Got any plans yet for next month? Why don’t you join me in Panama City for a few days?
It could be the most profitable decision you make all year… and I promise, we’ll have fun, too.
(Cocktail parties… rum tastings… schmoozing with the “best in the business”… it’s all on the schedule.)
The Offshore Wealth Summit on Sept. 20 to 22 is the most important event on my calendar.
It’s a chance for my readers, like you, to take back control of their lives.
Alongside my top offshore contacts, I lay out, step by step, the pathway to success in your overseas investments, protecting what you’ve earned, and enjoying more freedom than you have now…
Why exactly are the strategies you’ll learn at the Offshore Wealth Summit so important?
I sat down with Offshore Living Letter Managing Editor Ben Murnane so he could put his questions to me about the summit and why I believe an in-person gathering like this is the key to offshore success…
Here’s an edited transcript of our no-nonsense conversation…
BEN MURNANE: Going offshore can mean doing anything outside your home country. Taking advantage of any opportunities that are available to you on the international scene.
That’s really what setting yourself up offshore is about. Giving yourself options.
It really can mean the difference between protecting what you’ve built and what you’ve earned and having options in the event of the next government lockdown, or the next financial crisis, or being stuck with whatever the government decides to impose on you whenever it wants, be it the next lockdown, or shutting down bank accounts as happened during the truckers’ protest in Canada.
So in this interview we’re going to give a special preview of the best way to learn about and get access to these strategies—which is at the Offshore Wealth Summit happening in September.
And this really I think is one of the most important events on your calendar, Lief, would you say?
LIEF SIMON: Right, this is where I bring together all my offshore colleagues, experts, friends. A lot of the offshore information out there from other sources is overly complicated because they’re trying to sell you a service and they want you to think that only they can help you. There’s plenty of people who can help you, plenty of service providers. At our conference we do try dial it down, simplify things and really help you figure out what it is you need for your situation because one size doesn’t fit all.
BEN MURNANE: One question that I have, Lief, and I think maybe a lot of people might have, is don’t I need to be a multimillionaire or have a huge amount of assets to take advantage of these strategies?
LIEF SIMON: Back in the ’70s you did because before airline deregulation the cost of the flight just to get down to the Caribbean was expensive and the fees that you were charged for offshore services were exorbitant, because the idea was the service providers were saving you money via taxes so they could charge you an arm and a leg.
Today there’s more service providers, there’s lots of ways to structure things, and it’s really just a matter of what you have and how you want to protect it.
BEN MURNANE: Just to emphasize, we are talking about perfectly legal strategies here. You’ve never broken the law that you know about!
LIEF SIMON: Exactly. The news likes to sensationalize things like the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers. Again, we get into lots of details for each of these kinds of topics at the Offshore Wealth Summit. So, banking, structures, residency, second citizenships, etc.
BEN MURNANE: And I know another thing that we’re going to cover at the Offshore Wealth Summit is the fact that there are still perfectly legal ways to shield your assets from the IRS. Well, there are certain assets that you don’t have to report to the IRS. Is that right?
LIEF SIMON: Yes. The key one is holding real estate in your own name. Again, more detailed discussion at the conference.
But those are, again, the types of things we talk about: what you have to report, how do you report it, the tax consequences for Americans, specifically. We also have a Canadian tax expert who won’t be at the event itself, but he will be doing a virtual presentation.
You’ve got to be able to connect all the dots. And that’s the point of coming to this event.
BEN MURNANE: The “five flags” theory of offshore diversification has been around for a long time. This is the idea of planting a flag related to a certain offshore strategy in different locations around the world. And everybody who attends the Offshore Wealth Summit will get that strategy really presented in detail.
But we can, I suppose, give a high level overview here of the different aspects of the five flags, Lief. So maybe you might take each of them in turn and just speak to their importance in an overall “Plan B.” We have the flags of residency and citizenship, asset protection, banking, and business. How does each one of those fit into a comprehensive strategy?
This is a story I tell all the time in writing and different conferences. But if you’re Argentinian, you grow up knowing you’ve got to have bank accounts outside of your home country because it’s a rollercoaster constant economic crisis in Argentina. And so anybody with any amount of money opens a bank account outside of Argentina, whether it’s in Uruguay, which is just over the border from Buenos Aires, just across the river, or farther afield. Because they know at some point, even if times are good right now, times will be bad again.
I learned that lesson when I was living in Argentina and they were pegged one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. Argentina was expensive because everything was outsourced. They didn’t make anything in the country anymore because they had the dollar. And in 2001, they had to go off the dollar peg because they weren’t bringing in enough hard currency, and they had a financial meltdown overnight.
Smart Argentinians had accounts outside of the country so they didn’t lose all their wealth when all in-country dollar accounts were converted to pesos overnight.
You lost minimum two thirds of your money overnight when dollar accounts were force-converted in Argentina at that time.
Now, this kind of thing may not happen in the U.S. But people have been talking about the demise of the dollar for more than a decade now. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But fluctuating currency rates, bank issues—the banks that have closed recently in the U.S. You just want to have some diversification to stay safe.
Then you’ve got residency and citizenship, which give you options for being in countries long-term, for traveling more widely. And the great example I’m able to give now is that during the pandemic, I wasn’t trapped in any one country for a year and a half, as so many other people were. I was able to move relatively freely once flights were available from Europe to the U.S. to Panama and back and forth. Because I had both a U.S. and a European passport as well as another residency, in Panama.
BEN MURNANE: I think people may find the idea incredible, but you were able to take advantage of this loophole effectively because you had the dual
citizenship and another residency as well, that you effectively were exempt from lockdowns in a certain way.
LIEF SIMON: Yeah, for travel purposes.
So that’s the advantages of second citizenship and second residency.
And then when it comes to offshore structures for you or your business, which is another flag, that’s a whole different conversation about asset protection and really estate planning and things like that. We go into a lot of detail at the conference about what structures make sense. Do you even need a structure to hold your real estate offshore or your other investments? It’s a complex conversation that we dig into during the main event.
This year, we’re also offering an Executive Program, the weekend after the Offshore Wealth Summit for a limited number of people, where you can work with me to get a personalized offshore plan including the structures you need for asset protection, the best way for you as an individual to get a second residency, and so on.
Most importantly, I have some of the Offshore Wealth Summit speakers staying over the weekend as well, so we can dig in deeper.
So, if you’ve got a complex situation or you’ve come to the previous Offshore Wealth Summits and you’ve got the basic knowledge, but now you’re trying to put something together and need some more help and some more consultation, then that’s what the Executive Program is meant for.
(If you want to watch the full conversation between myself and Ben… you can do that right here.)
Stay diversified,
Lief Simon
Editor, Offshore Living Letter
