The step-by-step plan for Romania

As a Dutch citizen you need no visa and may be in Romania for three months with your passport or identity card without conditions. If you stay longer, within those three months you lodge an application at the regional office of the immigration service, the Inspectoratul General pentru Imigrări, and receive the certificat de înregistrare — the registration certificate for EU citizens.

That certificate is issued on the day of the application and is valid for five years, or shorter if you ask for it, but never shorter than a year. It carries your cod numeric personal, the personal number the bank, the health fund, the tax authority and the registration office ask for. Without that number nothing starts in Romania.

The tax. The treaty dates from 1998 and on paper looks like a residence-state treaty: article 18 places pensions from past employment and annuities with the country where you live. But protocol XII to the same treaty turns that back: the Netherlands may keep applying its national law to those payments until Romania notifies that it taxes them itself, and the Dutch tax authority does so. So the Netherlands taxes your occupational pension and your annuity, your AOW — a social security payment may be taxed by the paying state — and your government pension, unless you're a resident and a national of Romania. There is no wage tax exemption here.

And Romania? It charges one rate of ten percent, taxes a pension — a foreign one too — only above a tax-free allowance of three thousand lei a month, and deducts the Dutch tax from it. What remains you declare yourself in the annual declarația unică; on balance that is rarely anything.

Healthcare. Romania is a treaty country. With a Dutch statutory pension you go through the CAK: an S1 form, registration at the health fund of your county, the Casa de Asigurări de Sănătate, and choosing a family doctor — after that you have the same care as a Romanian insured person.

Bucharest has the international schools, the English-speaking doctors and the direct flights, and prices heading towards Western Europe. Cluj-Napoca and Timișoara are the university cities of the west, a day's drive from the Netherlands; Brașov and Sibiu lie in the mountains of Transylvania, where many Western Europeans already live. The east and the south are empty, cheap and far from everything.

Romanian is a Romance language in the Latin alphabet — whoever knows French or Italian reads the signs after a week. At the counter, at the notary and at the family doctor it is the only language; in the big cities and with the younger generation you manage with English. Go and look in January, not in July: the summers are hot, the winters inland cold, and heating an old village house is a real item.

The paperwork is cheap here: you take the registration certificate home the same day, the driving licence doesn't need exchanging, and the registration certificate for the car costs 76 lei. The money sits in the distance — a good two thousand kilometres — in the inspection and registration of the car, and with a purchased home in the notary and the land registry. Romania counts in lei, so the exchange rate is in your budget.

Discuss the language before you choose the place. For adults who work from home, Romanian is a hobby; for children at a village school it's the whole day, compulsory from age four. Whoever goes to Bucharest or Cluj buys convenience and pays for it; whoever goes to Transylvania or the countryside buys space and a language none of you speaks.

From here everything counts back. This journey has three clocks you start yourself: three months after entry for the registration certificate, thirteen weeks after the export notification for the refund of the Dutch bpm on your car, and thirty days after you've spent one hundred and eighty-three days in Romania for the tax authority's questionnaire. Put all three in your diary on the day your date is fixed.