The 5th Empire - Avansa AS

Avansa AS is a registered IT company, owned and operated by a friend of mine, a fellow Norwegian whom I met in May of this year. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of my wife, and I must thank Facebook for having met him. Without it, I would never have met him, and Avansa AS would never have come about, which proves once again that social networks like Facebook are a force for good much more than they are a threat to humanity.

It soon became clear to me and my friend that the two of us would make a great team. I have sufficient experience with IT to act as a sales engineer, and he knows his way around rules and regulations. I have indirect access to software engineers here in Porto, and my friend has business contacts who could use these engineers. The plan is to act as facilitators, and make some money from the price difference in wages between Portugal and Norway.

Avansa AS has yet to make any money, but the business model is easy to understand, and a great way to start conversations a little more substantial than the weather and the kids when out socializing. People open up to the possibilities inherent in the business model. One thing leads to another, and pretty soon, all sorts of things are discussed.

Being a tax evader makes it impossible for me to accept a regular job in a corporate setting, and I had for this reason come to the conclusion that my working career was over. However, it now looks like I'm about to embark on a new and substantially more enjoyable career path than the one I've abandoned. I'm now a sales engineer for a small IT company. That's way better than a programmer inside a large corporate structure.

My friend and I are not drawing any salaries from the company. We will instead split any profit that may come between ourselves. That will in practice mean that it will be my wife that finally sends an invoice to Avansa AS. I will never be credited directly. Everything will go via my wife.

This again shows that I've made no real sacrifice in severing my ties to the state. I was fed up with my professional life in the corporate sphere, so being unable to return to corporate employment was not all that much of a threat. What I gained by not paying taxes has way outweighed the minor inconvenience that followed. Adding to this that I can now pursue a more interesting career outside the corporate world, precisely because I have put aside money saved by not paying taxes, it is clear that I really did make the right decision. Life is far better now than it would have been if I had remained in corporate employment.

Endless possibilities

By Jessie Eastland - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link