If you do not spend more than 180 days in a country, you are not considered a resident, and therefore, tax exempt. So, from this year on, as digital nomads, we won’t have to pay any taxes anymore. And that is 100% legal.

It makes founding a company plus everything that is involved in that a bit of a headache. We’ve been researching the subject (called off shore companies) for the last few months and have settled for an LLP (limited liability partnership) in the UK. And that is just the easy part.

That is to say that incorporating an LLP in the UK is a breeze. Really. There are dozens of agencies that can set it up for you for less than 100 euro. However, since we want to receive money through a website, and we use PayPal and Stripe for that, we need a business bank account that is accepted by both.

So we’ve been researching possibilities, pro’s and cons, and have gone stir crazy from the sheer amount of information. At one point, we were convinced we would be needing an account with an old fashioned brick and mortar bank. However, it seems that TransferWise will do.

So last week, we applied for a borderless account with them, and this morning, we received a message that all our documents have been found in order, and that we are now the proud owners of such an account. Yea!

Like incorporating an LLP, this was actually quite easy. We decided to go ahead and set up business accounts with PayPal and Stripe. PayPal first.

Being Europeans, we tend to think in euros these days. So on our website and in our business plan and in all our conversations, we have always used the euro as currency. Thus, we had set up a euro account with TransferWise. That account has an IBAN number in Germany.

However, setting up a business account at PayPal for a company based in the UK, we were required to enter the data for a UK bank account. Which is different from an IBAN. Hmmm… We ended up creating a GBP account at TransferWise and will change the amount to be paid as mentioned on our website to GBP. It’s the only way it will work. Fortunately, at TransferWise, you can set up accounts in 28 different currencies for free, which is brilliant.

All in all, we spend an hour today, just connecting PayPal to TransferWise. And we still have to set up an account at Stripe. Let’s hope that goes a little bit easier. Because we found the set up at PayPal quite hard to understand, to be honest.