I have no idea how many long-term expats there are in Vietnam but I know the number is a big one. While we likely constitute less than 1% of the overall population it seems like everywhere I go there is a rather large expat population doing this or that in order to stay and Vietnam, for the most part, is a pretty easy country to stay in long term with very little in the way of hassle.
It gets more complicated if you want to stay long term consecutively though. At least for now I have figured out a way to stay long term via the use of an agent but this could change at any time and it costs me a fair bit in the way of bribes. Some members of the expat community are not interested in keeping up with the ever-changing rules or paying the bribes so they instead opt to just depart the country for a while at the end of their 3-month initial visa. I call these people "in-and-outers" because they are normally here for 3 months, disappear for a month or two and then come back for 3 months. Most of them still maintain their residences here in Vietnam despite not actually living in them. The owners of the condos will normally reduce their rent if they aren't even here occupying it.
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Most of these people are not retired so they have to make money somehow right? Well most of them are digital nomads of some sort. Many of them are teachers, others are copywriters, and some of them have something to do with crypto that I don't understand but it pays them so, great!. One person I know is an online nurse which is a profession I was unaware existed until she told me.
So the deal with these people is that they play by the visa rules and don't try to skirt the system the way that I do. I am quite certain that after 4 years of consecutive tourist visas including one that I overstayed (not recommended) by more than a year, that the Immigration officials are extremely aware of the fact that I am not a tourist. They aren't idiots, they just don't care if you want to live here. The in and outers normally don't have a plan about where they are going to go when their visa runs out but some of the more common destinations for them is Thailand (super easy), The Philippines (did I spell that right?), and others routinely go home to their home countries. All the while they work remotely from wherever they are and the only people that I hear ever complain about this are the online teachers because when they relocate the can have issues with poor internet quality or if they happen to be returning to Europe or N America, they have to deal with crazy time-zone issues. Whatever the case is, they must be happy to do it because they keep on coming back!
Once you are out of Vietnam you can start to apply for a new 3-month visa almost immediately, but when you are doing so, you need to know the EXACT day that you are going to return. This is a rather stupid policy in my mind but I don't make the rules here. Virtually every other country I have been to when you apply for a visa that visa is valid for whenever you want to enter the country for the next 3,6, or even 12 months. It is what it is!
There is one other kind of in-and-outer and those are people that work in rather lucrative seasonal jobs such as the energy industry. I am quite envious of these people and if I could go back in time I would have studied how to work on oil rigs. Those guys make TONS of money in 30 to 60 day stints and it is enough for them to live the rest of the year here in Vietnam while still putting money away in the bank.
I would actually love the freedom of being an in-and-outer because I would like the idea of bouncing back and forth between here and the country that I called home for over a decade - Thailand. However, there is one very big reason why I can't and wont do that.
Moving an animal from one country to another isn't as easy as just putting them on the plane, there is a lot more to it than that. There is paperwork and offices and all sorts of regulations, most of which I think are just so that someone can have a job and act authoritarian towards you. There is no way I would go through that every 3 months and I would also never leave Nadi behind regardless of how much care she is going to receive. I go through trauma when I am separated from her, probably more than she does.
I kind of admire the in-and-outers but they do suffer one major caveat and that is that unless they want to go house hunting every time they return they have to pay rent on a place that they aren't even staying in, perhaps months at a time. This isn't a big deal for the oil rig types, but for online teachers making $10 an hour, spending $400 a month on a place that you don't even use could be a huge downside.
The major upside is that they don't ever have to worry about visas since the biggest problem keeping visas here is doing them back-to-back. The in-and-outers are not concerned with such things and just treat the breaks between visas as tiny vacations. But since el' doggo Nadi cannot go on vacation at all, I will not be joining their ranks anytime soon.