Making It Legal

When you’re traveling as an American or Canadian tourist in Europe, you don’t need to apply ahead of time for permission to be in the country, it’s granted automatically. However, if you intend to stay long term, you’ll need to apply for a residency visa, and you usually have to do it before you leave home.

The requirements for qualifying for residency status can vary greatly country to country. Furthermore, some countries offer many different options for establishing permanent residency.

Once you’ve identified where in Europe you’re thinking you’d like to relocate, you need to make sure that that country offers a residency option for which you qualify. If it offers more than one that could work for you, which one makes most sense and why?

You don’t want to pick your new home overseas because of the residency options it offers… but we do recommend that you factor this important question into your thinking right from the start.

For the destinations that we cover in detail over the days to come in this course, our in-country expert will outline for you all the best options that country has to offer. Several of the countries featured here are favorites of ours because they offer excellent residency and citizenship options in addition to their fantastic culture.

A local attorney in your country of focus can detail all the possibilities for you, and in most cases we recommend you use a local attorney to process the associated paperwork for the visa you choose to apply for. It’s worth the minimal expense, and it saves you the effort of trying to wade through the related red tape in a foreign language.

For each of the seven countries we treat in detail in this course, you’ll virtually “meet” our trusted local lawyer as they present the options for staying long-term, and if you’d like to continue the conversation with them, no problem. You’ll have direct access to their personal emails and can set up consultations as needed. And in each case, this expert will be someone we’ve worked with for years… someone who has helped us personally in addition to dozens, maybe hundreds of our readers… it will be someone you know you can trust.

The most important thing about residency visa options for any country is to understand the rules before you get too far into your relocation plans. You don’t want to begin house hunting in a country only to find that you don’t qualify for any visa option and won’t in fact be able to take up full-time residence as you’d hoped. That’s where expert advice comes in.