Modern Wisdom - #740 - Nomad Capitalist - How To Travel The World And Pay No Tax

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

Andrew Henderson is the founder of Nomad Capitalist, a global citizenship expert and financial consultant known for helping people with offshore strategies. Should you stay in the country you were born in? Is that the best, happiest place for you to be? What if there was a different option? Well, that's Andrew's entire philosophy - to go where you're treated best. Expect to learn the best travel hacks to save on taxes, what it actually means to have dual citizenship, why America ranks so low as from a tax and financial standpoint, what you should if you don’t want to renounce your citizenship but do want more international flexibility, the best visas to get that are easy to acquire and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 15% discount on the best Colostrum from ARMRA at https://tryarmra.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Andrew Henderson. He's the founder of Nomad Capitalist, a global citizenship expert and a financial consultant known for helping people with offshore strategies. Should you stay in the country you were born in? Is that the best, happiest place for you to be? What if there were a different option? Well, that's Andrew's entire philosophy. To go where you're treated best.

Expect to learn the best travel hacks to save on taxes, what it actually means to have dual citizenship, why America ranks solo from a tax and financial standpoint, what you should do if you don't want to renounce your citizenship but do want more international flexibility, the best visas to get that are easy to acquire, and much more. to get that are easy to acquire and much more. Very cool, really cool stuff that someone's made an entire career out of treating the entire globe as one market that you can kind of move between. Most of us think that that ends at the boundaries of our country, but Andrew sees the world in a bit of a different way. And yeah, there's like at least a bunch of things that you'll take away from this that you've never heard of

and never even thought of. And I think encouraging people to see themselves as citizens of the world is a good thing to do. I genuinely think that Andrew's making the world a better place. So I really hope that you enjoy this one. This Monday, don't forget Dr. Joe Dispenza is joining me on Modern Wisdom,

one of the most requested guests, and it is a huge three hour long episode, and you'll miss it if you don't hit subscribe. So make sure that you do. Thank you. Recently, I went and got a gut microbiome analysis, and one of the products that they suggested I start using was a colostrum product.

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tryamra.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's T-R-Y-A-R-M-R-A dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Woop. I've won Woop for over four years now since way before they were a partner on the show and it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best. It is so innocuous. You do not remember that you've got it on and yet it tracks absolutely everything 24-7 via something from your wrist. It tracks your heart rate tracks your sleep your recovery all of your workouts Your resting heart rate your heart rate variability. How much you're breathing throughout the night?

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So you can buy it for free, try it for free, and if you do not like it, after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. One of my favorite purchases over the last two years has been my cold plunge from the team over at plunge.com. They are the gold standard when it comes to cold therapy.

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change, if you're looking to get yourself a cold plunge or a sauna for your house, this is the place to go. MW150 a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Andrew Henderson. How do you describe what you do for work when you meet someone at a cocktail party? I like to say that I help people go where you're treated best. Those are five magic words. I learned them from my father at a very young age. He gave me a permission slip. I did not have to stick around where I'm from. I didn't have to stick around and take care of my parents because they didn't want their kids taking care of them. They wanted their kids to go where the best opportunities were. And he thought

back in the 1990s where I grew up in the United States, there'd be better opportunities by the time I got around to being in business. And so what I've discovered is if you live in the United States or if you live in a country like it, you're probably paying way too much in tax. And so what I've discovered is if you live in the United States or if you live in a country like it, you're probably paying way too much in tax. I'm not saying you should pay zero, but you're probably paying too much for what you're getting. There's probably some things holding you back. I think what we're seeing now is there's a lot of opportunities in business around the world and increasingly there's multi-polarity where the US is pitted against other places and so there's

going to be a choice which market you want to sell to. And so we help people at Numbad Capitalists produce taxes, become dual citizens, find opportunities around the world that most people don't talk about because I'm a pretty contrarian guy and I think that what we think is the best is often not. It's strange having read and listened to a good bit of your work. It's from first principles, it's kind of weird that people presume, well, this is the place that I was born. So this is the place that I'm supposed to work and live and die and bank and pay taxes and date, all of these things. and bank and pay taxes and date, all of these things. Well, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in the US, right in the lake and right across the

lake from Canada. I look and I say, what if I've been born right across that lake? I mean, the grand scheme of things, that lake is a pretty small thing. If you're a Canadian, you can leave your country and you can leave your tax burden behind for one thing. You don't have to follow Canadian regulations when you live overseas. You have a passport that for years, it's the joke that people respect you a lot more. And people are more open to giving you a bank account in other countries. Just take life as a global citizen is a lot easier. Life just as a Canadian traveling is a lot easier. People aren't picking on you.

And to say that you're born that close to where your identity would have been different to me, to me, just shows the miracle of birth. But not only, the movie Midnight in Paris talked about, But not only, you know, if you the movie Midnight in Paris talked about, you know, were we born in the wrong part of, you know, Earth's history, you know, would you rather been born 50 years ago? You know, we can't change when we were born, but we can certainly change where we were born. And if we weren't born in a place that we want, we can change that. I also happen to think as my father said, sure, when I was born in 1984, the United States, according to the studies that do this, it was the best place to be born. But there wasn't a lot

of competition. I'm talking to you from Malaysia. I think it's the best value destination in the world for someone who can work from anywhere. And you would have never even been talking about it in 1984, but you can talk about it today. And so there's a lot more competition, the world changes, the world evolves. And even if you were born in the right place, maybe it's not the right place today. What about cultural displacement? I was born in the UK and I live in America on an 01 visa. And there's part of me that does feel culturally displaced. You know, a lot of the way markers that you would, references and things from history and things from your past and stuff from culture and stuff from all the rest of it, that can be a little bit disquieting. What's

that like as a global citizen? Well, obviously, different places have different cultures. I think that if you look at it in a sense, we're all the same. Obviously, we all have the same motivations. In a sense, we're very different. There are places that I think that if you look at it in a sense, we're all the same. Obviously, we all have the same motivations. In a sense, we're very different. There are places that I think it is difficult to adapt. I think that part of my background to the United States coming from a very humble background probably caused me at times to spend a bit more time in places where people were a bit less agreeable because you're taught where I'm from, that look inwardly first.

But let's take Malaysia, for example. I think you have probably some of the kindest people in the world. It's a quality that I've looked at is being extremely important. I look at a place that I've spent more time in the last year next to where you're from in Ireland, some of those polite and kind people and welcoming people in the world. They've done an incredible job transforming their country in the last 30 or 40 years. And I say to myself, I mean, those are important markers. So I think that the things that we're used to, sure, there's places where I go and I still have an American mindset and it's frustrating. And I was just, you know, just talked to my team, Mr. David, with the people all over the place. You know, we're going to run this like a business run by a guy who's from the United States and yet being out of the United States for many

many years Cost is one develop an international mindset to where if I were to go back to the US today I think I'd feel very culturally displaced from there because number one. I'm politically homeless. I don't agree with Trump on everything. I certainly don't agree with Biden on everything. And yet if you don't agree on everything, it seems for a lot of people, you're a communist or you're a fascist. I think that people are at each other's throats

where I'm from. I think that would be the ultimate cultural displacement that someone who's kind of developed an international sense of thought wouldn't be very welcome there today. How many passports and bank accounts and stuff do you have? I think it's five passports now, always looking for new. I had a coach who said, how about one new passport and one new property a year? The properties I decided, I kind of got p-editaires around the

world because I like to split my time up, have employees in different places, kind of got tired of staying in hotels. But okay, the passports, I think for now I'm good. Yeah, we've opened probably dozens of bank accounts all over the world. We have multiple companies around the world. We invest in things like stocks all around the world. And as I said, I mean, we're really, in my business, no metacapitalists to me, we're expanding to hire all around the world. And as I said, I mean, we're really, my business is no metacapitalist. I mean, we're expanding to hire people around the world. We've largely been kind of Europe focused over the years, but we're really doing a lot of work now in Latin America,

hopefully soon in Asia. So, I mean, for me, they call it planting flags. I want to have as many flags as possible, but I want them to be correspondent to what the opportunity is I live in Malaysia because of someone who can work from and I live in Malaysia most of the winters now is Someone who can work from anywhere and who can live anywhere for me the idea of paying ten million dollars for this apartment And then paying five or six million dollars in tax because Singapore can demand that just as a one-time purchase for a foreigner, I don't have to do that.

To live in a place that's marginally easier to live in than Malaysia where this place is 600 grand and everybody marvels at how cheap that is for what you get. And yet if I want a bank, I trust Malaysian banks, but Singaporean banks to me are the gold standard. So I'm looking for all the places around the world where I can take advantage of what are you the best at. And the reality is when we say, you know, go where you're treated best, the place where you're from, they're probably not the best at anything. The US does not have the best banks, they're not the safest banks. I mean, they have the most bank failures of any country in the world combined.

So, but if they are, if they are the best at something, you should, you should use it for that. I'm looking for places that are the best and I'm planting flags there. And I think places all around the world are the best at something. How do you conceptualize the different elements that a person has to manage or play with, country of residence, bank accounts, tax status, stuff like that? Is there a series of knobs and levers that we're playing with? Yeah, I think so. What I decided to do in our business was to make it based on what I've experienced.

I mean, a lot of people out there will help you get a passport in the Caribbean. I thought there's a real world challenge of going out and doing this. It can be tough. I mean, you go to banks, a lot of banks don't want to take non-residents these days, for example, but yeah, I broke it down and I'm continuing to add things to this day. I mean, you mentioned dating. I think that's a great one to add. Where should you be dating?

I just had a guy who works for me. He lived in Ireland. He broke up with his girlfriend of seven years. Okay, I was there's a bit of the rebound phase going on. But I took him to a couple of our offices, we had some work to do around other parts of kind of Eastern Europe. And it was a dramatic shock that like, wow, these people are much more interested in me than maybe someone back home where I'm just kind of standard fair.

And I think that if you just look at everything in life and saying, am I doing this the best? People probably ask themselves similar questions just without the geographical element. So I decided to add this overlay of geography to it. overlay of geography to it. Okay, so tax is one that's important. How much tax you are paying? Ability to invest, bank accounts, quality of life. What else am I missing from the big buckets? Where's your company based?

Which, I mean, in part, is based on where you live, right? I mean, so the mistake is if you live in the United States, but you put your company in the British Virgin Islands, you could avoid tax. I mean, they figured that one out, right? I mean, you have to move as well. But if you live in a tax-friendly place like in Malaysia, you can have your company and a number of places that serve you well. Where are you hiring people? Where do people have the best attitudes?

I don't know that we're paying people that much less than we'd pay them in the U.S. They're certainly probably keeping more money than they would to an equivalent American, but we can start off paying them less to begin with and then quickly scale them up once the risk is reduced. We can hire more people, try more things. So I think for a business owner, those are important elements.

Where's your business based, where the employees based, and they all work together. But then again, there's the personal things, where's your data stored. If you're in crypto, I think people should perhaps have a ledger, and the ledger should be stored somewhere. That's an asset haven. Where's your precious metals stored? I've always liked lightweight business models. My entire life, I've started my first business at 19. I never wanted to have a business where I had to buy a ton of assets. I had to have a factory.

I think it's a business because then you could just be profitable immediately and then you scale and nobody owns you. I think the same thing about life. If I want to live in Malaysia, do I really want to be dragged down to all my stuff is stored in Malaysia? If I own certain investments, it's all sitting in my living room. I want to run a kind of a lightweight lifestyle where I'm flexible. I think that's the name of the game this in this century. What's the difference? Can you explain to me between owning a passport, being a citizen,

being a resident, having a visa? What do all of these different things mean? Citizens, so I mean, generally speaking, citizens are entitled to get a passport. There's some things where, you know, a stateless person can apply for a passport and then what's the nationality, but generally speaking, if you're a citizen, you can apply for a passport. So a passport's a travel document. You want to be a citizen. You know, I've been talking, there's kind of the latest version of an old scam, the Mexican passport scam, where some guy puts your name in the

system and they can print out a passport. But you don't have any of the formal stuff that shows you've actually been naturalized and eventually, at least historically speaking, people start traveling these passports and they eventually have a problem because you're not really a citizen. So you want to go through the proper channels to become a citizen and therefore to get a passport. So there's any number of ways to get a passport. You know, if you have a parent or a grandparent or a great-grandparent in many cases who comes from somewhere, you could potentially go back and get that citizenship. You can go back to a great-grandparent's generation and knock on the door of the embassy and say,

hey, I fancy a passport. In some, they even took it back even further, like Italy, for example. As long as Italy existed or Slovakia, they even went back one further recently. Yeah, you have to get your documents. Obviously, the further back, the harder it is to prove. And there are some exceptions, like in the case of Italy, if somebody became American before the next one was born, there was no dual citizenship. I mean, there's some caveats. But yeah, you can go back through your family tree and you can track that. You can get a citizenship that way. There's citizenship so you can invest in about a dozen formal programs and a number of informal programs where if you're starting a business and hiring 20 people, there's

probably a country that would like to give you citizenship in exchange for doing that. If you want to make a donation to a Caribbean country, they'll give you a passport in a matter of months. And then of course you can just go and live in some country and eventually become naturalized two or three years in Argentina, up to 30 years in San Marino in Europe or something like that. And so to be a resident gives you permission to live

somewhere, a country like Malaysia is never really going to give anybody citizenship. Asian countries, it's not really their thing. Citizenship is kind of an ethnic thing, but you can be a resident. And so I can have a residence permit for a certain period of time, as long as I keep my nose clean, as long as I maintain whatever got me the permit, whether I married to a citizen, whether I invested, whether I did, you know, started a company. I'm a resident. If you're a resident in a European country, you can, you know, if you go to the UK, six years, you live there X number of days a year, eventually you can apply for citizenship.

And so, you know, there's different ways to look at this. Ireland, for example, if you live there for five years, you can apply for citizenship. Arguably one of the best passports in the world, not only in the European Union, but also has access. You can live and work in the UK. Everyone likes the Irish. And yet you can live in Ireland for those five years as a special tax status that locals don't have, but that foreigners can avail themselves of. So you could live in Ireland, speak English, have all the services, pay some tax, but not the full 52 percent people are paying on their salaries, and then get one of the best passports in the world.

So there's different ways to approach it. Plenty of Americans now just want it. They want a residence permit in Mexico or Argentina or Malaysia is a place to go and be welcomed. They want a citizenship just in case something happens. They want a citizenship because I think in the future, being an American will be bad for global business. And I've seen that myself.

But some people want to move. So it's, you know, is this a plan B? Is it a backup? Or is it like, hey, what I did, I don't want to live here anymore. How do I move somewhere else? How do I navigate the world? Yeah. Just how badly does the US rank on your global list of places from a tax and financial perspective?

And if we ranked it on tax, I mean, it is the one country that just across the board, taxes citizens, no matter where they live. Here's the international view. I'm a pretty libertarian guy. I believe in lower taxes. I don't know why you have to pay so much tax in the US, especially because you get nothing. Even my father shares the same view. He likes to travel to Germany now. He likes to travel to Europe. He's like, all right, you know what? At least here they're getting something. You don't get anything in the US. And even all that said, I know no one ever signed up to pay high taxes, but if you live there, you know they're the only US, you got to pay the high taxes. If you don't want to pay them, you should be allowed to leave. But the US is the one country that without restriction, taxes you don't matter where

you live. Now, if you're a business owner, you can incorporate your business somewhere offshore. You can pay yourself as an employee of that offshore company and legally not have social security tax. You can exempt a whole bunch of money. You can defer additional money at a pretty low rate. I'm not saying you're going to move overseas and pay the exact same taxes. We help Americans pay a lot, lot less.

But you still have to file. You still have to keep track of all the rules. What happened when I gave up my US citizenship was I was suddenly able to access a lot more of my company's capital. Our company's a cash flow company. We don't have to reinvest it all for our growth. I took some money out. I built the collection of piano tears up.

So now I can travel around and live the lifestyle that I talk about always having someone comfortable to go. I couldn't do that. I've got an apartment here in Kuala Lumpur that's owned by a company. Nobody in the jurisdiction of the company understands it. Nobody in Malaysia understands it. It was done for one reason. It's the legal way for me to acquire real estate as a US citizen without paying a huge amount of tax. And so there's all these restrictions that Americans have. Again, if you stay in the US, pay your taxes. If you want to vote, if you think Trump's going to lower your income tax rate 2%, good luck.

But if you leave, you should be allowed to leave. And I think that Australia's tiptoeing in the way that the US is going. Canada, there's been people talking about it. There's this notion now that citizenship is not as much a privilege as it is a responsibility. It's an obligation. That even if you don't drive on the roads, even if you don't send your kids to the schools, why aren't you paying? Because you're American, you should pay for the privilege. Well, I didn't choose to be born here. And again, I was born 50 miles from Canada.

And so for me, that's what's pretty unfair. And so, in that regard, it must rank like the lowest of all. I mean, my friend is from Norway, and if he just leaves the country and moves to Dubai in the first three years, he has to pay a certain amount of tax. But after that three years, he's done. And if he moves to any number of nice countries that they like, he's done. So that's like a very, very small version of what the US does. But the US, for as long as you are a US citizen, you have to pay. And you know what? If I liked the US so much, I'd be willing to pay that low rate of tax. But for me, the issue is, I think it's offensive that there's this idea that since the Civil War, just having that citizenship means you should have to pay. If I live there, I'll gladly pay. That's the deal. I was fully

compliant when I lived there. I didn't agree with the rates, but you follow the law. I think people should have the chance to leave. I think anything else is kind of like it's abuse. Isn't there one other country with that global tax thing? Yeah, I was funny because I had an employee of mine They said I have an Eritrean taxi driver this eastern African country next to Ethiopia I guess it broke away from Ethiopia in the 90s. I think and they imposed a diaspora tax I think it was 2%

On anybody who's living overseas and I think that they're like, if you want to renew your passport, show us you pay the tax. It really wasn't enforced because as you can imagine, like the United States has a lot more global power to influence banks and set up IRS offices and everything else than Eritrea does. You know, war-torn kind of the North Korea of Africa. And she's like, yeah, the guy says he doesn't pay the DS for tax. So yeah, they do it.

Again, there's other countries that in limited circumstances do it. Australia is kind of tiptoeing in. I think you'll see more countries doing a de facto version of it. As in it's already kind of the fact that if you're leaving a country like Australia or like Canada, maybe, and you just kind of live a totally digital nomad lifestyle with no base. Did you really leave? Maybe you should still pay us. So it's getting worse, which is why I think having second passports is important. I'm not opposed to paying. Listen,

I will spend some time in Ireland and I will pay something. But I don't think, I mean, for 50% of your income, you know, it's easy to make 40 grand and to say, hey, I'm happy to pay my four grand. No one's arguing with that. When you run a business that makes a lot of money and the government almost gets in your way more than they're helping you and you realize, well, wait a second,

over there they're doing it with 5% tax. What, why do you and oh by the way have you been to Dubai recently the roads are a lot better than they are in Cleveland where I'm from. What where's this money going. So I think there's a certain class of countries where they're clamping down because they don't like the competition that I'm talking about. They don't realize I can come to Malaysia with a territorial tax system. My company can be based somewhere else. Maybe I'll pay a little bit of tax on my own personal salary, but my company will be entirely tax-free and I can take a dividend. And I can pay a couple of percentage points of tax at the most. And I support the country. I buy a lot of stuff. Maybe I employ some people and they're happy with that. Australia and the US and Canada don't like that.

Malaysia does like that. What is the process of saying I don't want to be an American anymore? What is that? You go to a US embassy overseas. Obviously all the embassies are overseas. Hang on, so you have to leave. You can't tell America in America that you don't want to be American anymore. No, because once you, right, because generally speaking, there's two appointments. You go into the first appointment, they kind of explain it to you. Are you sure you want to do it?

Okay. And then generally it's like, come back. It could be, you know, the same day. It could be a week from now. It could be six months from now in some countries, depends on which embassy you're dealing with. But after that second appointment, you leave your passport and you walk out and you're still in this kind of transitional status. The State Department hasn't approved it yet, which is generally kind of just a de facto process. But I mean, you're in a sense not an American anymore. So I mean, you can't walk out back onto US soil like what they're going to deport you to where I mean, of course. Wow. Yeah. I didn't even you're done even think of that. How funny. So there I mean, if you didn't plan this

correctly, you could have no passport. They generally like they'll ask me and I was like, the most professional experience I've ever had with the US government was my expatriation. Like, I would say the most professional experience I've ever had with the US government was my expatriation. Like, I would even say kind with the people. Now, not everyone has that experience, but I did. And they're like, hey, we want to make sure you want to show us you have another passport just to make sure we don't need to be stateless. There is there are a couple of people who've chosen to be stateless. And then they have to go and like get some stateless travel document.

It's really confusing. No one's ever going to understand. Don't travel if you want to do that. You're going to have a tough life. But, yeah, theoretically, I guess, if the embassy doesn't force you to, not every embassy is going to force you to prove that you have another passport.

I remember there's a story of a guy back when dual citizenship was far less common. I met this guy who lives in Vanuatu. He renounced in the 70s because he wanted to become a Vanuatu citizen to be an equal footing for business and you could not be dual. So he had to get up the US. There's no US embassy in Vanuatu. So we flew to Australia. They took his passport. He's like, well, how do I leave Australia now? They're like, well, that's not our problem. And there was this whole discussion of like, well, you can just hang out for 90 days and we'll deport you and we'll figure out where to deport you to and then eventually he's like

to back to Vanuatu to back to Vanuatu. Eventually he got like an emergency passport or something and he got sent back. But yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of planning required. Yeah, Jesus. What about exit tax? When you left, is there, what is that? Is there such a thing? So yeah, the US has an exit tax.

By the way, a lot of countries, I mean, this is one thing people pick on the US. I get why they do it. Because the idea is, if you made a whole bunch of money here, you don't just get to wipe the slate clean and pretend that money wasn't made while you were a US citizen. Much of my wealth now was made when I was living overseas. We can't argue it's those roads and bridges that are doing it for me, but they would say, well, you are still a US citizen. You still had our support. If you have $2 million or more, if you earned, what's the inflation adjusted number for this year? I don't know, probably if you pay like $800,000 and some thousand

dollars in income tax federally over the last five years, if that's what your income tax bill was for the last five years, or if your taxes aren't in compliance, which you can bring them into compliance before you expatriate. So if any of those things are applicable, then you've got to pay an ex attack where basically they sell your assets on paper. So we've had clients who come to us where the first time they come to us, they have 10 million dollars. Their business is worth 10 million dollars. And so if they leave, they started it for zero, that's a 10 million dollar gain, whatever that is, that's the tax minus a small exemption. They're like, well, I can't afford that then they come back two years later

Now it's worth 50 million. They can't afford to renounce Yeah, right because I mean it I have a friend in in Canada who has a number of businesses that have grown an awful lot and He he literally isn't able to pay the money to leave. Yeah, like a financial prisoner of his own financial success. Yeah. So I mean, like Canada and other countries have an exit tax when you become a non resident because their their tax system is residential. If you live in Canada, you pay tax on anything that you earn anywhere in the world. So I invest in Cambodia. If I get a dividend from Cambodia and I'm a resident of Canada, Canada will tax that dividend minus whatever I paid in Cambodia, whatever. So people think, oh, that's a citizenship

based tax. No, because you can just simply leave. You don't have to go to the embassy and give up your passport. You just have to demonstrate that you've cut your ties and you've departed Canada. You can return to visit within limited parameters, but you're not giving up your citizenship to leave Canada. So he is the same exit tax, just not the same requirement to give up his passport. Which makes it more difficult. The last year was the first year that I was fully exclusively filed in the US. It wasn't like the UK was coming knocking on the door. I mean, I'm glad that I didn't have to go through the forms.

That's the reason that you have an accountant that understands this stuff. But it's relatively simple. It's like, hey, I didn't spend 90 days in the United Kingdom. Therefore, I don't I don't got to pay the United Kingdom any cash, but that's not the same as it is in America. In the UK, there's different different tests, depending on what connections you have. It could be, you know,, it could be under 91. But yeah, the day's test can be difficult because I think people think like in Australia

and Canada, if I spend under 183, no, no, no, that's just one of the tests is how long you spend there. But what are your connections? What do you have? But yeah, they let you go. The UK is not one of the worst ones. And so it is aggressive. Is anyone else more aggressive than America?

I mean, California is probably the most aggressive of all. So if you're living in the US and you live in California, you're just to me that's unbelievable. Listen, you know what frustrates me? People say there's nowhere to go because they live in a bubble they watch their local TV news. Let's be honest by the way Is the propaganda in the US really that much different than the propaganda anywhere else? It's you know, they're telling you what the narrative they want you to hear You know, it's

People live in the bubble and they say well well, where am I going to go? Because their thoughts of where they're going to go is Canada or Italy or something like that. By the way, Italy has a tax incentive now. I mean, at least they realized, hey, we've got to bring some money into this joint. I mean, if you can pay a flat 100,000 euros a year and you can make as much money as you want, they also have a 50 to 70% reduction for the first five years on taxes. So at least they've done something to bring people in. But you know what bothers me is there's nowhere to go. Even in a country like Ireland,

pretty laid back. Like the immigration office, really laid back. The tax office, laid back compared to the US. You come here to Malaysia, you come to a lot of places. It is not what it is in the US. And I'm not saying you shouldn't pay. I'm a big fan of following the law, just going to where you agree with the laws. Why try and fight and change the laws and fight against all your fellow citizens? What you wish existed already exists somewhere. Just go there and you'll fit in. But the idea that there's nowhere to go is nonsense. The enforcement system, just the divisiveness, but just the adversarial relationship with the government. Again, speaking as a libertarian, not a huge fan of a lot of government. It's much less adversarial in some of these countries, whether it's the police, immigration, tax,

less adversarial in some of these countries, whether it's the police, immigration, tax, these handful of Western countries, it is almost unique how adversarial they are. What should people do if they don't want to renounce their American citizenship, but they do want to try and dial their tax back? Well, if, I mean, if, again, if you're British, if you're Canadian, if you're from anywhere else, you should just find another place to live. If you are American, I didn't renounce immediately. I remember my father read how the tax system worked to me. He would come up and read articles from the Wall Street Journal when I was a teenager. And I said, wait a second, if you don't live here, you don't have to pay. That's ridiculous. He's like, well, it says here you can renounce your citizenship. I'm like, maybe I'll do at 13.

I'm like, maybe I'll do that because. I'm like, maybe I'll do that, because that seems ridiculous that they trap you like that. But nevertheless, I didn't move overseas and immediately renounce. I took advantage of dramatically lowering the taxes. So if you're an investor, you're at a disadvantage. So right now, you know, Bitcoin's up. And I was telling everybody, move out of your high tax country when Bitcoin was at 16,000. Now it's at 45,000, high tax country when Bitcoin was at $16,000. Now it's at $45,000 because you would have saved that whole $29,000 delta in capital gains tax. As an American, investment is passive. Puerto Rico is an option. That's pretty much your option if you want to lower your taxes on passive investments. But if you run a business and a business defined as not a one man or one woman show, but a business with some employees and a confunction without you, you can incorporate that business in some

tax haven. I think if you're an American, it probably should be a zero tax jurisdiction just so the two systems don't fight too much. What would that be like? What would be an example? Well, the UAE, that really anymore, that was the one people think about is Dubai. I mean, they've really come in. I had one of our wealthiest clients of all time

message me the other night. I love the UAE, but this new 9%, not a fan. Hong Kong still has a decent system. I mean, depending on the business, the British Virgin Islands, there's also multiple structures. I mean, you're probably not going to be running robust payment processing and anything. So maybe there could be a US element to your business

to do things like credit cards, but maybe the parent company is going to move somewhere else. And so it depends. Like if the parent company, I mean, many different things, but you know, traditional tax havens, British Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, probably more difficult than it should be. Hong Kong now, you know, Panama is not as robust, but that's an option. Belize, not so robust. but that's an option. Belize, not so robust. Depends. I mean, here in Malaysia, LaBuan is 3%, but set up a company and probably a zero-tax jurisdiction. Figure out some kind of structure, depending on what your business needs, depending on how people pay you. Take a salary from that company. If you're married and you both work in the business, both take a salary. Obviously, I'm not giving this as that formal tax advice. But if you're married,

potentially you can take out close to about 250 grand. You can avoid social security and Medicare tax. And then on the rest of it, you're gonna pay some lower rate of tax. And so then the question is, if you can use things like tax treaties or tax credits to pay that low rate of tax to some other country and then take it again as a credit against the US, you know, rather than moving to a zero tax country, do you

move to a country where you can pay 5% tax in Europe, for example? And then you use that as an offset against the US because you were going to pay the US anyway, you might as well put some tax into Europe and then live in Europe if you want to and then work towards your passport in five years. So these are the kinds of things that go into it. If you're going to be an American these days, you're going to have to pay something if you make more than six figures. And again, you know what? If you like the country and you want the option to go back and you're like, hey, for 10 years, let me pocket a boatload of cash. Fine, keep the US, pay the

US. I'm not opposed to paying some tax. I'm just a guy who didn't want to live in the US, didn't want to be American. And so why would you not want to be something and pay for the privilege? If you like being it, pay 10%. Pay 8%. I mean, that's not so bad. It's a lot better than what you're paying now. Keep the American passport. You're not going to get as good a deal as you would as a UK citizen, just being able to pay zero, but such is life. The challenge though is, again, that passive income comes, are you going to sell the business for $50 million in the future? Because that's where they're going to nail you. And so that's the issue where you might want to look at, if you're only concerned about tax planning,

expatriation. Because if you can argue that your business is only worth $1 million today, and you only have $ million dollars in other assets Maybe you're under that two million dollar threshold and you can leave with no exit tax at all and then once the business grows You know, I mean I Again tax was not really my motivator for leaving It was the frustration of I don't like the way the country's being run And I don't really feel like I want to be part of it anyway. So why not just just expatriate?

But I will say from a financial point of view, the time when that happened was very fortuitous. My business is worth a lot more money now. If I wanted to sell it, I'm going to save a lot of millions of dollars because I because I left when it was worth not really that a lot. What's the reality of this Puerto Rico hack? Well, I mean, you've actually got to live there I Think it probably days for you There's different criteria, but I'm not just call it half a year

Maybe let's call it a little bit more than half the year I'm a more conservative guy I mean and I've seen some of these things people pitch like what was one of the ones last year the multi-pension plan That one got unraveled. And they have all these different schemes that various advisors promote like, oh, it's so easy. You could just, you know, I'm not a fan of the, oh, it's so easy because eventually that stuff comes crashing down. Let's say it's a little bit more than half the time in Puerto Rico to satisfy all the things. I do think it attracts the kind of person who's like,

can I just get on a raft and float back to Miami? No, don't do that. Like, don't do that. It's a place that is not that efficient. What's the quality of life like I've never been? I've been there only once. I think people say they tolerate it. And by the way, by the way, people say, oh, you know, it's like people move from California to Florida in droves now. And they don't think anything of that.

People move from New York to Texas in droves. I would argue you'd save a lot more in taxes and maybe you'd have a closer cultural connection. Okay, a lot of people from New York or in Texas now. But you might have a closer cultural connection. Okay, a lot of people from New York or in Texas now But you might have a closer cultural connection. It's about an Ireland If you're from Boston if you're from New York then moving to Dallas But for some reason moving to Ireland or moving to Panama is scary Moving to Texas Oregon Puerto Rico is not scary because it's in the US. I don't think a lot of the local Puerto Ricans Puerto Rico is not scary because it's in the US. I don't think a lot of the local Puerto Ricans necessarily like this, the system that they have going on there.

I think you have some of the same issues as if you move to a foreign country. It's not that efficient. People tolerate it. I mean, if you want to do something at the bank, just prepare to spend all day. And so I get it. I mean, if you want to be an American or if you just can't, if you already have tons of money but you plan on having tons more, I get that there's certain people who want to go there.

For me, the issue was I was single at the time when I expatriated. I didn't think I would date an American. And so, do you know how many people I've had where their best tax move is to move to Puerto Rico? But they've got a Mexican girlfriend. Well, is she going to get a green card? How are you going to hang out with your Mexican girlfriend? Right?

So I mean, that's where the dating piece comes in. Like, dude, I'll take the Colombians, I'll take the Russians, like, okay, not anymore, but that for me was the problem in Puerto Rico is you're limited to who you can be with. What do you mean when you talk about the global citizen sandwich and the trifecta strategy? So the trifecta strategy is, as I get older, I'm more focused on being in one or two places And as I get older, I'm more focused on being in one or two places and then just kind of briefly visiting the others for business or checking out opportunities. But for a long time, I said, I can't decide. I just love it all.

I'm a legitimately very curious person. I'm fascinated by absolutely everything. And I would say, I'd go to Mexico. I'd have some Mexico. I'd have Latin America in my life. And then I'd come to Asia, oh, I love Asia. This is great. And then I'd go to Europe. Okay, I need some of this. Okay, the trifecta is you pick three home bases. You get either a residence permit or a citizenship. Theoretically, maybe you could live, there's a tourist in some countries. And you basically have three home

bases, and you split your time between them. Now you can modify it. But I mean, the pure trifecta, as I called it, was four months in one, four months in another, and four months in a third. So it might be from December through March, I'm going to be in Qualdempore where it's warm. Then April, May, June, July, I'm going to go somewhere in Europe. And then the rest of the year, I'm going to be in Latin America. And I want to experience everything the world has to offer. There's different business lessons you learn from being in different places. There's different cultures. Um, I mean, Asian culture is substantially different in some ways to what you might

be used to in the UK and in the US. And so some people 12 months a year, they're going to burn out. A lot of people come to Asia, they do the two year thing. That's why they call them expats. It's not permanent. They're not immigrants, right? They don't plan on staying. I think if you spent four months a year in Asia,

in the best months, you would love coming back. And so that was the trifecta. And it just so happens that in the kind of countries that I tend to like, that can be very tax friendly. And in some cases, it's just like, hey, you didn't spend six months in Colombia, so you don't owe us any tax. The goal was not tax avoidance. That was the side effect. And so I'm in the tax business, right? People don't come to me to talk about how they don't like their

mother or they want to dance salsa. They come because they have a problem paying too much tax. And so I prescribed it as, I like it for the lifestyle. You might like it for the tax. The global citizen sandwich is exactly why I'm in Malaysia. Malaysia is Kuala Lumpur. I'm not saying it's the absolute best place. It is the best value place in the world to live. Nicest people, it's humid, but otherwise good weather.

Tons of consumer conveniences. I went to a five-star hotel where we have our Nomad Calculus Live event last year. They have a beautiful gentleman's club like a cigar lounge. Got four cocktails at happy hour, served by a guy in a white dinner jacket who knows everybody who's successful in the country. And four cocktails cost me 23 bucks. The most beautiful ambience you wear a smoking jacket, they come and they can get a haircut. I mean, there's nowhere better. You obviously wouldn't pay that in Singapore. But I do trust Singapore more than if I have precious metals to store or I want to put $10 million in a bank,

I'd rather do it there. I do think Malaysian banks are pretty darn safe, but I'm not putting my $10 million. They just don't have as many options. They don't have as many investment options, as many currencies. It's harder to get the money out. So I'm going to Singapore next door. That's the top layer of the bread. That's like the creme de la creme. The meaty part, the meat in the middle is where you live, Malaysia. And then the other layer of bread is, okay, I own a home in Malaysia. The trade-off is it's not really increasing in value. That's a good amount of supply. It'll take 10 or 15 years for me to see much appreciation. My investment is a lifestyle investment.

And so, you know, I'm one of the largest investors in a fund that a friend of mine runs in Cambodia. I think Cambodia in real estate has some of the highest promise for capital appreciation in the next five to 10 years of any market in Southeast Asia, and it's accessible. And so, I wouldn't live in Cambodia. I wouldn't bank, you know, $10 million in Cambodia. I don't think I need to live in Singapore. So the nice meaty part in the middle is where you spend your actual life living. And then the layers on top are the extremes of the asset protection and then the more adventurous kind of capital appreciation.

Can't you buy... And you can do that anywhere. You can buy land in Cambodia as a non-citizen, non-resident. Is that right? No, there's like four countries in Asia. Thailand was promising to open it up. And I think they scrapped it for high investors. Malaysia, Japan, parts of Korea, I forget the other one. But Malaysia is actually the most open in Southeast Asia. You can own land.

So you can actually buy land, you can build a house. I have a friend who's doing that. In Cambodia, you can not, but you can own condo buildings. Now, there's a program, if you donate money to a charity endorsed by the king, the king will give you citizenship, then you can go out as a newly minted Cambodian citizen and buy what you want. But you can also set up a Cambodian company

and you can do that. So, what my friend did was he set up the Cambodian company, pulled everybody together because it's not really cost efficient to do it to buy one apartment. But generally in Asia, you're not going to get citizenship and outside of like Malaysia, you're going to buy a condominium. That's how it works. But they're very tax friendly places.

They're very laid back, very laissez faire. People come to Kuala Lumpur, they think, oh, it's a Muslim country. And everyone who comes here, the most progressive people I know, they say, everyone told me we don't care. Especially if you're not Malay Muslim. I mean, if you're Malay Muslim, okay, they're gonna judge you a little bit. Even if you're Malaysian, but you're not Muslim. You can wear the shortest shorts. You can wear the tiniest tops. You can do what you can drink. You can do whatever you want. We don't judge you. That's like, that's between you and your God. We don't judge you. So it's this very laid back place. I'm a big fan.

Talking about Muslim countries that are both Muslim and not Dubai being British. That is probably the most common after somewhere like a season in Ibiza for the summer or Magaluf or Zanti or somewhere like that. A lot of people going to Dubai, a lot of my close friends going and living out there. There was a period, some of my friends have been going out for literally 10 years. There was a period a while ago where did you have to get, you had to know an Emirati or something? And if you knew someone who was Emirati, you could kind of get this extra blessing. And then there was this other period for a brief while, maybe five years ago, up until five or four or five years ago, where you had to go and do like a visa run once every quarter or something. And now it's a little bit easier and it continues to be doing

that. But what's the, give me the thoughts on Dubai. Because from a British person's perspective, it's the, it's nomad capitalist encapsulated in a single country. Again, I'm a bit of a contrarian, right? I mean, and I think I almost like Kuala Lumpur. I think it is the best value, but I almost like it in a sense because it's not Bangkok. I want people to go to Bangkok. I just kind of like to do my own thing. So we had our company in Dubai for a while and we decided to move out. The banking, I think, is quite difficult. The quality of private banking is... It's not ready. It's just not And I just had that experience as recently as two months ago Um, I've got to go and figure out, you know, what what where you know

What's happening with some money that I sent them because there's the quality of service in the banking system not impressed Um, if you want to run a business, I think it's much it's really designed To For people who want to live there. So our finance team is in Tbilisi, Georgia. And every time we wanted to do something, they're like, well, just come into the branch. It's like the US. They're like, well, people live outside of the US?

What are you talking about? Like, people live outside of Dubai? Like, we can't imagine that. Because people who live there, who work in banks and stuff their dream was To live in Dubai. How can you not live in Dubai? That's impossible. It's not really set up for remote operations. So And now the free I mean now they're bringing in this 9% tax and they're applying it more aggressively to even the free zone companies Then you explain the 9% tax? I haven't heard of this. So, well, there's this global minimum tax that they brought in on big companies. So if you have, you know, hundreds of

millions of dollars in revenue, the world got together and said, we can't have you moving all your profits to, you know, Bermuda, let's apply some global tax that applies across the board, not to businesses like yours and mine. Or maybe you're making hundreds of millions, but not mine. And so they basically said, okay, everybody's going to raise their rates. So a country like Ireland, for example, said, okay, we're 12 and a half. If you meet the threshold, we'll bump it up to 15. What also happened was some of these countries that wanted to kind of get along were like, okay, well, we'll increase our tax rates just on everybody. And the UAE

did that. They said, okay, it's going to be 9% if you run an onshore business. But if you're in the free zones, which is where a lot of people would set up, there's different free zones in Dubai and all over the country, as long as you're not working with other UAE entities, you're not going to pay. It's still going to be zero. I said, okay, that's kind of like Hong Kong. If you're based in Hong Kong, you pay tax. If you're offshore, there's a way you can exempt yourself and not pay any tax. Okay, fine. Fair enough. Well, then they started creeping in more and more and more into the free zones to where now it's like most people running a business are going to pay 9%. Even like we looked at into, can we just keep our trademarks there?

Now, you have to do transfer pricing. You've got to move money into the UAE from your other companies to pay for the value of the trademarks that you're using. And then we're going to tax that at 9%. So the UAE basically rolled out a 9% tax on domestic companies. And then it's kind of been creeping into the companies that don't have any connection to Dubai. They just said, Hey, it's 0% tax.

What a nice place to go. I can get a bank account. I can get a residence permit. I give the UAE incredible credit for making the residence process that you mentioned incredibly easy. It is one of the easiest in the world. And if you want to personally live there, they've said for now it's going to be 0% tax on your personal. So if you would just have, again, stock earnings or something, well, actually stocks, if you have dividends, could be a problem. But if you just have capital gains, if you have Bitcoin, whatever, fine. But if you're going to run a business that's based in the UAE, I don't think it's that ideal. But I give them incredible

respect for how they've made immigration super easy. And it just proves the point. If you run your country to where you don't have a big social welfare system, you don't want people to get away with crimes. Why wouldn't you let anyone who sets up a company, anyone who invests some money, why wouldn't you let them come and be a resident? I mean, that's the way the US used to be. And so I see in that point, like it's kind of like the new American dream, anyone who wants to make something of themselves, come on in, we're not going to make it hard." And they don't. But I think on the tax side, in an effort to placate the global powers, they got a little bit more aggressive than they initially thought. And it's not the government's fault that the banks are difficult. I'm just not impressed by the banks. I mean, we are talking about a country that changed the weekend only a couple of years ago. And just people that don't know,

the Dubai weekend used to be Friday, Saturday. So your Friday night would have been a Thursday night and you went back to work on a Sunday morning. And one day, one day everyone just woke up and the government said, hey, guess what? The weekend is Saturday and Sunday now. All the British like, yeah, are you gonna kind of like, I'm working on Sunday? Like what the hell's that? Listen, I, and I

think, I mean, Saudi Arabia is kind of doing this now as well. I mean, Bahrain was always one of the more liberal ones. I mean, I think the whole Gulf with the UAE being the kind of the biggest standout has done an incredible job at what I would call, let's go out and figure out, basically go where you're treated best. Hey, who's doing this the best? Okay, let's just implement that. Okay, what do they got going on? Okay, that makes sense. No, but from a policy perspective. Yeah, how interesting.

Right. I mean, you know what the bit, here's what I can assess whether a country's a failure. And I know this because we have people who work in some of these countries, and that's why it was more affordable for us to go there. I don't know. That's not how we do it. We do it this way. Well, maybe the results suck, and you should change how you do it, but your pride gets in the way. I have a great respect for the UAE and these other countries. I mean, they have a pride for their country, but it's not, the pride doesn't get in the way of let's make the right decisions. Yeah. And they did an incredible job on that.

How would you say like philosophically non-monogamous when it comes to the procedures? Yes. Yes. Yes. I think, yeah, I think non-monogamy in the context of choosing countries and policies and things, it makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I've had in my head as you've been talking through all of this

today is, dear God, how much paperwork is associated with all of this? You're talking about, I mean, dude, I had to submit, and I'm aware I tried to get into a very difficult country to get into, but I had to submit a three inch thick 700 page hard copy portfolio for my 01. And, you know, to get a social security number and there's no license equivalency test. America has the worst. Hey, guess what, America? You can't drive. No one can drive in America. Right? No one. Everybody's a bad driver. There's no license equivalency between the UK and the US. So I need to retake my theory test in order to be able to get a driver's license in order to be able to get a car. But before I did that, I had to get a social security number. And in order to get a social security number, I had to show my I-94. But your I-94 is only triggered if you've entered the country through the border within the last three months, which meant that I had to leave

to go to the Bahamas to come back just to trigger this arbitrary number. So my point being, I've had to deal with lots of paperwork and I essentially live in two countries. I'm invested in some form or a stakeholder in two different countries. And you're this big long octopus with his tentacles wrapped around many countries. How would anybody even begin to get this started without just drowning in tons of correspondence? Well, I was in a bank not so long ago in Serbia. I think the banks are safe there. I think it's a nice diversification play, but it was never a place to put a lot of money. I said, okay, let me get a new debit card

just in case I need it, I'm never gonna need it, but just in case I carry around like this many debit cards. And I went to pick it up and they're like, oh, do you have a Dina card? I'm like, yeah, I guess it expired. So they're required by law to give you this card that you can make payments in Serbian Dinars. Like nobody uses it, but they're required for you to give you one. you one and they're like oh we've got to cut up your debit card

And what you've got to come back in a month, and I'm like I'm not here like I'm here like once or twice a year I'm not coming back So you know what go where you're treated best I'm just not gonna have a debit card, and I'll keep a little bit less money in that account and You know that's what it is. I'm probably going to sell some land I own next door in Montenegro. Just the thought of, oh my God, I got to build a villa. You know what? Someone's probably built a villa somewhere else, and I could just buy it if I want to. And you know what? Maybe I should just rent a villa for a while and just like put the money

to work. So I think that you've got to, you know, that's kind of the whole thought process behind what we're doing is like, you don't have to go to the US because yeah, I had some properties that I owned in the US and it was the most laborious process. Now, the US real estate market does have more liquidity than some of their markets, but where I own these properties, it wasn't that great. And I sold them and there were just so many fees and so many things to do and just like I mean I think that the grass was literally half an inch too long And I got a thing in the mail like violation and they're like they just want you to pay a hundred bucks That doesn't really exist in all the other countries. I just went through I go through end of the year

I pay all the bills for seven properties. I have one of the people on my finance team helped me and for seven properties. I have one of the people on my finance team help me and it's pretty darn easy. And I have people who have helped me. It's in many cases, in many countries, it's more informal. Someone was your real estate agent three years later. If you want their help with the air conditioning, I'll just go over there and check it out. You pay them a few bucks. So I found that, yes, there's bureaucracy. I mean, having, if you grow the business large enough, you just build an in-house team that specializes in it. We do it in-house. But I mean, the same with Dubai, it just became too much to manage. We just said, you know what, we're just going to go back where we were.

So it is go where you're treated best. And I think that, again, the US is an extreme outlier. I saw a statistic not long ago that if you're getting a green card interview for, I forget if it's like a sibling or what kind of family member you're trying to come as through family reunification from certain countries like India, Mexico, China, you applied in 1998. That's when you filed. That's when you did all the paperwork to get approved.

You're now coming in to finalize the process in 2020, well, it was 2023 then. Now, whatever you think about family reunification, I mean, we do that for people all the time. You know, someone gets a Portugal residence permit, then they add their wife through family reunification. It takes, you know, a month or two or something. There's something, the US system is broken.

And again, even in Ireland, just got someone a work permit the other day, so they can go and work there and they can work for their own company. It's kind of a tax-efficient way for them to live in the country. It took like a month and a half. for their own company and it's kind of a tax efficient way for them to live in the country. Took like a month and a half. The person made a small mistake. The solicitor pointed it out. Oh my God, I'm so sorry, said the government officer. That doesn't happen in the U.

I mean, the U.S. is an outlier. It's very adversarial, very cantankerous. It really is. I mean, and you had the best situation I mean go into a US Embassy in and I've been there in Georgia for example, you know and just watch the visa interviews there I mean, I mean, I like a nice touch. No, no, I went to Guatemala Yeah, I went to the the embassy there because the wait time I was 88 days into a 90-day ester about to go over, and if I had, I would have been immediately banned from the country for God knows how many years.

So I was like, right, well, I'll leave. Go to, God, I had the choice between El Salvador, Belize and Guatemala. And I was like, right, well, let's go to Guatemala. So I go to Guatemala, I'm able to get, no, Berlin 2024. This is 2022. It's taken ages because there's this backlog from COVID for people getting a one application blah blah blah London 2024 Guatemala next week. I'm like, hey, guess I'm going to Guatemala. Right. So that was I guess that was a little bit sort of nomads. I mean, you're still bird. I mean, I think you kind of stand out as the shining, you know, it's like, oh, I finally somebody I like an ex colonist. No, I mean, I think if you're British or Irish, I'm getting an L one is more straightforward. But no, it's, you know, people say, oh, you hate the US. I just don't think they're best at anything. I guess prisoner population per capita. They're not, they're not even best at obesity anymore. So, I mean, like, I just want to go where things are best.

And I, I would, if people take nothing away from this, I, I just, I never felt good in the U.S. again for multiple different reasons. But like when I started traveling, you know, the TSA, they open up your stuff, they're yelling at me. Just so many interactions with the government are unpleasant that when you go to so many other countries, it's, you think, oh, it must be the same. It's, it's not the same. It really isn't. That's, it's just not the norm. Let's say that there's someone who's listening to this, maybe two people, one of them is American

and one of them isn't. And they're thinking, Andrew made a bit of sense there. I don't feel a massive amount of affinity. I feel like I could do with a change. But I don't really know where to start and going to somewhere to simply be a tourist. Like I need to, perhaps I need to work in some regard. Where would you, like you mentioned that Dubai is very simple. What are some of the other places that's like on the, the new passport bro starter kit, who's what's included in that? Well, so I mean, my focus, I mean, I've been an entrepreneur my entire life, and I realized, you know, as maybe 20 years old, I had a Vonage phone. And if everybody remembers, Vonage, like a VoIP phone. And I would basically, you know, cold call people for my business. I

would call businesses. Hey, do you want to buy some advertising? And I realized pretty early on, why could I do this from anywhere? And eventually, I started to do as I was traveling. I resisted the urge to move fully, but there were some years I traveled more than half the year and I'd be in China and nobody would even know. I would literally call my clients that they wouldn't know the difference. And I think that's the perspective I come from is you have something that you can take with you. So first, I would develop that. Is it, you know, I'm a cryptocurrency trader, I'm a stock investor, I have an online business, I'm a consultant, yeah, freelancer, whatever I can take with me. The cool thing about the US

is there is more flexibility, again, not tax advice, but there's more flexibility generally speaking on keeping your US bank accounts And so you know, where's if you leave the UK or Canada? I give there's they're more like you should probably close that I Would get that in line first now. I think You know qual them poor versus like New York was like 25 cents on the dollar I mean, I just you know for cocktails 23 bucks. That's like one cocktail in Las Vegas or something. You don't have to make as much, but I would get to the point where I can support myself. I mean, Dubai does have

a lot of networking opportunities, depending on what you do. I think, I mean, it depends on your personality. I think a place like an Ireland where they speak English, where it's very open, I would say the UK, but the UK has no way to move there. We had Nigel Farage at No Med Capitalist Live a couple of years ago. I told him like, you got rid of the investor visa. The startup visa doesn't really work. Even when it rarely does work, it's like you have to be the next Facebook, or you have to be investing in the next Facebook.

Like there's just no way for a person with wealth or a business to move to the UK generally. It's just really just not a process for that. You can get a job and move to the UK, you can get married and move to the UK, but like a guy like me cannot easily move to the UK. So to me, that's kind of a bulwark. You know, I like a place like an Ireland, somebody else might like a place like a Switzerland that has maybe more

established, I don't know what you want to call it. I mean, Dubai, obviously, is a lot of very new money. What about Portugal? So Portugal were advertising for a while coming live in Lisbon, it's on GMT will give you a visa that's simple and so on. Is that not simple to get to? They are, but they got rid of the tax programs. They had a great tax incentive.

It was the crypto rows, right? They were looking to try and bring people in that were trading crypto. Okay, for crypto, yeah. Unfortunately, I've lost some confidence in Portugal. Not a bad place to live. For me, the places that I've mentioned today, Malaysia and Ireland, people complain in both cases

for opposite reasons about the weather. To me, the weather is the least important thing. If you can't handle some humidity, turn on the air conditioning. In Ireland and Dublin, it doesn't rain that much. So I think the use case for Portugal is like oh the weather is so nice. I've never entirely understood that one So some of their incentives have gone away. I mean the answer is there's something for everybody I mean, I think Mexico is an interesting place a lot of people have gone there

Is Mexico simple to be able to spend a three months six months? I'm gonna go and do my graphic design from there well, so I'm a big fan of having a residence permit, especially now. So Mexico technically is like the UK, you get 180 days visa free. But much like the UK, they're not doing it anymore. Hey, when are you leaving? I'm just here for the six months. Yeah, we don't accept that, get the hell out. Or I'll give you one month and then you need to leave If you can get a Mexican residence, which is pretty easy I mean everything's easy nothing is easy, but it's the qualifications are straightforward enough You have a couple thousand an income every month You can get a residence permit live there all you want obviously that if you live there too long

There's a tax planning question, but yes I mean Mexico is a straightforward place Latin America is a place where if you have income You can get a residence permit Asia is generally a place where you need to have wealth put some money in our bank buy a property You know put in six figures Latin America is the place where if you're just starting out Hey show us 800 a thousand 1200 $2,000 a month in income for the last three, six months, 12 months, whatever. Here's your residence permit.

You can live here all you want. So, I mean, I think Columbia is interesting. People live in Medellin. I'm in Bogota. I think all of Mexico is interesting. I mean, Mexico City in particular for me, but there's so many cities for me to pick. Portugal is interesting.

They got rid of the tax incentive. Italy has a very interesting tax incentive. People like that, you know, it just depends on what you want. I mean, I think we popularized the country of Georgia very tax friendly, not as affordable anymore with all the luxury that's coming. East of Turkey, south of Russia. Okay. In the Caucasus. Yeah. So now, you know, Georgia are mean. What's the culture like in Georgia? Decreasingly conservative. Coming into land. Yeah, I mean, it's a very kind of conservative, respectful culture laid back. So like Armenian

next door, they were always the ones who, there's like 40,000 Armenians in Uruguay. I went there and I saw Armenian restaurants. Georgians were always more like chill, enjoy, great food, great wine, great hospitality. If you know a Georgian, you've got like a friend for life. So in that regard, it's nice. The culture is a little bit different. I've enjoyed it, but I also see why some people could get stuck up on that. I mean, there's just so many places. And then there's Southeast Asia. I mean, Malaysia, Thailand. But that's those are a little bit more restricted to wealth and presumably a little bit more procedural.

You can get digital nomad visas. Thailand has the Thai elite visa you pay a fee every five years. So there are more affordable ways to do it if your goal is not permanent. You can also come to Malaysia for if your goal is not permanent. You can also come to Malaysia for 90 days on a tourist visa. I would guess if you left for a couple of weeks and came back, they'd give you another 90 days if you're a Westerner. If you're not a Westerner, it's 30 days and that becomes harder to navigate. If you can make $2,000 a month, I think it is, you can get a digital Nomad visa. That may not last

forever. The question is, what's your level of commitment to this? For me, when I left the US, I said, I lied to myself, I'm going to do this for a year. I knew I wasn't coming back. It was just, hey, keep the house, don't sell the house. But I always knew it was done. I think for some people, there's nothing wrong with saying, I'm going to have a five-year adventure. I'm gonna learn how the world works I'm gonna pick up some new ideas. I'm gonna learn. Hey, they do it over here same as we talked about in the UAE Hey, here's how they do this over here if I added that I bet that would make my business better I'm gonna save some taxes for five years. I'm gonna bring that money back and then just you know enjoy my life I don't think you have to do that. I mean I've talked about about, you know, having kids, I could have kids and

live in multiple places. You can hire a tutor. There's any number of different things you can do. Yeah, well, that's a question. Let's say that somebody does have kids. What's a solution that you look at for your clients, presumably a tutor that you would need to pay that would have to fly and be prepared to move with you? Well, I mean, some people just move to one place. They move and they put their kids in international school. We've got a private client right now. He's like, I want to move with you? Well, I mean, some people just move to one place. They move and they put their kids in international school. We've got a private client right now. He's like, I want to move to Thailand and I'm buying in the same complex as the school.

And I mean, there's something to be said for that. You could, you know, there's international schools a lot of places. You could home school a lot of places. I mean, some of the Northern European countries, you're pretty nasty on that, but most of the rest of the world is not. But if you don't want to homeschool yourself, as I know a family, we got a guy who's speaking at our live

event coming up this year named Joshua Sheets, and he's a family of four, and they homeschool them, and they travel around and they do it themselves. I also met a very successful guy in the entertainment business who is doing kind of my trifecta. He's like, I heard you say trifecta and he's like, that's kind of what I'm doing. He has the homes around the world and they hired a tutor that travels with them. So there's different ways to do it. So my point is I don't think that like this has to be a single person's game or a couple's game. I think you can keep doing it. If you decide to do it for five years and to get

the experience and to save the money, maybe you get an extra passport in the process if you settle down in one place. I think that's fine too. It's always good to have more options, have more knowledge. But the idea that you have to give it up because now it's time to settle down I mean, I I mean I Talked to my friend. I said bring your son your son's like 17 come over and visit me in Asia Bring him for two weeks take him out of school He'll learn more hanging around in Asia for two weeks than whatever they're teaching in the Chicago school system Okay, I mean believe me so, you know, we have this bias that whatever happens in our country somehow works. Now, we complain about our country.

Biden has sold us down the river. Trump is turning us into a fascist hellhole, whatever. Right. We complain about it, but somehow it's still the best in the world. And that's not just Americans. Everyone says, a lot of people say that. And it's like, well, wait a second. Again, what's best about it? Is your education system the best? Who was it the other day? It wasn't Guatemala, but it was something similar. Is now outpacing the US in math literacy or some shit.

Not Korea or something you've heard of, but it's like El Salvador or something. They're better now. And So you can't have kids? I have a non-zero cohort of friends who are around about my age, mid-30s, and I think, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, kids are probably gonna come along at some point, maybe they've got a partner or maybe they're looking or maybe they're engaged or married or whatever. And they're staring down the barrel of the US education system with trepidation. And they're thinking like, I don't know if I put a child in, I don't know what's

going to come out the other side. And, you know, look at how many different people are trying to innovate their way away from this. It's Waldorf schools or it's like, um, there's one here that that's run Apigee Park that's run by Tim Kennedy. And it's like all of this stuff sounds great, but like all of these things are largely unproven. Now that may be better than something that's proven to also be completely crazy or useless. But like, do I do I want my kid to learn how to whittle a flute out of a fucking stick? Like, am I going to teach him how to hold the ground like so the US you're totally correct Like we have these things

Education I had a friend I had a friend who moved to Dubai and he had a salary like a million dollar salary So he was screwed as an American because if you just have a salary you just get a small exemption You pay on the rest But he at least was still paying less than I lived in New York York City. And he told me when I had three kids, I had to earn $400,000 pre-tax as a student of school. Imagine for 13 years, you put $400,000 into some fund for those kids and you had them live in Dubai.

They'd learn another language. They'd learn international. They would do something else. You're telling me the extra money and not being in New York and being some international wouldn't be far better for them. Here's what else I think about it. One of the concerns that some of our clients have and some of my old friends in the US have is not just the low quality of education in the US, but, oh, they're teaching, you know, there's this whole social conversation. They're teaching woke. They're teaching this. They're teaching that.

And people sometimes get upset with me that I'm not so angry about this. You know, there's this whole social conversation. They're teaching woke. They're teaching this, they're teaching that. And people sometimes get upset with me that I'm not so angry about this. And I say I'm not angry about it because I don't even know what it is really, honestly. People aren't talking about that stuff where I live. And I don't have to be a part of it. I think that what makes people angry is powerlessness. And so we convince ourselves to stay in the bubble based on where we're born because because that's the best, that's what we're told, and we're fed the propaganda. But then we gain this sense of powerlessness because we don't like the way things are being done, and we get angry about it. We become miserable because we don't think there's another option. I have plenty of options because I've decided to have options. And so therefore, I don't have to sit around like,

I don't have to bother myself. Like, if I don't want to do something, so therefore I don't have to sit around like, I don't have to bother myself. Like if I don't want to do something or if I don't want my kids to learn something, whatever that may be, that's we're not going to do it. There's a solution to that. I don't have to feel powerless and carry this anger around with me. And I certainly don't have to think that I have to base my entire life on one politician getting elected and they're going to solve all my problems. I'd heard, I think I'd even heard you speak about some people that have traveled abroad when the wife is pregnant to give birth in another country.

How common is that as a nomadic strategy? Well, I mean, I think it's much more common for people to come to the U.S. and Canada and do that because, you know, most countries in the Americas have this birthright citizenship. If you're born on the soil, you're given citizenship. I actually know somebody from Armenia. I did not encourage them to do this. I wasn't even aware of it. They got a US visa. She and her husband, she came over and gave birth. Now she has an American child. That child cannot sponsor her. I was going to say, does that work upward for the parents? I think the child has to be an adult and then they can bring you.

And so that's a faster one. I don't think you're waiting 25 years for that one, but you might wait five years. Yeah. Well, you get away at the age, right. But the child always has the opportunities. They also have now this lifetime citizenship. So it's like, really, this person watches my stuff and they didn't think of that. But the reverse, I mean, so this, you know, Joshua Sheetz, they gave birth to one of their children in Costa Rica. And so now they all got residence permits in Costa Rica

and the child's a Costa Rican citizen. I think that's great because especially if you're like an American, Costa Rica is a nice antidote. Who hates the Costa Ricans? Imagine you want to travel. Okay, Costa Ricans need a visa to go to the US. Well, if you're a US citizen, you're going to go with your US pass we were required to. Costa Ricans can pretty much go to most of the rest of the world.

You know, Canada, Australia, they can't go. Those are kind of the toughest ones. But they can go to the UK, they can go to all of Europe. I mean, Costa Ricans are pretty well accepted all around the world. So are El Salvador, so are Guatemalans. I mean, those are pretty good passports, actually. You wouldn't think that the people, you see the entire story of that region is not so much Costa Rica, people are all trying to come to the US for more wealth. But if you have wealth, you have plenty of options in Central America. And so

I think it's an increasing strategy Brazil is one people go to Mexico is one Sometimes you can get citizenship faster in Brazil. It's one year if you've got a child or a spouse Now you've got to wait like an extra year to be processed. You probably should live there for a part of that two years but Now you've got to wait like an extra year to be processed. You probably should live there for a part of that two years. But, um, it's, in some cases, a strategy for you to get a residence or even citizenship in the country. But if nothing else, you're just giving your child an extra. And I mean, when I, when I met my wife, this is one of the things that's like, would you be willing to go, go to Brazil?

So all right, that sounds reasonable. I'm like, that seems like a pretty open minded person. Um, you know, again, I, I had a friend who told me, you know what? That sounds reasonable. I'm like, that seems like a pretty open-minded person. You know, again, I had a friend who told me, you know what your superpower is, is you don't have this nostalgia about things that cause you to put up barriers. Oh, we used to all go to the portilloes after high school. You don't get into that. And so my question is, it's very entrepreneurial, I think. Like you don't get into that. And so my question is, it's very entrepreneurial, I think. I wanna have my mother of my child give birth in Brazil,

for example. What do I need to solve for? I need to buy a few flight tickets so that family members can come, because that's what people want. Okay, we want our family there. I need to, maybe you've gotta go there X number of months early for certain kind of, you know

appointments throughout the pregnancy, you know, like That's what you have to solve for and the payoff is you now have a child who has a passport That potentially there's a domestic economy. I think Mexico is I mean look at the peso It's done incredibly. I was on CBS a couple weeks ago talking about the pay. It's incredible against the US dollar. Mexico is moving in the right direction. I think you're potentially giving them a passport in some of those countries. There's gonna be a lot of opportunities. If nothing else, it gives them an opportunity to travel, gives them more places to live. I mean, you're just giving them a whole world of opportunities. You mentioned there about living in a place before you perhaps move there.

In your experience, are there any locations that are fun to go on holiday and might seem romantic or seductive as an idea? But the reality of living there for one reason or another is not what the holiday promised? I was thinking the other day about Vienna so love Vienna and Now Austria has no tax program again. My goal is my goal is people confuse this. I'm happy to pay some level of tax We can argue with their taxes fair or not fair My goal is not to always pay zero if it happens that I pay zero great I pay a little bit great. I don't think any country is worth if you're a successful person 40 or 50 percent. Oh, you get free health care

Well, it's great. You made 10 million you paid 5 million you could have bought your own health care But I think that the challenge with some of those places that people like and my father loves Germany He just likes to vibe It's harder to meet friends there. I really like it optimizing people like, I mean, my father loves Germany. He just likes the vibe. It's harder to meet friends there. I really look at optimizing. Closed. I mean, I remember flying back from Vienna 14 years ago,

I sat next to the guy, American guy married to an Austrian woman. He said, it's just a harder place to make friends. Now, I think once you make friends in some of those places, it's they're better friends than you'd have like in LA. I mean, it's more serious friends. But I would say the same thing about Georgia, for example. I mean, I have always been helped whenever I need something.

It didn't take me that long to integrate. They're just open people. So I wasn't, I'm not saying this is good or bad. I love Austria. But I think that maybe some of those central European places that a certain kind of person like myself who doesn't like the Southern European laidback beach vibe, they think, oh, Austria, I love Vienna, but I think you're going to have a harder time making friends in a place like that.

And no, I don't think it's the language barrier. I can get by in Spanish. My Spanish isn't fluent enough. And I'm certainly not fast enough to engage in the long conversations that the barista in Bogota wants to have with me. If I solve for that, I could have tons of friends in Bogota. So that's an issue. The language barrier, I don't think in Eastern Europe that are very direct. I appreciate certain directness. Over time, the directness turns into brusqueness in some cases. Obviously, and I'm not a big fan of resort destinations.

I think people should... I don't understand the thing of living in a vacation, like living in a Caribbean island, but to each their own, somebody might like that. I'm not a laid-back person, but I think that you want to optimize for where can I make friends easily. And some of the happiest people that I know who are expats or even immigrants in very far-flung cultures, none of their friends are expats. I've got a friend who lives in Thailand, all of his friends are Thai, and they're educated, they speak English, he speaks some Thai, but they kind of accommodate him in English. But he thinks like a Thai person with some American attributes, but he really kind of has the whole kind of

Thai approach. And he's stuck with it for that reason. So I think that you want to maybe have some local friends. And if you have a hard time doing that, I think that's probably a place that's more difficult. How many of the clients that you're working with and the people that you come into contact with are doing the Nomad thing as a protection strategy, kind of like being a, I guess guess a global prepper in some regard How is that is that on the rise? What are you noticing with trends with regards to that?

It's an increasing number. I mean, there's always waves, right? So I think we're gonna see that again this year with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as those go up It just as we saw in 2021 COVID I think was a big big wake up call for people. And we can debate, you know, I'm sure there are some people who have views that are more extreme than mine. But I mean, governments around the world are pretty restrictive. And it showed that citizenship really is an obligation. I mean, if you were Australian, you couldn't leave and you couldn't return.

And look at how many people in Australia said, well, yeah, it's your fault you took a holiday to Mauritius. Like what about the rest of us? Like this whole kind of greater good. The individualism of you're a citizen, you've got a right to return to your own country. That's literally like international law, like the United Nations.

This is not like some right-wing concept. Was just thrown out the window. And so I think people realized in what people thought were these great infallible countries, like, oh, my country can screw me. They don't really care about me. I've been paying all these years and maybe I haven't even complained about paying. And now when I need support, I'm hung out to dry. And so I think you're seeing more people saying, yeah, I want a backup plan, whether that's about people want health freedom, we have people from the US that when Roe v. Wade was overturned, they said, I don't want to live in a country where abortion is not legal.

What people don't understand about me and my brand, I don't judge. I mean, to me, that's the international political views that I've kind of picked up. Again, the Dubai approach of let's just have the best, like what works. If you want to live in a country where there's legal abortion, I'm not going to judge you for that. If you want to live in a place where there's less of a vaccine mandate, I'm not going to judge you for that. I might agree with some of those positions and I might agree in part or I might not agree at all, but I think people are realizing that, again, where they're born doesn't mean it's always going

to align with their values. I think a lot of these countries are changing. And so, yes, more people are looking for a plan B. There's a fine line between kind of forcing people to do what you've done, which they may not be comfortable with, and trying to open their mind to the idea that you can leave. Again, I'll tell you what we get a lot. I want to leave in five years when the kids all graduate. I mean, could the kids not go to school somewhere else? Would that maybe not be better for them? I don't have kids in high school, so it's not for me to judge. I think

more people should have a plan A, not just because they can save money on taxes, but because I think you learn a lot. I think it changes you in very positive ways to live other places. And I think that people don't move because of this sense of fear. Again, they're happy to move to Florida, not happy to move an equal distance to some other places. And I think that people don't move because of this sense of fear. Again, they're happy to move to Florida, not happy to move an equal distance to some other country. But a lot of people want Plan B, citizenship, residence. Sometimes they want Plan B, C, D, E. So yeah, not everyone that we work with now is moving. Whereas when we started, it was, I want to move, I'm tired of paying tax. Now. Whereas when we started, it was I want to move. I'm tired of paying tax.

Now there's a lot of I don't want to move or I'll move later or maybe I'll, you know, get a residence permit and spend three months there in the winter. One of the guys I talked to, a very kind of wealthy guy, didn't realize as an American, he just can't go to Italy and spend four months. Yeah, you can't. It's 90 days, every 180. You need to get a residence permit. You need to get some kind of citizenship.

So it's kind of clearing up some of those basic misconceptions as well. But I think- You mentioned a couple of times today that Italian, whatever the tax implications are, and what is that? They've got a couple of programs. Uh, so Greece rolled one out, Italy rolled one out. They're kind of based on the Switzerland model. It's a lump sum.

So if you, if you have a high income, uh, you pay 100,000 years a year, if you're married, it's 125 and that's all you pay. And it's more flexible than like what Portugal system was like, where if you want to have your company in a tax haven and pay zero, you can do that. You live in Italy, whatever amount of time per year, and then you pay them this lump sum. So that's kind of based on the Swiss system

with different cantons. You can kind of negotiate different rates, but it's cheaper than Switzerland. And you can get citizenship in Italy, maybe in Greece. So that's kind of a flat amount. So if you make a million dollars a year or a million euros a year, that's 10% basically. They also have an Italy incentives

and they're gonna shorten it this year for how long you can do it. And they're gonna take away some of the most aggressive incentives, but you can reduce your tax rate, like it's a freelancer between 50 and 70% wherever, depending on where want to live in the country So like in the in the north it'd be like 50% reduction

So if the tax rate is 50% you pay 25 if you would live in the south, I think it's gonna go down to 70% So if the tax rate is 50 you pay 15 So it's not zero, but if you want lifestyle, I mean that's a much, you know better deal So it's not zero, but if you want lifestyle, I mean, that's a much better deal. One of the things I've been thinking today is you travel around the world, you have businesses in various locations, bank accounts in various locations,

and you mentioned about being able to use different currencies. If someone put a gun to your head and said you have to have all of your life savings into one currency that isn't the US dollar. All right, what would it be? I'm glad it doesn't happen. Certainly there's people who say it's big point.

I promise I'm not threatening you. Yeah, be careful on the US. You gotta, you know, they're pretty aggressive over there. I, you know, I, here's my construct. There's judgmental and there's not judgmental. Here's my construct. There's judgmental and there's not judgmental. And so, I think Singapore's a pretty non-judgmental country, i.e., if you go there on an African passport, they look at the list. Is your passport in the list? Okay, there, okay. Here you go. 90 days, welcome. Whereas if you do that in the UK, it's like, yeah, you got a visa, but like, eh, you know.

I think if you're going to hold a currency, that policy applies equally. One of the wealthiest clients we've ever worked with says, I'm from a place that the West doesn't like. I'm against my country, but I'm from a place like the country the West doesn't like. I don't trust the UK. I don't want my money in UK banks. I wouldn't want to live in the UK. And it's just, I mean, for better or worse, there's a judgment of like, we like these people, not like these people. I would probably say the Singapore dollar, it's based on a basket of different currencies. It's the freest economy in the world. They do a great job running it.

I mean, name a place where retail banks are lending money to the central bank. I would say Singapore dollar. What about you? So, let's say you're going around to smaller banks in these emerging or frontier countries or whatever. Can you actually put a significant amount of money deposited into the bank accounts there? Well, you can do whatever you want. Should you? Is the question. Okay.

So that first that question. And then also how do you assess bank risk? What's a good way to assess bank risk? Well, I mean, look at the bank failures in the US last year. I mean, there are more bank failures in the US than I think pretty much every other country combined. Um, so I, I think the risk is in the US now. You have the FDIC, which is basically broke has less than 1% of all the money.

And if, if you had a couple of big bank failures, they're wiped out. And so you're basically dependent on is the US Congress going to bail out banks? I'm not so convinced that, you know, oh, I've got millions of dollars in my bank account. Does the US Congress really want to be bailing out with taxpayer dollars in an increasingly kind of populist country? People who had millions of dollars in the bank. I'm not sure if it comes to that they're going to. So, I mean, I look at banks in places like Singapore, there's some of the highest rated in the world. That's not an emerging economy. But some of those banks might have operations in other countries. I mean, look at a country mentioned Cambodia, there are stable Asian banks that opened

up offices in Cambodia, people are going and investing in Cambodia, they're building my friend's strategy as he's buying real estate on corners in the city center that one day we'll get torn down to build skyscrapers or shopping malls because they're doing it. I mean, when I first went to Cambodia, they had like one skyscraper. Now they're going up everywhere. It's like a front running gentrification. Front. It's a good, it's like a band name or a book name or something.

So. Like, yeah, am I going to get go to Cambodia, invest in like, you know, some local bank? I mean, no, I'm not going to put as much money there. Am I going to go to Armenia and invest in the bank that's like owned by a guy? I mean, this like in Serbia, I mean, there are some banks like the 18th largest bank is like it's owned by like a guy. No, but I can go to Armenia and there's banks like there's French banks.

Yeah, I'm gonna feel comfortable doing that because like, do you think if that French bank in Armenia collapses that nobody in France is gonna pull their money from that bank? Of course they are. So they have to make sure they move the money around. So I think the risk is based on the quality of the institution. I mean, in Georgia, the two largest banks are traded on the one that's stock exchange. That doesn't mean they can't go under. Just like banks in the U.S.

were on the U.S. stock exchange, they went under. But I think that if you look at those factors, under. But I think that if you look at those factors, you can find decent banks. In a country like Ecuador, it's a lot of credit unions, very high interest rates, the US dollar's official currency, which I actually kind of like because if anything ever happens, they're not going to force you to take their currency. But the banks are, there's no big, huge banks that you would trust like all your life savings. I think for me, the point is I wouldn't trust any of my life savings. I mean, think about it. Look at Nigel Farage in the UK, whether you like him or not, you know what?

We just don't want your business anymore. I mean, that can happen anywhere. So I mean, I've had things happen to me where they're like, you know What who oh you're charging for that like yeah, you're not really the kind of client we want And then what do you do? Like the same bankers that want you like oh give us all your business are the same ones that would cut you off at the knees So I don't care how stable the bank is. I don't want any bank to have all my money I just don't. But, you know, for me, yeah, I might put, if you put a million dollars

in Singapore, would you put a hundred thousand dollars in the Bank of Georgia? Obviously, you know, in some of those emerging world banks, if you're willing to take on other currencies, I mean, the Georgian lari is done incredibly well in the last couple years. Meanwhile, you made 13% interest. So if you don't have any better places to park your money, that's an interesting kind of diversification. There's some countries, if you do that, you can get a residence permit, for example. So it's like, how does this stuff all work together? I wouldn't move $200,000 to a Dominican Republic bank. But if you told me, oh, we'll give you a fast track to citizenship, I'd be I'm interested in that. Right. So I think it all comes down to what are you getting out

of the deal, higher interest rates, residence, citizenship, or just in the case of like, in a Cambodia, it's probably safer than you think. I'll give you one more thing. There's banks in places like the Bahamas, they don't even keep your money. They just have accounts at bigger banks all around the world that would never take you as a client, you know, BNB Paribas in France or Qatar National Bank Qatar

Oh god I like this the the stub hub ticket reseller of bank accounts They're basically just yeah, I mean there's small banks they take your deposits and they just have your money somewhere They don't make loans, right? I mean like why is it like the US banks getting so much trouble? I mean, they just lend out to the Hilt. And they're, you know, they're so aggressive in some cases. You get a Hong Kong. Hong Kong is actually opening up more now for banking. But why is Hong Kong historically been so difficult to get a bank account? The banks literally don't want more money. They're so conservative, they have nowhere to put it. literally don't want more money. They're so conservative, they have nowhere to put it.

That's wild. That is absolutely crazy. What do you make of the meme of the passport, bro? Because you have been doing this for significantly longer than that meme has come about. But there is a strong trend at the moment of especially Western, especially men, deciding that there is a problem with the

culture or the dating or the government or whatever it is. And then going, right, yeah, I'm out of here. Were you an early adopter of this or is this sort of playing into your guys's culture in some way? What are you seeing? I'll be honest. I don't entirely know I my thought is that that passport bro is kind of more focused on the dating element, right? And that's kind of the core driver of it um, I think for me many many many years ago um, I mean I I was An entrepreneur. I wanted to be an entrepreneur at 12 years old. It wasn't cool back then like now. It's cool

It wasn't cool. I wanted to be an entrepreneur at 12 years old. It wasn't cool back then. Like now it's cool. It wasn't cool when I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so, you know, I wasn't the most popular guy. You just a weird kid. Yeah, just kind of like, who's this, the guy wants to start a business, you're a freak. I remember like being 21 and my friends would drag me to bars and girls would like, you know, make fun of me. Cause I was good like, you know, business meetings

and it was embarrassing in retrospect. Like, you know, go to these business. Excited. I was good, like, you know, business meetings, and it was embarrassing in retrospect, like, you know, go to these business meetings, but like, like, why are you wearing cufflinks? Like, what are you, a weirdo or something? And I remember being like 22 or 23, and I was on one of my early trips, and I met this girl from China. And she's like, all the stuff that everyone else that was weird, she's like, fascinated by like an Asia. It's like, what is it?

Like you're 23 and you have like a business and you're making money and like it's growing Like that's pretty like that's pretty like saw like nobody in China would be like under 50 would be doing that like that's pretty cool and It kind of showed me this kind of arbitrage opportunity you know, I mean, yeah, I've You know dated people around the world is it's interesting I never looked at it as something where you know, I've never wanted to be one of these guys where it's like I'm going to places I've never chosen a place for dating like Kuala Lumpur probably not a great dating location That's probably why some of the people don't choose it

I mean Thailand or Indonesia is probably better. So I've never really chosen a place based on on dating but So I've never really chosen a place based on dating, but I've enjoyed meeting people from different places. I never wanted to make dating kind of the only aspect, but I certainly think that people should seek competition in their life. I think the biggest thing, I mean, you look for competition for a restaurant, you look for competition if you're buying a product. I mean, people use apps and how can I save $3

buying this product somewhere else? Why don't you use competition for your taxes and for the government that serves you? Why don't you use competition for the people that you meet? And again, I mean, really is your, whether you just want to find a short-term relationship or whether you're looking for your soulmate or whatever you whatever it is Are the odds that they live around you? I mean really out of all people Out of 8 billion people the person that matches you Happen to also be born in Cleveland, Ohio. It seems ridiculous to me, right? And and if you look back throughout human history, I mean, people didn't have so many options that just learned to live with it. But like, you lived in a village and there were 50 people and you just like chose one. And really, those were the happiest relationships. Those are

the most fulfilling relationships. So I mean, I, I, I, yeah, I'm, you know, I'm not the guy. Remember, we were doing real estate and Medellin years ago, and people wanted to buy property for Airbnb. And we would go to some of the buildings, and they were like, oh, this one, the government's for Airbnb, but the building banned Airbnb. And one place they went, they told a story of some woman was coming home with her child, and a guy was being serviced in the elevator. The elevator door opens and there's this guy with the woman and it's like, yeah, we don't

want these people coming here anymore. Obviously, the idea that an American guy goes to Columbia and wants to find someone to date, I see nothing wrong with that at all. Some people do. That's ridiculous. But obviously, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to have a certain level of class about it that we're not doing things in L.

That's the optimal way to do it. Look, Andrew, I really love your work. I think it's a very first principles approach to people who live on a rock. And these lines around it are pretty arbitrarily drawn apart from the oceans and even they weren't done of your own choosing. And to think about it from first principles I really really like it I think your input is is massively needed and really hugely inspiring actually so I really really love all of the stuff that you're doing if someone wants to get started with this, if they said, right, I'm bought in, this sounds like it's something that's kind of cool. What are the first places that they should go? We have a YouTube channel, I think, over 2,500 videos. We put something out, you know, 15, 16 times a month with these ideas. You can watch and get the vibe. Our website, we've got almost that many articles,

nomadcapitalist.com. If you wanted a bit more aggregated, I wrote a book called Nomadcapitalist. It's on Amazon. It's more storytelling than specific ideas. We talk about some of the ideas. We talk about what's not possible. We talk about what you can do through the lens of 15 years of my exploring this. So the book is a way to aggregate it down into a shorter read. And then we host this annual event called Nomad Capitalist Live and we bring a curated list of people who, everything from frontier market investing to, you know, giving birth overseas to lowering your taxes. We bring some of our staff that talks about our client

work. So, you know, from free to 10 bucks to live events. And then you'll do white glove service, I'm going to guess as well, for the people that need it. Yeah, if you have, you know, a mid six figure income or a low seven figure net worth or above, we work with people all the way up to, you know, billionaires to put together these holistic strategies because you heard me multiple times throughout saying, okay, well, this bank account probably isn't working its own. But if you got a citizenship because you opened it, like, you know, you want to, you want to kind of consider the holistic nature. And you have to consider the holistic

nature given our tax conversations. I mean, nothing works in a vacuum. You can't just put your company in the British Virgin Islands and not move and think you're going to save tax because there's all kinds of rules around how that works. And so you have to understand that. And so that's what we help people figure out is not only the known unknowns, but the unknown unknowns. Gallia, Andrew, I appreciate you. Thank you for today. Thank you.