German town offers 2 weeks of free accommodations for new residents. But there's a catch.
German town offers 2 weeks of free accommodations for new residents. But there's a catch.
Show Caption
Hide Caption
Want to move abroad? These are the best countries for remote workers.
Here are seven countries with digital nomad visas if you're looking to move abroad.
For those who have dreamt of living in Germany but are afraid to take the plunge, now's your chance.
A small town in the eastern part of the country is launching a trial relocation program, offering two weeks of free accommodations to eligible applicants.
Located near the border of Poland, the quaint town of Eisenhüttenstadt recently announced its "Make plans now – try living in Eisenhüttenstadt" project to encourage skilled or self-employed workers and commuters to relocate there, according to the town's official website. The immigration program is also tied to the town's 75th anniversary.
Under the program, selected participants will be given a free furnished apartment and "have the opportunity to experience life, work and community in Eisenhüttenstadt during a 14-day trial stay – free of charge and in the heart of the city," the website states.
'Rose-colored glasses': The stressful reality of being a digital nomad
People can experience what daily life is like there and also make connections for potential careers. Companies located in the area will offer internships, job shadowing and interview opportunities. There will also be activities like touring the city and a local factory.
At the end, participants will be asked to write a "love letter to Eisenhüttenstadt" that will become feedback for public relations and city marketing.
The program will take place from Sept. 6 to 20, and applications open the beginning of July. Currently, only those who are legally permitted to work in the European Union or Germany are allowed to apply as the town states it is not a visa, holiday or study program, according to the website. Applicants also need to have a basic understanding of German.
This is just one of several incentivizing relocation programs recently created by small European regions to help revitalize rural areas. Last June, Italy's Tuscany Region offered homes as low as $32,000 for those who were willing to move to a town with less than 5,000 people. On the island of Sardinia, homes were allegedly being offered for as low as €1 (about $1.14) to Americans who sought to leave the U.S. after the last presidential election.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Indonesia expects to conclude free trade talks with EU by end of June
JAKARTA (Reuters) -Indonesia said on Saturday that free trade negotiations with the European Union, which have been going on for nine years, are expected to finish by the end of June. Airlangga Hartarto, the chief economic minister for Southeast Asia's biggest economy, met with EU Commissioner for Trade Maros Sefcovic in Brussels on Friday. "Indonesia and the European Union have agreed to conclude outstanding issues and we are ready to announce a conclusion of substantial negotiations by the end of June 2025," Airlangga Hartarto said in a statement. He did not disclose details about what agreements may have been reached. Representatives for the EU in Jakarta did not respond to a request for comment. The EU is Indonesia's fifth biggest trade partner, with total trade between the two reaching $30.1 billion last year. Indonesia had a $4.5 billion trade surplus, Airlangga said. Indonesia and the EU have previously disagreed on the EU's trade rules for products with potential links to deforestation which could affect Indonesian palm oil, as well as Jakarta's ban on exports of raw minerals. Indonesian officials have been motivated to accelerate talks on free trade agreements, keen to diversify the country's export destinations as they deal with U.S. tariff challenges. Seeking to end U.S. trade deficits worldwide, U.S. President Donald Trump announced sweeping "reciprocal" tariffs that have since been paused until July. Indonesia is facing a 32% tariff rate. Error al recuperar los datos Inicia sesión para acceder a tu cartera de valores Error al recuperar los datos Error al recuperar los datos Error al recuperar los datos Error al recuperar los datos
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump's trade talk delegation is set to face off with China's negotiators in London. Here is what's at stake.
Top Trump officials are meeting Chinese negotiators in London on Monday. This would be the first official US-China talk since a temporary tariff truce on May 12. International trade experts have said that Trump could be under pressure to strike a deal. Three top Trump administration economic officials will face off against Chinese negotiators in a renewed effort to break the US-China trade deadlock. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will be meeting China's delegation in London on Monday. "The meeting should go very well," President Donald Trump wrote in a social media post announcing the talks. This coming meeting will be the first official talk between the two countries since they mutually lowered tariffs in a temporary truce on May 12, after talks in Geneva. The renewed talks follow a 90-minute phone call between Trump and China's leader Xi Jinping on Thursday, a rare direct conversation that Trump later described as "very good." According to Trump, the two leaders also agreed to visit each other in person, without providing more details in terms of a timeline. The Chinese Embassy of Washington did not respond to a request for who would be attending this negotiation from its side. The team they sent to Geneva consisted of Vice Premier He Lifeng, Vice Commerce Minister Li Chenggang, and Vice Finance Minister Liao Min. Notably, Li has a Master of Laws from the University of Hamburg in Germany and has been part of China's delegation to the World Trade Organization since 2021. International trade experts previously told Business Insider that much is at stake for both China and the US to strike a deal, or at the very least, continue the truce beyond August 12 when the 90-day tariff pause will expire. "The Trump administration made their job harder because the tariff policies they've implemented are costly to Americans and American companies, and therefore, the market doesn't like it," said Philip Luck, director of the CSIS Economics Program. "They are under a lot of pressure to do things fast." Meanwhile, a lawsuit that threatens to undo all of Trump's tariffs enacted under the IEEPA also looms over negotiations with China. Drew DeLong, lead in geopolitical dynamics practice at Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm, told BI that if the court strikes down tariffs before trade deals could come to pass, other routes of imposing tariffs could be more complicated and time-consuming. The White House did not provide Business Insider with any additional comment beyond Trump's Truth Social post. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Germany on tenterhooks for Merz's first official meeting with Trump
Germany's new conservative leader, Friedrich Merz, is due in Washington on Thursday for his first official meeting with Donald Trump, putting political Berlin on tenterhooks like no other transatlantic encounter in living memory. Discussions between the German chancellor and the US president will focus on Ukraine, the Middle East and trade policies. How well or badly the talks go – during a small group meeting, followed by a lunch and then, perhaps most nailbitingly, a press conference in the Oval Office – may shape relations for decades to come, analysts say. Long before Merz's plane was due to take off on Wednesday evening, political observers in Berlin were weighing up the most nuanced of indicators as to how the visit might play out. The fact that Merz is being put up in Blair House, the official government guesthouse – a factor that convinced his advisers he should stay the night, when he otherwise might have just slept on the plane – is being seen as a positive sign. Also, having reportedly spoken by phone four times since Merz's election win in February, swapped numbers and exchanged an undisclosed number of text messages, the two leaders are now on first-name terms – something that, culturally at least, doesn't come easy to a German. German government advisers say it bodes well that they have dropped 'Mr President' and 'Chancellor' in favour of Donald and Friedrich. But Merz knows the road to a normal friendship is thorny. The transatlantic relationship has been altered almost beyond recognition since Trump's return to office, and the shock 'sits very deep', said Mariam Lau, a journalist and the author of a new in-depth portrayal of Merz. 'It's the equivalent of a medical emergency in political terms: the speed and degree to which the Merz government has had to react to the disintegration of the transatlantic alliance, one of its main foreign policy pillars, is like being forced to undergo dialysis or an organ transplantation,' Lau said. Related: Friedrich Merz calls for US to 'stay out' of German politics Berlin has viewed as menacing and dangerous the unprecedented interference in German politics by leading members of the Trump administration – by his former adviser Elon Musk; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the vice-president, JD Vance, in particular. There is the lack of unity over how and even whether to punish Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, there are tensions over defence spending levels, and there are diverging viewpoints over the Middle East, and over Trump's looming tariffs. Lau said Merz would have to 'walk a tightrope between keeping an open dialogue with Trump and standing up to him, not giving into his whims'. She said his immediate concern would be that the US did not back out of supporting Ukraine. The German leader's first proper taste of conversing with Trump came shortly after Merz entered office last month. He told an audience in Berlin that during a half-hour phone conversation the two spoke, among other things, about places and people in the US with which they were mutually acquainted, Merz from his time when he took a break from politics and worked there as a commercial lawyer. 'Every second or third word was 'great',' Merz recalled. He made sure to congratulate Trump on the election of the new North American pope. Several people on both sides have stressed the 'positive tone', the importance of which Lau said was not to be underestimated, 'because the tone is the politics'. But nobody in Berlin is resting on their laurels. As to just how quickly leaders' inaugural visits to the Oval Office can curdle, one only needs to recall Volodymyr Zelenskyy's lions' den encounter three months ago, or more recently the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa's. It has not gone unnoticed that Merz called the latter last Friday, reportedly to pick up a few Trump-whisperer tips. Normally, a visit such as this would not get so much attention in Berlin, according to Henrike Rossbach, a parliamentary correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. 'But the chancellery has long since recognised that the most reliable thing about Trump is his unpredictability … and the Oval Office has been labelled as an item on the agenda containing residual risk.' The type of reception Merz gets could come down to the mood Trump happens to be in that day. Not something a typical German mind, keen on structure and order, usually finds easy to deal with. But Merz is said to have been coached on an array of eventualities and is armed, rhetorically at least. If pushed by Trump on longstanding issues of bilateral disgruntlement such as Germany's underspending on the military, Merz will lay out his new government's plans to increase contributions to 3.5% of GDP in future, as well as investing a further 1.5% in 'defence relevant infrastructure'. 'Though, keeping it short for Trump, he may just round it up to 5%,' said the Frankfurter Allgemeine's political correspondent Matthias Wyssuwa. Getting the grounding right on this will be seen as crucial by Germany's allies before the G7 summit in Canada in mid-June and, a week later, the Nato summit in The Hague, both of which Trump is expected to attend. Merz will also stress his government's tightened immigration policy, recalling how Trump criticised Angela Merkel on this topic during his first term of office in 2017. When it comes to tariffs, in particular a punishing 50% on aluminium and steel introduced the day before his arrival, Merz has already prepped – and used – the firm sentence that the US should remember it is dealing with a marketplace of 500 million consumers when it does business with the EU's 27 members. Merz knows that keeping things brief, not interrupting, heaping praise and stressing the commonalities is the accepted playbook when dealing with Trump. The subject of Trump's German roots might also help. It was apparently the US president who brought it up when they spoke – even though until well into the 1980s Trump had been apparently keen to hide the fact. Trump's grandfather Friedrich changed his name to Frederick upon emigrating to the US in 1869. Merz has already discussed with Trump the idea of bringing him on a heritage tour of his old heimat, Kallstadt, a village in the rural wine region of south-west Germany famous for its grape juice and speciality pig's stomach (there has been speculation this might be what he ends up giving the teetotal president as a gift). However, it would require treading carefully with the locals who, anecdotally at least, seem far from enthusiastic about hosting him, far less erecting a statue of their most famous son as some have suggested. Usefully, Merz knows the region, having completed his military service there in the 1970s. One subject he may choose to avoid, though, is the fact that Trump's grandfather was in effect kicked out, deported as punishment for having skipped the mandatory military service of the day.
