SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Dani van Vuuren, business development consultant at Sovereign Trust . Dani, I appreciate the time. One of the issues these days is looking for residency abroad, and of course the old-fashioned way is get a job and the like and sort of do it in terms of emigration.
We’ve come to learn – and of course many South Africans have realised – that there are different routes. These are categorised in three main categories, one of them being financial independence or the passive-income route, which is quite popular because it means that I don’t have to take out a lot of capital.
DANI VAN VUUREN: Absolutely. I think ‘generous’ is a good word to use there, Simon, because in many different retirement or visa applications for clients, they tend to say, Dani, we would need to look at what we do with my parents. Can we take employment? What about the children? So anyone who is whatever part of their lives at the moment in terms of residency and looking to go abroad. They are not just looking for themselves. They are looking for their families, their parents.
SIMON BROWN: The other [thing] is the tax residency programme, which I had absolutely never heard of before. This is essentially where you give up as a taxpayer in South Africa – that’s a process, and again there are some Ts and Cs – and you become a taxpayer in one of these other markets. Malta, Portugal, Cyprus, for example, you sent out. And that again gives you the ability without necessarily the requirement to go and buy an expensive property.