istanbul – Page 2 – Becoming Turkish

The Basics Of Turkish CBI

As the name states, at the fundamental level, CBI requires an investment of money prior to obtaining citizenship. In Turkiye, the investment goes toward property, meaning that you will also be a local property owner once the process is complete.

Since we are American citizens, we do not have to give up our primary citizenship. When our CBI is complete, we will be dual citizens of the US and Turkiye. Note that this is not true for all countries; some countries do not allow dual citizenship, and those residents would have to give up their primary citizenship when pursuing Turkish CBI. This is great, since it not only gives us the freedom to move back and forth, but we will be able to use our Turkish passports to travel visa-free to certain countries.

If you’re wondering if a lot of paperwork is involved, you’d be right. But the overall process involves selecting and buying property equivalent to $400,000 (which often involves more than one property), and you and your family will have passports within about four months. Yes – if you purchase the property, you, your spouse, and any dependents under the age of 18 will also be included in the deal. There are many hoops to jump through, and I would recommend using a reputable attorney to help you through the process so that you don’t miss anything, but it’s one of the fastest CBI programs around.

Moreover, if you are not staying in your property, it can generate rental income (after any renovations are completed, of course). And, if you aren’t satisfied in the end, the program only asks that you hold your property for three years – then you can sell it.

Interestingly, all of this paperwork – including choosing and purchasing the property – can be done remotely. I have heard of many people who receive their Turkish passports never having set foot in the country. That sounds crazy to me, since I want to spend as much time as possible there; but even we have had to do some of the work through our local Embassy, as it hasn’t been practical to travel back and forth to Turkiye.

The Journey Begins

Unfortunately, going to Istanbul every time we need to complete paperwork is not an option from where we live in Seattle, much though we would love it.

To complete the first step of our CBI journey, we needed to give our Turkish attorney power (power of attorney) to open Turkish bank accounts for us and deal with some of the paperwork. We are represented by the Los Angeles embassy, so we went down there in mid-March. As a former Southern California resident, I was not upset by this, since I was able to drive around and reminisce as well as getting work done.

Was this as much of a food adventure as a CBI/work journey? Maybe…

Indeed… this was one of my favorite places in Newport when I went to UCI a gazillion years ago, and they’re still going strong. Bagels not quite NY-level, but far better than what you can get here in Seattle.

This says it all. What numbskull decides to start construction on a major road on a Monday morning? We thought we were so prepared, even driving the route to the Embassy the night before to get a sense of the gotchas along the local roads. But the very next day — yep, they’d torn up the road, which made traffic ten times worse.

Luckily, we’d more than doubled Google Maps’ estimate to get there, and only ran 10 minutes late. For such an important appointment, we weren’t taking chances.

This was a Turkish government facility, so I didn’t take any pictures inside. But I just had to sneak one picture before going in to document this historic event. Note the Turkish flag on the door — we knew we were in the right place!

While inside, we spent a lot of time talking to an interpreter, walking back and forth between the seating area and the officials, and just waiting until we were needed for questions. (We should’ve taken a picture of the interpreter, who was wonderful. She was originally from Istanbul, and told us that she thought LA was slow-paced. )

In the end, we officially signed over POA to our attorney in Istanbul successfully. But we were lucky — our interpreter was told that we were the last foreigners allowed to have an appointment before the May Turkish elections. Since it was mid-March when we set this up, that delay likely would’ve killed our CBI process. Glad that we squeezed through all of the traffic!

Once that was taken care of, we spent some time at the breezy, but still beautiful, Manhattan Beach pier.

Step one complete! Now, on to putting money in the account, and selecting our properties…