In 2024, one in five Americans, around 21%, said they would leave the country permanently if they could. It was a record, and roughly double the level of the early 2010s, when the figure sat near 10%. It held close to that mark again in 2025.
The data tells the same story each year: wanting to move is not the same as intending to, and the large majority who express the wish never act on it.
The right way to read these numbers is not that one in five Americans is getting ready to leave the country. It is that one in five feels uncertain enough to imagine leaving. Of those people, only a small fraction have both the resources and the motivation to turn that idea into a realistic plan.
The Client Who Has Already Decided Nothing
Every year, a certain kind of client arrives, having decided everything and nothing at once. They have run the numbers on leaving the United States. They have a country in mind, sometimes a city, occasionally a specific street.
What they lack is the willingness to sell the house, move the children, and commit to a life abroad on the strength of a moment. They want the door open. They are not ready to walk through it.
The Freedom to Choose Later
For clients in this position, the objective is rarely immediate relocation. It is preserving the option to relocate if circumstances change.
This is where many residency frameworks fall short. While they provide a legal route into another country, they often require applicants to spend a minimum amount of time there to maintain their status. In other words, they require a version of the move before the decision to move has actually been made.
Italy’s Investor Visa is the exception, and it is the exception by design.
Introduced in 2017, it grants a two-year residence permit, renewable, to non-EU nationals who make a qualifying investment. Two features make it particularly well-suited to investors who value optionality.
First, you commit no capital until after you are approved: Italy issues a pre-clearance, the Nulla Osta, before you wire anything, so a refusal costs you only the effort of trying.
Second, and this is the one that matters here, there is no minimum-stay requirement. You can hold the permit and renew it without relocating, provided the investment stays in place.
You are buying the right to live in Italy, not the obligation to do so.
Where the Flexibility Stops
What matters for the person on the fence is where the flexibility ends, because it does end, and this is exactly the point where most sales pitches go quiet.
The permit gives you the option. On its own, it does not give you the two things people most often assume come attached.
It does not start the clock toward an Italian passport: citizenship requires genuine, continuous residence, not a permit held from a distance. And it does not, by itself, deliver Italy’s flat tax on foreign income, the €300,000 regime that attracts so much of the attention. That is available only once you become an actual Italian tax resident, which in practice means living in Italy for more than half the year. The option and the tax break are separate things. You can hold the first for years without ever touching the second.
The freedom runs both ways. The permit sets no minimum on your time in Italy, and no maximum either: you can spend as much of the year there as you want, for as many years as you want.
That is precisely where tax stops being an abstraction. Once you live in Italy for more than half the year, you become an Italian tax resident, and Italy’s tax rules begin to apply to your worldwide income unless you have already elected into one of the above preferential regimes.
That is why Italy’s Investor Visa works best when legal and tax advice form part of the planning from the outset, rather than being added afterward.
The right to come and go is genuine. Keeping the legal and tax implications aligned with your plans is what makes it truly usable.
You Still Have to Show Up
One place the hands-off picture breaks down, and it is worth saying plainly: holding the option does not mean the process can be run from a laptop. The steps that create the permit, and later renew it, are done in person.
The visa and its biometrics are handled at an Italian consulate in your home country. Then, in Italy, comes the residence permit application, the fingerprinting, and the collection of the card, each in person. Plan on at least a couple of visits in that first year, and one more around every renewal.
Call it friction if you like. Some of it is. After all, an immigration office is still an immigration office, and no one has yet made a fingerprinting appointment pleasant.
In practice, though, it is friction we help clients manage. We book the appointments, prepare the file, and hold you to the deadlines that matter, chief among them the eight days you have to apply for the permit once you land, so that your part of the day stays short and the rest of it is yours.
Our advice is to use that time deliberately rather than resent it. The clients who choose well are almost always the ones who spend those required visits testing whether a city actually works as a home, not the ones who treat the trip as an errand. The framework keeps the door open without asking you to walk through it immediately. Those visits become part of the decision, not just part of the process.
An Important Consideration for American Investors
For Americans, there is one more point worth stating plainly. A US citizen is taxed by the United States on worldwide income, wherever they live and whatever second passport they hold.
An Italian permit held for optionality changes none of that. Even a genuine move keeps an American inside the US tax system.
What changes is how the two systems interact, and the US-Italy treaty offers real relief when the planning is done well. It is the first thing we raise with any American weighing this, because the interaction rewards planning in advance rather than discovering the implications after the move has already begun.
The value of the option, for an American, is mobility, a European foothold, and a hedge against a future they cannot yet read. It is not, in itself, a way to stop paying US tax, and anyone who suggests otherwise is skipping the part that counts.
The Gap, and What it’s Worth
Which brings us back to the gap the data keeps measuring, the distance between wanting to leave and actually leaving.
Almost everyone treats it as a choice between the two, the wish on one side and the upheaval on the other, and so most people stay on the near side for years, wanting and not moving.
There is a third option, though, and it is what this article has really been about.
You can close the distance in advance. Turn the vague someday into a concrete, standing right, held and ready, yours to exercise when you choose and on no one else’s schedule.
Whether you ever use it is not the flaw in the plan. It is the plan. That is what an option is: a real choice kept open, forced by nothing and foreclosed by no one.
The value was never in the leaving. It is in holding that decision, in your own hands, well before the day that asks for it.