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    Super Cheap

    • Chitré, Panama
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    • Phuket, Thailand
    • Dumaguete, The Philippines

    Cheap

    • Medellin, Colombia
    • Boquete, Panama
    • Kyrenia, Cyprus
    • Hua Hin, Thailand
    • The Algarve, Portugal

    Affordable

    • Valencia, Spain
    • Cascais, Portugal
    • Las Terrenas, The DR
    • Pisa, Italy
    • La Rochelle, France
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    Luxury

    • Ambergris Caye, Belize
    • Kotor, Montenegro
    • The Panama City Beaches
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  • Home
  • Countries

    Top Destinations:

    Whether you’re looking for fun and sun, a peaceful retirement, or the chance to earn some extra income, you’ve got a real world of opportunity open to you… In short, we’ve done our best to narrow down your best options, but only you can decide the right country for you.

    • Spain
    • Portugal
    • Panama
    • Belize
    • Colombia
    • Cyprus
    • Mexico
    • France
    • Montenegro
    • Browse All Countries

    Best For:

    • The Best Places To Retire
    • Health Care Abroad
    • Cost Of Living
    • Investing in Real Estate
    • Establishing Residency
    • Gun Laws In The World
    • English-Speaking Countries
    • Safest Places For Retirement
    • Best Places In Latin America
  • Budgets

    How Much Will It Cost You To Live Overseas?

    The only honest answer is, we have no idea. And neither does anyone else. The only one who can answer that question is you. Here’s the most important thing to understand about budgeting your new life overseas…

    Super Cheap

    • Chitré, Panama
    • Santa Marta, Colombia
    • Phuket, Thailand
    • Dumaguete, The Philippines

    Cheap

    • Medellin, Colombia
    • Boquete, Panama
    • Kyrenia, Cyprus
    • Hua Hin, Thailand
    • The Algarve, Portugal

    Affordable

    • Valencia, Spain
    • Cascais, Portugal
    • Las Terrenas, The DR
    • Pisa, Italy
    • La Rochelle, France
    • Mazatlán, Mexico

    Luxury

    • Ambergris Caye, Belize
    • Kotor, Montenegro
    • The Panama City Beaches
    • Paris, France
  • Resources

    Global Living

    • Living & Retiring Overseas
    • Raising A Family Abroad
    • Foreign Residency & Citizenship
    • Offshore & Diversification

    Making Money

    • International Real Estate
    • Banking
    • Employment
    • Investing

    Follow Us:

    • Meet Our Experts
  • Real Estate

    Buying Real Estate For Cashflow

    • Discover tips and strategies used by global property investing veterans

    Explore Our Latest Posts

    • Learn how to invest and purchase property abroad…

    Go To The Overseas Property Alert Site

    • How To Become Independently Wealthy And Fund The Lifestyle Of Your Dreams
  • Conferences

    Upcoming Events

    • Explore Our Events Site

    Live and Invest In Spain Conference

    Offshore Wealth Summit

    Greece Workshop

    VALENCIA, SPAIN

    Sep. 17-19, 2025

    PANAMA CITY, PANAMA

    Oct. 15-17, 2025

    VIRTUAL

    Nov. 13, 2025

    Learn More About This Event
    Learn More About This Event
    PRE-REGISTER
    Learn More About This Event
    PRE-REGISTER
    • MORE EVENTS

    Contact Our Events Team

    Toll-Free U.S. and Canada:
    1 (888) 627 8834
    From Outside North America:
    1 (443) 599 1221
    Working Hours
    Monday – Friday 08:00 am – 17:00 pm EST.

    Reach us with your questions by email at: events@liveandinvestoverseas.com

  • Store

    Unlock The World

    • Access Your Library

    Overseas Havens Reports

    • Expats' comprehensive destination guides

    Conference Kits

    • Hours of coverage  from our latests conferences

    Lahardan Books

    • Titles on living and investing around the world
    • Explore Our Store
    Your passport to a life well-lived abroad

    Services

    overseas living letter offers affordable retirement guidance
    The Simon Letter Wealth Protection Insights
    Global Property Advisor Global Investment Opportunities

    Our Customer Service team is here to assist with any questions or concerns CustomerService@LiveandInvestOverseas.com

  • My Library
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Home Investing

3 Key Benefits Of Overseas Property Investment

by Lief Simon
Jun 10, 2025
in Investing
0 0
Benefits of overseas property showcased by luxury residential apartments, condos, and townhomes in the hills of Monte Carlo, Monaco, overlooking the Rock, Mediterranean Sea, and marina along the Riviera.

Luxury residential apartments, condos and townhomes in the hills of Monte Carlo, Monaco. AdobeStock / @Kirk Fisher

Two core benefits of investing in property overseas are high-yield rental income and capital appreciation.

But there’s another strategic benefit that demands your attention right now: currency diversification.

Currency diversification means spreading your wealth across multiple currencies to protect it in case any particular currency crashes.

People from Argentina have long understood the importance of this. During Argentina’s 2001-2002 financial crisis, Argentines with savings in banks woke up one morning to find that their account values had been decimated.

The government removed the peg between the peso and the U.S. dollar and converted all bank accounts from dollars to pesos overnight.

Argentines who came out financially unscathed were those who had been accumulating physical U.S. dollars and keeping as much of their wealth outside the country as possible.

Stockpiling greenbacks in safety deposit boxes is a strategy that many Argentines employ to this day. Argentina is home to the second-highest number of physical U.S. dollar bills outside the United States (after Russia).

At some point, we may not have to look as far as Argentina for an example of the importance of currency diversification…

Financial commentators have speculated about the weakening of the U.S. dollar for years. De-dollarization is an ongoing global trend, and the U.S. dollar is experiencing notable weakness right now because of economic, political, and monetary factors.

Regardless of how those factors play out, the message is clear: reliance on the dollar exposes your portfolio to risk. There’s no time to delay getting your diversification plan started and avoid becoming a case study like Argentina…

The 2025 International Property Summit—coming up June 18—could put you on the fast track to achieving currency diversification. More on that here.

First, What Is Diversification?

Diversification is taking some action offshore that helps ensure that you’re not at the mercy of any single market, economy, political landscape, government, or currency.

It comes in many forms, from pursuing multiple residencies and citizenships to opening bank accounts in various jurisdictions, investing in varied asset classes, and holding businesses offshore.

I’m homing in on the importance of currency specifically. Everyone agrees that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, and the same rule applies to currencies.

Diversification into various currency baskets is a way of protecting the value of your assets from problems in one financial jurisdiction.

For Americans, this means spreading your wealth among multiple currencies—creating stores of value and investing in cash-flowing opportunities that bring in euros, pounds, francs, and so on.

How To Achieve Currency Diversification Quickly

One of the smartest and fastest ways to achieve currency diversification is to invest in property overseas.

This immediately moves money outside of the United States and into a different market, creating a store of value in a different currency and economy.

This can insulate you from risk because that market may be immune to disruption in the U.S. market and fare better than the United States during the next crisis.

An overseas property investment can also bring diversification of market, type of investment, and type of property… All welcome benefits on top of currency diversification.

It’s also a bolthole that you can escape to if life becomes unbearable for you back home.

If you invest in a rental property, you can start earning income in the local currency, providing a pool of local funds that you can dip into when you spend time in that place or if you have local bills to pay.

This eliminates the issue of having to move money across currencies and being affected by inopportune fluctuations in the exchange rate.

Not all foreign property markets bring currency diversification, however…

Some countries’ economies use the U.S. dollar (Panama and Ecuador, for example). Other countries, like Belize, peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar.

Some countries (Nicaragua, parts of Mexico, etc.) have their own currencies but price real estate in U.S. dollars, meaning that your currency hedge isn’t as clean as it could be.

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What Diversification Is Not

Owning different kinds of properties in different cities and states across the United States isn’t diversification if it’s all invested in the United States.

However, neither is moving all your real estate investment capital out of the United States and placing it in any other single market—Panama, for example, or Colombia, or Brazil.

A past conference attendee once boasted that he’d diversified his real estate portfolio overseas. He’d sold off all his U.S. real estate, which had been a sizable portfolio, and bought a bunch of properties in Nicaragua.

He hadn’t diversified. Instead, he’d simply moved all of his real estate risk from one country to another. Now his personal wealth is completely exposed to whatever might come to pass in Nicaragua.

A global property diversification strategy may include investments in the United States, but it must also include investments in at least two (and preferably at least three) other countries, ideally each with its own currency.

Exchange Rate Impact

Exchange rates will affect your purchase price, ongoing expenses, and profits upon exit if you’re investing in a country where the U.S. dollar is not the local currency.

Using the Mexican peso as an example, it has been trading between 19 and 21 pesos per $1 in recent years. Even within this narrow band, the exchange rate impact can be significant. For a property valued at 7 million pesos, that 2-peso spread can cost or save you more than $35,000.

Exchange rates can work in your favor, especially when the U.S. dollar is strong. It’s currently strong against the Colombian peso and the Brazilian real, enhancing your buying power in those places.

Don’t Try To Time It

Just like we don’t recommend buying property solely for capital appreciation, we don’t recommend trying to time property purchases with exchange rate fluctuations.

It’s impossible to predict that you’re going to make money on a currency transaction in advance. Pay attention to property values rather than currency movements when shopping for real estate overseas.

Stay diversified,

Lief Simon signature
Lief Simon
Director, Overseas Property Alert

Tags: 'buying property overseas''Diversification Offshore''rental properties'currency exchange
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Lief Simon

Lief Simon

Lief Simon has lived and worked in 7 countries on 5 continents and traveled to more than 75 countries. His real estate investment career began with a $5,000 down payment on a three-flat building in Chicago. Less than three years later, Lief sold the building for a leveraged return of 3,000%—$150,000 in profit after closing costs and commissions.

From there, he turned his attention overseas and has bought property in 24 countries including France, Croatia, Portugal, Ireland, Belize, Spain, Argentina, Cyprus, Romania, and beyond. Thanks to his decades-long career as a global property investor, Lief has built a multi-million-dollar portfolio that includes rental properties, significant land holdings, and 7 personal residences.

Lief has established residency in 3 countries and acquired a second passport from Ireland.

In 2008 Lief and wife Kathleen Peddicord made the most important investment of their lives—a 215-acre oceanside finca, known as Los Islotes. There, on Panama’s largely undiscovered Veraguas coast, they’ve installed underground electricity, water, and internet and built a forever family home that sits at the heart of their ultimate vision: a gold standard private residential community for those in search of a true safe haven escape.

Lief’s latest book, “Cowboy Millionaire—The New American Pioneer,” collects all the wisdom he has learned in three decades of living and investing outside America.

He offers advice on international diversification in his twice-weekly Offshore Living Letter and monthly Simon Letter dispatches. For real estate investment opportunities, check out his monthly Global Property Advisor service.

If you’d like to meet Lief in person, join him for one of our upcoming in-country conferences. You’ll find further details here.

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To Live Overseas?

Super Cheap

  • Chitré, Panama
  • Santa Marta, Colombia
  • Phuket, Thailand
  • Dumaguete, The Philippines

Cheap

  • Medellin, Colombia
  • Boquete, Panama
  • Kyrenia, Cyprus
  • Hua Hin, Thailand
  • The Algarve, Portugal

Affordable

  • Valencia, Spain
  • Cascais, Portugal
  • Las Terrenas, The DR
  • Pisa, Italy
  • La Rochelle, France
  • Mazatlán, Mexico

Luxury

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Reach us with your questions by email at: events@liveandinvestoverseas.com

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