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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

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    • Raising A Family Abroad
    • Foreign Residency & Citizenship
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    • 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
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    Live and Invest In Spain Conference

    Offshore Wealth Summit

    Argentina Workshop

    VALENCIA, SPAIN

    Sep. 17-19, 2025

    PANAMA CITY, PANAMA

    Oct. 15-17, 2025

    VIRTUAL

    Nov. 13, 2025

    Learn More About This Event
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    Reach us with your questions by email at: events@liveandinvestoverseas.com

  • Store

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    • Titles on living and investing around the world
    • Explore Our Store
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    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

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Home Offshore

3 Possible “Go Offshore” Paths

A Back-Up Plan That Puts You In Control

by Lief Simon
Jun 18, 2024
in Offshore
0 0
a man with cowboy hat and lasso

AdobeStock/alexkich

I don’t need to remind you of the challenges of our age. Cable news in the United States has got that beat covered.

Most importantly, I believe in finding opportunities and organizing your life to enjoy what the world offers. Sometimes, you may need to make some changes to do so.

So, my job is to help you formulate a customized plan that allows you and your family to carry on safe, protected, comfortable, and prosperous no matter what the rest of the world gets up to.

As I see it, big picture, you have three options…

These are your three possible “go offshore” paths:

· Offshore Path I: The Backup Plan

· Offshore II: An Integrated Lifestyle

· Offshore III: Total Paranoia

How To Make Your Perfect Back-Up Plan

Let’s start with Path III—the paranoids.

This group is small but active and vocal. They want the government out of every aspect of their lives and invest in extreme measures to try to achieve what they perceive as total independence.

Some go 100% off-grid, vowing to be dependent on no centralized system for water or electricity.

Meanwhile, some operate on a cash-only basis… or, today, crypto-only.

Some denounce electronics or invest in bunkers and container loads of canned goods.

Few things in life are enjoyable at the extreme… including offshore diversification.

Still, I comprehend that we can interpret our world today as an end-of-days scene.

The problem, though, is predicting how, exactly, the apocalypse will play out.

A television show about preppers I saw had each prepper lay out his plans and preparations for surviving the coming end of the world so the review committee could consider the plan for viability.

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In the episode I watched, everyone’s plan was deemed more or less viable… should the catastrophe each respective prepper was most paranoid about come to pass.

If doomsday took any other form, though, the plans were all insufficient for survival.

One guy was ready for the big earthquake in California, but he wasn’t ready for a meteor strike… for example.

Most people don’t subscribe to that acute level of concern or aren’t up for such dramatic lifestyle transformations.

We can all agree that our world is rife with risk and danger. Metaphoric minefields everywhere. However, not all of us are ready to reduce or restrict our lives in the extreme in an effort to avoid them.

Most of us want more options for how and where to live our lives… not fewer. And the Total Paranoia Path can lead to many fewer alternatives.

However, if your objective in diversifying your life offshore is to improve your lifestyle, expand your upside, and guarantee yourself and your family control in the face of chaos… then I’d say you’re on Path I… in search of a Backup Plan.

You can develop a Backup Plan anywhere, including from wherever you’re living right now. You don’t need to move—not overseas or even around the block—to put a Backup Plan in place. You can achieve a solid level of global diversification from the comfort of your current home.

I began down Path I about 30 years ago. I knew from an early age that I wanted a Backup Plan that put me in control of my own future.

Funny thing happened at some point during the decades since…

My Plan B became my Plan A.

That is, my Backup Plan became my lifestyle.

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I made a property investment here… opened a bank account there… then traveled to check in on them…

Another property investment… another bank account… residency in Ireland… then an Irish passport…

More property purchases… that doubled as both investments and places to enjoy time with my family.

The more time I spent in the locations where I’d planted flags, the more contacts I made… the more business ventures I staked… the more connected I felt…

Fast-forward to today, and I have home bases in four countries… residency in two… a second passport… and investments generating cash in five currencies.

In addition (my wife would say more important), as a result of all this backup planning, I’ve developed a global network of friends that makes my life much richer than it would be otherwise.

In short, when I’m in Panama… in Colombia… in France… in Portugal… I’m not a visitor. I’m at home. My wife Kathleen and I stay in houses and apartments that we own and have furnished to be comfortable for us (while also suitable for rental when we’re somewhere else).

We’ve become part of the local scene. We’re residents, not tourists. And we prefer it that way.

Organically, over decades, we’ve built a Backup Plan that is also our ideal way of life.

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I call this Path II: An Integrated Lifestyle.

In the past few years, Kathleen and I have entered what I believe is the ultimate phase of a lifestyle like this one. With the help of friends and business partners on the ground in the places where we regularly spend time, we’ve noticed opportunities for becoming connected in a new way.

We’ve begun investing not only for personal profit… but also in helping our adopted communities in small ways—providing scholarships, for example, and donating computers to schools that otherwise couldn’t afford them. As we look ahead, we see this as a priority agenda.

Living an Integrated Lifestyle, you’re a moving target for any disaster that might strike. You’re not at the mercy of any one government administration… any single economy… any particular currency… If life should become unpleasant in the place where you are… you can easily go somewhere else and plug into another fully-fledged life.

An Integrated Lifestyle overseas doesn’t emerge overnight.

Frankly, I’ve reached my limit, and Kathleen and I are now spending time consolidating and downsizing.

The point is that we’re in control. We’re deciding where we most enjoy spending time… which of our investments is worth the ongoing administration hassle and expense… and which aren’t… etc.

That’s the objective—being in control of your own destiny. And that’s what the steps in my new book are all about.

Stay diversified,

Lief Simon signature

Lief Simon

Editor, Simon LetterP.S. My new book, “Cowboy Millionaire—The New American Pioneer”, offers a simple solution for those looking to protect and grow their wealth, diversify outside home borders, and leave a bulletproof legacy for the generations that follow.

Tags: 'Diversification Offshore''doing business overseas''Global Property Investing''going offshore'legacy wealth
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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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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
  • Mazatlán, Mexico

Luxury

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

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Lahardan Books

  • Titles on living and investing around the world

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