International tax expert, founder of Perspektive Ausland
Sebastian Sauerborn
Since 2006 Sebastian has advised entrepreneurs and families who move country. He knows Ireland from the inside: in 2014 he moved with his children into a Georgian country house near Lismore in County Waterford.
Ireland was never the plan
Ireland was never on any list of mine. No boyhood dream of the Emerald Isle, no long-held longing. Ireland came to us at the end of a hard time: after the years in the United States, latterly in Texas, and a first year in Malta. It was meant as a stopover. Gather ourselves, sort things out, save our strength for the return to America.
In August 2014 I arrived on the Emerald Isle with my children. It became one of the richest years of our lives.
A Georgian country house near Lismore
Lismore lies in the west of County Waterford, where the road crosses the Blackwater and the Knockmealdown Mountains begin behind it. One main street, one cathedral, one river, and above it all a castle that is still lived in. Anyone who comes from London, Frankfurt or Zurich understands after two days: they have not landed in another country, they have landed in another time. That was exactly what I wanted.
We rented an eighteenth-century Georgian country house right at the gates of the town: seven bedrooms, a good hectare and a half of land, furnished in the style of the period and badly in need of repair. The rent was a gift, 750 euros a month. Keeping the house warm cost another thousand euros on top, every month. We heated the living room and the drawing room with open fires. And yet the children and I agreed: it would be this house. When life opens a door like that for you, walk through it.
A daily life that was ours again
We had no car. Once a month we hired one and shopped in Dungarvan as if we were fitting out an expedition; everything fresh came from the town. The children went to school in Lismore, on foot, and they went gladly. Their teachers looked after them as if they were their own. Carmel, our housekeeper from the town, took them under her wing, and the parish priest cycled up to the house unannounced and stayed for tea.
The whole town took us in, with a warmth I have never forgotten. I walked for hours through the countryside, and when a hire car stood at the door I drove further out: to the cliffs at Ardmore, up to Mount Melleray.
My practice ran without a break the whole time. I switched to paid consultations, handed my inbox to an experienced assistant and, for the first time in years, had time to think. Along the way it turned out that Ireland works better as a base for an international practice than most people think. English as the working language, a time zone that catches Europe in the morning and the American East Coast in the afternoon, airports in Cork and Dublin.
No lease, and then no second house
I had never paid a deposit and never signed a lease. Keys, a handshake, move in. In the summer of 2015 we were driving across Europe in a camper van when, in Vienna, the landlord's email arrived: we were not to come back, he was moving back in himself. Still on the campsite, I searched for another house in Lismore. There wasn't one. Not a single one.
That is the lesson that reaches beyond my own story: a town that small has no rental market. It has coincidences. Renting is the fragile part in Ireland, across the whole country and not only in Dublin. If you come with children and want a school, a town and neighbours, you buy.
Blackrock and Rathmines
I went back to Malta for a year. Two of my children did not want to come: my eldest daughter stayed with a host family in Lismore, and my second son went to a boarding school in Dublin. So I needed a base on the island, and if I am honest, I wanted one too.
I rented an office in Blackrock, south of Dublin, right on the coast, and lived in a studio in Rathmines, Dublin 6. For years I commuted like that, back to the island again and again, to the children, to the desk in Blackrock. It was only around the time of the pandemic that I gave up both, the office and the flat.
Why Ireland matters to me
Much as I liked Blackrock and Rathmines, I never found the happiness of Lismore there again. The Ireland that caught us back then lives in the small towns. That is why today I bring clients for my seminars to the country around Cork. Never to Dublin.
Ireland is not perfect. The weather is what it is, and the rental market is a sorry affair. But the sum of things is astonishingly attractive: an attainable EU passport, a neutral country outside NATO, state schools in English with no fees, a mild climate, tax rules that look kindly on newcomers with foreign income, and small towns where a family is an asset, not a case file. If I did it again, I would choose the same corner. I would do only one thing differently: buy.
The whole year, from the country house to the email on the campsite, I tell in my Lismore story.
Why entrepreneurs book him
Most questions about Ireland are really questions of location: what happens to your company, your residence, your family and your assets when you change country. That is exactly where Sebastian has worked since 2006, for entrepreneurs, freelancers and families. In an Ireland consultation three subjects lead: non-dom status with the remittance basis, the road to Irish citizenship for the whole family, and the exit questions back home.
He is the founder and the voice of Perspektive Ausland, the German-language podcast and YouTube channel on emigration and international tax planning. And he has lived through what his clients have ahead of them: a house, a school and daily life in a small Irish town.
The whole story
Ireland is one chapter. Sebastian was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1977, left Germany in 2000 and has since lived in six countries: Switzerland, England, the United States, Malta, Ireland and Scotland. Today he divides his time between Austin, Texas, and London. How the road ran from Freiburg to Texas, he tells himself: The whole story.
If you are seriously weighing Ireland for your family, one conversation with Sebastian sorts out your questions on tax, residence and passport in an hour.