Tax Strategies For Cross-Border Business Owners: Go Where You’re Treated Best with Andrew Henderson

In this exclusive interview, Andrew Henderson, the founder of Nomad Capital, shares invaluable insights and strategies to help you maximize your earnings and protect your wealth in the ever-changing global landscape. Discover the latest trends and flows of money among the elite, and gain actionable tactics to secure financial success. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or new to the world of business ownership, this episode is a must-listen for those ready to take control of their financial future.

We extend our sincere gratitude to Andrew Henderson for sharing his invaluable expertise and insights on tax strategies for cross-border business owners.

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We want to give a big shoutout and thanks to Andrew Henderson for dropping some serious knowledge on tax strategies for cross-border business owners. And of course, a huge thank you to all our awesome listeners out there for tuning in and joining us on this incredible financial adventure. You rock!

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[00:00:00] Episode four hundred and four, four zero four Global. From Asia, we are going where you’re treated best. Andrew Henderson, nomad Capitalist. This is a great one about cross-border business and tax fun stuff. Let’s do this. Welcome to the Global from Asia podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight up actionable advice.

And now your host, [00:00:30] Michael Michel. Thank you so much for choosing to listen to or watch this show. And I am in my studio office. I think I’ll show you. I’ll spin I’m, I’m using a tripod today. If you’re watching, I know a lot. Still listen. But you can see I got the background for the Web three handshake stuff.

We did some shows, of course the Cross Border Summit here. You know, I got all these samples of different. Products and brands we’re [00:01:00] working on and various studio stuff and the balcony. So just showing you a little bit of a 360 of the studio here. Let me sit back down and you know, we, we did this as a live webinar with Andrew Henderson.

He’s been at a cross-border summit pre Covid. He’s supporting the Cross-border Summit again this time getting somebody from his team come also, he’s doing the Nomad Capitalist live event before Cross-Border Summit, which will [00:01:30] be September 6th to the ninth in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I’ll be going. I’m excited for that.

And today we show you the recording from this live webinar. I had a lot of fun. If you’re on our email list, you should get this invite or following our social media. We had a lot of fun discussions. I know fun and taxes doesn’t sound like it, but Andrew knows so many different things and he shares a lot of different insights.

So we bring him on today and you can see me there if you, it’ll be a video. He did have slides, but I think [00:02:00] if you’re listening and audio only, you’ll be fine to hear it cuz he’s speaking of what he’s talking about and you’ll be able to follow along fine in the audio version. So let’s tune into this show, episode 404 of Global Form Asia.

Okay, and let’s dive in. All right. We have Tommy, the sales manager at Cross Better Logistics. How are you Tommy? Hi and I. We just got to meet here in Sheen, China. It’s great. Uh, they support the show at Global from Asia, and we also use them ourself for [00:02:30] many of our brands and e-commerce businesses. And Tommy really cares.

They always are. Uh, Try to help us save money, you know, not, you have some products you keep for us in China, you have some products you keep for us in the US warehouse. And uh, I really appreciate that. And you’ll, you can talk to this seller, right? You can give them your advice. You work with many Chinese sellers a lot, right?

And, uh, you can help, um, help the sellers understand more. Yeah. We are very [00:03:00] professional for the shipment to USA and Canada. Also, we have warehouse in USA and Canada. We can help our factories, supplies, sellers for the shipment. Yes. Yeah, yeah. For the e-commerce. Yep. And you even keep stuff in China too. So sometimes if you have the limitations of, uh, sending too much to Amazon, you can keep it here in China with, with, uh, cross better.

Or you can send of course to the US warehouse. They have many different [00:03:30] options and they’re always trying their best. To find, uh, find out what’s the best solution for you. So definitely talk to Tommy, talk to Cross Better, and thank you for your, uh, support of the community. Yes, we have good pricing and better service.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. How’s everybody doing? Can you hear me? Put a, put a little one where you’re dial in from or what, what time it is where you are. I hope the time works for everybody. Andrew, you’re in ar you’re in the Europe [00:04:00] time. I don’t know if I could say your location. You’re in Ireland, right?

I’m in Istanbul. Istanbul. Whoa. So exotic. That’s exotic. Exciting time. Yeah. Good to, good to, good to be with you here. So I’m sure we get people from all over Asia and Yeah, there’s, there’s a few in Thailand. I think there’s some in Europe too. I see Andrew here. Austin, Shane. Oh, well, some regulars. How’s everybody doing?[00:04:30]

And, uh, Sally’s here in the back in community management. Okay, great. Joan? Doing good? Okay. Okay, so tax planning. All right. Sounds exciting. We’re gonna make it exciting. It is. You know, I like to go where you’re treated best. That’s your slogan, man. I, I, I’m a fan of, you know, you’re also supporting the Cross-Border Summit.

Appreciate it. You’ve, you’ve spoken there in the past and, you know, representing for [00:05:00] us this year, and you have a great event coming up too in September, which is gonna be awesome. But go where you’re treated best. I, I always think about that. I always think about your book and, and your, uh, your experiences and your, you’re, you are, you’re always the, you know, your post you’re always looking for where you’re, you know, it’s not what you know, like, what’s that saying from like Rome?

It’s not what you, or is it a Gladiator movie or Braveheart like you think he’s, you know, Mel Gibson says, you think you exist [00:05:30] to, the people exist to serve you. You know it to the politicians right. Over Simpson. But I think you exist to serve the people. Right. But like these right. Governments and politicians they think that we have, are like stuck in their system.

And we are like, but we are customers of that country, right. As a, as a, as an individual, as a citizen, we are a customer and they need to serve us and attract us. Right. You know, that’s, that’s the way [00:06:00] it, that’s Well, and I think that’s, that’s what we talk about. Right. And so I, I, I figured we’d have maybe 45 minutes of going through a handful of slides and sharing what’s happening on how you can go where you’re treated best.

Because I think, you know, to your community, to this, you know, cross border community, there are so many opportunities. Choose the place that serves you best. I am spending, you know, I’ve spent time in Asia. I continue to have a presence in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. For me, I [00:06:30] found that to meet some people, to kind of go to the next level, I wanted to be in a, in a kind of native English speaking country.

And so I’ve chosen to spend some time in Ireland. They have a great program in Ireland for foreigners where you’re gonna pay a more tax than you might in Malaysia, but you’re gonna pay, you know, a lot less percentage. If you are a successful person, you’re gonna pay basically on only part of your income that you spend in Ireland.

And so you can kind of arbitrage it because I think that they, in the uk and Malta, and Cyprus and countries that have that kind of tax system, [00:07:00] it’s a remittance based tax system realized, if you’re from Ireland, all right, we’re gonna stick it to you. You’re gonna pay 52%. But if you’re not, historically the logic was let’s have a reason for people to come here and be competitive.

If I had to pay 52% tax and everything I made by living in Ireland, I wouldn’t go to Ireland. Instead, I can go there. I can spend money, I can, you know, we’re hiring 10 people there, perhaps for sales and marketing and we’ll get into that today. Yeah, let’s get it. [00:07:30] Let’s, yeah, I think, how about where are they attracting you?

Right mean, I think that there’s places where they think, oh, well you should just come here because I mean, there’s so many options these days and if you live in Thailand, you probably wouldn’t have lived in Thailand 30 years ago. Like your parents would not have probably thought that was a place that could be lived in.

Now it can be. So are the countries keeping up and where are you going? Makes sense. Great. We got a good turnout. So do you want questions? I mean there’s, they can’t do voice, but they can of course, text questions. Do you want me to collect [00:08:00] them for the end or would you want I’ll kind of, I’ll hang out here Andrew and hang out.

1. I’d like to go through six or seven slides and spend 40 minutes going through some issues. I think at a surface level, I mean, we could probably spend three days and, and actually as you mentioned Yeah, that’s true. We’re, we’re having a live event where it’s four days and unlike any other, I think your event’s pretty, pretty solid.

But I mean, unlike most events I go to our live event is like, I think one day is eight in the morning to 11 at night. Wow. Of speakers. I mean, with a few breaks, but [00:08:30] not like three hour long breaks. It’s solid. And so that’s, we, we talk about how to do all this stuff. We’ll talk about that maybe for five or 10 minutes at the end.

I know you have a special deal Perfect. For your folks. Perfect. I I just wanted to spend 40 minutes kind of talking about the stuff that we do that might be of interest. Pure information, spend five or 10 minutes talking about some things people can take advantage of, and then take a couple of questions that we can accrue over the, the session, if that works for you.

Great. Great. So the audience can use the faq, section Q and A will be easier for everybody and then it will keep track, but [00:09:00] I’ll try to help if not, but, uh, yeah, Andrew, take, take it away. I can’t wait to hear this myself. Basically, I wanna cover these things, challenges we’re facing. I think to an entrepreneurial audience like this one, we’ll spend a little bit less time on that.

I think we know what those are and we know we can push through those things. Actionable tactics you can use to start protecting and growing your wealth, keeping more of your wealth. Some people call it the new world order. Maybe some of that has a kind of conspiratorial element. To me, the new world order is very simple.

You guys are part of it. You know, you’re sourcing stuff in Asia. Obviously Mexico is becoming a [00:09:30] good big place for sourcing stuff. Now I’m looking at countries like Indonesia is playing a much bigger role. If you look at the economic rankings, let’s say, I think it was 2033 and 2038, you’re gonna see countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, China, India, moving up the ranks.

We all perhaps have experience with those places, but the average person doesn’t. And you’re seeing, for example, since the turn of the century, the amount of, uh, the world reserves that were in US dollars have gone down by about 15 percentage points from 70. Three, I [00:10:00] think to 56 or 71 to 56. You know, the US dollar, the United States is not going away.

But I think you’re gonna see the places where some of the people here are doing business sourcing living, are gonna play a bigger role. And that’s gonna eat at the margins away from the power in the west. And that’s why I think that having a plan, if you, you’re from the west, protect yourself, is a good idea.

I took some flack for this, but I stand by it. My interpretation of what’s happening in Australia is they’re gonna start really trying to rope more people who don’t [00:10:30] live there into their tax system. And that if you’re living a digital nomad lifestyle, they are turning the screws to make it harder for you to not pay Tax in Australia is not quite what the United States does to its citizens.

But I think that as these countries have marginal declines in tax revenue and things like that from people like us who go somewhere else, where we’re shopping around for the best deal, they’re gonna make it harder to leave. And so I left the United States many years ago. I gave up my citizenship for a number of [00:11:00] reasons.

You don’t have to go to that extreme, but I think that that could be something, some version of that could be something that’s worth doing if you’re from the west, because when they, they start to lose a percentage point here, a percentage point there, as you’ve seen with the US dollar for example, I imagine that they’ll just make it harder to diversify overseas.

We’ll talk about integration, we’ll talk about tax savings. So, Obviously, you know, a couple quick challenges. Some of you may have seen kind of flag theory that I think we’ve modernized at now, med capitalist being reliant on just one government [00:11:30] during covid. You know, Mike and I were talking about this before the, the session.

If you had a US passport, you weren’t going anywhere. If you had an Australian passport, you weren’t leaving and you weren’t going home. That, to me, is a problem and it’s in some cases against like what the UN everyone agreed to. So if you’re just reliant on one passport, one bank account, had a guy recently had all of his money frozen, took him six months to get it unfrozen, but he couldn’t even defend himself in that time.

Uh, passport you have, he had a guy who got a bunch of different weird [00:12:00] passports, including some of the Caribbean, just people to travel and do his, his work in Asia because the US and some of the, like in Malaysia, I think it was, it’s like if the number of COVID cases in your country is too high, you can’t come here.

Well, obviously there’s gonna be fewer covid cases in St. Lucia than the United States, so he was going and getting these different passports, and he found even though five of them could get into St. South Korea where he had some business, only one was actually allowed into South Korea during covid. So having multiple passports could be a good thing to talk about.

If [00:12:30] you are in business and you need to do business, I do think tax rates go up. I do think that C B T, which is what’s called citizenship based taxation, if you’re an American, you’re taxed no matter where you live. Now, if you’ve got a foreign spouse, if you’ve got a foreign business partner, you may be able to reduce that tax down to zero.

If you’re a business owner, you may be able to reduce it down to the single or low double digits if you’re not a business owner. When I see people doing business in Asia, living in Asia, and they’re still working from A U S C Corp or U S L L C I I Shutter, you want to [00:13:00] have your structure overseas if you’re overseas, but still where you are from is potentially an issue.

If your country taxes you, or if Australia now says, Hey, you gotta really live in one place and be a tax resident there. Even if you don’t come back to Australia, we’re gonna start looking very unpleasantly at somebody who’s all over the place. So that’s an issue. Diversification’s important, again, maybe this doesn’t apply to this audience, but I think that most people don’t wanna leave as long as [00:13:30] I think it should say things are good.

We had people in Canada who were freaking out last year about what was happening there, where they were freezing people’s accounts and by the time it came to deliver or to execute on the solutions that we put together in a course of three to four weeks, they felt better about it. I think it’s kind of like, you know, if you’re in a relationship and, and, and your partner, you know, punches you in the face, you know, it’s probably not gonna get better.

You know, like that’s gonna happen again. And I think the same thing applies with [00:14:00] countries, which is why you don’t wanna be reliant on just one. So those are some of the issues we’ll talk about. I do think when it comes to having a citizenship, this is gonna be a fulcrum, not for people who are necessarily from non-Western countries, but for people who are from Western countries.

So the US again, if you run a business, you can reduce your taxes to 0, 5, 10, 12%, whatever it may be. Now you’re gonna have restrictions on how you spent the [00:14:30] money. So when I gave up US citizenship, I did not do it for this reason, but suddenly I was able to access a lot of money that was tied up in my companies.

And so I went out and, you know, bought a few pieces of real estate and built some diversification that would’ve been much more difficult as an American. You know, if you buy a property in Turkey, you’re supposed to buy it in your own name. Generally you shouldn’t buy it in a corporate structure, but that’s what I would’ve had to do if I were an American.

So, you know, being out of the US tax system allowed me to, you know, [00:15:00] take more money outta my company and have more control. Even though I was legally paying nothing for all those years, or very close to nothing because I didn’t live in the United States at all, the citizenship dictated how I made investments.

I still have a property in Malaysia that nobody understands why it’s owned by a foreign company. And it’s like a lot of hassle every year. But it was done for us tax planning. And if I wanna move it to a different, you know, if I wanna own move it to my own name, it’s gonna cost like $10,000 and a lot of paperwork and a lot of hassles.

And you gotta pay a lawyer $4,000. [00:15:30] And it’s just like, all right, leave it there and have the finance team be confused every year. So I think that, you know, with, we see Australia being more aggressive on what you need to do in order to exit their tax system if you’ve lived there. Again, reasonable minds can disagree, but I think that all of our tax professionals say, if you’re gonna be a digital nomad, it’s gonna be hard to be outta the Australian tax net.

I think Canada has made rumors in that same direction. The UK not as much. Ireland, not as much cuz they’ve got a history of [00:16:00] immigration. But these kind of further flung, more isolated countries like US and Canada, not a lot of neighbors. Australia and New Zealand, not a lot of neighbors have really talked about, if you leave, we we wanna still tax you or in the US we wanna still regulate you, who you can do business with.

What if you saw like TikTok Trump wanted to make them sell it to uh, you know, an American company. You know what happens when you, what’s that? I think it was Microsoft maybe that to sell Walmart something. Yeah. They were all [00:16:30] jumping at buying TikTok us. Yeah. So it’s like, I mean, do I wanna be an American if I’m doing business in Asia, where I think some countries like Malaysia have said we were the ally of the us, but what have they done for us?

Remember the old Prime Minister was like, what have they done for us? And then they just come and lecture us. I don’t know that I wanna be an American. If I’m in Asia, I’d like to have another passport that I can have my resident on. I mean, it’s obviously very hard if you’re not from Asia to be an Asian citizen.

I’d rather be like St. Lucian in Asia. They’re like, all right, cool, whatever. Or if I could be, even [00:17:00] if I had like, you know, if I had a grandparent from Ireland and I could become an Irish citizen, I’d rather be that than American or British. Or Australian, where it’s like these wars and the geopolitics, I think it could be an issue.

Yeah. Like they sent extra 6 billion or whatever to that Ukraine I heard in the us something like that. Billion. That’s what I mean, 1 billion. I don’t wanna do the new world order, like a conspiracy thing. But if you look at, I mean, I sent an extra a guy. From India on a plane, I don’t know, six, nine months ago.[00:17:30]

He was like, so anti Ukraine, so pro-Russia. And I think whether you like it or not, that’s a good chunk of the world. Either he’s that or they don’t care. This idea that we live in the Western bubble, whether we live there or whether we just consume western media, we hear certain things. That’s a very small percentage of the world’s population.

Again, I mean, what you are doing in Asia, it’s a huge population there that is maybe opposed to the west. So if I’ve got a Western passport for geopolitical reasons, for business reasons, for travel reasons, during a pandemic, for, you [00:18:00] know, these trade issues that people get into as the western countries become more nationalistic and try and push back, or just because I think that my western country as they lose some power, is gonna wanna start taxing me even if I don’t live there.

I would, I would consider having another passport. I think three is kind of like ideal. If you can get two, that’s kind of like having one, because there may come a time when one is an actual hindrance on you. Mm-hmm. If you’re willing to move to Asia, that’s not gonna be very good for getting a passport.

[00:18:30] Singapore, I don’t know a single person who’s been naturalized there. It’s really hard. Most of the other countries don’t allow dual citizenships. That’s kind of like stepping from one frying pan to the other. I guess Cambodia has a citizenship scheme, but that’s probably not gonna be, I mean, I guess that could be your backup passport for working within Southeast Asia, and if that’s all you wanted, I know a guy who did that, but that’s probably not gonna be, it’s not gonna replace your Western passport for traveling.

So if you’re willing to move to Europe, [00:19:00] Ireland’s a good tax friendly place to live. You already speak the language. If you’re here it’s five years. I think they actually deliver on that five years on like countries like Malta, where they say it’s five years and it’s really 18 Ireland. Ireland’s a tax friendly English speaking place to live, where if you wanted to employ yourself in one other person, or if you’re a European citizen, you could just move there.

You know? You could work towards getting that citizenship. They allowed dual. It’s a nice place to be, but it’s a commitment. It’s nine months, a year, maybe the few exceptions for travel, if you’re willing [00:19:30] to move to Latin American, speak Spanish, they’re pretty easy. The easier thing if you have the funds is just, you know, go the route that I did.

You can get Caribbean citizenship starting from a hundred thousand dollars. No need to move there. They are introducing an interview requirements. They’re putting some more Roblox, which to me shows exactly what we said. The US went down and bullied them and said, you need to interview people first. Some of these options are gonna become less and less available.

Cause I think that the US is leading a contingent of Western countries that’s tired of people having [00:20:00] options. I think that’s pretty clear in their communications. So, you know, I, I would look at that as something to do. Now if I had a hundred thousand dollars in change to spare, if I wanted to buy a property, you said it’s kind of exotic to be in Turkey.

It’s now $400,000. You buy a property, Erdogan got reelected, so they’re gonna keep doing it. You buy a property for 400, you, you keep it for three years, you resell it and you keep your citizenship. It’s not gonna replace a Western passport. But they’re neutral. For example, in Ukraine versus [00:20:30] Russia, they’re not gonna have any ability to tax people from their country.

No matter where they live. They don’t really care. You know? So I think that, you know, Turkey is something for certain people who are doing business in the East. I mean, turkey’s a great passport for Asia, better than almost any other. You can go to Thailand visa free, you can go every Japan visa free. It’s just not as good with the West.

But if you’re here and your business is in Asia, I would look at a Turkish passport. If you have money to [00:21:00] invest in river states, you’re not really spending a lot. I mean, what we do for our clients is fine properties that are at market value, if you buy a condo that they’re advertising at the airport, you’re probably gonna lose half your money when you gotta resell it.

If you buy a resale property, it’s not from a developer and you know the right people, you can probably get it pretty close. In my property in about two years, two and a half years has gone up 30% or something in dollar terms, not inly terms, but in dollar terms, inly terms, it’s like four Xed. Nice. And if you want, you can [00:21:30] get citizenship for you and your entire family.

Something like if you, if you didn’t want to change your life stuff, you wanna live in Asia, keep your American, Australian, European passport, whatever. Look at something like Caribbean Passport by Investment. You can read about that on our website. No medical capitalist.com. Turkey would be another one that I think is very Asia friendly.

Now you’ve got three. Now you’ve got a big strong country. You’ve got a very small, tiny country that’s tax friendly and you’ve got your Western country that who knows what they’re gonna do to you if you wanna move. I like [00:22:00] Ireland. Argentina, I guess could work. That’s a little weird. It’s not that tax friendly.

So we could go into this all day, but those are some considerations. Does that make sense, Mike? Definitely. No, this is really great. So is, um, Turkey’s 400 k real estate? Do you have to, do we have to live there? And he said the whole family could. No, we had a, we had a billionaire who hired us. He’s like, listen, every time I get on my jet, it costs me 300 grand.

So I’m doing everything. Power of attorney. He said, okay. He’s never, I don’t think he’s ever been to Turkey. [00:22:30] Oh, okay. Most, most people come to choose the property. You know, you can come for two or three days, turn around. It’s a nice place. I heard it’s great. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard it’s great. I love it.

And by the way, if you’re in Europe or the US or wherever, and you’re also in Asia, for me, I think Turkish Airlines is the best. And so if I’m going from Bocata to Kuala Lumpur, I fly through Istanbul. One stop and I’ll hang out for a couple days and like take the, take the heat off of, you know, a 30 hour [00:23:00] flight, right?

Do some shopping on the cheap, you know, whatever. Okay. So I think, I think we want, I would look and if I’m a westerner, this historical thing has been, I have the best passport. I’ve got a great passport. Now the American passport on our Nomad passport in index was like number 40 this year. Not terrible.

Mad of 200, but not number one. Because of some of those restrictions, I think you’ll see more of the big Western countries having restrictions. I’d want to have another passport if I’m willing to move. I’m big [00:23:30] on island right now cause they’re the one that delivers on their promises and there’s not a lot of, you know, it’s, it’s close to home.

There’s plenty of wealthy people you can network with. There’s business opportunities. It’s easy enough to get in and they honor their word and it’s, it’s, and it’s the one EU passport. You can still live in the UK with Latin America. If you wanna do that, you’re learning a new language. If you don’t wanna move or if you wanna move to Asia where you’re not gonna probably get naturalized, then I would go to my financial strategy of Caribbean citizenship plus or, and or Turkey.

I would not do Vanawatu [00:24:00] unless I’m like a criminal or something. They’ve got a passport program. I wouldn’t do that. I never even heard of. That’s a country vanawatu. Vanawatu is in the South Pacific. If you’re from Australia or New Zealand, you probably, you know, it’s two or three hours away. Otu. Yeah. Yeah.

That was like shorthand in my house growing up for like a place that was really far away. You went to Vanawatu. Interesting. I always remember, you know, tan Tanzania? No. That’s, that’s, that’s, no, that’s, that’s easy compared to Vanuatu [00:24:30] Van Wato. Alright. Who’s from Australia? There must be some Australians here.

I, I see one Q and a Joan. She says she’s from Australia. She’s asking, and she doesn’t seem to know about her taxation thing. There’s a couple that I clarifying about what you’re saying, but yeah, there’s at least a couple here from Australia. I, I think Shane, I don’t wanna call people out, but I know some people, we, we put a video on our YouTube channel a couple weeks ago, and of course, you know, as with all things tax, somebody said no.

He said, people said, oh, he’s talking about something. That’s for years. They changed the rules on June 7th. [00:25:00] Now technically the rules are how you’re supposed to file and if you wanna sue the com it’s, it’s complicated stuff. But like, basically if you just want your life to be easy and if you just don’t wanna avoid hassles and lawsuits with the tax man, Australia has basically unified some rules to where people who have no proper tax homes somewhere else are gonna be more easy to drag into the Australian tax land.

So I said that’s a form of citizenship based taxation in the sense of if you don’t live the way, if you [00:25:30] don’t, if you, even if you leave, if you don’t leave the way they want you to leave, they may still tax you in Australia. So for me, I never went back to the us. There were the year were, the years I was there, zero days, and yet I still had to pay Australia.

If you’re gonna say I’m moving to Singapore and I’m living in Singapore, you’ll find me there, then yes, you’ll still be off the hook. But if you’re gonna be like, I wanna go here and then go there and go here, and I don’t know, I don’t really pay taxes anywhere. Australia has tightened the noose on, okay, we’ll tax, you got it.

It used to be all right, you’re [00:26:00] never really here. All right, fine. At some point, all right, we, we, we give up. And now they’re like, well, no. Like if you’re not paying somewhere that you actually live, we should tax you. Will that change? Will it be adapted? Will it be reinterpreted? But that was kind of the unification of three tax rules on June 7th.

Everyone has a little bit d a diff, different opinion, but obviously what we do is international tax. Most people’s local accountants have no idea about international tax and then they try and say, no true. Talking about you’ve seen this, right? I mean they don’t Yeah, I’ve seen it all the time. Yeah. Most, most accountants are [00:26:30] bookkeepers.

They know their country, the country they work in and they end and the cross-border, like between two countries. They never know. They say, I just know mine. I don’t know that one. Right. That’s what I, I had one of the top tax firms where I lived in Phoenix, Arizona for domestic stuff. They were not, they were not cheap.

But when I moved overseas, even the simplest thing, like the foreign earned income exclusion where Americans can take, it’s about $10,000 a month this year tax free from a company before you even have to get into the corporate structuring. They didn’t even know. They’re like, you don’t qualify cuz you don’t have, [00:27:00] I think in that case they’re like, you don’t have a tax.

I was a digital nomad. So Americans actually benefit. Americans can still be digital nomads. Because they still are always taxed by the us. They just get to spend less time in the US as a digital nomad. They get like one month a year basically versus yes, maybe three months a year if you have a fixed home.

Australia is basically kind of unifying and nobody ever hear, oh, I didn’t hear about the newspaper. They say This is gonna apply to like a few thousand people. It’s not gonna be front page news. I mean the, in the US when Trump passed a sweeping tax reform a few years ago, it [00:27:30] got a lot of news. I never saw a single article about how individual people like you and I, Mike, we’re gonna be swept into that tax system with the transition tax and with an ongoing tax.

It changed the tax code for individual Americans operating overseas because it treated everybody the same as it treats Apple and not a, not a word was printed about that anywhere in the media ever. Nobody even knew it existed. People said, how dare you don’t like America first? And I finally met Doug Casey, the international man at our event in [00:28:00] 2021.

He said, yeah, Trump was bad for expats. Not a single word that’s printed about it, cuz who, I mean, how many of guys like us are there? That’s true. They, they, it’s like taxation without representation. They say almost Right? Cuz we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re Americans overseas. Nobody’s listening to us. You know, like, I go back to America.

I haven’t been back since 2018, February, you know, I entered a country and they, they, they say, why don’t I live here? What am I doing? And they like, make me feel like a terrorist man. [00:28:30] I had, they scary, right? They’re like scary to me. I’m like, man, I, I’m not doing anything wrong. I, I had a, I had a immigration attorney and I shared this story for my friend.

He lives in Asia. He lives in Thailand. He went back and they said, we’re putting him in a room. He said, what? Why am I being detained for three hours? He, they said, we think you might have child pornography. And I was talking to the immigration attorney about, he said, oh yeah, they have this thing like, people who live in like Thailand, like they think that like, that’s why they’re in Thailand or the Philippines is one too.

Like they have this impression and they just screw [00:29:00] with people. So, And so like what a great privilege to be a citizen pay tax and when you go home, you know, they think you’re a child pornographer. Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty, pretty insulting to other countries. It’s really scary. Yeah. Couple ways you can get a second citizenship.

I mean if you can qualify by descent. And we’ve had a lot of Australian clients, for example, who were had Greek ancestry. So by dissent, I mean if your parents are from some country, in almost every case, there’s a few exceptions, you can be a citizen of that country. So if your mother was born in [00:29:30] Canada, she’s Canadian, by default, you should be able to go and apply grandparents, in many cases, great grandparents in a number of cases.

And now some countries even go even further back. Like if you have ancestors, as long as Italy existed, you can go back, man, you gotta help me. But I couldn’t get it for Italy. I, I don’t know. I don’t wanna probably cause somebody, probably cause somebody gave it up before the next one was born. Yes. My grandfather came to Ellis Island, you know, for the American Dream and, uh, became American citizen.

Before [00:30:00] my father was born. I went to the Italian Embassy in New York City and I went through all the paperwork. I had all his birth certificates from Italy and all this stuff. They’re like, oh, nope. Can’t do it. You’re grandpa booking the American Cause back then there was no real dual citizenship. You became an American and then you kind of like forfeited the other one.

And so they’re like, well, so then when your father was born, they’re like, but there was nothing to give him. Right? But if you can prove that it was, it was always sh it always should have passed along. You can get it. Listen, my ancestor, I just, after [00:30:30] nine years, by the way, I just finally put the final nail on the coffin.

I can’t get Lithuanian, which is eu. So you know, if I’m EU, I can live anywhere in the eu. I can travel anywhere in the world, pretty much, you know, it’s. Basically the same as Spanish or Italian or whatever else, because they left two years early and also apparently because they were Jewish. So it’s like, oh, great.

But if you have someone from your family tree, it’s worth evaluating. We do this for folks. We’ll check your, maybe I need this. The other, the other one I’m trying, [00:31:00] I haven’t tried so hard is my, my, uh, I, I have Russian descent. My, my, my father’s, my father’s mother is Russian, my grandmother, and they said that they said that she was a Jewish.

I never knew her. She, but my friend says if I go to Israel and prove that my grandmother was Jewish, I can get Israeli passport. So obviously both of those have a certain toxicity to them. I suppose Israel’s kind of cracking down and wanting you to spend time and live there, and that’s [00:31:30] pretty tax unfriendly if your goal is tax savings.

I mean, Russia obviously, I mean, they’re really giving people a lot of problems. My sisters were all adopted from Russia. And it’s, for the first time ever, I’m like, eh, maybe don’t get your passports. So yeah, check your family tree. We, we can talk offline, but check your family tree, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some of ’em, like the uk it’s basically just like you have to have a parent, but some of them go back four generations. The big ones would be Europe and also Latin American and the Caribbeans. We had a guy who was [00:32:00] Trinidadian. We had, you know, Barbadian, we had actually a guy from St. Kits Nevus. So option number two is you can go to St.

Kits nevus and give them $150,000 and they give you citizenship. It’s a pretty good passport. You’re not going to the US or Australia with it, but you can go most other places. Again, I think if you’re living in Asia, doing business in Asia, that’s probably gonna be more accepted in the years to come. And they’re not gonna tax you cuz St.

Kids, some tax people who live in St kits, let alone their own citizens. So, I mean, That’s what, you know, citizenship [00:32:30] by investment, you can make a donation. Or turkey’s the one where if you do it properly, you can actually make it an investment by buying river estate or by putting money in the bank for three years and then you can get out of your investment.

And again, if you’re willing to move, then you can naturalize by getting residents in again. I think Iowa’s a good one. A lot of countries in Europe deliver, but they don’t have the mix of tax friendliness. English speaking, you know, I mean, if you move to Germany, it’s eight years, soon to be five years. [00:33:00] But there’s, you know, restrictions on dual citizenship.

You have to learn German to a very high standard. Like you have to adapt, like, you know, Ireland to me or Latin America are the ones if you’re willing to move, don’t count on Asia. You had a program which might be coming back, actually we just heard this week in Portugal, if you’re not a European citizen, you can invest in the Golden Visa.

We’ll see what the options are. It’ll be somewhere in the mid six figures. You spend a week there, you learn Portuguese to a basic standard and in five years you apply for citizenship. Here’s the challenge on why I’m [00:33:30] speaking highly of Ireland. I’ve been waiting two and a half years to get my Portugal golden visa.

I did my biometrics and they’re just taking their time. So it’s kind of like hard to put your faith in that Cypress had a program, like a lot of countries have pro closed their programs in the wake of the war. Do I think it’s a huge, vast conspiracy that they wanna shut down your options? Not entirely, but I think that the US has been on record saying we don’t like people having so many options.

So Caribbean. You donate money, you get citizenship in six months. Do you need [00:34:00] that right now? Only if you’re an American and you wanna not be an American. But I think if you can afford it, if that’s like 5% of your income or 10% of your income, or 5% of your net worth, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to do.

I’ve gotten five different passports besides the us, which I got rid of, and I can tell you it’s coming a lot of handy for traveling during covid, for doing business, for getting residents permits issued for just avoiding bureaucracy. In some countries where the US, for example, would’ve caused that for keeping taxes low, I don’t think any of my [00:34:30] countries are gonna follow me around the world in tax me, because I don’t live.

If I don’t live there, if I live in the country, maybe they’ll tax me, but if I don’t live there, they won’t. And so I put less credence in Europe these days outside of Ireland, by descent, by investment, or by moving. That’s how I would do it. If you have any quick questions, we can go through a quick question on that and then we’ll go through kind of the tax side.

If you answer questions, um, there’s actually quite a bunch of good questions, but I don’t, I don’t wanna [00:35:00] interrupt you, but we got off five. We’ll go through it and then we’ll, sure. So I think that’s what I would be doing on the preventive side. If I’m an American and I don’t wanna be an American at some point, and I just think, I mean we had a client, he just wants to only be in Asia.

You don’t need a great passport to be able to travel around Asia. You get a residence, permanent one Turkish passport, you can pretty much get into every country as a tourist or you know, Grenada or do Monique. You can go to China without a visa, for example. So maybe that’s a passport they have. If you’re always going to China, [00:35:30] Armenia, if you’re Armenian descent with how people get that, you can go to China.

Serbia might be opening up a fast track. If you wanna move to Serbia for a year, let’s see if they passed the law, you could potentially, without learning Serbian, get Serbian citizenship. Now you can go to China, be free. All good passports to consider having. That’s the preventative side. If I’m Australian, British, Dutch, whatever, I, you know, if I can have a second passport, Dutch can’t.

But if everyone else I can, I can, you know, I want to have that preventative piece. And so, you [00:36:00] know, if I can, if I can pay, you know, some thousands of dollars to get my, you know, passport through my ancestry, that’s a slam dunk. When it comes to six figures, low six figures, obviously that requires a bit more belief.

But I think that, you know, we had a guy who had four Western passports when Trump passed this law. He had two weeks to decide if he wanted to be a US citizen or not. And he struggled. And, you know, I don’t want someone to be in a sit. I mean, he didn’t have, he struggled making the decision. Everyone else couldn’t make the [00:36:30] decision because they didn’t have a second passport.

Okay. And so I think he ended up paying like a million dollars more than he sh he could have, you know, by, by being more prepared. And so I would be prepared. Cause I think you can see higher taxes. How do you reduce your taxes to begin with? That’s what I call the tax free or tax friendly quadrant. So there’s four conditions.

Two of them are based on you. Two of them are based in the business, two of them are based on leaving. Two of them are based on arriving. So you need to figure out where you’re [00:37:00] leaving on the personal side. So that’s where the Australian piece or the US piece comes in. If you’re an Australian citizen, I think the trend pretty soon is gonna be, you need to leave some, you need to find a place.

You’re gonna live at least six months a year and pay tax. Now, if you live in Dubai, for example, paying tax means you don’t pay tax, but you’re liable for tax according to Australian standards. And then you need to keep your time in Australia minimum, right? If you’re German for example, it’s a little bit easier, but there’s still a lot of boxes to check.

Canada, there’s like 66 different [00:37:30] boxes. You could, you should consider checking or at least check most of them that, Hey, I’m out for Canadian purposes. So you need to figure out when you’re leaving. You also need to figure out, well your business is leaving. I talked to a guy the other day, he left the uk but the business is still there and then he thought he still had to pay personal tax because his business was still there.

They’re different. If you’ve got a company in the UK, it’s gonna pay UK tax. But if you don’t live in the uk, according to the standards, you don’t pay personally, I can start a company in the UK and it’ll be taxed [00:38:00] the same as any other UK company or US C Corp. If you’re, you know, raising venture funding, people go and set up Delaware C Corpse, they pay tax.

That’s a US tax nexus. An LLC is different, but if you have a corporation in one of these companie countries, it doesn’t mean you have to pay tax personally if you no longer are liable. Ideally, if you don’t need that business in the uk, why wouldn’t you move it out? Because most people have a business in Australia or the US because they live there and that’s just what you do.

But if I’m gonna be doing business online, why isn’t my [00:38:30] company in Hong Kong or a free zone in the uae? Or I don’t think Singapore’s is attractive. I guess Laa one in Malaysia for some people is interesting. But you know, Hong Kong’s probably a good one if you think China’s all right. And I think maybe there’s a geopolitical diversification element there with China, but you should leave and then your company should leave.

But they’re different things. And if your company leaves, do I have assets to sell? You can’t just take a very successful company and say, I’m shutting it down and I’m moving it over here. You may have assets to sell IP or [00:39:00] customer list or whatever else that you just sell to your new company. How do you value that as little as possible to where you pay as little tax on the Exodus possible?

On the personal side, some countries have exit taxes. You’ve got a business worth 2 million, you should pay a capital gains tax. How do you pay that? It’s easier to leave before you have big capital gains. That could be from a business, from crypto, from stocks. The more money you have, the harder it is to leave cuz you’re gonna to potentially pay on any unrealized gains.

You have a business worth 2 million that was started with [00:39:30] zero is an unrealized gain in many countries. So how are you leaving? How is your business leaving? And then where are you arriving? Again, you know, if you’re an American and you wanna spend more than one month back in the US every year, you should ideally be living.

None of this is formal tax advice, but you should ideally be living in one place and you should be have a tax residence there and you should or at least have plenty of connections there. I may not have to be tax resident, but just there should be a preponderance of evidence that you’re living in one place and that’s your [00:40:00] home.

If you wanna be a digital nomad, fine. But that’s gonna be a different situation. So where are you gonna be arriving? Do you want to be a digital nomad? Do you want to live my trifecta lifestyle? Three different countries, four months a year. Do you wanna move to one place and just travel? That’s gonna all determine where you pay tax.

Obviously you can move to any high tax country, but ideally, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, are all more relatively tax friendly places in Asia, the uae, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, uk, Greece, [00:40:30] Italy, and Portugal all have tax exemptions. Switzerland is a very expensive tax exemption. You know, Chile has tax exemptions.

There’s lots of countries that have different levels of tax exemptions, tax loopholes, whatever you wanna call them. But where it is that you’re moving, if you live in three places, four months, a year, each, it depends on what those countries are. If it’s Columbia, Montenegro, and Malaysia, none of them are gonna tax you.

But now I go back to is that good enough for the place that you left? I have a friend from Norway and another friend from [00:41:00] Finland, they, along with Mexicans, have to live in a certain list of countries for the first three years when they’re leaving, or else life gets nasty so that their country kind of restricts them where they go For the first three years, Mexico, Norway, and Finland are the ones I’m aware of.

So where are you arriving? Right? I mean, for him, he had to arrive in Portugal. He had other word choice. He’d like to go to Dubai, but he can’t. So where are you arriving and in what way? If you wanna, again, live my trifecta lifestyle, three different countries. Maybe one of [00:41:30] them taxes you because they, there’s a preponderance of time.

If it’s Spain, maybe they’ll step in and say, Hey, you spend enough time here. We’ll tax you if you don’t pay it somewhere else. But again, how does that play with where you left? And then the last part is, where’s your business arriving? This is where most people focus on. They just think, I left Australia. I never said anything, but I’m gone.

And I moved the company to the uae, by the way. Had a guy the other day. His income all comes from royalties. The UAE doesn’t help with that. There’s no tax treaty with the US and the UAE for his YouTube and music royalties. He’s gonna pay [00:42:00] more in the UAE than he would living in Ireland, for example, or Thailand because there’s no tax treaty on royalty tax reduction.

He’s gonna pay the top rate. But he thought, oh, Dubai set up a company, you’re done hardly. So this is the hardest part of where do you put your company? And probably you, if you’re, if you’re doing sourcing, like if you’re, like, we had guys who, they do e-commerce, they have to collect money through Afterpay, for example, and they want a certain company structure.

And then what they’ll do is the entrepreneur will say, well, I need a US or an Australian structure or [00:42:30] whatever. That’s where Afterpay will pay me. Just as an example. Maybe it’s not the case anymore, but no, that should be a billing company and you should pay 2% of that company’s, you know, revenue and tax and then move the rest of it to the offshore structure by, you know, establishing there’s no other nexus in the billing company, but people think I’ll just keep this Australian company because I, you know, I have to have it for this reason.

You don’t, I mean, you might have to have multiple places where your company is going, or you might need to move 98% of your business overseas, but keep the [00:43:00] structure in your company just to collect some customer payments. So this is where the complications come in, but you have to factor all four of those quadrants.

If you miss one, it’s not gonna work. So happy to take any questions on that from you, Mike. Okay, great. So that’s, uh, and then I think we’ve got one more piece here. Obviously, you know, if we’re here, we understand, you know, places that people are competing for our business countries are competing for our business.

The UAE did impose a corporate tax rate. If you follow a certain set of rules, you can still use the free [00:43:30] zone companies at zero. Those are still competitive. I do think Hong Kong and UAE are probably some of our most popular ones. Now, if you wanna live in Europe, Italy is more open to where you’re structured.

So if you live in Italy, they’ve got like a, a lump sum tax you can pay. That may be easier than Portugal’s tax regime, which is where you start getting companies in Malta and stuff like that. So living in Europe definitely adds a layer of complexity. Ireland and Italy are two of the easier ones to live in that are tax friendly, that allow you to work towards [00:44:00] citizenship.

Ireland more easily if you wanna live in Asia where it’s more, you know, easygoing in terms of the rules. Then the UAE and Hong Kong are still the most popular ones. We are doing some stuff with the is of man. We think the Cayman Island ones is needlessly pretentious and overcomplicated. Bahamas has kind of suffered blow from the FTX thing, so I think is of Mann uae.

Free Zones Hong Kong are still among the most popular places. We don’t do, we do BVI sometimes, depending on the kind of structure. British Virgin [00:44:30] Islands, we’re not doing the sey shells. I saw one of our free zones in the UAE we’re opening up sey shells. Companies like, what is it, 1972. I mean, don’t have a say Marshall Islands, shells Belize, throw ’em in the trash.

You can’t bank with them almost anywhere. I mean, good luck. So, you know, those are where you can set it up. But we have employees all over the world. So we have staffing companies. You can use EORs, I’m sure some people here use EORs, like deal to employ people. But you know, if [00:45:00] I have someone in Germany for 15 months, they’re an employee whether I like it or not.

And I’m gonna be taxed to some level based on having a nexus in Germany. So you might set up a staffing company, you know, we have people in Georgia, for example. We’ve got a Georgian company and then the, the operating company pays the Georgian company. We pay a little bit of tax on top of the payroll taxes and it segregates those people in their work from the operating company’s profits and taxes.

So I put in a video a couple weeks ago and kind of, it’s called my perfect offshore structure, the four part [00:45:30] offshore structure. You know, do you need a holding company or a trust that’s up to you for asset protection. I think a lot of entrepreneurs probably over romanticize that stuff. You need an operating company.

You may need the subsidiaries to collect payments. And you may need a staffing company that employs people in certain countries to where you don’t get in trouble or have their work basically be, you know, basically have a, a physical or a, a permanent establishment for your, let’s say UAE company. You don’t want a permanent establishment somewhere else.

The kiss of the ultimate kiss of death [00:46:00] is having, like salespeople in the US and some other Western countries, you will be taxed. I don’t care if you’re in Hong Kong, I don’t care if you’re in the uae, you will be taxed in the us. We don’t hire people generally speaking in the US for that reason. I would never hire a salesperson.

But even other people, it’s like, that could be a, a tax nexus. I don’t want that. Got it. And if you live in the US, then forget it. I mean, if you live in Australia, forget it. I mean, you can’t use offshore companies. They’ll be considered a CFC if you live in the country. [00:46:30] So you’ve gotta live offshore, the satisfaction of wherever you’re living, to where they’re considering you out of the tax net, or at least foreign income qualifying if you’re a us.

And you’ve gotta make sure you don’t create other things that get in the way. So it’s about 45 minutes. I mean, we could go into this for time. Yeah, no, I mean I think it’s good. I think we can go into the questions. There was a, unless you wanna add more, but yeah, there’s some good ones I think I’ll start at, or Michelle on stage.[00:47:00]

So there’s a q and A tab, but I guess Joan, she’s also in some of our web three stuff that’s, I guess she’s a Australian and doesn’t know what’s happening in Australia, but I think you talked about that. Lemme just talk about this real quick and I’ll, I’ll get to the question. Yeah, please talk about your events.

Yes, yes. Obviously we work with the clients in this stuff on an ongoing basis and I think we have kind of a premium offering cuz I believe that, you know, from my own situation there’s a lot of complexity and a lot of other people they do too. The, I’m just moving to Dubai and [00:47:30] my problems are solved. I found four holes in that guy’s strategy in about 60 seconds.

He’s actually gonna pay more living there. So, For folks who are here, I think, you know, I’ve been to to Mike’s events before and he did a good job. We’re sending someone to Mike’s event this year. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for your support. I we’re putting together an event that I think for what the stuff we’re talking about, if you’re not sure what to do or you’re trying to gather ideas, you’re trying to maybe dispel all the misconceptions we don’t take.

We’re having, we’re having an event in Qual Lumpur. [00:48:00] It’s at one of my favorite hotels in the world of Majestic. It’s this September 6th through ninth. We have a a $1,500 discount now, and if you wanna bring friends, business partners, lovers, what have you, it’s like 80% off the main price. Four persons, two, three, and four.

It is a bit more of an expensive event. We don’t take sponsors. No one can pay to speak in our space, in the offshore space, most events are every single person paid to speak or there’s some 15% commission on the backend, which if you’re selling real estate, for example, a [00:48:30] 15% commission is ridiculous. We don’t even get into that stuff.

But if you want to go, uh, promo code is, is Michel Mike’s last name. Go to nomad capitalist.com/live and just enter that code. We have some great people talking about crypto. We have people talking about, you know, mostly our own r and d staff on tax issues, personal and business immigration, whether it’s low, you know, low level, high level, golden visas, passports.

We don’t talk about it anywhere publicly. [00:49:00] I mean, basically every part of global citizenship is covered at the event, and I think it’s a great way to dip your toe in. For folks here who are Asia centric, you know, it’s in Kuala Lumpur, which is nearby. It’s a great place. You’re very close to Singapore. You wanted to go there and open bank accounts or.

Stuff like that. But our events really, I mean, years ago we hosted events and maybe there were some folks who were like, eh, we’ve held, we’ve held two events called Nom Meth Capitalist Live in Mexico the last two years. I don’t know [00:49:30] of anybody who, their head didn’t explode with information. And that’s why I don’t take sponsors.

That’s why we don’t allow anyone to pay to speak. Cause I want it to be, we just jam pack it with everything you need to know. So the stuff we’re talking about today, I, I wish we could go on for hours and hours, but if you’re looking to kind of learn how this stuff works and be able to come to a q and a and ask questions of our strategy team that does this for the clients, I think it’s a worthy investment of a couple thousand dollars.

If you don’t live in Asia, you know, for someone from the US [00:50:00] come to Prince Court Medical Center and get your $300 soup to nuts medical exam as I just did through the medical checkup. Amazing. Yeah. If you’re not from the region, 300 bucks, they look you up, top to bottom, and you actually get to talk to the doctor.

That’ll the savings. It’s like 10 grand in the us You, you’ll pay for the techie, you’ll pay for the trip. But anyway, we, we’ll get to your questions, but I, if you like anything about global citizenship at least just check out nomad capitalist.com/live. If you book it, please use promo code mc aline, you’ll get your $1,500 discount.

You [00:50:30] get the discount everybody add. I think it’s a great entree to folks who may be already doing this stuff, but wanna tighten up their strategy. Or if you wanna start, or if you’re missing the citizenship part, rather than coming on board as, let’s say a client. This way you kind of get your ducks in a row first and figure out what you’re lacking and help to kind of hone your strategy in person.

It’s q and a, it’s hundreds of like-minded people. And so I’d love to have the, the group come and, and join us for that. And we got a big speaker, by the way, Mike, on July 1st. We’re announcing just days away. [00:51:00] Okay. I can’t wait, man. Yeah, I. Mic. Awesome. Awesome. That’s exciting. Yeah, I linked it also, buddy.

That’s an easy one to remember. Nomad capitalist.com/live. Live. Live. Yeah, live. Live in the flesh. Someone’s actually asking if you’re where your office is. I said I don’t think, I think you’re completely remote, right? I mean, so we have, I guess technically an office. We got one guy in Dubai who works at the free zone there.

We have [00:51:30] own, we have buildings that we bought in. We, we had a very Eastern European focus cuz it was good English, it was affordable. People had some get up and go. So we own offices kind of like right up the main squares in Belgrade, in Tbilisi, Georgia. And in a year of Armenia. I think we’re gonna kind of pivot away from two of those and still keep some of the people, but, but working at home.

We’ve kind of been expanding the team more internationally, so we’re all over the place. And then we’re opening up a, a space in Ireland. We’ve got, I think, six people there so [00:52:00] far, and we’re gonna figure out how to open that office. So, I mean, the, the headquarters are in Dubai. We have a presence still in Hong Kong, but nobody works there.

We have a US entity as well. Nobody works there. So it’s kind of like the ultimate flag theory, as they would call it. It’s have your companies in places that are convenient, but have your workforce somewhere else. So we do, we do own three office buildings, not, not the whole building, but you know, office spaces.

And we have a couple others that we lease. And, and so it’s, it’s, it’s an evolution. We’re, [00:52:30] we’re consolidating. There’s no real place. People come and like, knock on the door. Hello, can I come in? I mean, obviously we, uh, you know what we do. I’m sure some people, some people think you shouldn’t have the right to lower your taxes.

You know? Yeah. There’s those crazy people. I mean, even in my family, it’s like that, honestly. And I dunno that we want people just coming in like, no, I don’t think like a big sign or something. I mean, it’s not a secret to the clients where we are, but, you know, I don’t know. We want people coming in like knocking on the door.

Yeah, I agree. I, I met PayPal in Hong Kong and I said, where’s your office? Like, we can’t tell [00:53:00] people because they’ll, they’ll, yeah. I never had a problem with PayPal, but everyone else has a problem with PayPal. Yeah. I have problems with PayPal. I would be, I would doing PayPal, us. I wouldn’t be doing PayPal, Hong Kong.

I think the, this, this is where you need a multi-part structure. Probably if I have a Hong Kong company, I want to have like a US or European company to run my PayPal through and save myself 3%. It’s probably worth it. So anyway. Yeah, because Hong Kong, [00:53:30] PayPal is really squirrely. Yeah. I mean they’re, they can just steal your money cuz they’re not a bank, right?

So they can just, uh, just take your money. That’s how I. Yeah, we don’t, we never had them do that, but like, we can’t even close our account and so we have to like audit it every year, like to be conservative and just like, it’s like at least in the US they let you close it. So, so I, my advice would be just have a multi-part, have a two-part structure if you’re in Hong Kong and do your payment processing elsewhere.

Yeah. Anyway. Okay. So I think we’re talking about the Australia [00:54:00] one, so, uh, mark, I guess she was just learning about that. There’s, I, I think the simple answer is what they’re doing is they’re just consolidating various rulings. It’s kind of very boring tax stuff. And obviously we have tax attorneys and CPAs that we work with.

I mean, we’re kind of a general contractor. I’m not like a tax attorney myself, but, you know, obviously we talked to these guys for so many years. What it is, is we had a bunch of rulings to define what’s a resident, and we’ve merged them together and we’ve made some changes. And the, the basic [00:54:30] interpretation from a number of international tax people in Australia is, this is basically saying that we’re going to start saying if you’re a digital nomad, That that may may not be enough to break the residency test.

There’s four tax tests in Australia. One is the days test, which people commonly misunderstand in Australia and other countries. They think, oh, 180 3 days in a year, I’m a tax resident. They then think the opposite is true. By the way. There are some situations if you’ve got, okay, if you go to the US and you spend seven months [00:55:00] and you’ve got a closer connection somewhere else, you may be able to not pay tax even though you failed the day’s test.

But people think the opposite of the day’s test is true. If you’re under 180 3, that somehow you’re home free. And that’s not really it because there’s all the other tests that also instructed, and if you’re from Australia for example, or from Canada and you’re 180 2 in Canada and then you’re three months here and three months there, Canada’s still the number one place and you’re assumed almost to have been from there because like that’s where you’ve been living.

So you really have to show them, I’m really [00:55:30] leaving and living six months there, but one day less. And then three months, like they’re like, yeah, you didn’t really leave. That’s not enough for us. And so there’s four tests in Australia and they kind of. Strengthen how they look at the residency rules. I’m sure some people will disagree and, and some have, but all of our, yeah, I mean it’s like the thing, there’s always some people say taxes is an, is negotiation with the government.

It’s kind of like a negotiation way that did come up. Oh, you can get a private ruling and this, it’s like, do you wanna spend the next five years in court with the, with the tax man because you just No, that was, that [00:56:00] wasn’t really the formal, it’s now the, I mean, come on. Got it. Okay. Well let’s go. And soon she’s asking, she’s from Canada and her accountant told her she doesn’t have to pay taxes if she’s away from Canada for two years.

I, well, you like away as in not coming back at all. She’s in the, in the audience I think still, but uh, it just says gone for away from Canada for two years. So the goal when you leave a country like Canada is to break the tax prices. Like, yeah, but please, I’m [00:56:30] not giving, this is, I think, I think it’s gonna be hard to, uh, go into big, she says yes.

So I mean, I mean the general rules are you have to break your. Tax residents. And so, I mean, the longer you’re away, the better. The less time you spend, the better. I think what people get into trouble is when they try and like ride the line. If you’re an American, you can also move to Puerto Rico. You’ve gotta meet one of three te well you’ve gotta meet three tests and you’ve gotta do it in one of three ways.

And so, you know, people who are like, I’ll just do the bare minimum, that’s gonna be a problem. [00:57:00] So if it’s like, oh, leave forever and never come back for two years, I guess. But there’s, there’s other factors besides just your physical presence. Do you have a home, for example, I remember we had a case where we were really talking to the lawyers about like a person who had like a log cabin for the summer.

Like, is that a house? You know, and it’s an issue for some folks. They don’t wanna cancel their lease, they don’t wanna rent out or sell their home. Like, so there’s other factors. But yeah, I mean, I guess if you leave a country for two years, that’s a pretty strong indication. You don’t wanna come back.

That’s it. I mean, you can get back into a tax net. I think I could go to Australia now and if I overstay my visa or [00:57:30] something and I spend too long, I could be taxed. I mean, it doesn’t, it’s not like you can’t get back into it. So. I guess she’s asking what country she has to pay taxes if she’s not in Canada.

She has no assets there. But Ophelia’s a little bit specific. I don’t know. I know it’s already almost at the one hour Mark. Andrew, I’ll just quickly tell you, I mean, I, I, there’s different ways to do it and what’s interesting is that, again, there’s individual circumstances based on how many ties you have to the country.

Again, now Australia’s saying maybe it won’t even matter how many ties that was, what was in the ruling. It may not even matter how many ties you have to [00:58:00] Australia if you don’t, if we don’t like the way you’re handling the residents part of the test. So it depends. But I mean, for example, in some countries, I mean there’s, you can go to some countries and you can spend a month, pay them $20,000 and then be a tax resident, but you can’t spend more than six months anywhere else.

So if you’re a digital nomad, that’s a tax residence. Our interpretation with our, our tax guy’s interpretation was Australia is not gonna be so open to that anymore. Right? So that’s a place where technically you’re paying tax to give you a tax resident certificate. You tell your bank, I [00:58:30] pay tax in this place.

There’s even one, there’s even a country where you spend like one day per year. There. Actually they’re, they’re, they’re tightening their rules, but one day per year, as long as you have some money or some income, they’ll give you tax residents and then again, you can’t spend six months somewhere else. But I, you know, that may not apply to everybody in every situation.

If you go and spend six months or more and you really make a home and you can make a case like, this is my bonafide place of living, generally speaking, that’s probably good enough as long as you clear up the ties on your departure. [00:59:00] Then the issue is where am I want, if I want to go somewhere for six months, where’s that gonna be?

I mean, it has to be a tax friendly place, either tax free, like the UAE territorial tax, which has some restrictions like a Thailand, you can’t remit money under certain circumstances. Non dumb, like in Ireland tax exclusion like Italy or Greece or, well, no, like more like Portugal, a lump sum like Switzerland or Italy or Greece.

There’s five different ways you can move to five different types of tax scenarios you could move to, and you could spend the entire year there if you [00:59:30] want to, and pay zero or some predefined amount. So that works. You have to pick any of those. Got it. And then, and then again comes into, I have royalty income from YouTube, from book sales, from music.

Okay. Well now do I, I want a tax treaty and does my country have a tax treaty? I mean, some do. It’s a lot of factors. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Four, four more. I don’t know. You hit me. So Mohammad says, hi Andrew. I know you’re a fan of Malaysia. I’m wondering if there’s any point to Malaysian passport since benefits are more prevalent to higher [01:00:00] income individuals on Malaysian, by the way.

Yeah, I don’t think you’re gonna get Malaysian pass. Oh, does he have a Malaysian passport? He’s already Malaysian. I guess he’s just curious about foreigners in his country. I know you’re a fan of Malaysia. I’m wondering if there’s a point to the Malaysian passport. Since most benefits that are more relevant to higher income individuals are open to foreigners.

Oh. Right. I forget, you know, I, I don’t, I forget some of things. We’ve had some people who, like their wife [01:00:30] is Malaysian or they used to be Malaysian, they became Australian. So I, I honestly, I forget exactly like, like what rights of feel. I feel like you get, you get some kind of permanent residence in certain cases or like they look at you like you can keep your, my ad like your id.

I feel like there’s some thing you can hold onto and they don’t really care. I feel like Malaysia also doesn’t really, isn’t very strict on enforcing the no dual citizenship. I mean, I know Malaysians who have three passports and I feel like as long as you don’t flaunt it, they almost kind of tell you they don’t care.

Some of the border guys like just don’t show us that. [01:01:00] I mean, if you were to get Maltese citizenship, they re, they report to your country of tax residents. And so that probably would trigger somebody in Raja, I guess to say you’re, you’re canceled. I mean, Malaysian passport’s, great. They’re not gonna bother you no matter where you live.

I mean, I think the only country you need a visa to is basically the us Maybe Canada, I’m not sure. So a great passport. I mean I do, I want insurance against that. I’d want less insurance against Malaysia than against Australia or Canada. I feel like if you’re in a, if you’re a Malaysian [01:01:30] and you ever got tired of it, you just go and live somewhere else.

I mean, Malaysia already isn’t tax foreign income even of its own citizens. And I think there’s a political reason for that. They’ve talked about kind of pulling that back in 2026, but I’m not convinced that all those politicians with money overseas are gonna wanna get rid of that. So I, I, I think being Malaysian’s fine, but you’re not gonna become Malaysian, I don’t think.

And I wouldn’t try to become Malaysian. I mean, I guess if you’re a Kosovo football player and your passport trash, I would take it. But otherwise just live there. There used to be the mm two H, but [01:02:00] I hope blow up. I heard, I, I, I don’t, I know it’s, he raise the reform. It’s a lot. You gotta make like $9,000 a month and you have to deposit like 202.

I mean, the ring it’s down now, which is part of why it’ll be a great time to come to our event. And everything’s cheap, but it’s like 9,000 a month in income. And like I, I, IM estimating 2 10, 2 20 in the bank. Okay. It’s not the end of the world, but I mean it’s, it’s more than it was Great. Okay. Julius Everett asked, uh, I [01:02:30] know Portugal ranked quite high on your passport index.

I’d be curious to learn more about Portugal’s Golden Visa requirements. Is real estate still and option? Well, so they, they said they were canceling the golden Visa this year, and now they’re saying, okay, well we’re gonna bring it back without the real estate because it’s a political thing, right? People were complaining as they are in many places in the world.

Foreigners are coming in, buying our property and our prices are going up. So I think what they’re probably gonna keep is investment funds, which I always thought was one of the better ones anyway. And a lot of the investment funds do [01:03:00] invest in various kinds of real estate. So it’s kind of a way to get a more tax advantaged, more hands-off way to invest.

So I think we’ll see what they bring back. It seems like the investment funds may survive and some of those are in real estate, right? We’ll be, we’ll be talking about that in September. Cause I think what the dust will have settled and we’re gonna kind of lay out all the different golden visa options.

If the goal was to get citizenship without living there, Portugal is really the only one that ever did that. If the goal was to live there and get citizenship or to not live there and not need citizenship, then the [01:03:30] other ones could work. Portugal is a good passport. I don’t know that the EU is as likely to tax foreign citizens, especially like Portugal, which has like a diaspora history of immigration.

They have kind of a maritime culture historically. It you’s a good passport. I, I’ve lost some confidence in them, honestly, in their ability to execute. So, I mean, if, if I say I’m gonna make a decent investment that I think I can recover in 6, 8, 10 years, whatever the investment is. I’m willing and I have the optionality to live in Europe without the [01:04:00] requirement to do more than seven days a year and I’ve got a decent chance at naturalization.

I’m willing to put up with some, some bumps along the way. It’s not a bad option, but I would not look at it as a guarantee. Caribbean citizenship. Turkish citizenship is guaranteed. C b D. Once you qualifies, probably guaranteed. Okay. Thanks so much Austin saying what’s your take on passport by lineage for Poland?

I think he’s saying in great-grandfather, last descendant, I believe, I think great-grandparents are allowed for Poland. I [01:04:30] I, to be honest, I. I have some team members who are much more up on the CBDs, and they’re the ones who are talking about it at the event. I mean, they’re, they’re gonna cover it.

Obviously we do that service as a standalone. You could just, you know, call us. I thought at one point for certain people there was a language requirement, but it seems like a lot of times there isn’t. So I, I don’t remember everything about Poland, but I do believe great grandparents qualify for Poland.

If you meet the other conditions, and I think, and I’ve had Polish people or people with Polish ancestry say, I don’t, I don’t wanna live in Poland. Again, if you have an [01:05:00] a European Union member, state citizenship, you can not only live in all the other ones, plus, I mean, Polish citizenship got better in the last year.

You can now go to the US without a visa. So if you are some other Western citizen, that’s a nice backup, which probably, again, pollen has a history of immigration to some extent. Are they as likely to make it impossible to leave? Probably not. And I think if you’re European. Even if they did make it impossible to leave, they would make it possible to leave within the other countries.

And you’d always have an Ireland who says, okay, come here and don’t pay much [01:05:30] tax or Malta, okay, come here and don’t pay much tax. So you have options. I think that other people’s, other people don’t. I would, I’d be polished. Sure, why not? And great grandparents should qualify again. Thanks. And last one, but not least, Homer Simpson, what, which country outside USA has lowest yearly registration fee for setting up corporation does not have that, does not have tax or, or audits for a purely equity holding company.

[01:06:00] Oh, well, I mean the UAE now has these audits, even some of the free zones. So I mean, I think audits are becoming a thing. I mean, yeah, the US LLC for example, is obviously very cheap to set up in some states. Some of them never have any ongoing fees at all, other than like a registered agent Yes. Says outside us, so, but uh, well, I mean that’s the thing I too, like outside us, they have higher, you know, maybe lower tax, but they have like audits and upkeep that, you know, like Hong Kong, well, it’s like, you know, it’s a Why is it, why does some things cost so much?

I mean, cuz they’re worth it. Right? I mean, I, [01:06:30] I recently was, I recently made an offer in a house that was like 30% cheaper than all the other houses. And I thought, okay, I can renovate this. And it turns out it was gonna cost 3 million euros to renovate this house. And, and it’s like 2 million more than I thought it, than I was hoping.

And it’s like, yeah, that’s the reason it’s so cheap and yet it’s still too expensive. Mm-hmm. So, I mean, if I’m an American A U US llc, alone’s not enough. If I’m not an American, I, I still think given some of these residency rules, Just having an LLC in it own is a, is a problem. So, I mean, I don’t know. I guess the [01:07:00] offshore jurisdictions, like the BVI aren’t that expensive to, I mean, Belize, I guess, but it’s trash.

I mean, I think you’re paying for a combination of low tax efficiency, reputability, those are all important. I mean, so what’s a UAE free zone? If you wanna be in the fancy ones? It’s expensive. If you wanna be in one of the cheaper ones, it’s, I don’t know, four grand a year or something. I mean, it’s money well spent.

I mean, Hong Kong, the audits are the year, right? Yeah. But I guess nobody likes audits. You know, I, I, yeah. [01:07:30] Listen, I mean, there are times I, okay, I have a company in the BVI for purely holding equities. There are some conditions to meet, but there’s not an audit yet. So if all I’m doing is just holding stocks, like it means like stocks fine.

If all I’m doing is holding my shares in a certain fine, something like that could work. But if you plan to like, okay, I have a thing now, where can you send me dividends? We have a bank in the US that’s willing to, in some cases, open for their existing account holders accounts for like [01:08:00] foreign companies.

It’s pretty rare. I mean, try getting a bank account for a BVI company. I mean, Singapore has pretty much gotten rid of those, you know, maybe Switzerland if you pay them six thou, but now you’re paying, I was, I was quoted 12,000 francs a year to have an account in Switzerland. So, so much for cheap. Right. So I mean, do you need to receive a dividend payment or some money?

I mean, I wouldn’t like, you know, I mean, it’s a, it depends. I mean, maybe the BVI could work in some cases, but, uh, I mean, even we’ve had guys with crypto holding, they just wanna hold crypto [01:08:30] and, all right, the Marshall Island’s fine, whatever. Nobody cares cuz the exchange doesn’t care. You just need to title it somewhere.

But I, I think generally speaking, it’s a problem. Great. We’re getting lots of thank you all to me too, but people are all happy with these, uh, your answers like Julius and Hammad, many, there’s one last chat question from Yeah, yeah. Fernando, maybe if you wants to squeeze, he’s asking any countries offering interesting passports in exchange for investments in local REITs versus directly buying real estate?[01:09:00]

I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give you a salesy answer on that because all the other answers, I mean, the reality is we could probably answer the question for two or three hours on end with all the different permutations on this question. I’ll say there are countries where you can make kinda a res, I mean, Ireland just closed the i i p, which had an excl exclusive, like 2 million euros in REITs, and then you get access, but you don’t, you don’t need to do that to live in audit.

You just need to start a company and hire one person that’s much more efficient than putting 2 million in a REITs. We’re gonna be [01:09:30] talking about at the event, what I call the paper residences, where you make some kind of bank deposit or real estate investment and you don’t necessarily have to live it live there.

We really try not to put those out publicly, which is part of why we don’t record the event because you know, Parkway had something like that and it got abused cuz it was just out there for everybody and now it’s tough and that was a good passport to have. So I mean, we’ll be talking about some of those res in particular, I, I’m trying to think.

Maybe some version of a, I’m trying to, I dunno, it should be on the tip of my [01:10:00] tongue, but real estate, bank accounts, investment accounts, bond accounts, those are all possible from, you know, 20,000, 50,000, 200,000. Um, so that’s the kind of stuff we’ll be, we’ll be talking about. Awesome. I think it’s a great opportunity for someone to come that, by the way, that’s like a 30 minute presentation, just so you know.

At the, at the, yeah. We talk about these kinda exclusive, these kinda like weird passports where you put 50 grand and kind of come back in three years. Obviously they could change the rules in those countries, so it’s maybe a good idea to have a couple of them rather than like [01:10:30] banking, like. My only hope of escaping Australian tax is this one country.

Just they promise, but that’s half an hour out of four days of materials. So you can imagine how much we’re gonna talk about. Yeah. Plus just the, plus the hallway chats and the people, you know, other people there. I’m, I’m coming Andrew, so I’m, I’m locking my ticket. So, yeah, I think, I think it’s gonna be truly, we, obviously we have a certain marketing angle, as I know you do, but for me, this is all about, you know, the customer experience, which is again, yeah, I don’t want sponsors.

I don’t want some [01:11:00] sponsor tell me what I’m supposed to say or not say. So it’s kind of like, do you wanna be the customer or do you wanna be the product? We’re talking about exhibiting for the first time at an event this year. All their money is made from, from sponsors and exhibitors. It’s like, how am I getting any good information?

Like, you’re just basically paying to be sales pitched. So, yeah. Anyway, yeah. Ken’s a good, yeah, Fernando seems like he’ll. This. He says he’ll have to come to find the rest. He’ll be, seems like he’ll be, hi, listen, you gotta have a little, I mean, you know, I was, I was saying for all the entrepreneurs [01:11:30] here, people might say, oh, you know, your business has decent margins.

And I said to myself, if you wanted to go and spend, if you went to some guy where we’re from Mike and like in the us and you said, Hey, do you wanna spend 12 years of your life going through some of the hell holes of the world? And then employing people to do the same, to figure out, it’s like if you were to pay someone what the average person would need to be pay, I’d have, I’d have zero margin at all.

Right. I mean, there’s, there’s something to be said about, I think there’s a lot of opportunities in lesser known markets, but it’s very [01:12:00] opaque. I think we hopefully will clear up some of that and give you some good stuff at the event. And uh, obviously we put out, you know, daily content on YouTube. So I appreciate your having me though.

No, it’s fun. We had fun. These are fun. Great, great stuff. And uh, yeah, I’ll, I’ll see you there. Look, we haven’t, we haven’t met in years, so I’ll let see you there and well cross, cross Border Summit too after, in November. So that’s a good combo and, uh, thanks, thanks for, yeah, I always love our exchanges and, uh, thanks for sharing, [01:12:30] especially all this extra time and getting everybody’s questions and, uh, yeah, everybody’s really, really happy.

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody for your time. Yes, cheers. And thank you to our sponsor, our returning sponsor, mercury.com online bank. Well, it’s a real bank, but you can to totally online for us. Our blimp program participants are going through this as well. Thank you Mercury, Travis, it’s great there.

It’s been on our show, it’s been in our events. We’re gonna have another event where we will have them attending [01:13:00] as well. And if you want to get a little bonus for you and us, if you sign up and do some special circumstances, you can go to global information.com/mercury. Also have a video tutorial that we use even for the blimp people.

Use the same exact video to learn how to use it. Oh, hope you can check it out. Totally free. Why not? It’s you there. Alright. Right. Thank you Andrew for sharing. That is a, that was a really in depth one all around the world, talking about business and personal taxes and citizenships and [01:13:30] residencies, and answering various questions from the live audience at the webinar at Global Asia.

So thanks so much, Andrew. Actually both. Nor by capitalist san information is about the same age, 10 years each. So that’s really cool. And you know, of course you could use his services for your own specific help, like some pretty specific questions even during the webinar. He does services to help you out.

Also, he’s got the live event, September 6th, seven, eight, and ninth in Kuala Lumpur, [01:14:00] Malaysia. You can also meet up with me there. They’re also supporting Cross-Border Summit, sending somebody to our events November 16th and 17th in Chang Mai, Thailand. Lots of cool stuff happening in Asia. Lots of cool stuff happening in world of cross-border trade, online business, I guess you can say Digital nomads.

But basically we are the new, the new World Order referenced that in the talk. But we are the future. You know, I think we have to keep our minds open. We have [01:14:30] to keep trying new things, learning new things, being aware of the changes in the world between countries and policies, and there’s so much happening.

There’s something I’ll be announcing soon. It will actually already be online as the show goes online about a new project and protocol we’re building on the load pipe. Yes, might’ve heard that over the years. It’s gonna change everything we’re do here. It’s gonna change everything in the world we’re pretty sure about, and I’ll be sharing that in future.

But thanks again for watching episode [01:15:00] 404. Global from asia.com. Find show notes there. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thank you. To our sponsors, cross Better Logistics, which we use ourselves. Thank you to Mercury for being our, one of our Cornerstone podcast sponsors over the years. We also use them for our cross border payments in, uh, in the US and our, our online banking.

Thank you for everybody for, so support this. Thank you for, uh, our team editing this and making this go alive. I think our team [01:15:30] is doing amazing work. Thank you Alvin, LJ and Manley. Stephanie, everybody. We got so much to do. It’s halfway through the year. I am sweating. I gotta turn the fan back on after this recording is done.

Thanks again and we got so much to do, so much to do. Take care. To get more info about running an international business, please visit our website@ww.global from asia.com. That’s [01:16:00] ww.global from asia.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.