The U.S. election season is winding down… thankfully. This election has been more embarrassing for this American abroad than any previous such season in my nearly 20 years living overseas. Watching the debate last night, I kept waiting for Jack Bauer to come running into view on the TV screen and save the day. The […]
Banking overseas is more challenging today than it’s ever been and more challenging all the time thanks to the constantly changing landscape. One week, one bank will open an account for Americans. The next week it won’t. Another bank that required a US$100,000 minimum bank balance increases that requirement to US$500,000… and then reduces it […]
Panama, by comparison, didn’t need to think about such outside-the-box ideas for
Negative interest rates are in the headlines. Japan has just recently caused a media uproar by joining the ranks of the ECB and central banks in Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark, who are all charging commercial banks to store their extra cash. One investment strategy touted by a colleague in the past to take advantage of […]
Kathleen and I flew from Panama to Belize City Tuesday morning for this week’s Live and Invest in Belize Conference. Passing through the airport, we picked up a copy of the local paper. Big topic in the press and on everybody’s mind in this country is banking. Belize is being beaten up and knocked around […]
The window to take action in Colombia is right now… for two reasons: First, current exchange rates have pushed down property prices in Colombia to levels not seen for many years. Not surprisingly, real estate sales to Americans are at an all-time high. The U.S. dollar continues its rampage against the Colombian peso. How much […]
Belize is indeed a small offshore banking jurisdiction. It has five international banks. In the past several months, every one of them has lost its correspondent bank. A correspondent bank is the connection between a small bank and the rest of the banking world. Without a correspondent bank, a small retail bank can’t accept incoming […]
Yesterday, day one of the Global Asset Protection and Wealth Summit Lief is hosting in Panama City this week, he and I had lunch with banker friends in town for the conference. One, with 30 years of experience in the global banking industry, sat down, looked around the table, and said: “I wish I hadn’t […]
The currency gods have conspired against the doom-and-gloomers who have been predicting (even, it seems to me sometimes, demanding) the demise of the U.S. dollar. The dollar continues to appreciate against many currencies, including the currencies of commodity-producing countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Chile, and New Zealand. Over the last 30 days, the […]
Five years ago, when the U.S. FATCA law had just been passed and the effects it would have on non-U.S. banks were a hot topic for speculation, a banker I knew from Andorra made a remark to me along the lines of: “We’ll all go back to goat herding before we roll over for the […]
Offshore Living Letter is a publication of Live and Invest Overseas. Our goal is to provide timely, actionable information on all things offshore, including: how to go offshore, diversifying your portfolio, wealth creation, protecting your assets, and much more.
