Living in Tbilisi as an entrepreneur and foreigner

hello everyone nathan again back with our next video i wanted to answer that pretty much the most frequently asked question um that i get at the moment which is what do i why do i live in georgia what do i like about georgia um and various questions about georgia as like a location and so i thought i would go through all of them today i've been living here three years i've owned multiple businesses here um so i just thought i'd like share my uh my experiences and so on i think this will be quite a long video so i'll cut this up into sections so

you can skip through into whatever part is most relevant to you um whatever you're most interested in learning about um so as i said i've lived here for three years and we'll start off with the introduction georgia came up on my radar from a few different people for one i was working with a georgian software developer on one of my businesses notifier which is like most of you probably know a website plug-in for collecting emails increasing conversion rates and so on and the main developer on that is a georgian developer he was based in tbilisi um so we were working together on notifier for about

a year before before i ever ever even met him we built a successful business together it was profitable we're paying customers um but i've never i'd never even spoken to him on the phone in fact we did all communication purely through messages over slack so he was based in georgia and then i had another colleague of mine sort of more of like a mentor i would say actually who mentioned georgia to me a few times he'd never actually been there but he was recommended it and it was coming up on his radar and there's also a podcast he runs a podcast he's sort of like

an accountant slash tax tax advisor for seven figure entrepreneurs so for people who make over a million dollars a year and he references to georgia quite a lot as being a good place to have a base um which i i do agree with so anyway georgia had like been coming up on my radar from these sort of different angles and i i had just arrived back from bali from indonesia i'd spent a month with a friend of mine very nice tropical island and i arrived back in london i got out i came out walked out of heathrow airport and it was like it was like

winter in london pouring down with rain cold depressing and um i just thought i don't even want to be here so i messaged my friend that said i'm going to come out to Tbilisi for a week and i've got to one-way flight one-way flight as i always do just because it gives you that freedom in both directions if you like it you can choose to stay longer whereas if you don't like it you can choose to like shorten your trip so you can adjust accordingly and with Tbilisi i had no idea what to expect i i didn't do any research i knew it was an

ex it was part of the soviet union previously um and i'd lived in vilnius on and off for like over the course of a few years i i've been in vilnius um so i was expecting some like similarities but i really did not know what to expect when when getting off that plane and i'll tell you now i could not have had a warmer welcome into the uh into the country like um the developer we were friends by this point to my friend and his wife um the friends who i was working on Notifier with a software developer they came they picked me up from

the airport it was about six o'clock in the morning uh he took me back to his um girlfriend's mother's house and they just laid out this georgian feast um for breakfast so georgian food is really it's really nice but it's quite heavy uh it will be a lot of breads carbs cheeses a lot of meat fish and so on um but really really good food and and also georgia was the country that invented wine i think it was about four or five thousand years ago it's the it's the country where they found the the most dated um evidence of wine being made and and they're

very very proud of that there's a very large wine drinking culture in georgia and they make very nice wine semi-sweet red wines that they make really really nice and so anyway i we were like drinking wine and um they just brought out continuous amounts of food which is is what they do in georgia um and then they they like showed me around the city they took me to to my like airbnb just like honestly could not have asked for like a warmer welcome and the original plan was just to spend like a week here a couple of weeks here working with um with my colleague

in in a co-working space and we just thought would be very productive if we worked together for a few weeks my plan and still to this day i never actually had the moment where i said i'm going to live in georgia it sort of happened very very naturally so before i knew it i'd been out here for like a month and i was renting an airbnb and i thought maybe i should get an apartment um because they're quite cheap here rent an apartment so i rented an apartment and i got a clause i could leave the contract within any like one month period which worked

really well for me um because i still have my like freedom to to leave and then summer came around georgia has great summers really hot very very green city and i just i was just working i made friends with some other like foreigners living out here i hired a couple of staff i started dating a georgian girl and it just yeah it just sort of happened like two three years went by very very very very quickly and so that was that was basically how i how i ended up here um i'll just list off like a few i guess useful facts to know know about

georgia so there's a population of about three million people one and a half million of those live in the main city which is called Tbilisi Tbilisi has like a sort of european feel to it but georgia geographically is located east of turkey and south of russia and it's sort of the final country that can claim itself within europe anything more to um to the east you're talking like middle east countries and further over than that is asia so Tbilisi is like right in the middle of of asia and europe uh other than that it has a very very unique language so they speak georgian here

and it has its own unique alphabet and it's it's got it's very very rich history in in georgia especially for such a small country is very very interesting history and i think it's because tactically it's in quite a technical like geographical location where a lot of countries have to travel through it to trade goods goods to each other um it's been invaded quite a few times even to this day 20 percent of the country is occupied by russia this this is actually recorded on the top gear not the the grand tour the new top gear program they actually did a road trip through georgia they

they saw the border um and it's known that the russians police or army actually moved this overnight and they're constantly essentially invading invading the country and they are occupying the territory um and they yeah they documented the story of a farmer who one day woke up and he was in russia and they weren't letting that over the russians wouldn't let them back over and he said if he tried they would they would shoot him um so it's really really quite sad they the thing to realize as well is georgia is a developing country and i think you if you were going to live here you

sort of have there are some things you have to accept that especially if you're going for example i grew up in london for like 21 years it is not going to be anything like london in both positive and negative ways so to give you an example of some of like positives the things that i really like very very friendly towards small businesses and you can as a foreigner you can walk in and you can register a company and it will be set up for you the next day all you need is your passport it's going to cost you 50 banking system here personal banking system

sorry is great business banking not so good even though they're with the same bank it's just that i just there's a real difference in the level of quality that you get between personal and business banking personal it's fantastic you can walk in you will have a personal bank account also you'll have it set up within 30 minutes you can go with your passport georgia is great because he will pay zero percent tax on foreign income it's completely legal very very smart move by the government uh i'll just explain why quickly i used to work on a um for two reasons actually i used to work

on a project within within the eu it was like a sort of eu incubator where they would invest in startups and the reason that they were doing this is because there's a very large investment culture in the us for investment firms to invest in startups and there are a lot of great startups that come out of of europe um you know berlin tech capital london when it was part of the eu anyway it was of course a lot of great startups coming out of there um amsterdam uh estonia has some great companies as well lithuania is now becoming like a fintech capital of Vilnius and

so a lot of great startups that do come out of europe but there's just not such a big investment culture here so often they would get investment from american companies um american investment firms and they would be forced they would they would be required to make us another u.s entity to reincorporate their business in the us often in delaware or something like that so that the investment company had more control over their money um and it could also be for tax reasons in the us i'm i'm not quite sure of the specifics but it was pretty much a a requirement if they were going to

take investment from the us they would have to reincorporate within within the us and what happened is um all of these great startups were coming out of the eu but then because as soon as they started to get some traction they were reincorporating in the us the eu was missing out on all of the taxpayers that they thought they would make and the u.s economy was booming because they were just bringing all of these um sort of unicorns like successful startups coming out of europe and the us was benefiting from from the taxes that they were paying and it was costing the eu a lot

of money so they actually decided to set up their own digital incubator to combat this problem [Music] and a second reason on top of that so by georgia making it very friendly towards start-ups and offering zero percent tax on foreign income it can't be beaten in the u.s like in the u.s you're going to be paying taxes on your income so it encourages businesses to number one to incorporate here it encourages people like me foreign entrepreneurs to register my companies here and i will pay i will hire staff i will pay taxes on goods i purchase within georgia remember it's only tax on foreign income

which just helps to push the economy forward in my opinion it is a great great move another benefit of that is something when i used to work on a project in the uk um something government related i was told by quite a senior individual that for the uk government to bring in uh for example one euro into the british economy so if i'm a business and i'm selling uh and i'm selling to europe and bringing in money out of a different country and into the uk into into the british economy is worth three times more to the uk economy than if i was just to

sell locally because technically if i'm just selling within the same country i'm in i'm just recycling money that already exists in that current economy whereas if you're selling to internationally and you're bringing money from a foreign country into the country that you're in is very very beneficial for the economy here because you're bringing new money into the system that is why it's very very smart in my opinion for um georgia to not tax you on foreign income because it is it really encourages you to bring new uh of course it encourages you to incorporate your business here and you will just be bringing in foreign

income money from other countries into the georgian economy which strengthens the georgian economy very very clever move some of the in generally in business i do like their decision some of their other decisions are a bit questionable particularly when it comes to roads and just like some like i don't know let's call them like bureaucracy bureaucracy type issues where just a real lack of organization in my opinion and but in terms of small businesses i i think they do really quite well there's a lot of grants and things like that with both government grants and also business um through banks you can receive grants and

they're not investments there it's free money you don't have to give up any percentage of equity and there's tons of them i i literally can't list them off you would have to look into them particularly in like the digital tech space there's really a lot of options a friend of mine just secured 150 thousand dollars without having to give up a percent a single share in his company which yeah is is also good to know that they are trying to like push you forward but then there are some other very i don't know like one example would be in accounting a negative example for example

in in the uk we we would submit if you register a new company you don't have to submit taxes for the first 18 months and you only have to do it once per year anyway after that so you just have to keep your receipts invoices income outgoing and so on and then you just submit that and you pay the amount of taxes that you would owe in georgia they ask you to do it every single month and for a new company i think there's a really i don't know i think it's very short-term thinking because only yes okay they get their money a little bit

quicker but it puts a lot of pressure on the startup which is going to have so many expenses anyway in the first month of getting up and running i think it'd be much much smarter to do something similar to what the uk are doing where you give the company a bit of breathing space at least for 12 months rather than like we pay our accountants about 300 here on like a small company for them to just submit these returns every month there's three thousand six hundred dollars per year and that's not even including the taxes that you have to pay think about it's just they

should give companies a little bit more breathing space to get up and running and then after a year after 18 months and you shouldn't be required to do it every single month in my opinion it may help with cash flow for the government but i i really think it's quite short-sighted i think they would see a lot more success and a lot more startups growing if there was more more breathing space on on that side of things um i i don't really want to get back to um political number one like i'm far from an expert on georgia politics i can literally just discuss why

what i see around me um there's there are protests um i would say ever there's there will be multiple protests per year there will be about three or four protests per year they have reached that international news often to do with gay rights and things like that there's a real sort of shift going on between the younger generation and like the older generation or what i think are like a lot of people that are not in the city center right there from villages um or various um remote regions from like outside of the city the city generally i think is very very open-minded particularly with

like the young generation but then you'll have like these people who have more of like a fixed mindset who they're not happy for example there was like a sex shop that opened and people were throwing bricks at it there was a um there was i think it was a gay rights protest and then there were a load of protesters who came and they were burning like gay flags and so on so it's like it's going through like a shift basically and but i i don't want that to it's sort of a small percentage that of putting a bad um because when it reaches international news

i think that's what people will think georgia is like and i promise you it's not at all that is like a tiny percentage of people living here who sort of in my opinion have have views like that and and it causes like a bad look for the whole country um i think Georgia could do a better job of dealing with it but again i'm not my next government it's just just my opinions then there are also like just some almost like laughable decisions where for it they had like this main boulevard one of the main boulevard with the center of the they decided to build

the bus stops in the middle of the road so people have to cross a double carriage like dual lanes on each side there's four lanes in total and in the middle the of two lanes there's a bus stop and then on the other side there's two other lanes which just doesn't make any sense to me at all or it meant that they have to put traffic lights all the way along this main road so now it's just like there's no movement of like traffic at all it's completely ridiculous and to make matters even worse if you think of a bus how it opens because they

put it in the center of the road the buses actually have to drive the wrong way down the road so you have cars going one way a bus going in an opposite direction on that side and then the same on the opposite side of the road so it's it's just completely ludicrous and it just makes you question how some of these things get approved again it's a developing country i i'm completely fine for it doesn't affect me so much but there are just some like some funny things that you you see going on um some questionable decisions let's say particularly if the reason for for

doing this was to reduce pollution um promote the use of public transport for one Covid had just started and i don't think it's the best idea to be promoting people to be crammed on in these buses which like they are is this a sort of city like that the buses are absolutely packed and i don't think it's a good idea to encourage that and number two by causing people to sit in so much traffic for so long because the buses only come along every few minutes and then there's these other lanes just completely full of traffic the whole time i think they probably increased pollution

as a whole anyway not my area of expertise just as a fun funny funny story for you some funny decision making going on the other thing that you will have to accept if you did decide to live here is customer service is atrocious it is is unbelievably bad regardless of if you're in a five-star hotel in fact i would argue that some of them are even worse and it's just it's just not what their forte is which i always found quite surprising because as people they are so so hospitable they're some of the nicest people ever i personally think it's because wages are so so

low here that people just generally don't care about their jobs so a way to know waitress isn't just isn't that motivated to work which i guess leads me on to my next point of salaries and how much does it cost to live in georgia so salaries an average salary here is about 400 dollars for just like average skilled work and people do earn higher than that i think the prime minister's salary is about 1 500 um dollars per month and then if someone's working in like a shop for example i was told that on an overnight shift in like a major supermarket they would earn

about 180 dollars per month there's no minimum wage here as well um and people working in like the factories and so on outside of the city center i've been told they can earn as little as like 80 or 150 dollars per month which is actually cheaper than china the cost of labor in georgia is cheaper than china in a lot of places yeah and the cost of living in georgia that's really down to you there's two sort of main areas um like vera and Vake which are like various quite cool areas of bars little restaurants cafes so on things like this and then Vake is

a little bit more let's call it posh but develop the posh not nothing nothing like london or mayfair or anything like that it is considered like a high-class place to live this is it's more expensive um you can get an apartment there for 400 to 600 per month um with like one or two bedrooms and of course you can spend much more if you want to but you would get like a comfortable place for that in terms of eating it's really really very cheap to eat out i haven't cooked i've barely cooked a meal and i mean i've cooked under 10 meals in the last

three years that i've lived here because it's so cheap to just order food and have it delivered which is also part of the reason I put on weight since i've been out here um just the the hassle of having to go to the shop cook the food clean up after like and the time involved in doing it when the cost of doing it is almost the same if you just order the food in um yeah it's uh like it is really quite for about a thousand dollars per month you could have a good life and i mean a good life in in georgia if you're

if you put two or three thousand dollars of disposable income you you you can literally do do whatever do whatever you want um you'll be living like a king here the one thing that i will say though is there's a limit to the quality of life that you can have so when i say a good life i mean you can eat in like the uh there's a restaurant here which is top 50 in the world there's another one which i think is meant to be top 10 in the world not quite sure about if it should be but um and then they're really quite cheap

so you can have a very good quality of life here but if you're talking like michelin star restaurants luxury london style living for example something like that is you cannot purchase it here it is not physically not available to buy even in the best hotels here the service is it's nowhere near like a five-star hotel that you would even in like turkey for example which is a neighboring country they really have a fantastic service but it just does not exist in in georgia and trust me i've stayed everywhere um there's like one or two places that are good um and there was one restaurant i

went to actually and they this is they said that she didn't hire georgians because they felt that it was much easier to hire foreigners who had experience in european service to to work like that but um yeah i think that it's just as i said it's a developing country there's not there's just something to be aware of don't expect like five-star service anywhere you like you will not be able to buy it other than that i guess like on like the dating side of things um it's again going through a bit of a shift as a country in my opinion i've had situations where i

was dating a girl who wanted marriage very very quickly um out of like respect for her family and then there are also girls like who just i guess that more european mentality like much more relaxed than not so just i guess i'm more open-minded open to like one-night stands online dating doesn't really exist here there are girls on there but they're judged quite a lot for being on there um i find so that you're much better off talking to girls in person or instagram george and women are very very loyal really they make fantastic girlfriends actually really really good um very much focused on like

looking after the man and very respectful uh really very respectful very very loyal yeah i i highly recommend for like a relationship a georgia woman especially like in long-term relationships 100 i think you do very well to a wife a georgian woman um uh things to mention that are quite interesting is as a foreigner generally i believe you have a much better quality of life compared to the georgian living here as i said they're just really quite hospitable and you're just treated like really very friendly like very nicely everywhere you go i i really think you have a better situation than a local living here

another quite unique thing is that you can also get a mortgage for a property you will not find many um many countries that would offer a foreign mortgage i because i own this apartment uh sorry like have a mortgage with the bank on this apartment i now have access to get um further loans without the requirement of any down payment at all because i've now built up some trust with them i i think that you will struggle to find that in quite a lot of other countries you can also get a georgian citizenship and claim tax residency within georgia as long as you're here for

more than six months of the year and if anyone's in the u.s and watching it's going to be a bit more difficult for you to do to do it i have a friend who actually paid the accountant i mentioned earlier andrew henderson he paid him about 75 000 to work out a customized tax scheme for him and the recommendation that he was given was to renounce his u.s citizenship this cost him 75 grand to renounce his u.s citizenship and to get citizenship in georgia which is currently what he's doing so it is a bit more complicated if you're from in the u.s but for most

countries within the eu you as long as you're based in georgia for six months of the year you can renounce your tax paying status in your home country and you can only pay tax on uh you will only pay tax on local income in georgia and you'll pay nothing from foreign income and this is a much better setup bearing in mind i've used offshore companies before i've owned the offshore companies before georgia is a much better setup than having something in belize or in the seychelles anything like that you will get a personal banker that you can talk to anytime ten dollars per month there

on whatsapp you message them with whatever you want and georgia isn't looked at as being like a black money there's something wrong please so georgia isn't looked at as being like a black money or like tax avoiding um country so when i was working with like a um offshore company payments can get paused especially if you're working with uk banks they can get pause they ask questions they want proof of things they want to know that you're not laundering drug money or and like everything like this so georgia isn't like that at all i make constant payments between the eu between the us um and

back to the uk and i never have any issues so i really i if anyone does come to georgia and set up bank account i've got a fantastic personal banker she's really very good she's part of the reason that my experience is so so seamless as well so