Your Plan To Be Wealthy In 3 Countries

A few years back, at a Live And Invest Overseas conference, an attendee approached me to talk about his offshore goals.

He’d just sold his business, and he was getting ready for retirement…

In his golden years, he wanted to be “wealthy in three countries.”

What does that mean?

And how can you achieve it?

I recently sat down with Offshore Living Letter Managing Editor Ben Murnane to talk about my Offshore Wealth Summit taking place in Panama City next month, Sept. 20–22.

I brought you the first part of our chat in Monday’s newsletter. Here’s part two of our conversation… where we talk about achieving that powerful goal of being “wealthy in three countries”…

(By the way, if you’re still considering whether or not to join me in Panama City—today is the day to decide. This weekend, the price of admission goes up. But today, you can still click here to get your Early Bird discount.)

BEN MURNANE: In each of the five flags areas, when it comes to offshore living—residency and citizenship, asset protection, banking, and business—it is all about having options. So, if your bank fails—and we saw three bank failures in the U.S. this year—it’s good to have an option to have a bank account somewhere else.

I think you’ve seen some bank failures over the years, Lief, in different countries you’ve been working in. You weren’t stuck then. You didn’t lose all your money because you had other options, right?

LIEF SIMON: You wouldn’t call them failures, but closures. And all three of them were instigated, for lack of a better term, by the U.S. government. So in Panama, different banks were shut down by the efforts of the U.S. government. One was by the SEC and the other two were by the Treasury Department for money laundering concerns.

If I didn’t have money in other accounts, I’d have been stuck until that money in those banks was released. I didn’t lose money in two of the situations and I lost about 20% of my deposits in the third situation.

And that was the lesson learned, I guess, with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year in the U.S. At least one of the big companies, they had all their money or most of their money with that one bank. And to me that was just stupid, right? No matter how great of a relationship they had with the bank, they should have had some money elsewhere for diversification.

And again, it all comes down to you don’t know what’s going to happen and everything’s fine until it isn’t. Your car drives fine until it breaks down.

BEN MURNANE: As you say, everything is fine until it isn’t. And even in the U.S., the world’s most developed economy, there can be emergencies. Extraordinary measures come into play. During the Great Depression, gold was confiscated by the Roosevelt administration. So even if you have diversified in the U.S… If you have stocks, if you have real estate holdings, if you have some of these alternative assets, if you have gold—if you have everything all in the U.S. still, you could be at risk. So that’s where international options come into play.

LIEF SIMON: I’ve had conference attendees (at non-offshore conferences) come up and tell me, “oh, I’m taking your advice. I’ve diversified overseas.” Oh, what did you do? Well, the one guy sold all of his properties in the U.S. He moved to Nicaragua and bought properties in Nicaragua. He didn’t diversify. All he did was move his risk from the U.S. to Nicaragua.

I know someone else whose goal was to be considered wealthy in three countries. That was what he wanted to do—set himself up in three different countries. So if two thirds of those countries turned into Venezuela, he still had that last one where however much money he had there, he would be considered wealthy. It’s a simple idea, but it took sophisticated planning to put his plan together. It took some time to select the right countries and allocate his assets accordingly.

BEN MURNANE: I think that’s such a powerful idea, that idea of being wealthy in three countries. And I think it speaks to what you do and what we do at Live And Invest Overseas and what the Offshore Wealth Summit is all about. It is about being wealthy, enhancing your wealth, growing your wealth, building your wealth. It’s about protecting yourself, yes, but we’re not about doom and gloom necessarily.

It is about enriching your life and your opportunities, not about limiting your life. So maybe speak to that a little bit, because I know the Offshore Wealth Summit is not just about protecting your wealth, but also growing it. And you have some speakers on investment opportunities.

LIEF SIMON: We do. There’ll be some real estate speakers. We’ll have some asset managers presenting as well. And we will have a couple of new presentations for some financial investments.

BEN MURNANE: It’s exciting always to bring something new to the table.

So maybe give us a high-level overview of the three days of the conference, Lief. What can people expect and what can you promise people when they come out at the other end?

LIEF SIMON: We break it down into two types of presentations. We do panel discussions where we talk in big-picture terms about the flags that we’ve been talking about. And then there’s individual presentations by speakers digging into more detail. So we have speakers talking about specific residency programs in different countries, specific structure options in different countries, asset protection and estate planning, again in more detail specifically. Then there’s the investment presentations.

BEN MURNANE: So that’s the main event, Lief. And then this year we’re also offering the Executive Program the weekend after, which is about personal consulting time with you and the other experts.

LIEF SIMON: In the main Offshore Wealth Summit program, it’s all kind of 101-level stuff to just help you get your feet wet or update yourself if you’ve heard some of these things before. And then the Executive Program weekend is really digging in helping put together a more personalized plan for you. And so it’s about having more one-on-one sessions and your chance to do straight-up consulting with the experts.

Plus, we’re going to have a little bit of fun. We’re going to have a night out. I won’t spoil the surprise here, but we’ll do a little bit of nightlife in Panama, go for dinner and enjoy a rum tasting.

BEN MURNANE: You can choose to attend both the Offshore Wealth Summit and the Executive Program weekend where you will get 16 hours of personal consulting, really, with Lief and his team. Or you can choose just to go with the Executive Program weekend if you feel like you have enough information already, maybe to start putting together your individual, personal, offshore plan, because that’s what that weekend is all about. It’s about those individual plans and getting them signed, sealed, and approved.

LIEF SIMON: If you’re not ready, the weekend program doesn’t make sense for you.

The weekend is for people who are ready. They want to start finalizing or connecting all the dots or have some stuff set up that they want to confirm and then fit in the other pieces. The three-day main event for Offshore Wealth Summit is to help you understand the concepts better. You will have access to the speakers and their information, and they can help you connect dots there as well. But we’ll dig into much more detail in the weekend.

Hopefully this gives everyone a good explanation of what the Offshore Wealth Summit is about and what you can learn there. And again, we’ll dig into all these topics in much greater detail at the event, and I look forward to seeing some of you there.

(By the way, if you want to watch the full conversation between myself and Ben… you can do that right here.)

Stay diversified,

Lief Simon

Editor, Offshore Living Letter