Celebrate! I'm a Norwegian citizen now!

The Totem Pole that Seattle sent to Bergen

It was exactly 8 years ago that I moved from Seattle to the sister-city Bergen, Norway. Here's the First Day in Norway post. It was just going to be a couple of years. Then the plan was for Ed and me to move on to Vienna, Austria to live out our golden years.

Anyone who reads annual Christmas letters and compares the plans given in one year, to the reports of what happened in the next, knows how plans work out for us. Same for you? So now, I've decided to stay here. I love Bergen and Norway and I have friends here.

Last year, I discovered that Norway started granting Americans a unique opportunity: dual citizenship! They don't allow dual citizenship here except in cases like, say, Syria, where you can't go to the local government office and renounce your Syrian citizenship. If it is "unreasonable" to renounce your citizenship, then Norway will let you keep it. The US made renouncing American citizenship unreasonable a couple of years ago. Thank you, USA!

This graph is from Valuewalk.com, but the same numbers are shown on CNN Money

Americans are renouncing their citizenship at exponentially increasing rates, and the government got tired of it. So they raised the fee to renounce your citizenship by a factor of 5! From $450 to $2350, which puts it in the category of "way too expensive". If I, a person living here with no children, make so little money that the fee is more than 4% of my income, I don't have to do it. And guess what? Accepting early retirement because of the oil price crash put my income well below that level.

Time for a party! Actually, I will need to go to the UDI government office to get my new passport and to retire my permanent residence card. Then they will have a ceremony where we sit far away from each other and slice brown cheese with that wonderful Norwegian invention, the cheese slicer.