Terms of use

1. Who runs this

This site is published by Pablo M. Hernandez, operating as an individual from Lisbon, Portugal — pablo@thefireexit.com. By using the site you accept these terms; if you don’t accept them, don’t use the site. Nothing in these terms limits rights that the law gives you and doesn’t let me take away.

2. Education, not advice

Everything on this site — the essays, the guides, the country pages, the glossary, the calculators, anything I say in a talk or write in a newsletter — is education and opinion, not advice. Specifically, none of it is financial, investment, tax, legal, pension, insurance or immigration advice, and none of it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial product. I’m not a licensed financial adviser, tax adviser or lawyer, and I don’t know your situation.

Decisions about your money, your taxes and your residence are yours. For decisions that matter, check the rules with the official source in your country and consider a licensed professional. If anything on this site conflicts with what an official source says, the official source is right.

3. Accuracy, and where it ends

I take the figures seriously: the tax and residency claims in the Europe atlas are verified against official and reputable professional sources on a schedule, and each page shows when its details were last checked. But laws and rates change between checks, summaries compress detail, and mistakes are possible. The site is provided “as is”: I don’t warrant that any content is accurate, complete or current, and you shouldn’t act on it without verifying it yourself. If you spot an error, tell me and I’ll fix it.

4. The tools

The calculators are deterministic illustrations that run entirely in your browser. They exist to help you think, not to decide: they simplify on purpose, assume steady returns unless they say otherwise, ignore your personal tax situation, and produce shapes, not predictions. Their outputs are not financial projections or advice, and no outcome is promised or implied.

5. Sessions and talks

The 1:1 working sessions and speaking engagements described on this site are services I provide personally. A booking becomes binding when I confirm it. Prices for sessions are stated on the site; payment, scheduling and any rescheduling practicalities are agreed at booking. What a session is — and is not — is described plainly on the work-with-me page: a straight verdict and next moves, not investment instructions, and no outcome is guaranteed.

Your cooling-off right (EU consumers). If you book as a consumer, you have the legal right to withdraw from the booking within 14 days of making it, without giving a reason — email pablo@thefireexit.com and any payment is refunded within 14 days, by the same means you paid with. No special form is needed: a plain statement that you withdraw is enough — for example, “I hereby withdraw from my contract for the session booked on [date] — [your name, your email, today’s date]”. If you ask for the session to take place within those 14 days, you expressly consent to the service starting early and acknowledge that once the session has fully taken place, the withdrawal right lapses; if you withdraw after asking for early performance but before the session, you may owe a proportionate part of the price for what was already delivered. None of this touches your statutory rights if a service isn’t performed with due care.

Consumer disputes in Portugal can also go to the certified consumer-arbitration bodies (RAL entities) listed by the consumer directorate at consumidor.gov.pt, and complaints can be lodged in the electronic complaints book (livroreclamacoes.pt).For disputes up to €5,000, Portuguese law (Law 63/2019) adds a lever worth knowing about: if you choose to take the dispute to one of those arbitration bodies, taking part is mandatory for me.

6. Your use of the site

Read it, share links to it, quote short passages with attribution — all welcome. What’s not allowed without my written permission: republishing substantial parts of the content, scraping or bulk-downloading the site, using the content to train or build datasets, passing the work off as yours, or framing the site to look like someone else’s. Don’t attempt to disrupt or overload the site or misuse the forms.

7. Intellectual property

The content of this site — text, tools, images, the design — is © Pablo / The FIRE Exit, all rights reserved, and I assert the database rights in its compiled datasets. Where something is credited to its own source (data providers like Eurostat and the World Bank), it stays under its own licence. One deliberate exception going the other way: the dataset files published at /data are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 — those files, under those terms, and nothing else. The licence lives on that page and inside the files themselves.

8. Third-party sites and services

The site links out — to official sources, to tools I recommend, to the booking calendar. Those sites are not mine: I don’t control them and I’m not responsible for their content or how they handle your data. The booking calendar is operated by Cal.com; how it processes data is covered in the privacy policy.

9. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows: I’m not liable for losses that come from acting, or not acting, on the content of this site — including investment losses, tax outcomes or residency decisions — nor for indirect losses, nor for the site being temporarily unavailable or containing errors. Nothing here excludes or limits liability that can’t legally be excluded — including liability for intent or gross negligence, or your statutory rights as a consumer, including rights relating to services performed without due care and skill.

10. Law, disputes and the rest

These terms are governed by Portuguese law. If you’re a consumer in the EU, you also keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in, and you can bring or face proceedings in your home courts where the law provides for it; otherwise the Portuguese courts have jurisdiction. If any clause of these terms turns out to be invalid, the rest still stands. I can update these terms when the site changes; the date below moves when I do, and the version on this page is the one that applies.

Last updated: 10 July 2026. Questions? pablo@thefireexit.com — and the privacy policy covers everything about data.