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What is the ‘Swedish dream’ and where can you find it?

Writer Paul Connolly explains why Sweden’s High Coast is home to the ‘Swedish dream’ and how moving there can help you to find life’s Swede spot.

What is the 'Swedish dream' and where can you find it?
Photo: Peder Sundström

Sweden has long been a beacon of hope for those looking to improve their lives. Whether it’s people like me escaping the Brexit-driven madness of the UK or a Syrian refugee fleeing that country’s civil war, Sweden offers opportunity, security and a chance to build a good life for you and your family.

The Nordic country is almost like a modern European America in that way — a land of opportunity and freedom. But while the ‘American Dream’ has been endlessly discussed, dissected and celebrated, not so much thought has been given to the ‘Swedish Dream’.

Maybe that’s because the Swedish Dream isn’t much like the American Dream at all.

Find out about opportunities in Sweden’s High Coast

The American Dream is all about money, power and status – ‘making it big’.

The Swedish Dream is all about happiness, opportunity and family – ‘making it golden’.

A region such as The High Coast in Sweden, on the Bothnian Gulf in Västernorrland, 500 km north-east of Stockholm, embodies the Swedish Dream – it’s a place of staggering natural beauty, thriving towns, great schools and robust entrepreneurial spirit.

But what are the other constituent parts of the Swedish Dream?

Living close to nature

Photo: Fredrik Lewander

Chasing the Swedish Dream on The High Coast can be a spectacularly beautiful experience – the region’s unique combination of ocean, mountain and forest landscapes offers a unique playground in which to enjoy outdoor life. Hiking, surfing, fishing, kayaking, climbing, skiing and snowmobiling, are all possible at different times of the year.

And then, when you want to kick back, the towns of The High Coast, such as Örnsköldsvik and Sundsvall have bustling bars and restaurants.

Blair Christianson, who left Canada for The High Coast 17 years ago, still can’t quite believe his luck: “We have ski slopes just a few kilometers away, are surrounded by gigantic expanses of wilderness and have peace and quiet when we need it. It really is fantastic.”

Sense of community

Rural Swedes are generally a warm, generous bunch. In our village, residents visit often to have coffee, share cakes and bring presents for kids. When we had our twin girls, we were inundated by well-wishers, many of whom we’d never even met before. It was an endless flow of friendly, baked goods-carrying Swedes. It was just like The Waltons TV series but with less God and more cake.

Friends enjoying a drink at APA in Härnösand. Photo: Supplied

“We’ve never come across rude people here,” says Blair. “If you want to talk, they’ll talk to you. If you want to be left alone, you can have seclusion. But one word of advice – learning the language will make you feel so much more at home. It’s really worth making the effort.”

Find out how you can live the ‘Swedish dream’

Gender equality

Sweden is almost ridiculously civilised. Its approach to gender equality is totally taken for granted by locals but a regular source of astonishment to outsiders. Every non-Scandinavian on their first walk or drive through a Swedish town is immediately struck by the number of men pushing kids in buggies. It’s a common sight in Sweden to see a posse of men wheeling their kids around town centres before stopping off for an afternoon latte. Where I come from in England such unusual behaviour would make the local TV news.

Photo: Fredrik Lewander. Photo: Supplied

Blair agrees. “Life here is so much more focused on both parents, not just the father. It’s so much fairer.”

This is the result of Sweden’s incredibly generous 16-month parental leave which can be shared out between mothers and fathers, with three months of that set aside specifically for each parent. This encourages fathers to bond with their children and allows mothers to get back to work.

Great work-life balance

When you first start work here in northern Sweden it’s a little discombobulating. You have to disentangle yourself from all your previous working practices. Swedes are loyal and highly committed employees who are unafraid of taking the initiative themselves and solving problems. They don’t need to be held by the hand. This makes them a productive bunch.

This dedication to getting the job done springs from being treated well. Employers don’t expect workers to eat their lunch at their desk. They encourage regular fika breaks and offer flexible working hours. Workers go home on time. Indeed, many parents in the office will likely have already gone to pick up their kids from school at 3.30pm to take them to the nearby ski slopes where they’ll enjoy an hour or two of skiing before heading home.

Find out about opportunities in Sweden’s High Coast

Peder Sundström. Photo: Supplied

Entrepreneurial spirit and support

Entrepreneurs here don’t just want to make money but are passionate about making the world a better place. 

Take, for example, Sandlund/Hossain, a Swedish/Bangladeshi leather bag company founded by High Coast local Anders Sandlund and his childhood friend Tulin Houssain. The company not only makes beautiful bags but does so sustainably through its CowFunder initiative which provides families in Bangladesh with cows. The idea is that the family cares for the cow throughout its life after which they can earn a year’s income from the meat while Sandlund/Houssain gets traceable and well-kept rawhide. Sandlund/Hossain embodies innovation and sustainability, two keywords for any business seeking the Swedish Dream on the High Coast.

There’s also a tradition of locals supporting local entrepreneurs by buying into their businesses, in a phenomenon called ‘stock-based crowdfunding’, which bolsters new businesses. Hernö Gin, for example, a startup distiller, has 1,000 investors of which 50 percent come from The High Coast – it’s a remarkable level of local involvement.

Local authorities also provide vigorous support for businesses. Timrå municipality on the High Coast was recently ranked eighth in ‘Best Service for Businesses’ category in the Confederation for Swedish Enterprise’s survey. Any business that relocates to the High Coast can expect a warm welcome, comprehensive support and streamlined establishment processes.

A great place to raise a family

In the UK, for example, childcare provisions now take up nearly 34 percent of a family’s income. In Sweden it is 4.4 percent. That disparity is truly vast. Medical care for children is free. The education system up to, and including, university is free. This is great. I don’t want my twin girls to have to pay for their university education and to be encumbered by debt for years after graduation. Sweden nurtures its young, understands that you have to invest in youth, not demonise it or financially hamstring it.

Photo: Peder Sundström

Blair agrees wholeheartedly with me. “The life here for our kids has been amazing. Brilliant. I would never have moved our kids back to Canadian schools. It’s very civil here. No bullying. There’s such a supportive atmosphere – kids can just be kids.”

Find out how you can live the ‘Swedish dream’

Affordable property

One of the most surprising aspects of The High Coast is the incredibly low price of property. For the average price of a garage for your car in London, in rural Sweden you can buy a well-maintained, 4-bedroom house with land overlooking a lake. Yes, all that for €60,000.

Indeed, moving to Sweden could be even cheaper if you’re a DIY ninja.  If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in to a spot of renovation you could buy a large house in need of modernisation for an amazing €15,000. No, you’re not seeing things.

The Swedish Dream is alive, real and waiting for you on the beautiful High Coast.

 

This article is produced by The Local Creative Studio and sponsored by High Coast Invest.

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LIVING IN SWEDEN

What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

In most countries owning a second home is a luxury reserved for the wealthy, but in Sweden it's very common to have a summer home or 'fritidshus'. Here's what you need to know.

What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

What is a fritidshus

In Sweden, second homes are generally either classified as a fritidshus, literally a “free time house”, or a permanenthus or permanentboende.

A fritidshus is defined as “a house which is not set up for all-year-around living”. Rather confusingly, this does not mean that you can’t live all-year-round in a fritidshus, or, indeed, that you can’t use a permanenthus as your summer house. 

The difference comes down to how the two types of property are treated in Sweden’s building code, with fritidshus allowed, among other things, to have lower ceilings, smaller bathrooms, more basic kitchens, worse accessibility for disabled people, a lower standard of insulation. 

If you decide to live permanently in a fritidshus, you do not need to get approval to do so, but the building committee at your local council can, if they learn of what you are doing, demand that the building be changed to meet the requirements of a permanenthus (although this rarely happens).

There is also a subgroup of fritidshuskolonilott, which are houses with a small amount of land which should be used for growing food (although lots of people just use them as attractive gardens). This is different from an odlingslott, which is just an allotment, essentially a kolonilott without the house.

These are usually in designated kolonilott areas close to or in cities, and are not intended for year-round living. In most kolonilott areas, water supply and drainage is cut off outside of the growing season, and you’re not allowed to register them as your permanent address, for example.

Relaxing outside a summer house. Photo: Doris Beling/Imagebank Sweden

How much does a second home cost? 

The average price of a fritidshus fell by about 6 percent in 2023, following a 1 percent fall in 2022, and now lies at about 2.2 million kronor.

But a search on the Hemnet website for fritidshus under 1 million kronor shows that many sell for a lot less, particularly outside the most popular areas. 

As a rule of thumb, anything within an hour’s drive of Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö is likely to be more expensive, as is anywhere on the coast (particularly on Gotland), next to a lake, or near one of Sweden’s more popular skiing areas. 

A report from Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, out in mid-2023, found that summer houses were cheapest in Kronoberg country (the southern bit of Småland), followed by Örebro, Värmland, Norrbotten and Västernorrland, and most expensive in Gotland, Stockholm County and Halland. 

What’s the point of having one? 

Despite its vast expanses of unspoiled nature, Sweden is very urbanised, with nearly 90 percent of people living in built-up areas and 63 percent in the biggest few cities. It’s much more common to live in an apartment in a city than in the sort of suburban sprawl of houses with their own gardens so common in countries like the UK and US.

This means that most urban Swedes leave any gardening to their summer houses or allotments.

Given the cold, dark winters, that probably makes sense. 

Fritidshus and other second homes are also at the centre of the long Swedish summer break, when people often take three, or even four, weeks off back-to-back. If you don’t have your own fritidshus, you can spend much of the summer visiting people who do. 

What’s the downside? 

Aside from the cost, it’s a lot of work. Owning a fritidshus means weekends spent at out-of-town building supply shops, and brings a whole new list of chores like cleaning the gutters, mowing, trimming hedges, raking leaves and chopping wood.

If you like foreign travel, and have a lot of other passions and hobbies, you may find owning a summer house squeezes them out. 

A summer house in the Stockholm archipelago. Photo: Sara de Basly/Imagebank Sweden

How common is it to have a fritidshus

There are about 607,000 fritidshus in Sweden, and according to Statistics Sweden, about one in three children (35 percent) have access to one.

It most common to have access to a fritidshus in the north of Sweden, with more than half of children having access to one in 51 municipalities north of Dalarna, and it is least common in Skåne, where in some municipalities only 10 percent of children have access to a fritidshus. 

Is it best to have a second home in a fritidsområde or on its own? 

Many municipalities in Sweden have set aside areas, often near a lake or by the sea, specifically for the building of fritidshus, selling off plots, or tomter, on which people can either build a holiday cottage themselves or get a builder to do it.

According to Statitsics Sweden, about a quarter of fritidshus are in such an area, with Stockholm County boasting the most fritidsområde, or holiday home areas, followed by Västra Götaland (near Gothenburg) and Skåne (near Malmö and Helsingborg). 

If you are building your own summer house, the advantage of doing so in a fritidsområde is that electricity, water and sewage has normally already been run along the edge of the plot, making these services cheap and easy to connect. 

If you want to get a summer house near the coast or a lake, it is also cheaper if you buy one in a fritidsområde. 

On the downside, they can feel a little like living in a housing estate, you have to be careful not to make too much noise, and can end up getting complaints from the local neighbourhood committee if you don’t maintain your property in the way they expect. 

As many fritidsområde were set up the 1960s and 1970s, with a lot of the houses then built by enthusiastic amateurs, they can also be in desrepair and have structural problems. 

The plots that have yet to be built on, meanwhile, are often the worst, for instance with ground that is damp or prone to flooding. 

Renting out your second home

One of the advantages of your second home being classed as a fritidshus is that – so long as you’re only renting it out short-term — you are not covered by Sweden’s strict rental law or hyreslagen.

This means whatever rent you agree with the tenant is valid, there is no requirement to ask for a “reasonable” rent, and tenants cannot contest the rent with the regional rent tribunal.  

Airbnb makes renting out your fritidshus extremely easy and on the other side makes it a lot cheaper and easier to rent a summer house for three weeks in the summer than to own one all year around.  

If you earn more than 40,000 kronor in a year from renting out your fritidshus, though, you are required to declare it to the Swedish Tax Agency. 

You can then subtract a 40,000 kronor ‘standard deduction’ from your rental revenue and a further 20 percent deduction for rental income, before it gets taxed. See the guide from the Swedish Tax Agency here

This means if you receive 60,000 kronor in rent, you subtract first 40,000 kronor, then 20 percent of the 60,000 kronor, which comes to 12,000 kronor.

This leaves you with 8,000 kronor to be taxed as capital income at 30 percent, leaving just 2,400 kronor in tax due. 

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