Diversifying Offshore Is The Most Patriotic Journey I Can Imagine
Fill In Presidential Election Winner’s Name Here
By way of full disclosure, I wrote this essay last week, before the U.S. presidential election. I held on to it waiting to see which candidate’s name to fill in to the opening paragraph…
Obama has won. He’ll be running the show in the United States for the next four years. What actions should you take now?
You should continue doing what you’ve been doing, as long as what you’ve been doing has been organizing and diversifying your life overseas. If you haven’t started down this road yet, I’d say that you should get started today with a sense of urgency. You must diversify, both your investments and your life. It’s a necessity of the world we’re living in, regardless who’s sitting in the White House.
Undertake this agenda understanding that whatever actions you take to take control of your life, your finances, and your family’s future will be vilified by many as unpatriotic and un-American. This is a great irony for me. Have these self-appointed patriots read any U.S. history? Have they ever watched “How The West Was Won”? America is a great country because, historically, Americans have always taken care of themselves. The un-American course of action would be to do nothing to protect yourself, to allow events beyond your control to overtake you. A real American never allows himself to play the victim.
Whether you’re trying to protect some wealth from litigious crackpots looking for their easy pots of gold in someone else’s yard or simply trying to earn a living and finding it not possible where you live, taking some or all of your life “offshore” can be the best answer.
Following The Path Of Our Ancestors
Considering America was built by people looking for opportunity, the most natural course for their descendants is to continue to seek opportunity wherever it can be found. Can’t get a job where you’re living in the United States? Move somewhere where you can. Have a business idea that would be over-regulated back home to the point where it would be too costly to get off the ground? Start the business somewhere else instead. Already made some money but see the vultures hovering around trying to pluck it away from you? Move that money where the vultures can’t access it.
The outcome of this week’s presidential election isn’t the point. The underlying problems in the country right now are greater than any one man (or even group of 535 men and women) can fix. Will the problems ever get fixed? Change will take place, maybe dramatic change, that will lead to a new reality of life in the United States. When will that happen? What will the new reality look like? I can’t tell you. It’s more than any one man can contemplate. And, even if the current problems are resolved, new problems will arise. What will they be? How will they affect you and your personal security, physical and financial? Again, I can’t say, and neither can you.
Planning is the only thing that will help protect you no matter what comes. That planning must include international diversification. Europeans have been diversifying internationally for centuries, holding their money in safe havens offshore just in case something unwelcome played out in their own countries. It proved a prudent precaution in the first decades of last century. Argentines hold as much of their wealth outside their country as possible, knowing that the next crisis is always just around the corner. Wealthy Americans have followed this model, too. Now it’s time for all Americans to recognize the common sense in this strategy.
Today, going offshore isn’t just for the rich. None of us can afford to keep all our eggs (whatever those eggs may be) in a single jurisdiction. This is not unpatriotic but pragmatic. If some nation decided to invade the United States, where much of my family lives and where I am still very connected, I’d fly back, get my guns out of their lock boxes, and stand up to help defend.
Meanwhile, the world is full of opportunity to prosper beyond U.S. borders, and pursuing new and better opportunities wherever they are to be found couldn’t be a more patriotic journey.
Lief Simon
