Live, Retire, Invest In The Dominican Republic, Malaysia, And Panama

World’s Top Three Retirement Havens

May 24, 2009
Panama City, Panama

PLUS: World's Most User-Friendly Expat Haven...Expat Life In KL, City Of Contrasts...No Place Is Perfect...Can You Borrow To Buy Overseas?...

AND: Coming This Week: Top Developer Financed Buys...

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"This Was A 10! Great Event. Awesome Job By The Live and Invest Overseas Team!"

We missed you in Panama City for our Live & Invest in Panama Conference, but here's your second chance to access all the insider and expert insights and information shared over the five intense days of this event.

This is everything you need to know to plan for a new life, your retirement, a real estate investment, or a new business in 2009's Land Of Opportunity.

Plus: How to live tax-free (and still be 100% compliant).

Our Live & Invest in Panama Home Conference Kit is available right now and through Midnight, Thursday, May 28, only. Full details here.
 
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Dear Overseas Opportunity Letter Reader,

As you survey the world map this morning, in search of opportunity, here are three places you should focus your attention:

• In the Caribbean: The Dominican Republic, perhaps the world's most user-friendly expat haven, says our Editor Rebecca Tyre, just back from a scouting trip. "Yes, this is a touristy country," Rebecca explains, "but that has its benefits. All that tourist infrastructure amounts to an extensive network of businesses and services that the expat can easily plug into. As an expat in the DR, you have many more choices for the kinds of amenities you might be looking for than you'll typically find in other countries.
  
  "Furthermore, gaining full-time legal foreign residency is a straightforward proposition. You simply apply for provisional residency and then deposit the equivalent of US$15,000 in a Dominican bank. After one year, you are granted full residency.
  
  "The truth is, though, many expats don't even bother going this legal route. Many stay on the island indefinitely as 'tourists..."
   
• In Asia: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, city of contrasts. As Correspondent Wendy Justice explains, "Kuala Lumpur's ultra-modern city center, with dozens of skyscrapers, overlooks Kampung Baru, a traditional Malay village and Kuala Lumpur's oldest neighborhood, which has somehow managed to survive less than half a mile away.
  
  "Beneath the shadows of the Petronas Towers, the Public Bank skyscraper, and the towering Wisma Celcom, Muslim families raise vegetables, hold open house on their front lawns, and tend to chickens roaming freely on the quiet streets.
  
  "In Kampung Baru, there is little traffic. Villagers make their way home from the Saturday market carrying orange plastic bags filled with produce and whole chickens, children laughing and scampering around them.
  
  "People stop when they see me. Few foreigners ever make it to Kampung Baru.
  
  "Loudspeakers at a nearby mosque broadcast the afternoon prayers, sung so artfully that I pause to listen. A family approaches, the woman wearing her headscarf and traditional two-piece, long-sleeved gown, her husband at her side with his white, woven Muslim cap.
  
  "'Good morning!' they say, then 'How are you?'
  
  "It is late afternoon, so I know that English is not their primary language. I am an outsider here, yet I am made to feel welcome.
  
  "It takes only a few minutes to leave this little village and return to the 21st century. The stainless steel Petronas Towers, visible from almost everywhere in Kuala Lumpur, serve as my landmark. They are 88 stories high (8 being a lucky number for the Chinese), connected to each other halfway up by a skybridge. They are beautiful to look at, gleaming during the day, illuminated at night, and startling in their height..."
   
• In the Americas: Panama. "Kathleen, I don't get it," wrote one reader regarding our position on this country. "Two days ago, you sent a message telling us nine reasons not to move to Panama, which sounded very negative. Now you send another message saying Panama is paradise. What is the truth?"
  
  Both things are true, I explained to this reader.
  
  As we discussed with attendees at our Live & Invest Overseas Conference earlier this month, Panama offers an abundance of opportunity right now. This is the best place in the world to retire, to start a business, to be tax-efficient, to invest in raw beachfront, and to have a grand adventure.
  
  Panama is 2009's top retirement, offshore, tax, and investment haven. That is not to say it's perfect. And that is not to say it's for everyone.
  
  There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all retirement or investment haven.
  
  Panama checks a lot of boxes. In addition to its retirement, investment, tax, banking, and offshore advantages, this country also boasts two long coasts and many sand-fringed islands. In its interior, the climate is spring-like year-round. In the waters off its coasts, the fishing, diving, and snorkeling are among the world's best.
  
  There are reasons Lief and I are in Panama right now, when, in truth, we could be anywhere in the world. Over the past few years, as we surveyed the global landscape in search of a place to indulge our entrepreneurial inclinations, we considered a dozen places. We concluded that nowhere else offers a comparable combination of advantages.
  
  On the other hand, we're not blind to Panama's downsides nor to the challenges and frustrations of living here.
  
  It's a question of priorities. What's important to you? What could you not live without?

• Nowhere in the world has it ever been as easy to borrow money to buy real estate as it has been in the United States of America over the past decade. You could borrow more than the cost of the property you were buying, even, with a fixed rate of interest and a nice, long repayment term.
  
  During this time, as a result, the easiest way for an American to source capital to purchase real estate anywhere in the world has been to borrow it at home. Pull equity out of his U.S. property. Or simply find some U.S.-based outfit willing to lend him money for property purchase elsewhere.
  
  One consequence of this easy credit market in the States has been that it hasn't mattered that financing is nowhere else in the world as easy to come by...especially if you're a foreign buyer.
  
  That is to say, over the past decade, as property markets worldwide have heated up and, in some cases, bubbled over, Americans have been able to participate by bringing their cash with them.
  
  Those days are over. Good luck these days finding a lender in the States to write you a loan to go buy a beachfront lot in Nicaragua or a condo in Panama City.
  
  Again, the markets we deal in operate on cash, with very limited exceptions. If you can't bring it with you from back home, you do have options...but not many and not always good ones.
  
  In Europe, you can borrow locally as a foreign buyer. Lending criteria have always been more conservative than in the States...and continue to be. And the product line is more limited.
  
  Adjustable-rate mortgages, not fixed, are the norm.
  
  Best case, the lender might give you 20 or 25 years to repay. No such thing, really, in Euro-land as a 30-year loan.
  
  And you're going to be required to get local life insurance for the entire term of the mortgage. In the U.S., you can get life insurance until age 100. In most of the rest of the world, you probably won't find anyone willing to write you a policy past age 75. Meaning that, if you're 65 when you apply for a mortgage, you're looking at a repayment term of 10 years.
  
  Straight up, you aren't going to be able to borrow to buy real estate in Asia as a foreigner. On the other hand, in many markets in this part of the world, you aren't going to be able to own real estate as a foreigner anyway...so it's not really an issue.
  
  Which brings us back to the Americas. The property bubbles of the past decade in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama City, and elsewhere have been fueled largely by Americans either speculating or buying retirement and second homes with money borrowed in the States.
  
  Now that that source of funding has evaporated, what are your options in Central and South America?
  
  Developer financing, which is increasingly a possibility, as developers in this part of the world are hungrier and hungrier, month by month, to stimulate sales. I know developers in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, and Uruguay, for example, who are more open to carrying back part of your purchase price than ever before in the 25 years I've been covering this beat.
  
  More this week, as we bring you especially interesting developer financing opportunities in our favorite markets.