out any of the typical off-shore setups which have made the business headlines in recent years.
There are lots of great articles online about becoming “Digital Nomads” and this is what we found to be the best term to describe what we are planning to do. What kept coming up was the ability to start a business remotely, and the country which appeared top of the list each time was Estonia. Known for its fin-tech, and for founding companies like Skype, Estonia is constantly evolving tech initiatives and at the time were trailblazing the digital economy space.
The government essentially funded a startup environment to get the digital eResidency ID scheme. This created a fascinating government-led culture of innovation. To shortcut the story (worth a read here) the government has been able to:
principally eliminate all government paperwork
set up the ability for non-citizens or residents to create a company in Estonia and become eResidents
create a highly secure ID which facilitates (for both Estonian and eResidents) the ability to transact tax, conduct business, fulfil medical prescriptions, etc. all electronically
The process of course is relatively straightforward and almost all digital. We lodged the application and had approval within 1-2 months. Given there is no embassy in Singapore for Estonia we had to wait for a window when they could setup a temporary embassy.
The day arrived when we attended the makeshift embassy at a well known Estonian company. It was a lovely affair as we joined a small number of others. What was additionally fascinating was the backgrounds and motivations for their applications. Startups, fin-tech interests, pure technologists and of course us - searching for a way to travel close to indefinitely whilst running some sort of income generation. We received our ID and card reader to initiate our online existence with the government. Very impressive system overall, considering that we've never set foot in the country.
There will be another blog on our entire personal and business finance setup for those interested. This alone has been a very interesting space for us to explore as we aim for a paperless and location independent administration.
-Ben