International wealth-building strategies. Here’s A Secret…

International wealth-building strategies: I grew up in a lower-middle-class home, the son of a single mother. There was no trust fund to give me a leg up in life.

I saved long to be able to pay for my first car, and I worked two jobs to cover college tuition… then grad school.

I tell you this to prove the point that you don’t need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to take advantage of the kind of wealth-building strategies I’ve followed.
I had a pioneering spirit in me from an early age. I simply had an idea that I wanted more out of life than growing up, going to school, working, and dying in the same place.

I had that idea for the first time when I was in high school.

I could have achieved my objective—of not spending my whole life in one place—by moving to another state. But something in my head told me to push for more.

I wanted options… as many as possible.

Beyond-the-border options.

I heard about a school called, at the time, the American Graduate School of International Management. You might know it as Thunderbird. I decided in high school that that’s where I’d go after college.

The school has since merged with Arizona State University, but it still offers one of the best international MBA programs in the world.

That was as far as my thinking went at the time.

After graduating college and getting into Thunderbird, my plan began to expand; my focus was on job opportunities overseas.

Let someone pay me to see the world, I figured… so I could either find a job in another country or join the Navy, as my best friend had decided to do.

I knew myself well enough to realize that I wouldn’t be much good as a link in the chain of anyone’s command.

I finished the program at Thunderbird and got what I thought was an ideal offer of employment from an international oil drilling company. Just as I’d hoped, they wanted to pay me to see the world… at least the world where they operated.

The trouble, I found, is that oil seems to be in places where humans probably shouldn’t hang out in the long term.

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

The experience was great. Unfortunately, the company wasn’t. So I quit and returned to the United States. But that initial international experience was all I needed to confirm that that was the life for me.

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

Finally, I felt ready to look overseas again.

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

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

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

Ireland became my first real experience at internationalizing my life.

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

I have obtained residency (in four countries), opened bank accounts (more than twenty-five accounts in fifteen countries), launched and operated businesses (in seven countries), bought real estate (in twenty-four countries), educated my children (in four countries), and obtained a second citizenship.

I don’t tell you all this to brag… but to show you that—unlike other “offshore experts” you may find out there on the internet—I have real-world, firsthand experience with the offshore world. It’s my everyday life.

None of this happened overnight, and here’s a secret…

Much of it was not according to any plan.

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

But you don’t have to “play it by ear.” You can easily learn all the things that I had to learn the hard way. And believe me, though the road I chose to take has not always been easy… it’s been worth it.

What have I gained?

Well, as I share in my latest book, I’ve built my fortune overseas—primarily in real estate.

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

A key to making money is making sure you’re not losing it… and that’s where my “offshore” expertise really shines.

I’ve worked for decades to increase my understanding of asset protection… The result? Not only has it helped make me money, it ended up saving me a fortune… three fortunes, actually…

This method allowed me to make money during the 2000 dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and even the global pandemic of 2020…

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

And I can tell you now that what I’ve learned—and what I want to share with you—will keep us from losing money during the next economic crisis.

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

No matter how high taxes rise… Or how far the stock market falls…

No matter when the next recession strikes—or how hard it hits… I am not worried.

And you shouldn’t be either. Because, providing you make a few smart moves, none of that has to affect you.

Stay Diversified.

Lief Simon
Editor, Offshore Living Letter