What Reddit gets right (and wrong) about flag theory

What Reddit gets right

• It is not magic, and it is not for most people. The consensus on Reddit is blunt: unless you have location-independent income and time to spend abroad, the savings rarely justify the upheaval. That is correct.
• The gurus oversell it. Threads are sceptical of the "pay a firm and never pay tax again" pitch — and rightly so. The strategy you read about is the easy part; see the take on Nomad Capitalist and the DIY route.
• You can do it yourself. Redditors who have actually done it tend to agree the building blocks are public. The paid roadmap mostly buys you sequencing and introductions.
• Days are everything. The better comments hammer one point: where you spend your days decides your tax residency, not where you say you live.

What Reddit gets wrong

• "Just don't be tax-resident anywhere." The most repeated myth. Many countries — and US states — keep taxing you until you can prove you established a home elsewhere, and the IRS taxes US citizens on worldwide income regardless. Being a perpetual traveler is a discipline, not a loophole.
• "183 days is the only rule." The 183-day line is a baseline, not the whole test. Home, family and work ties can make you resident on far fewer days — each country's own definition is on the OECD's tax-residency portal.
• "A second passport fixes your taxes." It usually does not — residency, not citizenship, is what most people need to change. See citizenship by investment for what a passport actually buys.

What the threads leave out

Reddit is good on strategy and bad on bookkeeping. The thing almost no thread solves is the unglamorous part: proving where you actually were, every day, across every country and visa allowance.

How Flags helps

Flags: Country Days Tracker rebuilds your day counts per country and US state from the dates in photos you confirm and warns as you approach thresholds like the 183-day rule; Flags: Schengen Calculator helps you stay inside the European 90/180 limit; Flags: Countries Visited Map keeps the private record underneath it all. Each runs on your iPhone with no account, no cloud storage and no GPS tracking.

Read the threads for the reality check. Just remember that the part Reddit argues about least — the day count — is the part that has to be right.