@fredbird67 Well, real estate market aside, the reason people "struggle" in these tail-of-Europe countries, which also goes for Italy and Greece for instance, is because we are highly-efficient "educator" countries without the infrastructure investment to keep a heavy services-oriented economy to the level that Germany, Switzerland, UK or others have. We also do not have free oil, natural resources, or majorly cheap labour from abroad to come do menial tasks for us at a fraction of cost (because of local immigration policies). And for the types of work we do make a lot of added value, we rely on foreign companies to exploit our own human resources here, directly, due to open trade the EU allows too. We let a lot of riches get out the country for cheap.
But individuals who get their shit together and actually manage to perform heavy-paying tasks for themselves no matter the region are, is exactly what countries such as ours need. They take money from much richer countries, spending close to no resources, and restore that balance in local investment and taxation, even if taxation is smaller.
But honestly, I don't think we are still in a scenario where we "struggle". There are much worse countries, even in Europe. We are just spoiled by a globalized mindset where we are bombarded with The American Dream lifestyles in media and can't cope with the fact the world isn't like that for everyone. It's not sustainable for long.
