Cowboy Millionaire—The New American Pioneer

Special Message From Kathleen Peddicord

I am delighted today to announce the release of the newest title from Live And Invest Overseas’ book publishing division Lahardan Books.

“Cowboy Millionaire—The New American Pioneer” by Lief Simon is a road map to navigating today’s uncertain world.

The secret to protecting yourself, your family, and your financial future is diversifying beyond your home borders. In his new book, Lief shares his personal story living and investing across the globe over the past three decades… and lays out a step-by-step plan for how you can follow in his footsteps to build wealth and then protect it in the face of whatever comes next.

I’ll let Lief tell you more himself…

Why should you be looking beyond the United States for opportunity?

I probably don’t need to go into all the problems America is facing these days. Unsustainable debt. Useless politicians. Everybody angry at everybody else.

I started looking overseas for investment opportunities more than 30 years ago. I did it because I wanted new adventures, not because I was running away from the States. But every time I return to the United States these days, I want to leave again as soon as I can.

My takeaway is that, to borrow a line from Will McAvoy’s opening monologue in the first episode of the HBO series “Newsroom,” America isn’t the greatest country in the world.

Stick with me…

In every way that you can measure quality of life, the United States doesn’t rank number one. It ranks well in many categories, but not the best in any one that I’m aware of.

In the Global Peace Index, which measures murders and violence, the United States ranks 131 out of 163 countries.

The country doesn’t make the top 10 in any health care ranking that I’ve seen.

The United States is a big place, and, even in categories where the country excels overall, parts of it lag far behind the developed world.

Take infrastructure. Every time I’m in the United States, I’m struck by the poor quality of the infrastructure. The roads I travel every day in rural Woodstock, Illinois (where my mother lives), aren’t in any better condition than the roads I drive anywhere else in the world where I spend time.

And they’re far worse than roads in France, for example, where I’ve got a lot of experience behind the wheel.

This is true not only in the context of roads in northern Illinois.

The broken asphalt and potholes I bump over in Illinois are similar to those in downtown Houston and suburban Baltimore, two other places in the States where I’ve spent time recently.

Cell phone coverage, likewise, is hit or miss. In Woodstock, my phone gets one bar at best, and most calls are going straight to voicemail. The internet service is maddening.

And it’s not just infrastructure…

Health care in the United States is a factory experience. One reason I return to Illinois regularly is to help my mother with some health problems. The experience is eye-opening in the worst way.

Old people in America go to various doctors regularly for one ailment after another. The result in every instance, as far as I can tell, is for the doctor to prescribe a pill or an injection.

Two out of three commercials on television are for prescription drugs. “Ask your doctor about blah, blah, blah,” every one of them recommends in the end. And many aging Americans do. They ask, the doctors write out a prescription, and the patient goes away to buy more drugs to take along with all the other drugs he’s taking, feeding the health insurance and pharmaceutical conglomerates that run the health care industry in this country.

All those drugs come with long lists of side effects, countereffects, and potential complications.

And don’t get me started on the insane bureaucracy surrounding Medicare and U.S. health insurance and working out what’s covered and what’s not, what you’ll pay out of pocket and what you won’t…

In no other country on Earth is the health care bureaucracy so complex… or health care itself so expensive.

In Panama, Kathleen and I pay $35 to visit an excellent, English-speaking doctor. In France—ranked by the World Health Organization as the best health system in the world—a family doctor visit costs 25 euros. And 75% of that can be reimbursed if you’re part of the national health care system.

There are excellent private health care facilities all over the world that rival any center of excellence in the States.

Despite all the medicating in the States (or, I’d say, at least in part because of all the medicating), the health of the average American is critically low. I haven’t checked the statistics, but my observational experience suggests that more than 70% of people in this country are overweight. Half those are excessively overweight.

They go to their doctors with complaints related to being overweight. Rather than counseling the patient on lifestyle choices, the doctor, to make the point again, writes out a prescription.

It’s not like that elsewhere.

I don’t want to get into a debate about why people get fat (there, I used the word… not very “woke” of me). However, I believe that, in most cases, it’s because they eat too much and exercise too little.

The poor eating habits of the average American are understandable. You have to work hard here to eat healthy. I estimate that more than two-thirds of the grocery store where I shop in Illinois is given over to nonfood items. For every aisle offering fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and bread, there are at least two selling candy, chips, cakes, doughnuts, soda, and a lot of nonfood that I’ve never seen before.

I’ve taken to reading the nutritional labels on each item I’m considering buying. Every processed product has sugar listed among the top five ingredients. It’s no wonder more than 10% of the population of the United States suffers from diabetes… and another 35% is considered pre-diabetic.

Enough about food.

Let’s talk instead about attorneys!

Television commercials in America sell one of three things: drugs, charities, or lawyers. “Were you ever exposed to XYZ? If so, you may be eligible for a payout. Get in touch now to talk about filing a suit…” recommend the sleezy attorneys in bad suits.

Like prescription medications and sugary foods, lawsuits have become an American industry. We should all aspire to go our whole lives without one, but they are being pushed on us from all angles.

Forty million lawsuits are filed in America every year… and so many of them are frivolous.

Then there’s politics.

The anger in America has become too much to bear. It’s in your face in the news and sometimes in person when you go out, and it’s just under the surface everywhere.

The vitriol from the two political parties in the United States only encourages the average man on the street to be angry. You’re either with them or against them.

The United States faces big challenges right now. I don’t know what it’ll take to address them, but I do know I’m not going to figure out the answers. I’ve got to focus on my own situation and my family’s future. When I do that, I realize today’s best opportunities lie beyond U.S. borders.

That’s why I’ve been living outside the United States for 30 years.

I’m not anti-America, and I’m certainly not anti-American. But I am anti-the lifestyle that I see all around me in the States every time I return. And I appreciate the diversified lifestyle I’ve developed over the past 30 years more every day.

As I say, this is not about being anti-America or anti-American.

On the contrary, it’s about wanting to rescue that older, pioneering, adventurous spirit of America I remember from growing up.

It’s about renewing the spirit of the American pioneer.

I feel so strongly about this that I’ve spent the past year writing a book that I hope can help.

Why Should You Listen To Me?

You could say I’ve been writing this book for 30 years.

It brings together the advice, lessons, and wisdom I’ve learned the hard way from three decades of exploring new markets and investigating opportunities outside my home country.

At age 18, I promised myself I’d be a millionaire by the age of 35. I achieved that.

But I had to take risks. I had to be a pioneer.

I grew up in a lower-middle-class home, the son of a single mother. There was no trust fund to give me a leg up in life. I’ve been working since I was 13 years old. I saved long to be able to pay for my first car, and I worked two jobs to cover college tuition… then grad school.

I tell you this to prove the point that you don’t need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to take advantage of the kind of wealth-building strategies I’ve followed.

These are the strategies that I share in my new book.

I had the pioneering spirit in me from an early age. As long as I can remember, I’ve had an idea that I wanted more out of life than growing up, going to school, working, and dying in the same place.

I could have achieved my objective—of not spending my whole life in one place—by moving to another state. But something told me to push for something more than that. I wanted options… as many as possible.

I wanted beyond-the-border options.

I heard about a school called, at the time, the American Graduate School of International Management. You might know it as Thunderbird. I decided in high school that that’s where I’d go after college. The school has since merged with Arizona State University, but it still offers one of the best international MBA programs in the world.

After graduating college and getting into Thunderbird, my plan began to expand. My focus was on job opportunities overseas. Let someone pay me to see the world, I figured. I considered joining the Navy, as my best friend had decided to do, but I knew myself well enough to realize that I wouldn’t be much good as a link in the chain of anyone’s command.

I finished the program at Thunderbird and got what I thought was an ideal offer of employment from an international oil drilling company. Just as I’d hoped, they wanted to pay me to see the world… at least the world where they operated. The trouble, I found, is that oil seems to be in places where humans probably don’t belong.

That drilling outfit sent me to work in Chad, the Tengiz oil fields in Kazakhstan, where it is minus 50 degrees in winter, and northern Argentina in a town so close to Bolivia that that’s where we shopped.

The experience was great. Unfortunately, the company wasn’t. So I quit and returned to the United States.

But that initial international experience was all I needed to confirm that that was the life for me.

I spent the next four years living in Chicago (another place humans probably shouldn’t be in winter… at least not this boy from Arizona) regrouping.

Finally, I was ready to look overseas again.

I signed up for a tour of Ireland. I had an idea for a property development project. From my research, Ireland seemed like a good place for it.

That tour was led by Kathleen Peddicord, who, coincidentally, was also considering a move to the Emerald Isle. We met in June, were married in November, and headed to Ireland together two weeks later.

Whereas the jobs with the drilling company had been short-term gigs, that move to Ireland was indefinite. That meant obtaining legal residency, setting up a bank account, buying a car, getting a local driver’s license, and all the other fun things you do when you move to another country.

Ireland became my first real experience at internationalizing my life.

In the more than two-and-a-half decades since, I’ve gone offshore completely and thoroughly. At this point, I’ve done just about everything one could think about doing in another country…

I have obtained residency (in four countries), opened bank accounts (more than 25 accounts in 15 countries), launched and operated businesses (in 7 countries), bought real estate (in 24 countries), educated my children (in 4 countries), and obtained a second citizenship.

I don’t tell you all this to brag but to show you that every recommendation I make is born of real-world, firsthand experience with the offshore world. It’s my everyday life.

None of this happened overnight, and here’s a secret: Much of it was not according to any plan.

Kathleen and I have built our offshore life organically, step by step. Each step has opened new doors and led to more options. We’ve sifted and filtered and made choices, one after another, that have gotten us from where we were all those years ago to where we are today.

But you don’t have to “play it by ear.” That’s the big point of my new book, which shares all the lessons, insights, secrets, and strategies that I had to learn the hard way.

Believe me, though the road I chose to take has not always been easy… it’s been worth it.

What have I gained?

Well, as you’ll read about in my new book, I’ve built my fortune overseas—primarily in overseas real estate.

But more than that, I’ve been able to protect what I’ve built through the international diversification strategies I’ve discovered.

A key to making money is making sure you’re not losing it. That’s why I’ve worked for decades to increase my understanding of asset protection. The result? Not only have I made money… but I’ve been able to build three fortunes.

The method I’ve followed has allowed me to make money during the 2000 dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and even the global pandemic of 2020.

You know as well as I do that each of those events devastated millions of retirement plans and businesses across the United States. They forced a lot folks out of retirement… and many more out of their homes.

And I can tell you now that what I’ve learned—and what you’ll learn in the pages of my new book—will keep us from losing money during the next economic crisis.

No matter who’s pulling the strings in the White House…

No matter how high taxes rise…

Or how far the stock market falls…

No matter when the next recession strikes—or how hard it hits…

I am not worried.

And you shouldn’t be either. Because none of that has to affect you.

Stay diversified,

Lief Simon signature