From the monthly archives:
As an expat you will be tempted to invest locally. By locally I mean you will be tempted to invest perhaps in a piece of property, a local business, or in the local financial exchange. But which one? Or should you invest in all of them? My suggestion is to say none of them. Or [...]
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Any search for information online about retiring abroad will inevitably lead a person to many web pages that argue that buying property overseas is a great investment. I’m going to be a contrarian and say the opposite. I think buying property overseas is generally risky and almost always a terrible investment. In retirement these problems [...]
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Retiring abroad might make sense from a financial standpoint. On paper when you move to a poorer country you’d expect your budget to grow tremendously. Everything is cheaper from rent to the cost of food. However, with a lower cost of living comes a host of other challenges. In general, the less expensive the country, [...]
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I just want to really quickly point out this great article on offshore accounts and their legal status for Americans. It’s good to hear an expert confirm what I’ve been ranting about. While it is not illegal per se to have them as an American citizen, if you do not declare them to the IRS [...]
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For many expats, you may be tempted to move to a country that is politically unstable. It sounds ridiculous on its face. Why would anyone in the world want to move to a country that is unstable? Instability means rioting, political demonstrations, and even all out civil war. It can also mean your injury or [...]
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I currently am living in the Washington D.C. area and have just experienced my first mega storm. Yesterday, a storm lasting what seemed only minutes managed to kill six people and turn out the power to more than a quarter of a million homes, including mine. I’m currently writing this blog entry in a seedy [...]
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If you live overseas in Europe you’re probably reading headlines about the recent failure of seven banks to pass stress tests. Stress tests are essentially theoretical tests on a financial institution to see how well it would do in the event of some theoretical cataclysmic scenario. A regulatory body looks at a bank’s books and [...]
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The Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald reports on another reason to avoid offshore accounts in tax havens: the banks that run them have a tendency to collapse. Banks are generally an unstable business unless they are propped up by the government. By that I mean, unless a country’s banking system has its accounts insured [...]
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The Daily Telegraph has a good look at evacuation insurance or an assistance company as the British call it. Evacuation insurance is an additional insurance that goes hand in hand with your health insurance when you live abroad. In many countries, particularly the poorest ones, the local healthcare system is insufficient when it comes to [...]
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Offshore banking is a massive industry. There are several countries whose economies are utterly dependent on what is seen by many an illicit trade. The most famous example of a country devoted to its offshore banking industry has to be Switzerland but other countries and territories rely on being an offshore banking center in order [...]
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