While I complain about overbearing tourist season, the reality is that if you avoid popular tourist places in July and August Croatia can be a pretty great plac

While I complain about overbearing tourist season, the reality is that if you avoid popular tourist places in July and August Croatia can be a pretty great place to live, especially for us software developers that can remote. Working as a small business freelancer (<1M Euro income/year) gets you around 70% net income (this is with healthcare and minimal retirement plan payments and without accounting and doing stuff like justifying expenses etc. which drives that much further with VAT returns). Public healthcare is inconsistent at best, but there is a healthy industry of medical tourism built for western Europeans that's easily affordable on a normal freelancer income. Likewise private childcare, schools, etc. all available and affordable. And all those beautiful places are still around and nice other 10 months a year. You can easily afford multiple properties and a comfortable lifestyle. I spent a decent amount of time into looking for alternative places I could live in EU but really nothing looks that interesting, Spain looked attractive until I saw the taxes (and their public system is not worth that kind of money), western Europe is expensive and I would get very minimal increase in income by moving there (programming is not well paid) so I can realistically have a better standard of living here.