What Were We All Doing Running Around In The Desert In Full SWAT Gear?
“What was the most fun thing you did while you were away?” asked my Spanish tutor Friday morning as we sat down for my first class since returning to Panama City following 10 weeks of travel over the summer…
Late last June, Lief and I flew from Panama to Lisbon. From there, we were in the Algarve, Paris, London, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, and Krakow. It was an unforgettable trip, most of it spent with our children…
But do you know what’s sticking with me as a best memory of our summer adventures?
From Eastern Europe, we flew to Las Vegas to host our annual Retire Overseas Conference. Two days before that event, friends from around the world in town for the conference spent the day with us in the desert outside Vegas.
What were the 15 of us, including friends from Portugal, Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, and Belize, doing together in the Nevada sun?
SWAT training.
Once or twice a year, we gather as many friends as we can and engage in something completely outside the box, something that most or even none of us has ever done before. When we scheduled this year’s Retire Overseas Conference in Las Vegas, Lief went online to research unconventional group activities in and around Sin City.
“How would you guys like to meet Kathleen and me a couple of days before the conference to engage in SWAT lessons?” read the email he sent to a couple dozen friends.
Among those who were able to carve out time in their schedules to participate in the unorthodox day Lief designed for us were our Portuguese and Colombian attorneys, none of whom had ever before fired a pistol.
Yet there they were standing in the desert in full SWAT gear learning to shoot and strategize in the pursuit of bad guys.
I think they got a bigger kick out of the day’s activities than even the rest of us.
“Hey, I’m tired of being a good guy,” our Portuguese attorney friend Duarte declared late in the afternoon, after we’d spent a couple of hours running house-clearing exercises.
We, the SWAT trainees, would storm the purpose-built-for-training house en masse to engage the “bad guys.” Our SWAT instructors took turns filling the different bad guy roles.
“Could I play a bad guy next round?” Duarte finally asked…
The memory of watching the retired Navy SEAL SWAT commander, ever patient and ever professional, give instruction to a bunch of novices with English as a second language makes me giggle even now.
Not everyone would be up for a day of SWAT in the desert sun, but, somehow, after three decades moving and doing business around the world the way I have, I’ve been lucky enough to find and form friendships with several dozen folks for whom the idea isn’t cuckoo but irresistible once put on the table.
These are hard-working, super-smart, uber-successful people who share a world view and who have learned not to take themselves or anything else too seriously.
People seizing opportunity at every turn… including an opportunity to spend eight hours together in Las Vegas last month learning what it means to be a member of a SWAT team.
Much of the allure is the like-minded company. Spending time and doing business with these guys (and gals) is, for me, the biggest benefit of the live-and-invest-overseas lifestyle Lief and I try to embrace.
It was in this spirit that last week we did something else we’ve never done before…
Last week we launched a new VIP membership service that is not at all conventional. For us that’s a considerable part of the appeal.
This could be just the thing you’ve been looking for, the most valuable opportunity you’ll encounter this year, maybe in your lifetime… or maybe you won’t be able to imagine why you’d ever need this.
You’ll recognize straightaway if this invitation is for you or not.
This new outside-the-box membership is also the most strictly limited of any we’ve extended.
We’re calling our new VIP program Live and Invest Overseas Private Access… and into this new group we’re accepting 10 members only.
Lief and I wouldn’t feel comfortable promising the level of support we’re promising to this group if it were any bigger than that.
Plus, remembering practicalities, we can’t fit any more people than that into our home in MedellĂn, Colombia, where we will personally host all of our Private Access clients this January.
As I said, this isn’t for everyone…
But if you’re ready to take your live-and-invest-overseas agendas to the next level, this could be what you’ve been looking for.
Details of this new VIP membership—which kicks off with a private weekend retreat in MedellĂn with Lief, me, and some of our advisor-friends (including, yes, the Colombian attorneys who joined us in Vegas for SWAT day) and which includes free access to every conference on our 2017 calendar plus personal consulting sessions with, again, Lief, me, and our core personal advisors—are here.
Kathleen Peddicord
