Living in Georgia (the country)

The visiting version of Georgia is well documented. The living version is different, and the gap between them is where the first year's surprises live.

What works better than expected

Internet and infrastructure for remote work. Fast, cheap and reliable. Coworking spaces are plentiful and inexpensive. The time zone sits usefully between Europe and Asia — you can hold morning calls with Singapore and afternoon calls with London.

The 365-day visa-free regime. The absence of paperwork is genuinely liberating. No sponsor, no minimum income, no application. You arrive and you live here.

Healthcare. Private clinics in Tbilisi are good and inexpensive. Consultations cost a fraction of Western prices and are usually available within days.

Food, permanently. The thing that impresses visitors does not wear off. Markets are cheap and excellent, and the restaurant culture is deep.

The foreign community. Large, varied and easy to enter. Coworking spaces, language exchanges and interest groups make it straightforward to build a social life quickly.

What is harder than expected

Bureaucracy in Georgian. Day-to-day life runs fine in English. Contracts, utility companies, government offices and legal documents do not. This is the most consistent frustration.

Banking. Opening an account has become materially harder for foreigners, with more questions about source of funds and connection to Georgia. Some people are refused at one bank and accepted at another with identical documents.

Long-term housing. Furnished short-term flats are abundant. Unfurnished annual leases with a proper written contract require more work, and the market runs on agents and Facebook groups rather than portals.

Winter heating costs. Older buildings are poorly insulated and the winter utility spike surprises people who budgeted from summer bills.

Air quality in central Tbilisi, especially in summer.

Rent has risen a lot. If you read about Tbilisi before 2022, the rental figures in that article are no longer real.

The things people wish they had known

The alphabet is a weekend. Thirty-three letters. Learning to read them makes the city dramatically more navigable even without speaking the language.

Russian is often more useful than English in practical situations with older people, and this surprises people who assumed otherwise.

The 1% tax regime requires monthly filing. People hear "1% tax" and think the story ends there. It does not — twelve declarations a year, due by the 15th, including months with no income.

Being an Individual Entrepreneur is not the same as having Small Business Status. Two separate registrations. The status is not retroactive.

Apostille your documents before leaving home. Doing it afterwards is a serious undertaking.

Georgia is not in the EU or Schengen. Time here does not consume Schengen days, which is precisely why many people use it as a base.

The social texture

Georgian hospitality is not a tourist-brochure invention. Guests carry genuine cultural weight, and a supra — a long structured feast with a toastmaster — is a real institution you will eventually be invited to.

The flip side is that Georgian friendships form more slowly than the initial warmth suggests. The immediate hospitality is real; the depth takes longer, as it does anywhere.

Would people do it again?

Most say yes, with the same qualification: they came for the tax or the cost of living, and they stayed for the food, the mountains and the ease of the visa-free regime.

The people for whom it does not work are usually those who wanted a Western European city at Georgian prices. That is not what this is. It is a country with its own texture, some rough edges, and a great deal to recommend it if you meet it on its own terms.

If you are still at the planning stage, how to move to Georgia has the practical sequence.