2022-09-12_Mikkel_Thorup

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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:33.800 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:37.600 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:40.400 | My name is Josh Rasheeds. I am your host, and today on the show,

00:00:42.900 | I am thrilled to welcome Mikkel Thorup. Mikkel from Expat Money.

00:00:46.800 | Mikkel, welcome to the show. I'm glad you're here today.

00:00:49.600 | Thanks very much, Josh. I'm looking forward to today's conversation

00:00:52.600 | and digging into an interesting topic that I think is near and dear to both of our hearts.

00:00:57.500 | So, yeah, hopefully the audience gets a lot of insights and inspiration from it.

00:01:02.600 | Indeed. I expect us to talk quite a lot about internationalization,

00:01:07.000 | because obviously running Expat Money, having written the book Expat Money,

00:01:11.600 | obviously that's where we're going to be focusing a lot.

00:01:14.500 | And by the way, just so that you know and the audience knows,

00:01:16.800 | I have followed your work for many years.

00:01:18.400 | I read your book that you published many years ago, Expat Secrets,

00:01:22.700 | How to Pay Zero Taxes, Live Overseas, and Make Giant Piles of Money.

00:01:26.500 | Love the headlines. So I read that book years ago, when you first published it in 2018,

00:01:33.400 | and have used it, of course, with lots of other resources along the way with my own story.

00:01:38.700 | So I'd like to begin, though, with just hearing a little bit about your story.

00:01:41.700 | Tell us how you became involved in the world of international living.

00:01:45.900 | Yeah, absolutely. So for my story, I have to go quite back in time,

00:01:49.700 | but I'll try to make it in a nutshell.

00:01:52.900 | So when I was a child, I was actually diagnosed with a learning disability,

00:01:56.200 | and what happened, Josh, is I got pulled out of my neighborhood school.

00:02:02.100 | I got sat down in a little room with the teacher and the resource teacher and the principal,

00:02:07.700 | and they sat me down and they said, "Mikael, something doesn't work quite right in your brain,

00:02:11.700 | and what we want to do is send you to a special school, special school for special boys."

00:02:15.500 | So that's what they did. Every day for three years, I went to this "special school."

00:02:21.100 | Unfortunately, it was not really a special school.

00:02:23.500 | It was a regular school with a special class.

00:02:26.000 | So you can probably imagine what happened.

00:02:27.600 | I got in a lot of fights, and I got picked on, and I got bullied.

00:02:31.300 | Now, this is no "woe is me, Mikael, I'm a victim, I'm a victim."

00:02:35.300 | I certainly am not. I don't like victim mentality at all,

00:02:38.400 | and I got hit, and I hit back, and I would never claim otherwise, you know.

00:02:44.000 | But anyways, after three years of going to this "special school,"

00:02:48.700 | I went back to see all my friends back in my neighborhood school,

00:02:53.200 | and I thought, "You know, everyone will have missed me so much,

00:02:56.700 | and they're going to be so excited to see me, and this is just—

00:03:00.000 | my life is going to be amazing again."

00:03:02.100 | And once again, you can imagine what happened.

00:03:04.100 | So I—the kids started whispering and gossiping, and,

00:03:08.300 | "Oh, I know, Mikael, he went to some retard school."

00:03:11.300 | Thanks, guys. Very politically correct, you know.

00:03:14.100 | Children are very sensitive.

00:03:16.100 | But what this did was leave a very bad taste in my mouth for education,

00:03:20.600 | specifically public education, and I stopped going to school.

00:03:24.600 | And they'd send me to summer school, and then I'd fail that,

00:03:28.300 | and then I wouldn't show up, and somehow I'd squeak by.

00:03:32.300 | But, yeah, basically at 12 years old, I stopped going to school,

00:03:35.700 | and at 15, I officially dropped out,

00:03:37.700 | and I started traveling internationally not shortly after that.

00:03:41.700 | And when I started traveling, I started meeting all these amazing people,

00:03:45.900 | and seeing how they were living their lives and doing things completely different.

00:03:50.200 | And it really showed me that there's not only one way to learn things,

00:03:53.700 | and not everybody has to have the white picket fence

00:03:56.900 | and live their life exactly like everybody else.

00:03:59.900 | And I decided to dedicate my life to this,

00:04:02.800 | to exploring the world and seeing what is out there,

00:04:05.900 | and uncovering all the secrets.

00:04:07.900 | And that's what I've done for the last 22 years.

00:04:10.300 | I have been traveling nonstop.

00:04:12.100 | I've circumnavigated the globe over 400 times.

00:04:15.100 | I've lived in nine different countries.

00:04:17.400 | And I visited 110.

00:04:20.600 | I think we're at 110 countries now.

00:04:24.100 | So, I do this from the personal side, from the business side.

00:04:28.700 | I write about it. I speak about it on my podcast, on the Expat Money Show.

00:04:32.500 | I live and breathe this, and I'm still as excited today

00:04:36.400 | at almost 40 years old as I was when I was 17, when I started this journey.

00:04:41.500 | - What are the nine countries that you have lived in?

00:04:44.800 | - Yeah. So, obviously Canada and the United States.

00:04:47.200 | Well, not necessarily, obviously the US,

00:04:49.300 | but obviously Canada, that's where I was born and raised.

00:04:52.000 | The US, I was in Guatemala for six months.

00:04:54.900 | I lived in New Zealand for a year, three years in Australia.

00:04:59.000 | Then I was in Singapore for a year.

00:05:01.200 | I lived in the Arctic.

00:05:03.400 | I lived in the Canadian High Arctic for 366 days.

00:05:07.600 | Then I was in the UAE for eight years.

00:05:10.800 | And then Panama, where I am today.

00:05:15.000 | And also Brazil. We went to Brazil last year for six months.

00:05:18.800 | We did birth tourism there. So, my son was born there.

00:05:22.000 | So, nine countries plus the Arctic.

00:05:25.000 | - Wow. My understanding is you met your wife abroad as well. Is that right?

00:05:30.700 | - Correct. So, when I was living in Abu Dhabi,

00:05:34.800 | I was taking a flight to Germany, and she happened to be sitting next to me,

00:05:38.300 | or I was sitting next to her, you could say.

00:05:41.300 | So, I'm Canadian with Danish heritage.

00:05:43.900 | My wife is from mainland China.

00:05:46.500 | We got married in the Seychelles in Africa.

00:05:50.400 | And then our daughter was born in Abu Dhabi.

00:05:53.000 | Like I just said, my son was born in Florianopolis in Brazil, in the south of Brazil.

00:05:58.100 | And if we have another child, or inshallah, when we do have another child,

00:06:02.700 | we'll give birth to him or her, hopefully in another country as well.

00:06:06.800 | So, we just keep having, growing the international family, you can say.

00:06:11.300 | - Love it. Love it.

00:06:12.700 | One of the things that's interesting about your story is you've lived in some very expat-focused cities.

00:06:20.100 | Singapore, UAE, obviously as many of the others have high international concentration,

00:06:26.000 | but for people leaving North America, UAE, Singapore, Panama,

00:06:33.600 | these are all kind of target destinations.

00:06:36.400 | What caused you to leave those expats?

00:06:39.300 | So, let's start with Singapore. What caused you to not want to stay in Singapore?

00:06:43.300 | - So, Singapore, although is a beautiful country, it is...

00:06:49.200 | I just didn't find it for me, you know.

00:06:51.000 | I've been back many times as a tourist and I really liked it.

00:06:54.400 | But after being there for a year, it's a mentality that I didn't like in my everyday life.

00:07:01.400 | Everything is give to the company that you work with.

00:07:07.200 | I don't have a problem with like give face type of mentality like Asian culture.

00:07:11.200 | I mean, I certainly understand it because of my wife.

00:07:13.800 | But where you're supposed to break your back every day for a company

00:07:18.700 | and if you leave "early", which is like two hours after you're supposed to sign out,

00:07:26.000 | then everybody looks down on you.

00:07:28.600 | Like it's this... I don't know if you've traveled through Japan,

00:07:31.600 | but I think it's very similar there.

00:07:33.000 | Like you become a company man and you give everything to the company

00:07:37.500 | and that's it. That becomes your whole life.

00:07:39.800 | I have a lot of passions in my life. I have a lot of hobbies.

00:07:42.800 | I have a lot of things that I want to do.

00:07:45.000 | And at this time, back then, I mean, I was working.

00:07:48.400 | I didn't have the "Expat Money Show" or doing consulting or doing all these types of things.

00:07:53.500 | I was in my 20s. I mean, this was back in 2008 or 2009 or something like that.

00:07:59.600 | But it just wasn't for me.

00:08:02.900 | I think that Singapore can be very good,

00:08:05.000 | but you have to understand what you're getting yourself into.

00:08:07.400 | - Right. So I'll come back to other countries in the first place,

00:08:10.400 | but I want to start with a question about kind of a sense of belonging.

00:08:13.800 | I recently did... For your context, I have been gone from the United States.

00:08:18.400 | I was born and raised in the United States.

00:08:20.200 | Gone from the United States since 2000 and early 2019, beginning of 2019.

00:08:26.200 | So three and a half years now.

00:08:27.800 | And along that journey, I have gone through various phases of, I guess, appreciation of other places.

00:08:37.700 | And I've watched and studied a lot of people who have expatriated from their country.

00:08:41.700 | When I left the United States, I never had any plans of being gone permanently.

00:08:45.400 | I was primarily interested in setting up a Plan B.

00:08:47.800 | But then things were good in various places, and I set up my Plan B, and it's just still working.

00:08:52.700 | But I've come to the conclusion that I myself will probably go back to the United States

00:08:56.500 | for a few reasons that we can talk about later, but not yet.

00:08:59.800 | So my conclusion about people who leave their country and stay gone is that the primary reason they do it,

00:09:10.600 | or the people who do that successfully, are those who don't like the culture from the country they've come from,

00:09:17.900 | or find a culture that they like better.

00:09:20.000 | It doesn't have to be that it's bad. You don't have to insult your home country.

00:09:23.300 | But when I find people who have left their home country and live abroad permanently,

00:09:28.600 | I find that most frequently it's because they weren't super accepted in their home country,

00:09:35.600 | which sounds a little bit like your story, right?

00:09:37.500 | I was bullied, people were just treated me poorly, and it leaves a really bad taste.

00:09:42.400 | Or I find that they just, "It wasn't great, and I found something better."

00:09:46.700 | Do you think I'm right about that?

00:09:48.700 | I think that you are right about that for a lot of cases.

00:09:52.200 | For me specifically, I think that although it may have been one of the main drivers when I started this 20-some-odd years ago,

00:10:01.100 | it's certainly not the reason anymore.

00:10:03.600 | What I have found, especially over the last 10 years or so, is that I like to be uncomfortable.

00:10:11.100 | And when things are too easy for me, when I settle into a groove and everything is too easy,

00:10:17.600 | I'm not being challenged.

00:10:19.000 | And living overseas and building relationships and a life in a business overseas,

00:10:25.300 | I mean, that really challenges you.

00:10:26.800 | You really grow as a human being.

00:10:29.400 | So although I think that you are probably right for a lot of the cases,

00:10:33.200 | especially where you're able to find a culture or a community which really fits you as a human being

00:10:40.600 | or fits your personality and you can fit into it,

00:10:44.200 | I don't know if that's really mine because I'm one of the expats who will never stay in just one country.

00:10:51.200 | Even the UAE, after being there for eight years and thought it was a great place and loved my life,

00:10:56.400 | things were too easy and I just was like, "I need something different."

00:11:00.100 | And we put everything in a shipping container and brought it down to Panama and started from scratch again.

00:11:06.200 | And although I love Panama, we've been here for three and a half years,

00:11:10.700 | I know Panama is not the last stop.

00:11:12.400 | There's lots of other places that I want to explore and see.

00:11:16.200 | I mean, you just don't get the full experience if you're just there for a week or two as a tourist.

00:11:23.100 | You need to spend at least six months, a year, a few years there.

00:11:26.600 | And even then, you're not going to ever understand the place fully, fully, fully

00:11:30.400 | or the mentality or the perspective of the culture, history or anything fully.

00:11:34.400 | But at least you have a better shot at it, spending a longer part of time.

00:11:38.400 | Does that make sense?

00:11:39.200 | It does. And you're probably not used to it.

00:11:43.000 | In most interviews you give, you probably don't start at these levels.

00:11:45.600 | But this is what I'm most interested in talking about.

00:11:48.100 | We'll come back to kind of the tactical stuff later.

00:11:50.600 | Clarification, you have two children now and about how old are they?

00:11:54.100 | Yeah, so I've got a six-year-old little girl and I got a one-year-old boy.

00:11:58.100 | Okay.

00:11:58.800 | Fifteen months, something like that.

00:12:00.800 | When you think about the culture that you desire for your children,

00:12:07.200 | what are your ambitions as far as the culture that you desire for your children

00:12:10.800 | and what you believe is most healthy for your children?

00:12:14.400 | Yeah, so I do think about this quite a bit.

00:12:18.500 | First of all, I want to have children who are very international,

00:12:21.600 | who really understand the world.

00:12:25.100 | As I said earlier, my wife is from China,

00:12:27.400 | so it's important that they have a very firm understanding of their Chinese heritage.

00:12:32.600 | My wife speaks to my daughter, well, both my children,

00:12:36.200 | only in Mandarin Chinese, so they are native level in Chinese.

00:12:40.900 | They're also native level in English and native level in Spanish.

00:12:46.100 | My daughter also is learning Russian,

00:12:48.000 | so we have special activities for her that are only in Russian.

00:12:53.100 | We were really purposeful about this.

00:12:55.000 | It was one of the reasons we moved to Panama and didn't want to be in the UAE.

00:12:58.200 | We didn't feel like Arabic was the best use of her learning another language.

00:13:02.300 | We thought Spanish would be a lot better.

00:13:04.200 | When we're looking for a fourth language,

00:13:05.900 | we started looking at what languages are going to be able for her to reach more people.

00:13:14.700 | We also homeschool our children, or what's known as world schooling.

00:13:19.800 | My daughter's been to 15 countries now at six years old.

00:13:24.500 | She's got her clothes from Colombia or from Brazil,

00:13:28.700 | and her toys and things from different places,

00:13:30.900 | and she remembers those trips.

00:13:32.800 | She's always asking, "Hey, when can we go to this place again?"

00:13:35.900 | or "When do we pack our suitcases?"

00:13:37.900 | The big one is Paris now.

00:13:39.100 | I've never taken her to France,

00:13:41.300 | but she's always asking me, "When do we get to go to Paris?"

00:13:43.700 | I'm like, "Why do you care about Paris?"

00:13:45.600 | I've taken her to Egypt and to Japan and, I don't know,

00:13:49.700 | Malaysia and things like this, and lots of random countries,

00:13:53.000 | but now it's Paris. I'm not sure.

00:13:56.000 | I'm going to interrupt you to say it is funny when you travel.

00:13:58.600 | For context, because I know you don't know much about my story,

00:14:02.100 | I have four children. My eldest is almost nine.

00:14:06.300 | We also engage in multilingualism,

00:14:10.000 | although both my wife and I are from the United States,

00:14:12.600 | and native English speakers.

00:14:14.100 | We're homeschooling in four languages now.

00:14:16.600 | That's quite the adventure.

00:14:20.800 | In addition, we've traveled quite a lot over the last three years.

00:14:24.400 | My children, who have no concept of time and space,

00:14:27.200 | will burst out with the funny things like that.

00:14:30.400 | "Daddy, can I go to Mexico for my birthday?"

00:14:33.100 | Or, "Can we go to such and such?"

00:14:34.800 | They think of countries and states as basically cities.

00:14:38.300 | They don't have the normal sense of place, of saying,

00:14:41.600 | "Okay, here's my city, and then here's the neighboring towns,

00:14:43.900 | and the states are far away, and the countries are very far away."

00:14:46.700 | They have this mixed-up geography,

00:14:48.600 | where they feel like everything is just neighboring towns.

00:14:51.500 | It's a funny, unanticipated consequence

00:14:55.900 | of traveling quite a lot with children.

00:14:58.100 | I understand that completely.

00:14:59.700 | Out of curiosity, and I know this is your podcast,

00:15:01.800 | but I'm going to ask you a question.

00:15:03.400 | What languages are you teaching your kids?

00:15:05.300 | Which do you decide on?

00:15:07.100 | We started, and I'll give you the background,

00:15:09.800 | because I'm really interested in this topic,

00:15:11.400 | and helping other people to achieve it.

00:15:14.900 | My wife and I both spoke Spanish under the typical American route.

00:15:19.300 | We had two years of high school Spanish.

00:15:21.700 | Unlike many people, we used our Spanish.

00:15:24.500 | We both probably had a good, solid upper intermediate level of Spanish ability.

00:15:30.700 | As we traveled abroad, though,

00:15:33.300 | we were spending some time in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.

00:15:37.400 | After a while, I thought, "You know what? We're going to make sure that we start."

00:15:40.800 | But I started a system of basically reading to the children,

00:15:44.400 | and I found that it helped them to acquire Spanish very, very quickly.

00:15:49.600 | We started with Spanish, and it took about a year,

00:15:51.700 | a little year and a half to come up to grade level.

00:15:54.700 | I won't say native level, but grade level in Spanish.

00:15:57.500 | I thought, "Wow, that was great."

00:15:59.000 | Then we added on French, and we had really great success with that.

00:16:05.900 | Then this year, because of the success in French, we added on German.

00:16:08.800 | We've been doing that for about four months now.

00:16:11.600 | I'm optimistic that probably another six months or so,

00:16:14.700 | and we'll basically be up to grade level.

00:16:17.400 | What I do is, in the homeschooling, I try to make—

00:16:20.700 | We don't have a ton of opportunities to speak those languages.

00:16:23.800 | I don't hire tutors right now because it's difficult,

00:16:27.200 | and I just don't have a good outlet for it.

00:16:29.200 | Most of the language acquisition is by input,

00:16:33.500 | but I work hard to get living books in all those languages.

00:16:37.600 | I work hard to have textbooks in those languages, etc.,

00:16:41.500 | to make sure that the language ability is genuinely part of their life.

00:16:49.300 | This year, we're starting in on the classical languages,

00:16:52.000 | and then after that, I have some more modern languages, and I'm optimistic.

00:16:55.000 | We'll see how far we can go, but I've pulled back some of the—

00:16:59.800 | I feel like I found the secret sauce to make language learning

00:17:06.500 | not a thing that is foreign to my children's education.

00:17:11.800 | I've brainwashed them into thinking that it's normal to speak 12 languages.

00:17:16.600 | I started by showing them all pictures of Bella,

00:17:20.200 | the little Russian girl that you can find online, beautiful little girl.

00:17:23.400 | There's a video of her at five years old speaking eight languages.

00:17:26.200 | I brainwashed my children into thinking that this is the normal way

00:17:29.500 | to approach school and language acquisition.

00:17:32.700 | - Well, I mean, as an expat, in a lot of cases,

00:17:35.100 | it is the normal way to go about it.

00:17:37.300 | Actually, monolingualism is not normal at all.

00:17:41.100 | I think that when you start traveling through Europe

00:17:43.500 | and you meet so many people who speak four or five different languages,

00:17:47.100 | and that's just really common and normal.

00:17:50.000 | Now, it's really interesting because you said, "Acquire the language."

00:17:53.300 | So I think we have watched and have probably very similar methodology for this

00:17:59.000 | because the comprehensible input and acquiring the language,

00:18:02.500 | I think, is really, really special.

00:18:04.900 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:18:05.900 | No, I think we're living in a golden age of language acquisition—

00:18:08.500 | I'll use that word—that's never been available before.

00:18:13.400 | And so, yes, I have gone pretty deep into the academic research,

00:18:19.300 | pretty deep into the best practices of the modern age,

00:18:24.900 | and then used my own little home laboratory to try to figure out what works and what doesn't.

00:18:29.700 | And I love it. I'm excited about it.

00:18:31.600 | And the cool thing about it is, to the point, you have—

00:18:35.300 | although I'm not sure what you're doing with Russian,

00:18:37.200 | but I am convinced that you can acquire—if you desire to have a multilingual family,

00:18:44.100 | or a multicultural multilingual family,

00:18:47.700 | in the past, physically moving to that country at an early age was really important for success.

00:18:54.600 | Today, I think that it doesn't have to happen in the early stages.

00:18:58.000 | I think it does need to happen to genuinely have and enjoy a native-level language experience

00:19:05.100 | and be truly comfortable.

00:19:06.100 | You need to spend some time surrounded in it,

00:19:08.200 | but it doesn't have to happen in the first few years.

00:19:11.000 | It can happen later on down the road.

00:19:13.800 | Yeah, we try to do as much input as possible.

00:19:16.800 | So, as I said, my wife speaks Mandarin as her first language,

00:19:20.200 | so it's been very easy for my kids to get that just around the clock.

00:19:24.100 | And as I said, we homeschool our kids, too.

00:19:27.400 | And then, from the Spanish, it has been so easy

00:19:30.200 | because we purposefully hired a nanny who only speaks Spanish.

00:19:34.500 | So, we have full-time help in the house, and she only speaks Spanish.

00:19:38.800 | And then my daughter does karate and activities,

00:19:41.700 | and we do homeschooling co-ops and things like that.

00:19:44.400 | So, she's getting it from Spanish from other sources.

00:19:47.400 | For the Russian—so, actually, it's interesting that you mentioned German

00:19:50.800 | because that was going to be the fourth language that we wanted our daughter to speak,

00:19:55.200 | but we couldn't find a lot of content that was in German,

00:19:58.800 | and I have no background in speaking German whatsoever.

00:20:02.800 | We have lots of German friends, but, you know,

00:20:05.500 | their English is at such an amazing level, it was never something that I'd learned.

00:20:10.700 | So, having a tablet and then changing the language of the tablet

00:20:15.200 | and having her watch the cartoons in the target language has worked very well for us.

00:20:19.700 | However, there's very little that we've been able to find that was dubbed into German.

00:20:23.700 | Now, Russian is not easy to find, but it's at least considerably easier than German.

00:20:31.300 | So, that's one of the reasons.

00:20:33.100 | And we were actually able to get a piano teacher for her,

00:20:36.400 | that her first language is Russian.

00:20:38.600 | So, she does piano a few days a week, all in Russian.

00:20:41.400 | So, she's learning piano, which is an activity that she loves,

00:20:44.500 | and we've anchored Russian to that.

00:20:46.200 | So, it's like, if you want to learn piano, you got to learn Russian,

00:20:48.700 | otherwise you're not going to know what's going on.

00:20:50.400 | We bought her piano when we practice, and, you know,

00:20:52.600 | a few days a week we take her for private lessons.

00:20:54.800 | And that is amazing. Like, that really, really helps a lot.

00:20:58.500 | Yeah, I love the topic of languages, and specifically languages for kids,

00:21:02.700 | and it sounds like you have a big passion for it as well.

00:21:05.400 | On my podcast at Expat Money Show, there's a ton of episodes

00:21:09.500 | where we've interviewed these polyglots, people who speak multiple languages,

00:21:13.600 | and I have absolutely used and abused them,

00:21:16.100 | and asked them every single question I could think about,

00:21:18.600 | about children learning languages.

00:21:20.400 | And, yeah, it's just so fascinating to discover and be able to expose your kids to this.

00:21:27.200 | Yeah, you're right about resources.

00:21:29.500 | My experience from seeking to teach—

00:21:32.300 | from—I try to always be humble with language, but I also need to be accurate.

00:21:37.800 | My experience from teaching my children three, now going on four languages,

00:21:42.900 | and especially what's interesting with the fourth one is that I don't speak German.

00:21:47.100 | I'm learning, but I do speak Spanish, and I do speak French.

00:21:51.900 | And so those were easier for me, even though I didn't teach them as if I were a native speaker,

00:21:56.600 | actually speaking to them and just from birth type of perspective.

00:22:01.300 | I was able to do that.

00:22:03.400 | So with German, I had to make my own German materials, and that's what I have done.

00:22:08.700 | And I've learned a lot along the way about what you can do

00:22:14.300 | and what you need to do to teach children a language.

00:22:19.300 | But basically, to answer your question, there's not a lot available in German.

00:22:22.900 | I make it all myself.

00:22:24.300 | So I make the audio files, and I find the content in German,

00:22:29.800 | and then I create the audio files myself, and I do it primarily with audio.

00:22:33.700 | And then I use graded readers to add in the text.

00:22:36.800 | And once—basically, once you can get a child reading—

00:22:43.000 | and of course, you could do it with cartoons.

00:22:45.200 | You can do it with that. We avoid most of those inputs.

00:22:49.500 | I think they're great for language learning.

00:22:50.600 | When we do watch something on a screen, it's always in a foreign language.

00:22:53.800 | But once you can get a child reading, my observation is everything just simply takes off.

00:22:59.200 | And so I'm convinced that while extensive reading is not the only way to learn a language,

00:23:04.700 | I think it's the most efficient way to acquire a language, because I've seen it work so many times.

00:23:10.100 | And so basically, you have a short, up-front slog to get through a few thousand words,

00:23:18.100 | and then you have to get to graded readers.

00:23:21.100 | And once you can get graded readers and get a child through some graded readers,

00:23:25.500 | and then set them loose on interesting native-level content,

00:23:28.300 | then the rest of it comes very, very quickly.

00:23:30.100 | At least that's been my experience.

00:23:32.100 | Yeah, I would definitely agree with that.

00:23:34.000 | So back to culture.

00:23:35.600 | And the reason I'm asking is because the number one thing that I wrestle with

00:23:39.800 | in terms of the international lifestyle is not how to pay zero taxes.

00:23:43.400 | It's not what to do. I've done all the PT stuff.

00:23:46.000 | I've got my flags all around the world. I'm done.

00:23:48.100 | Like, I've done it all. And we'll talk more about that as this interview unfolds,

00:23:52.300 | but because I'm about current opportunities, etc.

00:23:55.200 | But my reason, one of my biggest questions is,

00:23:58.400 | what culture am I going to impart to my children?

00:24:01.400 | And unlike my experience growing up in the United States of America,

00:24:05.600 | is that I was always very comfortable in the American culture.

00:24:09.000 | Now, the American culture has shifted a lot since I've left,

00:24:11.300 | and so I'm not as comfortable now as I was in the culture of my youth.

00:24:14.900 | But I'm through and through an American.

00:24:18.100 | It's, and it fits with me. And I look at my children,

00:24:21.400 | and I think, it was when I first, we were abroad for a year or so,

00:24:25.700 | and I thought, am I sure about this? Because if I raise you abroad,

00:24:31.300 | outside of the United States, right? If I'm living in Panama, right?

00:24:34.800 | If I raise you in Panama, regardless of what citizenship papers you have,

00:24:40.500 | you will never genuinely be Panamanian, never authentically, truly Panamanian.

00:24:46.100 | Because the Panamanian culture, while certainly that's very multicultural and accepting,

00:24:51.300 | the cultural identity is not based upon your citizenship papers or your language ability.

00:24:55.100 | It goes much deeper than that, and it's something that you cannot access when you move there.

00:24:59.400 | Similarly though, you're never truly going to be genuinely American.

00:25:02.800 | You're going to be a third culture kid. And while I think that's not a bad thing,

00:25:07.400 | I think there are good things about it, it's also really hard to commit to,

00:25:11.000 | and it's really hard to be confident of.

00:25:13.100 | And then especially I think about traveling the world, right?

00:25:15.500 | Right now we go back and forth between a couple different bases and do a few different things.

00:25:21.500 | I think, is this really the best way to do it or not?

00:25:24.100 | And it's totally untested, it's unproven,

00:25:26.800 | and it's hard to be confident when you take this unproven road.

00:25:33.900 | Sure, I get that completely. I'd say we're probably pretty similar in age.

00:25:39.100 | You've been an expat for three years, so you describe yourself as very American.

00:25:43.400 | I describe myself as the least Canadian Canadian you will ever meet in your life.

00:25:48.100 | My culture and my understanding of the world is multicultural,

00:25:52.100 | because I've spent more than half of my life overseas in foreign countries.

00:25:57.700 | So for me, the culture that my children will have will be an international culture.

00:26:04.500 | I'm not thinking in my head, you know,

00:26:06.300 | okay, if they live in Panama, they're going to have a Panamanian culture.

00:26:09.500 | I mean, all of our friends are international.

00:26:11.700 | We have Panamanian friends as well, it's probably half-half.

00:26:14.600 | But, you know, we have friends from Norway, we have friends from Germany,

00:26:18.100 | we have friends from all over the world. That's all input for them.

00:26:21.800 | The kids travel like crazy amounts. They go with me on business trips,

00:26:25.900 | we go on vacation every month, every two months,

00:26:28.300 | we're going to a new country, a new place at this point.

00:26:31.000 | So they're having input from many different sources,

00:26:34.900 | and that will be the culture. The culture will be international.

00:26:40.000 | How it will turn out? I mean, my kids are loved and protected and cared for.

00:26:46.300 | They know that their parents will always be there for them to help them

00:26:49.900 | and to walk them through this process.

00:26:54.000 | So I'm not worried about anything from that front, you know,

00:26:57.800 | about not having a culture or not understanding a cultural identity.

00:27:02.600 | Are you committed to homeschooling as part of your kind of family vision?

00:27:07.500 | Absolutely. After what happened with me in school, you know, I would just,

00:27:13.200 | I think it would be just so hypocritical for me to ever send my kids to state-run school.

00:27:19.800 | The only program that I've ever found in the world that I actually liked

00:27:25.100 | is a program by a guy named Michael Strong. He's an amazing individual.

00:27:30.900 | He literally wrote the book on Socratic thought and Socratic teachings.

00:27:34.800 | He's a curriculum developer from the United States and has been doing this for 32 years.

00:27:40.200 | I had him on my show a couple of years ago and just loved the ideas so much

00:27:45.000 | that him and I decided to partner together and build a school together.

00:27:48.700 | So we took his domestic school that he was already running

00:27:51.900 | and partnered and did an international version of it.

00:27:54.600 | And it's completely remote learning,

00:27:57.000 | although we are starting to build physical schools coming up next year.

00:28:00.600 | And we do get together and do international trips.

00:28:03.300 | The kids get together and do international trips.

00:28:05.600 | But it's called Expat International School of Freedom and Entrepreneurship.

00:28:09.200 | And if you go to expatschool.io, you can find out more information about that.

00:28:13.100 | But it is really interest-based learning.

00:28:15.200 | It's taking the ideas of homeschooling and bringing them online

00:28:20.000 | and having it instead of just wrote memorization and watching a video

00:28:26.800 | and then writing a report about it.

00:28:28.200 | It's all just dialogue. It's all live and having conversations with one another.

00:28:33.400 | It's a really amazing thing to watch.

00:28:35.700 | So I think that my children will go through this program when they're old enough.

00:28:39.500 | It goes from ages 8 to 19.

00:28:41.700 | So we still got about two years for my daughter and many years for my son.

00:28:46.200 | But he described it to me the first time we spoke as homeschooling by professionals.

00:28:53.600 | And I was like, that is so brilliant. That is so awesome.

00:28:57.000 | So it will never stop us from doing interest-based learning.

00:28:59.300 | It won't stop us from learning languages or traveling or doing all these cultures.

00:29:03.700 | But I think that the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the world,

00:29:10.300 | and he really is in the field of education.

00:29:13.500 | I think it's just so fantastic opportunity for them.

00:29:18.000 | Interesting. So tell me, you've been based in Panama for a few years.

00:29:22.600 | Are you there full-time? Do you have multiple bases around the world?

00:29:26.500 | How do you express your international lifestyle, your flag theory, etc.?

00:29:31.300 | Yeah, I do what I affectionately call the hub-and-spoke model.

00:29:35.500 | So I have a central base close to a very well-connected international airport.

00:29:43.100 | And I use this base to travel out from there.

00:29:46.100 | So I'm not a digital nomad where I'm living out of a suitcase

00:29:48.900 | and I'm dragging my kids around or anything like that.

00:29:51.200 | We have a huge 4,700 square foot apartment here in Panama with all of our stuff.

00:29:55.800 | But we go away pretty much every month now.

00:29:58.000 | I mean, there's so many places to explore for Panama.

00:30:02.900 | We did the same when we lived in Abu Dhabi. That was our main base.

00:30:07.100 | We're setting up another base in Turkey right now.

00:30:11.100 | We're in the process of buying a home there.

00:30:14.400 | We have homes in China.

00:30:15.700 | Obviously, over the last two years, it's been very, very difficult with China.

00:30:20.000 | But we used to go back three, four times a year there as well.

00:30:24.900 | So we have a couple of different bases around the world.

00:30:27.300 | And then, depending on my speaking schedule or where I have meetings,

00:30:33.500 | we kind of plan the trips around those.

00:30:37.000 | I'd like to talk now about birth tourism.

00:30:39.700 | So you chose to have your child in Brazil, in Florianopolis.

00:30:45.900 | Tell us a little about your experience with birth tourism in Brazil.

00:30:49.800 | So it's interesting because I had actually forgotten that I had wrote about it

00:30:55.200 | in the book that you mentioned earlier in 2018.

00:30:59.100 | But Brazil has a really amazing program where if your child is born on the soil,

00:31:07.400 | and even if the parents are not from that country,

00:31:09.800 | the child is automatically a Brazilian citizen.

00:31:13.000 | There's a lot of countries in Latin America and Caribbean who follow this.

00:31:16.800 | But what makes Brazil really special is they have a visa.

00:31:19.500 | It's called the Family Reunification Visa.

00:31:22.000 | And if you're the legal guardian of a Brazilian citizen,

00:31:24.800 | then you can apply for your permanent residency.

00:31:27.300 | And with only having your permanent residency for two years, you get citizenship.

00:31:32.100 | So when we want our Brazilian citizenship, we'll just go down there,

00:31:37.100 | spend a couple of years living in Floripa, and study some Portuguese,

00:31:42.300 | which I think will be fun and really interesting.

00:31:45.600 | Which is a side note, why my daughter does not learn Portuguese yet

00:31:49.300 | is because I have a future plan that when we live in Brazil,

00:31:53.200 | and most likely Floripa again, she will learn then.

00:31:57.400 | But as for the actual experience of going down there, it was great.

00:32:01.400 | I mean, we knew that Florianópolis was going to be a very beautiful spot.

00:32:06.200 | It was my first time in Floripa, although my fifth time in Brazil.

00:32:11.200 | Just so you guys know, it's a small island in the province of Santa Catarina

00:32:16.900 | in the south of Brazil, in the southern part of Brazil.

00:32:19.400 | So the weather is like really four seasons.

00:32:22.400 | It gets really cold there in the winter.

00:32:24.400 | Not Canada cold, but Panama, like way colder than Panama.

00:32:29.100 | And it's a very, it's a really beautiful place and a lot of wealth there.

00:32:35.400 | So a lot of people from São Paulo actually have weekend homes in Floripa

00:32:40.100 | and come down on the weekends.

00:32:42.100 | It's a big party spot.

00:32:44.900 | We're not partiers by any means, but there's a lot of people

00:32:47.900 | who will come down to the beach in the warmer months.

00:32:49.900 | We were there in their winter, and we went down when my wife was about

00:32:54.900 | six months pregnant, and she just wore a very, probably shouldn't say this,

00:32:58.900 | but she wore a very baggy sweater and looked as un-pregnant as possible.

00:33:03.900 | You know, she didn't walk around holding her belly or anything like that.

00:33:06.900 | And we went in under a normal tourist visa.

00:33:10.400 | Actually, side note, even more interesting, it was during the middle of the pandemic,

00:33:15.900 | and the Brazilian embassy in Panama City, Panama where we live, was closed.

00:33:22.900 | So we couldn't get a visa for my wife, because my, being from China,

00:33:26.900 | they don't get visas to Brazil.

00:33:28.900 | So we had to make an application, which was like $200.

00:33:31.900 | So we flew to Costa Rica for a week, or two or three weeks,

00:33:35.400 | made the application in Costa Rica, then flew back to Panama.

00:33:39.400 | We were back in Panama for like two days or three days,

00:33:41.900 | changed all of our stuff from like beach clothes to cold weather clothes,

00:33:46.400 | threw it in a suitcase.

00:33:48.400 | My mother and my daughter stayed in Panama, and we went ahead to Brazil.

00:33:52.900 | And we had an Airbnb there, and yeah, just settled in for six months of living in Brazil,

00:34:00.400 | and sent for my mother and my daughter once we were all fully set up,

00:34:04.900 | and gave birth at a private hospital.

00:34:07.900 | I had a doctor who spoke amazing English, like native level English.

00:34:11.900 | The staff were fantastic, the people were really good.

00:34:15.400 | The bureaucracy is pretty bad in Brazil, it's quite a pain in the butt,

00:34:20.400 | but we managed through it.

00:34:22.400 | I like to test a lot of these international strategies myself,

00:34:25.400 | I'm kind of a guinea pig with this stuff.

00:34:27.900 | Before I send clients to do it, I like to do it myself.

00:34:30.900 | But yeah, I think all in all it was a very worthwhile experience,

00:34:34.400 | very interesting, and my wife is not too traumatized,

00:34:38.400 | so we have agreed that we will do it again somewhere else.

00:34:41.900 | I won't say where, because if they see her coming in with a baggy sweater,

00:34:45.400 | maybe we'll get turned away at immigration, I don't know.

00:34:48.400 | How long did it take you to process your residency paperwork,

00:34:52.400 | or did you go ahead and get your residency visas based upon the family reunification visa?

00:34:58.400 | So what happened was we were told by the people we were working with

00:35:02.400 | that it should take a few weeks, a month maximum.

00:35:06.400 | So we stayed on for three months, and by the time we finally got our appointment

00:35:14.400 | with the Federal Police, the Polícia Federales,

00:35:17.400 | it must have been for about eight months in the future.

00:35:21.400 | We'd already been there waiting for it for three months.

00:35:24.400 | So the whole wait time was 11 months.

00:35:27.400 | So obviously we had to leave because we had done a visa extension to be in the country,

00:35:32.400 | which was expiring, and also I didn't want to become a tax resident in the country,

00:35:37.400 | so I didn't want to overstay my welcome.

00:35:40.400 | So we got out of there, and then we came back to go through it.

00:35:46.400 | Now we went through the whole process, and it was really,

00:35:50.400 | I'm telling you, the bureaucracy is very bad there.

00:35:53.400 | We submitted all of our application online. It got approved.

00:35:57.400 | Then before we came back for our second trip, we sent a colleague down to the Federal Police

00:36:04.400 | to make sure the documents, everything is correct, everything is approved,

00:36:08.400 | you just need them there to do the biometrics.

00:36:10.400 | Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, perfect.

00:36:12.400 | We go down there, they reject the application.

00:36:15.400 | So I was like, "Thanks, guys. Really appreciate that."

00:36:18.400 | You know, spent thousands of dollars on business class flights down to Brazil,

00:36:22.400 | rent an Airbnb for a couple of weeks,

00:36:24.400 | and the things that were supposed to be approved were not approved.

00:36:29.400 | So we're starting back at square one.

00:36:31.400 | However, as I said, my son is only 15 months old,

00:36:34.400 | so we have between 15 months old and 18 years old to go through the process.

00:36:39.400 | So what we're going to do next time is when we actually want to get our citizenship

00:36:44.400 | and we're committed to living there for two years,

00:36:46.400 | then we'll make a new application for our permanent residency

00:36:49.400 | and do it all in one go, opposed to in a two-step process.

00:36:53.400 | It was supposed to be, you know, while we were there last time that we were going to go through it,

00:36:58.400 | but, you know, things don't always work out the way they're supposed to,

00:37:02.400 | and even as a professional like myself, things still happen.

00:37:07.400 | So it's a good experience to have, and I'm not too concerned about getting it in the future.

00:37:16.400 | If you were going to talk about birth tourism and give your, say, top three to five destinations,

00:37:24.400 | including Brazil but other countries that people should consider,

00:37:27.400 | what would be your top three or five?

00:37:29.400 | So definitely Brazil. I think it is a worthwhile experience.

00:37:33.400 | I think Mexico is also a really good option.

00:37:36.400 | One of the nice things about Mexico is not only do the parents get a permanent residency there,

00:37:41.400 | but the grandparents can also get a permanent residency.

00:37:44.400 | So that's a really good one for us.

00:37:46.400 | I mentioned earlier my mother lives with us and she travels with us.

00:37:49.400 | She helps take care of our kids.

00:37:51.400 | So, you know, for her to get a permanent residency on the back of this,

00:37:55.400 | an instant permanent residency, I think that's pretty cool.

00:37:58.400 | As for third countries, I mean, there's not too many in Europe,

00:38:02.400 | but a little-known one is actually in Portugal.

00:38:05.400 | So in Portugal, if you're actually a resident of the country for more than 12 months

00:38:10.400 | and you give birth there, then the child will be a Portuguese citizen.

00:38:14.400 | But if you're there for less than 12 months, then it won't be.

00:38:17.400 | So, you know, for most of our case, like, you know,

00:38:19.400 | we wouldn't have been able to do the same thing that we did in Brazil

00:38:22.400 | where we showed up for three months before we were going to give birth.

00:38:27.400 | But if people properly plan this out, then Portugal can also work for them.

00:38:32.400 | Oh, and to tie things back just for one second, because it just popped in my head,

00:38:36.400 | I had said that I had originally wrote about this in 2018.

00:38:39.400 | So after I announced to my audience at Expat Money that we had done birth tourism in Brazil,

00:38:44.400 | someone actually took a picture of that page in my book and, like, highlighted it

00:38:49.400 | and was, like, putting it on the group and was like, "Holy crap, he really did it.

00:38:53.400 | He wrote about it and he's actually out there doing it."

00:38:56.400 | I was like, "Yeah, of course, I try these things, you know, I want to test them all out."

00:39:01.400 | But I thought that was pretty funny because I didn't even remember writing about it.

00:39:06.400 | You didn't mention Panama in your list.

00:39:11.400 | What do you think about benefits of having a baby in Panama?

00:39:16.400 | Okay, so pretty much all of Central America, Latin America, Caribbean countries,

00:39:22.400 | these countries all offer--okay, there's a couple of ones that don't,

00:39:26.400 | but let's just generalize here.

00:39:28.400 | They all offer citizenship based on where you're born, so if your kid is born there.

00:39:34.400 | Now, I didn't put Panama in there because Panama is already so easy

00:39:39.400 | to go ahead and get your permanent residency.

00:39:42.400 | I want to find countries where it's a lot more difficult

00:39:45.400 | or where there is a really big added bonus to it.

00:39:48.400 | So, okay, yes, you can get a residency in Mexico,

00:39:51.400 | but usually most people are starting with a temporary residency

00:39:55.400 | and then a couple of years later they upgrade to a permanent residency.

00:39:59.400 | But then it's like that's kind of a long process

00:40:02.400 | and every embassy has their own procedure for going through it.

00:40:06.400 | And now with the benefits of the child automatically becoming a citizen

00:40:09.400 | without having to live there, I don't know.

00:40:12.400 | I just think that the birth tourism way is the best way to get into certain countries.

00:40:17.400 | Now, for Panama, we've got--I think it's 22 different types of visas in the country.

00:40:22.400 | You're going to be able to find one which is going to match you.

00:40:25.400 | And then you can go through the naturalization process if that is what you're after.

00:40:29.400 | It can be a long process.

00:40:31.400 | But with a permanent residency here in Panama,

00:40:34.400 | you don't even need to go through the naturalization.

00:40:36.400 | I mean you really have everything you want with the exception of maybe the passport.

00:40:41.400 | But you have so many rights in Panama.

00:40:44.400 | I just think it's already so easy to do.

00:40:49.400 | So my number one when I teach birth tourism, my number one country is Mexico

00:40:55.400 | because I think that if you have a baby in Mexico on January 1

00:41:01.400 | and I have a baby in Brazil on January 1--or let's switch it.

00:41:05.400 | You have a baby in Brazil on January 1 and I have a baby in Mexico on January 1

00:41:09.400 | and we're both committed to citizenship for the whole family,

00:41:15.400 | I think I'll get it first in Mexico.

00:41:17.400 | The law is that Brazil says one year to citizenship

00:41:20.400 | and the Mexican law is two years to apply for citizenship after permanent residency.

00:41:25.400 | I think that because the Mexican bureaucracy, while not awesome,

00:41:28.400 | is a lot better than the Brazilian, I think I'll get citizenship two years before you do.

00:41:33.400 | What do you think?

00:41:35.400 | As you said, the Brazilian is officially the law one year.

00:41:39.400 | But if you go back to what I said, I didn't say you're going to get your citizenship in one year.

00:41:44.400 | I said you get your citizenship in two years

00:41:46.400 | because although it may be the law, in reality, that has nothing to do with reality.

00:41:53.400 | Yes, I would agree that Mexico is very, very top on that.

00:41:57.400 | I didn't choose Mexico as our first one because I already have a lot of other Spanish-speaking residencies,

00:42:05.400 | so I'm also fitting it into our personal portfolio of residencies and citizenships.

00:42:11.400 | I'm not ever going to be worried about what is the best one out there.

00:42:15.400 | What I'm worried about is what's going to fit my family and what's going to help me.

00:42:20.400 | But Brazil and Mexico are certainly the most famous for doing this type of work.

00:42:27.400 | The other benefit to Mexico is the permanent residency doesn't have a physical presence requirement,

00:42:32.400 | unlike the Brazilian, which can be a challenge to maintain it.

00:42:37.400 | My number three option, while it doesn't give you benefits for the parents,

00:42:43.400 | doesn't give a residency visa, but my number three option is Canada.

00:42:47.400 | I think Canada is the ideal birth tourism destination for people who don't need a residence visa

00:42:55.400 | or a pathway to residence for their family.

00:42:57.400 | What do you think about that?

00:42:59.400 | I think that it makes a lot of sense, and once again, I'm already Canadian.

00:43:03.400 | Obviously, it's not necessary for you.

00:43:05.400 | Correct, correct. I kind of just gloss over that one.

00:43:09.400 | I work as a consultant, so I deal with a lot of private clients.

00:43:15.400 | My clients are about 50% American and 50% Canadian.

00:43:18.400 | If I ever told one of my American clients that you need to go up there to give birth,

00:43:23.400 | I think I'd just lose all credibility with them.

00:43:28.400 | We've watched what's happened with Justin Castro up there and how he's handled the situation.

00:43:34.400 | I'm quite a freedom-loving guy, so I'm not a fan of Canada at all.

00:43:43.400 | Okay. Pivot for a moment now to pathways to residency.

00:43:49.400 | It's hard for me because both of us are probably pretty—I mean, clearly you are,

00:43:54.400 | and I'm pretty knowledgeable in this area.

00:43:56.400 | It's hard for me to ask questions and not to take over a conversation like this

00:44:02.400 | because I've also talked about it a lot on the show.

00:44:06.400 | Looking forward over the coming years, what are some of your favorite residency options,

00:44:12.400 | both for paperwork and also for actually being there, actually living in certain places?

00:44:21.400 | What are some of the regions or specific countries that you find very attractive at the moment?

00:44:26.400 | As I said, Panama. We've got the Friendly Nations Visa.

00:44:30.400 | Last August 6th, it changed from a $5,000 bank deposit to a $200,000 real estate investment.

00:44:37.400 | There are a couple of other ways to go about getting it,

00:44:40.400 | but realistically, the real estate is the best option.

00:44:45.400 | I have seen a slowdown for probably about two or three months after the change last year,

00:44:52.400 | and then things pick right back up, and nobody really cares.

00:44:57.400 | $200,000 for real estate, in most cases, for most of the people I work with, it's fine.

00:45:03.400 | I mean, they're not worried about this whatsoever.

00:45:06.400 | Now, it has gone from an instant permanent residency to doing a provisional visa to a temporary visa,

00:45:11.400 | and then your permanent residency after two years.

00:45:14.400 | Still, you have so many rights on your temporary residency, and you can do a lot of the things,

00:45:19.400 | and it fits a lot of the boxes from the tax situation, that Panama still ticks a lot of the boxes.

00:45:25.400 | Hold on one second. I'm sorry. I want to ask you a question.

00:45:28.400 | Go ahead.

00:45:29.400 | How do you defend Panama?

00:45:33.400 | I understand from the paperwork perspective, but how do you defend the Panamanian lifestyle

00:45:39.400 | when you're comparing that to the much more flashy, much less lifestyle available in other countries?

00:45:48.400 | Because certainly, downtown Panama City is world-class, no question.

00:45:52.400 | But you drive outside of the downtown ring, and all of a sudden, you're in hardcore Latin America,

00:45:57.400 | which is not as fun of a place and comes with a whole different lifestyle compared to your experience in Abu Dhabi or Singapore or something like that.

00:46:08.400 | So how do you factor that in?

00:46:11.400 | Well, first of all, I would never defend anything or try to convince anybody of anything.

00:46:17.400 | I love Panama. I think it's a great place to have a life.

00:46:20.400 | I do live in downtown Panama City, and we do have VIP cinemas walking distance from my house.

00:46:28.400 | We go to gorgeous restaurants that cost a quarter of what they would back in Toronto or in a major city in the U.S. or in the U.K. or something like that.

00:46:39.400 | So we have really high-class food.

00:46:41.400 | As for getting into the interior, I mean, it's farmland, and it's very just rural.

00:46:49.400 | I mean, I don't have any problem with that. It is what it is.

00:46:53.400 | There's amazing beaches here in Panama. You can go out to the islands. You can go out to the highlands.

00:46:58.400 | Geographically, it's very different. It's very exciting.

00:47:02.400 | Yeah, I think that Panama has a lot of opportunities here.

00:47:08.400 | Now, comparing that to Singapore or to Abu Dhabi, yeah, there's a massive difference.

00:47:14.400 | But you also have to understand that in Abu Dhabi, a head of cabbage would cost me like $14 at the grocery store.

00:47:21.400 | Like, avocados here in Panama are like 50 cents or something like that, 50 cents or a dollar.

00:47:27.400 | That would have been like $6 in Abu Dhabi.

00:47:30.400 | It's been 12 years, 13 years since I lived in Singapore, but I'm sure the prices are quite high there at the moment as well.

00:47:37.400 | Actually, well, it's been 12 years since I've lived there.

00:47:40.400 | I visited, but if you're not just eating at a kopitian, like little noodle house on the side of the road, restaurants are really expensive.

00:47:49.400 | Panama is like really affordable. So there's always going to be value for money.

00:47:54.400 | So it's kind of hard to judge countries on an apple-to-apple basis.

00:47:59.400 | Everything is going to have a little bit higher in one field and a little bit less in another, and it's a give and take with all of this.

00:48:07.400 | We haven't talked about, and we'll come back to other countries in a moment, but this is the subject that I think a lot about.

00:48:14.400 | Sure.

00:48:16.400 | We haven't talked about taxes or tax planning or living tax-free.

00:48:21.400 | And clearly one of the benefits of choosing a place like Panama is you can live there very tax-efficiently.

00:48:28.400 | And there are many other good countries that you can live in tax-efficiently as well.

00:48:31.400 | It's much more difficult to live tax-efficiently in the United States or Canada.

00:48:37.400 | Clearly much more difficult.

00:48:40.400 | However, if somebody has the potential to save a million dollars a year on taxes, then that is a big factor that is very much worth considering.

00:48:52.400 | Let's assume that you're somebody like me.

00:48:55.400 | And let me make up some numbers.

00:48:57.400 | The reason I say me is that I have four children.

00:49:00.400 | So by my calculations as a financial advisor, I can live in the United States and make 100 grand pretty much tax-free with the exception of payroll taxes.

00:49:10.400 | So I will pay some payroll taxes, but income taxes, I can live income tax-free on 100 grand.

00:49:17.400 | If I compare my lifestyle in a random, not New York, not LA, not downtown Miami, but just a random kind of suburb-type city, middle-tier city in the United States, possibly in Canada, although the Canadian prices have become so inflated in the big metro areas.

00:49:36.400 | But if I compare my lifestyle in the United States on $100,000 versus my lifestyle in downtown Panama City on $100,000, I'm not convinced I come out ahead in Panama City.

00:49:48.400 | And I've wrestled with this for years as I've lived all around the world.

00:49:53.400 | And I say this because I have a very American audience.

00:49:56.400 | There's a lot to be said for life in the United States and Canada.

00:50:02.400 | And I think people are often unrealistic in their pursuit of the international destination.

00:50:10.400 | And they minimize – I mean just – what do you think?

00:50:15.400 | What do you think about that example I gave?

00:50:17.400 | >>Corey: Yeah, I – okay.

00:50:19.400 | There's a couple of points in there, so let's try to go through them.

00:50:22.400 | Panama is not how to live $5 a day, $10 a day, or how to live on a social security check for $800, $1,000 or something like that.

00:50:32.400 | Panama is a real city.

00:50:35.400 | It's a fully fleshed-out city with amenities, with everything that you would want.

00:50:41.400 | Now, it's kind of unfair to compare Panama City to some random place in middle America.

00:50:49.400 | >>Joe: Fair enough.

00:50:50.400 | >>Corey: But if we were to compare it to a very similar style of city, and this is not even my words.

00:50:56.400 | This is what most people would say.

00:50:57.400 | You'd choose Miami.

00:50:59.400 | A lot of people would say that Panama and Miami.

00:51:01.400 | Now, what do you think the price comparison between Panama and Miami is?

00:51:04.400 | It's been a while since I've been there, but I'd say there's probably a pretty big difference between the two.

00:51:09.400 | >>Joe: Yeah, so it's hard.

00:51:12.400 | And by the way, I know this is probably – this is not like most interviews that you give.

00:51:15.400 | It's because we're two practitioners who both do it.

00:51:18.400 | >>Corey: We're both doing it.

00:51:20.400 | >>Joe: After 200 times being interviewed and 200 some odd episodes on my podcast, it's just fine.

00:51:25.400 | >>Corey: What's interesting is – so I'll agree with you.

00:51:28.400 | So Miami, real estate, it all comes down to lifestyle.

00:51:31.400 | If you're going to live the big city, downtown lifestyle, going to have a downtown apartment, I want to walk to everything,

00:51:37.400 | you're going to pay for that whether you're in Panama City or in downtown Miami.

00:51:41.400 | When I think of it, though, I guess in my perspective as a father with children,

00:51:47.400 | the thing that bothers me the most about Latin America is twofold – threefold.

00:51:52.400 | There are three things that I find very frustrating about Latin America.

00:51:55.400 | Number one is the Latin culture of kind of mañana, right?

00:52:02.400 | Laid back, relaxed culture.

00:52:04.400 | Number one, that's nice to be in on a vacation.

00:52:07.400 | It's nice to be in when you are old and just want to sit on a beach and drink beer until you die.

00:52:13.400 | But I find it doesn't click and it works for like people who are bums who just want to go and hang out,

00:52:19.400 | live the pura vida lifestyle and hang out and do nothing.

00:52:23.400 | But I find it hard to reconcile my ambitions and my children's ambitions with that lifestyle.

00:52:29.400 | The second thing that is really, really hard about Latin America is the safety concerns.

00:52:35.400 | That while I travel and have traveled in dozens of countries in Latin – that was too much –

00:52:41.400 | in a dozen countries in Latin America, and I'll go to any country in Central or South America today

00:52:47.400 | without a concern in the world, there's no question that it builds over time.

00:52:51.400 | And that kind of weighs on you, especially with children, right?

00:52:54.400 | You think about a house in the suburbs and I'm from South Florida, right?

00:52:59.400 | Jupiter, Florida, Juneau Beach, West Palm Beach, West Fort Lauderdale, something like that.

00:53:04.400 | You're vastly safer with just a standard house and you have a vastly higher lifestyle

00:53:10.400 | with just a standard house in one of those areas than you do in any place in Panama, including in downtown.

00:53:17.400 | And there's more and I'm not here to pick on Latin America.

00:53:22.400 | It's just I think as I've gone through – when I left the United States,

00:53:27.400 | I was super hardcore against a whole bunch of things in the United States.

00:53:32.400 | And now after three years of being abroad, I look at the country much more friendly, with a friendlier eye.

00:53:38.400 | And while there are many things that I don't like, I appreciate so many things that are there.

00:53:42.400 | And I feel like what we have the opportunity to do in a context like this is to help people give a –

00:53:47.400 | help to have a balanced perspective of what you can have and what you can expect.

00:53:52.400 | And that's how I talk about it, just the difference between a plan B and a plan A.

00:53:56.400 | I am glad I've done everything that I've done to build a good solid plan B

00:54:00.400 | because I don't want to be stuck in any country and not be able to get out no matter what's going on.

00:54:04.400 | But I think the idea that it's easy to pick up and move to another country

00:54:08.400 | just because highly multicultural, multilingual people like Mikkel or Joshua can do it,

00:54:14.400 | I think that's overstating things a little bit.

00:54:16.400 | Okay. So once again, you've touched on a couple of really important points.

00:54:20.400 | First of all, I'm not here or anywhere or on my podcast to sell a country or a jurisdiction or a certain location.

00:54:29.400 | My way of thinking about things is to have options.

00:54:32.400 | And as you said, plan A, plan B, plan C, you know, that's what it's all about for me.

00:54:38.400 | The other thing is that I specifically enjoy being an expat.

00:54:43.400 | I love this type of lifestyle.

00:54:45.400 | You know, if you've listened to today's conversation, I hope that my passion for this has really come through.

00:54:50.400 | Now, do I expect everybody to go out there and give birth in different countries

00:54:54.400 | and do all this crazy stuff and, you know, no.

00:54:57.400 | I mean, this is what I like to do and what I like to do has nothing to do, you know, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't with you.

00:55:04.400 | But what I think it is important to understand is that we have spent a certain amount of time in our home country

00:55:10.400 | and we know that country and we know that culture and the history and the people and the lifestyle and the food

00:55:15.400 | and all these things that go with it.

00:55:17.400 | And that's great, but we have so much time on planet Earth.

00:55:21.400 | And if you have a desire to go out there and explore the world and see what is out there and challenge yourself,

00:55:28.400 | then my argument is that living an expat lifestyle is a great way to do that.

00:55:33.400 | That's a great vehicle for making that happen.

00:55:36.400 | So that's the direction that I come from.

00:55:40.400 | And I like Panama right now.

00:55:42.400 | I first came to Panama over 20 years ago.

00:55:44.400 | I'm back here now.

00:55:46.400 | But Panama will not be everything for me.

00:55:48.400 | It won't be where I spend the rest of my life.

00:55:51.400 | It is a piece of my life and I try to enjoy it and look at all the experiences that happened here

00:55:58.400 | and try not to pull too much of my hair out at the back of my head.

00:56:02.400 | I got a little bald spot going here from, yeah, the guy who's supposed to fix the sink and he says 2 o'clock tomorrow

00:56:08.400 | and what he really means is 2 o'clock, you know, or 4 o'clock, 4 Tuesdays from now.

00:56:13.400 | Yeah, I mean, that's annoying.

00:56:15.400 | But I put that in context with everything else, Josh, everything else.

00:56:20.400 | And that's how I look at it.

00:56:23.400 | No, I share your love of the challenge.

00:56:26.400 | I also find one of the things that is the most appealing to me about living internationally is simply the challenge.

00:56:35.400 | It's fun.

00:56:36.400 | I feel like I've conquered the United States.

00:56:38.400 | I know how everything works.

00:56:39.400 | I understand everything.

00:56:41.400 | And so going into a new place where I don't even know how to get my lights turned on and I have to go and figure out how to get my lights turned on in a new language and all of that is, I find it enjoyable and interesting.

00:56:59.400 | When you wrote a book about flag theory, you didn't title it Flag Theory, but I use that as an encompassing term.

00:57:10.400 | I think my audience is well familiar with the basics of flag theory of basically choosing each country for what it's best at.

00:57:19.400 | And by the way, to your point, I think one of the most freeing things that I really appreciate about the international lifestyle is that I can appreciate a country for what it's good at and then not worry about what it's not good at.

00:57:32.400 | So I'm much more – now that I'm no longer dependent on the United States of America, I'm much more relaxed and sanguine about trends in the United States of America than when I was there.

00:57:43.400 | Living there, one citizenship, like this is everything.

00:57:46.400 | It matters.

00:57:47.400 | Now I can be much more relaxed.

00:57:49.400 | And so similar thing with you being in Panama.

00:57:51.400 | You can enjoy and appreciate everything about Panama and not feel like your future is inextricably linked to the future of Panama.

00:58:00.400 | I think that makes for a much better experience in a country to be able to appreciate it for what it has to offer, what it's wonderful at, and then you can ignore the things that are happening and that annoy you about it.

00:58:14.400 | So because you have been living this lifestyle for so long and due to your intense geographic changes over the years, you've seen a lot.

00:58:31.400 | What are some of the changes that are happening in the world of internationalization right now?

00:58:32.400 | How are you seeing things change right now?

00:58:33.400 | Yeah, a lot of the doors are being shut.

00:58:35.400 | Things that were available to people in the past are not available anymore.

00:58:40.400 | We're seeing a lot of the programs that, you know, although might not have had like a favorable outlook from the EU, now the EU is like actively aggressive against them and going after them.

00:58:57.400 | There's a lot of projects and a lot of residencies and citizenships that are in jeopardy.

00:59:02.400 | I mean, if you just look over the last two years, Cyprus got caught with a huge scandal with corruption over theirs.

00:59:11.400 | That's gone. Their citizenship by investment is gone.

00:59:14.400 | Montenegro's program was supposed to end last year.

00:59:17.400 | They ended up extending it by 12 months but doubling the investment amount or the donation amount, I should say.

00:59:25.400 | Vanuatu's lost its visa-free travel to the Schengen.

00:59:29.400 | It's just like so many of these programs that are disappearing or drastically going up in price.

00:59:35.400 | So, I mean, that is a trend.

00:59:38.400 | We're seeing a lot more disappear than we're seeing come back on board.

00:59:42.400 | The newest one that I have seen in the world is the Central African Republic.

00:59:46.400 | You can now get citizenship there.

00:59:49.400 | I'm not sure that I will be the first one to race out and get that done but I think it is interesting to look at.

00:59:56.400 | But a lot of the programs that people are really desiring, they're disappearing.

01:00:03.400 | So, I think it's going to get worse. I think it's going to get more challenging.

01:00:07.400 | I think that with 87,000 armed IRS agents, they're going to be out there hunting for somebody.

01:00:13.400 | And I think offshore and expat are an obvious target.

01:00:17.400 | So, you have to be very, very careful.

01:00:20.400 | Follow the law. Cross your T's, dot your I's.

01:00:24.400 | Make sure you work with professionals.

01:00:26.400 | Don't try to wing this yourself.

01:00:28.400 | I mean, international CPA, international lawyers who understand these types of things,

01:00:33.400 | your person down at H&R Block, don't get them to file your taxes for you.

01:00:37.400 | They'll have no idea about the filing requirements.

01:00:41.400 | Yeah, that's it.

01:00:45.400 | Just had a minor power flicker there.

01:00:48.400 | I want to go on now to my final question.

01:00:54.400 | Jim Rogers, the world adventure investor, billionaire hedge fund guy, had this quote that I've thought about for years.

01:01:01.400 | He talked about, he said that if you were in 1800 in the city of London, then basically everything was good for you.

01:01:11.400 | That you were completely set for success just by virtue of being in London in 1800.

01:01:17.400 | In 1900, if you were in New York City or San Francisco, you were set for the future just by virtue of simply being there.

01:01:24.400 | Because a rising tide raises all boats.

01:01:27.400 | And then similarly, he said that in 2000, if you were in Singapore, then just by virtue of being in Singapore, you were set.

01:01:35.400 | So, my question is, I wasn't in London in 1800.

01:01:38.400 | I wasn't in New York in 1900.

01:01:40.400 | I wasn't in Singapore in 2000.

01:01:42.400 | But I think a lot about 2050 and 2100.

01:01:47.400 | If you were looking forward based upon your experience of having flags in these different places, living in these different places, what are you excited about for say the year 2050?

01:01:59.400 | Okay, good question.

01:02:01.400 | I have an answer you're not going to like, I'm sure.

01:02:05.400 | I don't think like that.

01:02:06.400 | That's not how my brain works at all.

01:02:09.400 | The way that I look at things is that there are giant walls going up there everywhere in the world.

01:02:15.400 | And I think that it's important to have a base on the opposite side of every one of these walls.

01:02:22.400 | So, I'm not looking for the perfect place.

01:02:24.400 | What I try to do is choose a good place for right now but be set up in all of the other places which I also think will be.

01:02:32.400 | Because I will invariably be wrong.

01:02:35.400 | I will absolutely pick the wrong one.

01:02:38.400 | And if I only have one, then that's going to be really problematic.

01:02:41.400 | But if I pick ten, if I have ten different bases around the world just as an example number, then I think that I'm going to be very, very safe.

01:02:50.400 | So, I'm doing this with my kids.

01:02:52.400 | If you listen to the languages, English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese, that's going to encompass a lot.

01:02:57.400 | And Brazilian Portuguese to come up next.

01:02:59.400 | So, those are countries that we want to have bases in as well as Turkey.

01:03:06.400 | We're seeing a rise in the Ottoman Empire.

01:03:08.400 | We're seeing that Turkey is growing massively.

01:03:11.400 | They have big problems with inflation right now.

01:03:13.400 | But it's still, there's so much happening there.

01:03:16.400 | I want to have a base there.

01:03:17.400 | I want to participate in that.

01:03:19.400 | I want to be involved.

01:03:20.400 | If things get bad here in Panama or in Brazil or wherever I am, I want to be able to go there.

01:03:25.400 | You know, same thing as what we're seeing happening with Russia right now.

01:03:29.400 | They have tons of sanctions going on.

01:03:32.400 | If you're a Russian and you don't have any other bases, that's pretty crummy.

01:03:37.400 | I mean, that's not a good situation to be in.

01:03:39.400 | I also think as a contrarian play for Westerners to have a base set up in Russia, I think is something very interesting to look at.

01:03:47.400 | I mean, if you don't like what's happening in this part of the world, trying to be on the other side of the world is quite good.

01:03:54.400 | Now, I know Jim Rogers.

01:03:56.400 | I have had him on my podcast.

01:03:58.400 | I've read pretty much all of his books.

01:04:00.400 | He's amazing.

01:04:01.400 | He's an amazing man.

01:04:03.400 | I just look at things that there will never be one perfect place.

01:04:10.400 | Do you think that your version or my version, kind of the modern iterations of PT theory, flag theory, etc., that you're living,

01:04:22.400 | do you think this is as close to freedom as a freedom-loving person can achieve in the modern age?

01:04:28.400 | Yes. Yes. I mean, absolutely.

01:04:33.400 | It's after 22 years of exploring the world and looking for freedom and searching for freedom, this is what I have seen.

01:04:40.400 | This is the best vehicle for freedom that I have found.

01:04:44.400 | It's why I dedicate my life to it.

01:04:46.400 | It's why I try to help so many people.

01:04:49.400 | It's why I produce content about it and write about it and blog about it and have summits about it and everything,

01:04:54.400 | because I have not found anything else out there better than this.

01:04:59.400 | Yeah. That's been my observation as well.

01:05:02.400 | When I was a freedom-loving, libertarian-oriented guy, when I was noodling through the thoughts for years,

01:05:10.400 | I thought, "Well, if you can make America free," and finally I gave up on that.

01:05:14.400 | I said, "No, it's not going to happen."

01:05:16.400 | Then I realized I was reading about – I think it was – what's his name? Grandpa's Big Brother, whatever the Big Brother book was.

01:05:28.400 | I've got it.

01:05:30.400 | I was reading it, and I thought, "You know what? It's hard to argue with this argument.

01:05:36.400 | This is probably as close to maximally free that you can get in the modern age."

01:05:42.400 | That's been my experience over the last few years, is that it really is as close as I think a freedom-loving individual can get.

01:05:50.400 | Even if you don't move, which we spent some time talking about moving, probably because I think obsessively about it,

01:05:56.400 | but I don't know many other international people who have families, who have children, who are in a stage like you and I are in.

01:06:03.400 | I think at the very least, having an option, right?

01:06:08.400 | Any Russian who had another passport was much better positioned.

01:06:13.400 | Any American who has another passport, any Canadian who has another passport, who has a residence in another place.

01:06:17.400 | We saw that with COVID through and through.

01:06:20.400 | Anybody who had the ability to leave a place where it was bad and go to a place that was better was well-positioned.

01:06:26.400 | You have a summit coming up, and you have a podcast, a website.

01:06:30.400 | Go ahead and take a few minutes and promote to my audience some of the different things that you have going on.

01:06:36.400 | We've got a summit, November 7th to 11th. It's an online summit. Tickets are free if you guys go to expatmoneysummit.com.

01:06:45.400 | There is a VIP option there if you guys want to get a whole bunch of bonuses. That's great.

01:06:51.400 | But if you guys are just starting to dip your toes in this or you just want to watch the presentations and see what it's like,

01:06:56.400 | then I encourage you to grab a free ticket.

01:06:58.400 | We've got some big-name speakers. We've got Dr. Ron Paul, who will be a speaker, who's a personal hero of mine.

01:07:04.400 | We've got Doug Casey. We've got a whole bunch of people.

01:07:09.400 | Honestly, probably a ton of people you won't know their names.

01:07:13.400 | I say that because it's a lot of the lawyers that I work with and CPAs that I work with and people that I actually use in my business

01:07:21.400 | when I help move people offshore and build their lives overseas as expats.

01:07:26.400 | So I think it's going to be a really fun summit. It's five days. It's going to be tons of things.

01:07:30.400 | It's at expatmoneysummit.com, so grab a free ticket.

01:07:34.400 | Then, of course, the podcast, the Expat Money Show, whatever you're listening to today's podcast on, you can find me on there as well.

01:07:41.400 | We've been going for six years and lots of episodes about anything and everything expat-related.

01:07:48.400 | So I hope you get a chance to go and listen to that.

01:07:51.400 | The new website is expatmoney.com. We have two blog articles a day coming out specifically about residency and things like that.

01:08:01.400 | There are links to our groups. There are links to everything on there, I think.

01:08:04.400 | So if you go to expatmoney.com, you'll be able to find that.

01:08:07.400 | I know that's a lot, but that's my pitch. Come and check out our stuff.

01:08:12.400 | I'm happy to take care of your people, Joshua.

01:08:14.400 | I want to say thank you. As I started my journey, I primarily used information, not consultants.

01:08:19.400 | Your information was certainly part of the package.

01:08:23.400 | You also still have the book that's for sale, "Expat Secrets, How to Pay Zero Taxes, Live Overseas, and Make Giant Piles of Money,"

01:08:29.400 | which I think is a great introduction to the world of internationalization.

01:08:33.400 | Then, the up-to-date articles at expatmoney.com.

01:08:36.400 | Mikkel, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

01:08:39.400 | Joshua, a pleasure. All mine. Thanks so much.

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2022-09-12_Mikkel_Thorup_Interview