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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

I'm your host, and today I'm going to do a show that I've frankly put off doing for quite a while. We're going to call this Reflections and Comments on Three Years of Expattery, but in reality I could also title this episode My Updated Thoughts and Perspectives on My Native Country of the United States of America.

Long-time listeners know that I have been an expat from the United States for more than three years now, about three and a half years, and along the way I've shared some of the lessons learned with you here on this podcast. But I struggle sometimes to want to talk publicly about my personal life for various reasons, and so sometimes I don't update my perspectives and opinions very frequently in public, unless someone calls me on a Q&A show.

That's usually where you can get me to spill the beans, but I don't eagerly run towards these particular shows. Recently I've spoken to a couple of listeners who basically said, "Oh, well, you think such and such," and I said, "Well, no, I don't think such and such," and I realized that I have a duty to you to speak clearly and honestly on things that I have learned along the way.

And so I want to share with you some reflections from my own journey of three years of expattery, having lived as an expat for, again, three and a half years now. And I'm doing this because I know that this is something that many people consider. It's not something that many people do, but it's something that many people consider.

There's been a significant uptick. I hang out on Reddit a decent amount and look around and poke around in some of the expat forums and other places online where people hang out, and I use that as a good way to listen to people. And there's been a significant uptick of Americans over the last months saying, "Well, I'm going to leave the United States and go elsewhere," and I read their reasons and listen to what they have to say, and I encourage it to some degree.

But I also frequently speak to people who are thinking about leaving the United States, and I myself wind up telling them I don't think it's a good idea, and I explain why. And so today's show is going to be an extended discussion of these topics. At the beginning, I want to lead with the lead, which is simply I believe that the primary reason you should consider leaving your home country, be it any country in the world, or including the United States, is based on culture and opportunity.

What I mean is, if you like the culture where you are from, I think you should stay there. If you don't like the culture where you're from, I think that's a very good reason for you to leave. And as with most things, I don't think that you should generally be trying to run away from something, but rather I think you should be running to something.

This is my very best effort to encapsulate what I have learned over the last three and a half years of living the international lifestyle. When I see people successfully expatriate from their home country, move to another country, and be there happily, I think they do that most effectively when they find a good cultural fit.

I myself will, in my best guess, probably wind up moving my family back to the United States in the coming years. And the reason I think I will wind up doing that has to do with culture, the fact that I'm comfortable in the American culture, that culturally I reflect in my own being many American values.

Now if the American culture continues to change and that culture doesn't reflect who I am, then I probably won't do that. But this issue of culture at its core is, I think, one of the most important things to consider. Years ago I asked Andrew Henderson, the host of the Nomad Capitalist platform and business, and I asked Andrew, I said, because he talks about leaving the United States.

And if you listen closely to his story, his story, grew up in the United States, lived there, went abroad, traveled for many years, and eventually wound up fully expatriating to the point of even renouncing his US citizenship. And I'm using him because he's a public figure and he talks openly about his experience.

But if you listen to him, Andrew didn't leave the United States to save money on taxes. Andrew didn't renounce his citizenship to have a simpler life. Those are ancillary benefits. Andrew's primary motivation for leaving the United States and eventually for renouncing his citizenship is simply that he never felt comfortable as an American.

He never felt culturally American. So because he never felt comfortably culturally American, for him to leave the United States and eventually end even his citizenship provided him with a greater feeling of freedom. And there have been times, and the times that I've been most happy to not be in the United States has been when I've seen things in the culture that don't reflect me or my values.

But the times when I most want to be in the United States are when I feel a sense of cultural longing for the things that do reflect me and my values. So I think that culture is the driving force for most people. And then I think that if you're going to leave, you want to be going to something.

You want to go into something that you think might be better for you. And that may be a temporary job posting in another place. That might be a tremendous opportunity. It might be going to a land of opportunity or going to pursue something. It might just be wanting to have a cultural adventure for a time and enjoy something different.

But you want to be clear that you're not really running away. You're going to something. And again, these things are applicable to people from any country, but I'm very heavily speaking to Americans. As I'll talk later in the show, I believe that most of the things that people are looking for, especially Americans, most of the things that Americans are looking for from another country, are better answered by another region, another state, or another city.

This is when I think about the questions that people ask. I read Reddit posts, or I read blogs from people who are leaving, or I work with consulting clients who are leaving the country. In many cases, my answer is not you should move to another country. It's simply move to another state.

Move to another city. And the United States especially is so large and has such diversity of culture. Your experience of life will be very different depending on which corner of the country you happen to be in. And it'll be much simpler and almost certainly better for you to simply relocate within the country than to try to move to an entirely new country.

More on that later. As I begin my story, I want you to also adopt this framework for yourself. And it's the Plan A, Plan B framework. What I mean is, when people think about expatriating, they often think about that in terms of a permanent thing. But it doesn't have to be that way.

And I think the best language for this is what's commonly used in the international industry of Plan A versus Plan B. Let me define the terms. Plan A is a complete and total change from one thing to another thing with the idea that this is a permanent change going forward.

So I live in Miami, Florida. I have decided to move to London, England. And so I get a residence permit for London, England. I pick up my family and I move to London, England. And my plan is to be in London for the rest of my life. That's a Plan A change.

Plan B is I want to have a backup plan to be able to go somewhere if I want to. So using those same countries, perhaps I live in Miami, Florida, but I'd like to have the option to go to London, England in the future if I wanted to. It just so happens that my grandmother is British.

And so I'm going to make sure that we go ahead and file for our British citizenship all down the line. Now I hold a British passport and now I have the opportunity in the future if I want to move from Miami to London. I can do that at any point in time as a British citizen.

Or a Plan B could be, again, we usually come down to passports and residency documents because that's often the necessary thing, but Plan B could be something like this. I live in New York. I love my life in upstate New York. It's a wonderful fit for me. But you know what?

I'd like to have a backup plan in case New York weren't a good fit for me for any number of reasons, things that could happen to me. There could be reasons why I find myself facing persecution, why I find myself facing prosecution, some issue in my life and I decide it's better.

So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and I'll purchase a second citizenship for myself. I'll go to a Caribbean island and purchase a citizenship from one of the Caribbean nations that will sell it to me. It costs about $150,000 for an individual. And then I'll go ahead and set up, you know, I might not necessarily want to live in the Caribbean, so I might set up a residence permit in Europe.

There are many countries in Europe that will give me a residence permit for buying property. And so I'll go to Europe, I'll purchase property and they'll give me a residence permit. So now, if at any point in the future I had to, or I chose to, or I wanted to leave New York and go abroad, I have everything set up.

That's a good Plan B. When you think about these as Plan A versus Plan B, you'll immediately notice that there's not an obvious demarcation between them. What is today a Plan B can become a Plan A, and what is today a Plan A can become a Plan B. You can go back and forth between these.

But when I'm talking about my comments, you'll hear me talking primarily about the idea of people choosing to leave as a Plan A, meaning I'm just done living in the United States, I'm going to go live somewhere else and I'm never coming back. That is a big commitment and I think it's a commitment that's ill-suited for most people.

Not all, but most. However, establishing a Plan B for yourself, which is largely what I have done, is, I think, a wonderful plan and strongly recommended. And so as I talk about the lessons that I have learned, recognize that this may all be well and good and true, but you may still choose to pursue a Plan B.

You may still choose to go and live abroad for two or three years, set up a Plan B, maybe get a second citizenship somewhere, establish a residence permit, learn a new language, travel the world, expose your family to some interesting experiences, and then you may go back to your home country with a much greater appreciation of that home country.

And that's largely what I have experienced with my time being gone from the United States. In some ways, well, in many ways, I appreciate the United States more than I ever did. And I'm going to elaborate some of those things that I appreciate towards the back half of the show.

In some ways, I've never felt better than being gone in the United States. And it's that mixture of emotions that I think is common to most expatriates, that you can see things with a little bit more clarity, and you can appreciate the good things that each place has to offer.

Let me share now, with that line of thinking, a little bit of my backstory and tell you why I myself left the United States. Originally, I simply wanted a Plan B. And there were two aspects of my desire for a Plan B that were important. They were avoiding negative outcomes, of which there were three basic outcomes that I was worried about, and also preparing for positive outcomes.

There were some things that I really wanted that I felt could be well positioned for on the positive side. Let me begin with the negative outcomes. And as I elaborate on these three issues, you'll hear me say in a moment that on most of these issues, I'm not nearly as worried as I once was.

And so while I would do it over again, because I could be wrong, it's actually, I've become much more optimistic about each of these three factors. Let me go over them. The number one reason or the number one negative outcome that I was seeking to solve for myself and my family by leaving the United States and establishing a Plan B was the potential negative impacts of excessive government debt.

I looked around and I observed for many years that the United States government continues to in debt itself to a staggering degree, and there is no real plan for any reasonable way to minimize that debt or to make any measurable progress towards paying it off. And since I don't know what the long-term consequences of that might be, I worry that I'd like to have a plan to insulate myself and my children from any negative long-term consequences.

People, when talking about government debt, many responsible people say, "We are indebting our grandchildren. We're borrowing money that we're going to expect our grandchildren to pay back." After many years of hearing that and thinking about it, I thought to myself, "Why should my grandchildren have to pay back money that their grandparents borrowed?

That doesn't make any sense." And what if that were significant? As a financial planner, clients have expressed to me their concern about the risk of increasing tax rates due to this high level of government indebtedness. And they've basically, almost unanimously said, "I think tax rates are going to go up because we're borrowing money and at some point it's going to have to be paid back." And so if you think about that, wouldn't you like to have an option to not have to pay high tax rates if you didn't want to?

Well, as an American, you have to do some extra planning in order to get yourself that option. And I wanted to have in place a system where I and my children could be free of any future encumbrances if we wanted to or if we chose to. I didn't feel it was fair for my children that they would be obligated to a lifetime of servitude for the foolish decisions that their grandparents and their great-grandparents made.

And so I wanted a plan B. I wanted a second citizenship. I wanted the chance for them to live abroad, be citizens of other nations, so that if they didn't want to have anything to do with the United States, they could make that choice in the future. Now on this issue, let me talk about it for a moment.

I don't think, you might share this concern but you might not be willing to actually go through and set up a plan B. And I don't think it would be foolish of you to ignore this issue. Let me explain. At this point in time, it's my opinion that the debt will never be paid back.

The operating assumption of those who believe that taxes are going to be raised to pay back the debt is that the debt will be paid back. And I now don't believe that the debt will be paid back. I could be wrong, but let me explain why. First, all of my experience in life has shown me that paying back national debt or running a budget surplus is simply not a priority for government.

There's only one time in my entire lifetime that I'm aware of where there has actually been a government surplus, and I believe it was one year under President Bill Clinton in the mid to late 90s. I remember it because that was a time where I was starting to get involved in politics and I would read US News and World Report every week and listen to NPR every day on my way to school.

I remember all the stories about what are we going to do with this budget surplus? How are we going to spend the money? And nobody in that conversation seriously said we should use the money to pay down the national debt. It just wasn't really a thing. It was all about how could we spend the money otherwise.

And my entire lifetime the government has run in the red and they borrow the money, borrow more money. And those numbers just increase and increase and increase. So there are a couple of outcomes that are possible. One outcome that is possible is what many of the modern monetary theorists believe that government, because of its unique role, can basically do this forever.

You get the, what's her name, the girl that wrote that book, Stephanie Kelton. She wrote the book The Deficit Myth. And basically those proponents would argue that hey, the government can just borrow money indefinitely. Maybe they're right. I always wonder if they're right then why do they think we need to raise taxes?

And so basically nobody believes in the extreme form because they somehow think we still need to have tax revenue. So there's a balance somewhere, but who knows what that balance is. Nobody predicts a specific number. Nobody predicts a certain thing. We just don't know exactly what the number is.

Maybe it can happen. It can go on indefinitely. On the other hand, maybe the catastrophists are correct. Maybe the catastrophists are correct that everything's going to implode. The massive national debt is going to lead to untold money printing and economic collapse. And basically our entire modern economy is going to collapse and we're going to return to horse and buggy and plowing in the field with a single bottom plow to feed our families and basically shooting each other in the streets.

It's possible. It has happened, meaning civilizations have collapsed. It's hard to imagine a civilization collapsing quite so spectacularly, but it has happened and very well could happen. So those are two extreme cases. Are there some moderate cases? Well, I think the moderate cases are, we of course have the example of Japan, which has had the great economic malaise going on three decades now, two decades, three decades.

And so we could have a situation of just massive economic malaise due to plummeting population figures, due to an upside down economy. Maybe that's a figure, that's something that could happen. What I think is probable, in my opinion, if I had to put money on it, is what now deceased economist Gary North calls the "Great Default." And basically that the obligations are so large that eventually the government will default on those obligations.

So we can call this the "Great Default." Basically a form of bankruptcy. To me this seems probable. And so I expect the government of the United States and the government of many countries around the world to simply default on their obligations. I don't think that will be a sudden thing of one day we're just going to stroke a pen and ignore all of our obligations.

I think that's unlikely. I think it's more likely that that will look like a multi-year, who knows, multi-decade process of basically government entities simply not following through on their promises. And I think that there's good historical precedent for this position. If we look back we see, for example, Social Security.

Social Security has been bankrupt multiple times. And the Social Security organizers have defaulted multiple times on their promises. They said, "We're going to start this at 62." Then they changed the ages. "Then we're going to give this money to you tax-free." Then they start taxing a portion of it.

And so these are examples of defaults. But they're not sudden precipitous things. They're things that everyone looks at and says, "Oh, that's a reasonable normal thing. Obviously we don't have the money, so we're going to go ahead and change these benefits." And so if you look at the entitlement programs of the United States, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, then this is likely to happen.

And some of that default is public. "Well, we're going to institute means testing on Social Security now." Well, it's public. "Now you're not going to get the money that was promised to you. That saves us some money. Helps us to milk things along for a few more years." Some of the default is circumstantial.

Several years ago I did an essay, or did a podcast, highlighting a news story from Maine. And it was an example of the broken Medicaid system in Maine. The news report profiled how there are many residents of Maine who are fully entitled to Medicaid benefits, things like home health care, but that they simply aren't able to collect on those benefits because there are no workers who are willing to provide the services at the rates promised by the government.

And so effectively those people can't collect their Medicaid benefits because they're choosing to live in the state of Maine and the system is broken. Even though the government will write the checks, the whole labor supply is simply non-existent. And so that's a form of default. I think if you look across the economy, that's a very likely outcome, especially for the unfunded liabilities.

Now for the on-budget liabilities, who knows what will happen. The reality is sovereign governments default on their debt frequently. Usually it's not the United States. Usually it's Argentina, perhaps Russia in coming weeks and months. But it's not usually the United States. But there's no fundamental reason why it couldn't be the United States.

And so if we look at inflation as a form of default, if we look at rebasement of currency as a form of default, you go back and you look at how the US has handled its money supply, if you look at how the currency has changed several times, you have the first national banks in the late 1700s that collapsed, and then you have all of this.

We look at it and when you live in a time of stability, it seems hard to imagine. But if you look at history, you recognize this default has happened many times before, it can happen again. And what exact form it will take, I don't know, but it's happened quite a lot.

What about raising taxes? Well, it's certainly possible that taxes could be raised, but here is my observation. First, since World War II, tax revenues in the United States have never gone above 25% of GDP. They're actually, they have actually been remarkably stable. You can go through history and you can find some periods at which the marginal tax rates were truly astounding.

Go back to the 60s, 70s, you find 90% marginal tax rates, it's astounding. But realistically, those tax rates were never levied as directly as it would seem by the number itself. Because there were far more loopholes, there were far more exceptions, etc. So the trend of the last several decades has been generally declining tax rates mixed with generally closing out any loopholes or exceptions.

It's very difficult to find any truly spectacular tax loophole in the US tax code today. My whole life, I've pretty much been looking for them as a financial planner. What are they? There just aren't that many. There really aren't. There used to be a lot more, but they've been steadily closed by legislation.

And so, if you look back over the last 10 to 20 years, you see a striking stability of overall tax rates and tax collections. And it's been my observation that politicians talk about changing taxes, in order, tax rates, in order to curry political favor. But when elected, they don't actually change much.

Republicans generally seem to talk about lowering taxes. They gain in office, well, they lower it 3%. We go from a marginal bracket of 39.5% to 37%, top marginal bracket. Okay, big deal. Democrat comes into office, we go from 37% to 39%. Whatever, big deal. They're just generally small changes on the margin.

And I have also observed that during times of economic uncertainty, there is a strong bipartisan willingness to not raise taxes and often to cut taxes. So this shows me that regardless of what they say, politicians understand that heavy tax rates tend to minimize economic activity. So I think that the United States, being one of the most sophisticated governments in the world, from the perspective of good, reliable data, good understanding of the numbers, the trends, etc., I think the United States is pretty well locked in its ideal position on the Laffer curve.

The Laffer curve is an idea expressed by economist, Art Laffer, I think, that basically argues that if you raise tax rates too much, people minimize their economic activity and your tax collections go down. If you lower tax rates too much, then the government doesn't get the maximum amount of tax revenue that it could get by charging a higher rate.

And I think that the United States has pretty well optimized its Laffer curve. And I say that largely from simply personal experience, meaning you very rarely meet an American who will actually follow through on leaving the country in order to change tax rates, in order to eliminate taxes or lower them.

The US taxes are not low, but they're also not excessively high. It's kind of that really awkward, lukewarm middle ground where getting out is not really worth it, but staying in and really going is not really worth it. And so it's hard for Americans to give up on the United States just to save on some taxes.

And on a global basis, the United States is pretty competitive. And so I think that's an expression, a natural, practical expression of the Laffer curve, that we've pretty well dialed in where we need to be. And the United States has maximized, government is maximizing its revenue, while trying not to overplay its hand and suppress economic activity too much.

So all of that said, that I don't, I'm not that worried about the situation that my children will face. I'm very happy that I built a plan B for them, but I'm not that worried about it economically. And I think that if we bring into the conversation other macroeconomic trends, which I will talk about in the back half of the show, I think there are good reasons to believe strongly in the economic future of the United States, and not to be excessively pessimistic.

So the first reason I wanted a plan B was to avoid the negative outcome of excessive government debt. The second reason I wanted a plan B was to avoid having to pay immoral taxes for myself. I had a strong desire to be able to legally avoid paying immoral taxes without running the risk of imprisonment.

Let me explain, because here I'm not arguing from the perspective of, "I don't want to pay taxes," as meaning selfish, I want to keep my money. It's perfectly fine. Tax avoidance is a perfectly reasonable activity. Rather, I was very concerned about being able to look myself in the mirror and feel proud about the man staring back at me, simply based upon what the money is used for.

And there were two issues that have bothered me for years. The first is simply war taxes. I'm not a pacifist, but I do believe that warfare should only be waged in moral circumstances, which is self-defense. I do not believe that military power should be used to try to make more money or expand empire.

I believe that's dangerous and immoral. And since that's something that my own native country has done repeatedly and regularly for a very long time, I've often felt very guilty of participating in that system in any way. If you've never thought about this, let me give a modern example. I think sentiment is pretty, not universal, but pretty strongly united that the actions of the state of Russia invading its neighbor, Ukraine, are immoral, that it's an immoral invasion from one nation state to another.

I want you to imagine yourself as a Russian citizen, living in Russia, paying taxes to the Russian government. I want you to imagine that you believe that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is immoral. And now ask yourself how you feel supporting that government and sending tax money that is being used to murder innocent people in a neighboring country.

How would you feel about that? If you can imagine yourself in that situation as a Russian and then bring that back to your home country, you can see some of the discomfort that some people have. Now, there are a lot of Americans who don't reflect on the behavior of their government in that way, and there are a lot of good arguments to look at where you say, "Well, maybe it's different." For example, a Russian could look at the situation and say, "The only way that my country can be protected from foreign invaders is for us to control a significant amount of territory so that we can have defense through depth.

After all, we as Mother Russia, we have been invaded how many times? I mean, five times, something like that. We've lost hundreds of millions of people in these vicious wars, and we've learned that the only possible way for us to protect ourselves is to basically keep our nation with borders that it had when the Soviet Union was intact." It's my understanding, I'm no expert on Russian history, but it's my understanding that basically the Soviet Union was the first time where Russia could actually control and protect itself from external invasion because of controlling all of the strategic geography.

So you could argue that Russia's actions are a result, or excuse me, you could argue that Russia's actions are morally defensible by providing for the defense of Russia. This is where you go and you say, "Look, NATO has aggressed upon us. NATO is expanding at our flank, and the United States and its allies and all the NATO allies are messing around, and they're meddling in our elections and all kinds of things." And that's basically what people have pointed to, to say that this was inevitable.

And you could look at that and you could believe it, but you could also pull back and you could say, "But what's the actual effect of this? Like, the actual effect here is this is not right." And thus, should you pay taxes to your government that are being used to support that war effort?

As I record this in mid-August 2022, it's basically the one-year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. As perhaps a very good recent example, I want you to think about what happened in that withdrawal. Think about, especially, the lives of the 10 innocent people that were lost when a US drone fired a missile at their car and at their compound.

If you or I go out and kill 10 innocent people and then say, "Oh, it's a mistake," you or I are held morally accountable for it and legally accountable for it. Saying it was a mistake doesn't mean we won't be held accountable. But look at what happened. Look at what the US government did with impunity a year ago.

Killed 10 innocent people, most of them children, and said, "Well, it was bad intelligence. We got bad intelligence." And some random officer in the army comes out, makes an apology, but that's it. Nobody faced any legal problems, nobody was prosecuted for war crimes, nobody was held accountable for the innocent loss of life of 10 innocent people.

So you can argue against it, say, "That's the fog of war," and it is, right? That's what happens. But why was there the war in the first place? So that's the war tax issue, and I've always felt uncomfortable with supporting the violence and contributing in any way to the death of millions and millions of people around the world.

But that's never been a big, huge motivation for me to actually act, because although what I've said is true, it's just kind of the way it always has been, right? I've never not grown up and I've never not lived in the empire, I've never not lived in a situation where it could happen all around the world.

And for every issue that you look at, you can argue your way through it. You could say, "Well, those people, the reason those 10 innocent people in Afghanistan were killed was because all of the American soldiers were attacked the day before, and there was a soldier killed, and so that was fair and just arguing back." And you say, "Well, why were the soldiers there in the first place?" Well, the reason the American soldiers were there was because — nobody even remembers, right?

There were weapons of mass destruction. Oh, no, there weren't. Oh, they're harboring Osama bin Laden. And so you can argue your way back through, but at the end of the day, you basically get to a utilitarian view, ethical view, that says, "The reason the soldiers are there is because we felt it was better to fight a war on the other side of the world than to worry about people sending soldiers to our borders." So the war taxes thing is a big deal for some people, but it's just not — it's always been that way, and it's really hard to say, "I'm going to change things significantly." What finally caused me to act, however, was the 2015 political season.

Specifically, prior to the 2016 presidential election, then frontrunners Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunners for the candidacy. Eventually, it was Hillary Clinton that won the Democratic nomination. Both of them pledged that if elected president, they would end something called the Hyde Amendment. And the Hyde Amendment is an amendment that happens in — I think it's the budget, annual budget, that basically, ostensibly, prohibits the use of federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortion.

For me, abortion is a very, very serious and important moral issue. I understand abortion to be the intentional killing of an innocent baby, which is murder. And when I look at that, and I think about my money being used to pay for the murder of the most innocent and the most helpless among us, the people who have genuinely never done anything wrong, that makes my blood run cold, to think that I would be complicit in that financially.

Now, in many ways, I'm complicit by allowing it to happen, but it's very hard to know what to do and how to keep this from happening. But to say that I'm now actively supporting this with my taxpayer tax dollars is utterly repulsive to me personally. And I thought, "How on earth could I live in a country where I'm using my taxpayer dollars to support this?

This is awful. How do I look at my children and be proud of their father for doing that?" And so it seemed inevitable to me, and I had no idea what to do. It's a great, great moral crisis for many people. I'll explain the moral crisis in a moment.

So in 2016, when the presidential election happened and Donald Trump won an upset victory, an unexpected victory, I felt like I had gotten a major reprieve. I felt just this incredible load go off of my shoulders, where I thought, "Wow, I was just released from this incredible moral quandary." And I made myself a promise on election night 2016.

I promised. I said, "By the time the next election happens, I will not be so exposed to the vagaries of modern politics. I will not be so vulnerable to this." Because I felt such an intense wave of relief. I didn't expect President Trump to win. I expected Hillary Clinton to become president.

And so I felt this intense wave of relief wash over me that I had gotten a reprieve. And I promised myself that I would never be as vulnerable again on the outcome of a political election as I felt I was in 2016. I didn't have a clear plan of exactly what to do, but it was a strong personal commitment.

And I felt that way because I didn't see how... I didn't think that... I never trusted Donald Trump. I thought he was a liar through and through and a man of low moral character. And as such, I felt, I believed that... I was shocked that he won the presidency, and I thought that his presidency would be a disaster.

And I didn't see how he could win again. And so I felt like I had been given four years, and that I shouldn't presume upon anything after that. And so that was a big influence for me. Let me explain why I said I wanted to be legally able to avoid immoral taxes without running the risk of imprisonment.

When you look at tax resistance or tax protesting, not paying taxes because you're upset about the tax collection, it takes many forms, right? If you go back in Radical Personal Finance, I probably first talked about this when I interviewed David Gross of the Pickett Line back in the first couple dozen episodes of Radical Personal Finance.

There's nothing new here to the show. But if you look at it, you have basically a couple of roads that you can go down. Let's assume that you don't want to pay taxes for whatever reason. Let's assume, though... No, I can't say for whatever reason. Let's assume that you don't want to pay taxes because you feel like the payment of taxes is morally abhorrent to you for some reason.

You have two directions you can go. You can go down the illegal tax protesting direction, where you're consciously breaking the law, or you can go down the legal path of tax protesting. Let's start with the illegal path first. This is the thing that most people think of first. Government shows up, says, "Here's a tax bill.

You owe us this money." And you say, "I ain't gonna pay it. Stuff it. I'm not gonna pay it." That's illegal tax protesting. There are many people who have done it, do it, and have done it. It's happened all around the world. You see these revolts where people come in.

I remember a few years ago, I loved it. My family and I were driving through Mexico. We passed through a toll plaza. All the farmers were there. They had shut down the toll plaza. They'd opened things up, and they were just staging a protest at the toll plaza. Basically, the central federal government of Mexico City wasn't listening to them.

They regularly go in. They storm the toll plaza. They open it up to try to get the government to pay attention by the government losing revenue. All around the world, there are examples of this, and there have been many examples throughout history. Read David Gross's book called "The 99 Lessons from Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns," or something like that.

You can find all kinds of examples of this in history. The challenge with this line of tax protesting is that it's very hard for Christians to argue that they should participate. One of the things that is unique about the teachings in the New Testament, the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of the early apostles, is that there is a unanimous agreement that Christians should pay their taxes.

Jesus said, "Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Give unto God the things that are God's." When there were various tax issues, Jesus specifically at one point made a coin appear out of a fish's mouth so that his disciples could pay the temple tax. Paul, Peter spoke very, very clearly about taxes, paying taxes.

And so it's very, very hard for a Christian to argue from a biblical basis that he shouldn't pay his taxes. You say, "Well, maybe the government that they were under was not as wicked as the government of our day." And I've just always found that risible. Think about this.

Jesus said, "Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Give unto God the things that are God's," knowing full well that he was going to be murdered as an entirely innocent man by the government of his day, to which he was saying, "Pay taxes." You think about Peter and Paul saying, "Pay taxes." Their compatriots were being dunked in oil and stuck on sticks to be used as human torches in Nero's garden, and they still said, "Pay taxes." So you say, it's just hard.

You can't argue that the government was any better than today, and you can argue in many ways it was significantly worse. So it's just hard to make that argument. Then the practical effects of not paying taxes is imprisonment. If you care about freedom, you've got to avoid imprisonment. Imprisonment always comes with all kinds of knock-on effects.

I just imagine myself with my children, and I'm stuck in prison for being a tax protester. And, "Mommy, why is Daddy not here?" "Well, Daddy's in prison." "Why is Daddy in prison?" "Because he didn't want to pay taxes that funded foreign wars and abortion." "Well, Dad, but what about me?

Do I not have an obligation to try to stay out of prison for my children? If I'm put there through no fault of my own, if I'm unjustly imprisoned and I've done nothing wrong, okay, but don't I have an obligation to try to care for my wife and care for my children and care for my community by following the law?" To me, it seems you do.

So I can't, in good conscience, go down the illegal side of tax protesting. What about the legal side of tax protesting? So you can be a tax protester by simply changing behavior and following the law. You don't want to pay the toll on the toll road? You can go on the other road.

You don't want to pay the gas tax? You can not drive a car. You don't want to pay the war tax? You can lower your income below the taxable threshold and simply not owe any taxes. And in the United States, you can do this and still live a very agreeable lifestyle, depending on the personal deductions and credits to which you're entitled.

The number of children I have, I could earn about $100,000 a year and not pay any federal income taxes. So I could do fine and not pay federal income taxes if I run a business. Perhaps I put together a couple of good businesses. I take the appropriate business deductions.

I make contributions to a retirement account. I take my child tax credits. I can take any deductions to which I'm entitled by law, and I just intentionally keep my wages below the tax threshold. I can do that, and I can wind up paying a zero dollar tax line for many, many years.

So that's one form of tax protesting. The problem for me is also back to that, I imagine, my children. "Daddy, why are we poor?" You know, like, "Well, we're poor because I don't want to pay taxes." "Why don't you want to pay taxes?" You know, blah, blah, blah, because of these reasons.

"But, Daddy, aren't you supposed to be a financial advisor? Why are we poor? Like, aren't you supposed to know what you're talking about?" And that's just always bothered me. So along the way, I realized at one point in time that there was a solution to my moral quandary, and the solution was to change who had taxing authority over me.

I don't believe that I'm obligated, morally obligated, as a free man in a free condition, not living under slavery, not living under a system where I have to make the choice to stay put, not morally obligated to remain in the United States and to remain as a U.S. citizen.

And I realized I could solve my moral quandary by leaving, and that by doing so, I would be behaving uprightly and righteously in my actions, haven't broken any laws, I would be able to maintain my integrity, but I would also not be burdened by this idea that I couldn't live up to my potential.

Very simple. I could leave the United States, go to St. Kitts and Nevis, buy a citizenship from St. Kitts and Nevis. I don't even need one for my whole family, I just need one for me. $150,000. I could purchase a home and set up a lifestyle on the island of St.

Kitts and Nevis. I can earn $100 million a year and pay $0 of income taxes. St. Kitts and Nevis taxes based upon import fees and duties, they don't tax wages, profits, etc. And I could live legally, completely tax-free. I could even go back to the United States as a tourist, go back for three, maybe three months a year, sometimes up to four months per year, be a tourist, have no tax obligations, visit my family, visit my loved ones, and have resolved the moral quandary.

And I thought, I don't know that I want to do that, but I want to have the ability to do that if I want to. So let me put this in place. Because I imagined, I thought, you know, President Trump probably president for four years, Republicans wound up doing what they always do, lose the Congress, lose the Senate, etc.

But I thought, after President Trump, what if it's Hillary Clinton again, or Bernie Sanders, or in this case, Joe Biden? I don't want to be dependent on the government and them removing this law and my facing this moral conundrum. So I started taking action to make sure that I wasn't in that situation, to where if the day that a new president was elected, or the day that a new Congress proposed a law that I disagreed with, I could renounce my citizenship and be completely free.

That was a huge deal for me. May not be for you, but it was a huge deal for me because it resolved my problem in what I saw as an honorable way. Number three is simply that I was concerned about my potential loss of personal and physical freedom. One of the court cases in years that really hit me hard was when Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years for building a website that enabled commerce among unknown individuals.

That court case struck me to the core. And I had grown up believing in the legitimacy of the court system, believing in fair jury trials and all that. I still hold out hope that that is the best provider for freedom. I believe a jury trial is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny, because any juror on a jury trial can exercise his discretion to rule on the guilt of the subject and also on the validity of the law.

That's jury nullification. And so you can nullify as a juror, you can nullify any law that you think is immoral. So I believe that that is helpful, but it's really frustrating when you see great injustices like Ross Ulbricht being done. It's just a scandalous, scandalous scenario. And on the one hand, I generally try to stay optimistic about the future of the United States, and I genuinely am optimistic.

What I mean is, let me slow down and explain some background. If you were to go back in the history of the United States, you have a very stark difference between what I'll speak widely as the first hundred years versus the second hundred years. Now, of course, I know that the nation has been around for more, but just want to highlight this hundred-year distance.

Go back just over a hundred years ago. Go back to just before World War I, U.S. involvement in World War I, 1914 to 1918. Go back to the year before World War I, 1913, just over a century ago. The average citizen in the United States had no contact in any way, shape, or form with the federal government of the United States on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis except for the Postal Service.

It was literally the only federal agency or federal body that the average citizen had any contact with. No income taxes, no EPA, no Department of Education, no anything except the Federal Postal Service. That was it. Since that time, and even like travel restrictions, I often get accused by my Republican conservative friends of being a liberal Democrat because I support open borders.

I don't believe that the United States or any country should have restrictions on who can and can't enter the country for non-criminal persons. I say, "Well, you liberal. I just want to go back to the world that existed up till World War II. Prior to World War II, with the exception of a very short time in the Civil War and World War I, prior to World War II, the United States never had passport controls.

Anybody could come into the country, anybody could leave the country, no passport controls, no restrictions on immigration, anybody could come. Since then, what do you have? You have the growth of the welfare state and you have the growth of tyranny. So you didn't have to have a passport to come and live in the United States or anything prior to that point in time.

And so I consider that to be, in many cases, an ideal situation, is that we should have freedom. But if you look back in the last 100 years and you reflect on what I just described, no income tax, no giant federal government invading every aspect of your life, various state and local governments engaging in the principles of federalism to run their societies how they believed, people able to access and influence those governments because they were more to a human scale.

But you compare that to the last 100 years, the trend is, in many cases, at least legislatively, universally bad for freedom. Today, you and I commit on estimate three felonies a day in the United States, we just have no idea what they are. And you have this ever-growing body of laws that just grows and grows and grows, what, 60,000 pages a year, something like that, of new laws to which we're subject and we don't even know what they are.

It's so bad that when Congress passes laws, which is rare enough, they pass laws they don't even read, multi-thousand page laws, the legislators have a couple days to read them. And so it's just a farce, it's a joke. So that's the negative view. And I am concerned about the negative view because those laws do have long-range impact.

On the other hand, the positive view that I do subscribe to is that on a practical basis, an individual today has far more ability to live freely than really ever before in human history. But this is not due to a increasingly free government, this is due to increasingly free technological connectedness, increasing technology of transportation, technology of communication, etc.

And so on a practical basis, any one individual can be more free today than the freest person out there 100 years ago. But there's two separate trends, so I choose to focus on that. But I get really concerned about some of the trends. And right now, I think the United States is one of the best in the world for some of the things that matter to me, but that's not to say that it will still be that way 15 years from now.

I think about educational freedom, the freedom to educate your children as you desire. I think about medical freedom. We've seen that collapse around the world over the last few years. You see laws passed in Canada as horrific with some of the recent laws they've passed related to parents and parental rights with their children, etc.

And so that could happen in the United States as well, and so I was concerned about that. I thought I needed a solution. Those were the negative outcomes that I was seeking to avoid by building a Plan B. What about positive outcomes? I don't think that negative planning is ideal.

There may be times in which it's relevant, but I don't think it's ideal. There were some positive outcomes that I wanted from going abroad. One was just simply the fun and the adventure, right? I enjoy being able to thrive in an increasingly interconnected, international, multicultural lifestyle. I enjoy that very much.

I'm not, you know, it's funny. I think that there are people who have xenophobia, where they have a strange and unwarranted fear or hatred or dislike of foreign cultures, foreign persons, etc. I think there are also people that have unreasonable xenophilia, where they have a strange and weird aversion to their own culture, their own like-minded people, the people of their race, their ethnicity, their culture, and they have this strange love of foreign cultures.

But I find that there's, at least for me, maybe I'm deluding myself, but I think there's a happy medium where I enjoy the fun and the variety and the spice of life that comes with international living, international exposure. It's fun to be in places that are different and to experience some of those things.

The other big positive thing, though, was as someone who cares about freedom, I want the ability to live freely in an increasingly unfree world for myself. And along the way I came across the theory of what is now usually called flag theory, was formerly called PT theory, which stands for any number of acronyms, but it could be perpetual travel or permanent tourist theory.

And as someone who enjoys pretty much being left alone, I looked at some of the trends that I outlined over the last hundred years in not only the United States, but many governments around the world, and I realized that if you're somebody who cares about personal liberty, it's pretty hard to fight those trends.

But you may not need to fight, just choose to live freely. Harry Brown's book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, is a fantastic book, well appreciated by people like me who appreciate individual liberty. And yet it was Harry Brown and some of his friends who came up with the more powerful theory of PT theory.

And so when I started to understand it, I realized that this is the closest that I think it's possible to come in our current day and age to maximum levels of personal liberty. For the uninitiated, let me discuss what the theory is. This was developed back in the 1980s by basically a handful of rich international libertarian playboys who were looking around at the world and trying to figure out how do we do what we want to do and live how we want to live.

And what they realized was simply you can, if you leave one place where your actions are not appreciated or allowed, and go to a place where your lifestyle is appreciated and allowed, you can live how you want to live. So if gambling is illegal where you live, and you want to gamble, you can just simply leave where you are and go to a place where gambling is allowed and gamble your heart out.

This is why in the United States you have this patchwork of laws where certain places you can do certain kinds of gambling. Sometimes you have to go to Las Vegas, you have to go to an Indian reservation. It's just a different place where they have different rules, and then you can follow the law.

If prostitution is illegal where you live but you want to engage the services of a prostitute, go to a place where prostitution is legal. If drugs are illegal where you want to live but you want to engage in that activity, go to a place where it's legal. Don't run the legal risk of being tossed in prison, just go.

And I think about this, the old example of prohibition in the United States when the United States outlawed consumption of alcohol. There were a handful of Americans who just picked up their bags and went to Europe, went somewhere else. Maybe you want to have multiple wives, go to a place where polygamy is legal.

Maybe you want to run a certain kind of business. You see this right now where there are certain businesses that are simply not acceptable in certain places, you can go to another place where they accept that kind of business. And this strategy of "go where you're treated best" as Andrew Henderson has trademarked it, is a pretty effective strategy because it doesn't rely upon your forcing anyone else to change.

It just relies upon you making the individual choice to change yourself. And it's one of the most effective things you can do. If you're living in a place where they don't have laws that you like, you can spend your life arguing for the changing of those laws. And if you feel that that's an effective use of your time, I honor you for that.

But you might also just spend 20 years of your life and make no impact when you could have just picked up and left and gone somewhere else where they have laws that you like. And so this was the basic concept of PT theory. Now they took it to another extreme by using internationalization.

And originally you had the three flag theory, then you had the five flag theory that was eventually developed. Now people are calling it seven and eight flag theory. But the idea is choose each government for what each government does best. So the five flags are these. Number one, you want to have a citizenship from a country that will give you a good travel document.

So you can travel the world, right? If you reflect upon the fact that nowhere in the world basically has open borders at this point in time, the whole passport regime is a necessity. So you need some kind of passport document in order to travel with. And ideally you would get one that allows you to go the places that you want to go with minimal hassle and minimal problems.

And so you want to get a citizenship from a country that gives you a good travel document. You also want ideally a country that leaves you alone and that doesn't impose undue burdens on you. So you want a country that doesn't tax you on your foreign income, income earned abroad.

You want a country that doesn't impose military service on you or your children. You want a country that doesn't impose onerous reporting requirements and make you file a form every year of how much Bitcoin do you own or what kind of money did you earn or did you do something somewhere in the world etc.

So that's your first flag is your citizenship flag and related to citizenship of course your passport flag. The second flag is your residency flag. So ideally you would have a place where you have a residence, a personal residence. And in a perfect world that residence would be from a country that will leave you alone, that won't give you laws that you disagree with.

For me they won't say you can't homeschool your children or they won't say you have to inject your babies with an experimental vaccine or things like that. You want a country that won't tax you. Ideally they won't tax you on your foreign income. They pretty much leave you alone.

They won't expose you to personal security risks, things like that. You want to have the right to live in that country. And ideally it's a place that you want to live. And then number three is your business base. And so you want to have your business flag. You want to have your business set up in a stable business jurisdiction that allows you to run your business the way that you want to run it.

That gives you all the necessary paperwork so that you can stay on the right side of the law with your business and gives you the opportunity to run your affairs that are appropriate for your kind of business. And ideally it would be a jurisdiction that doesn't impose heavy taxes on you.

They might impose some taxes, but if they do impose taxes, ideally it's a very light taxation, light regulation, just enough to have appropriate for your industry, but not heavy taxation and not heavy regulation. And so that's your business flag. Your fourth flag is your asset flag. Where do you do your banking?

Where do you keep your money? And so ideally here you would have a country that allows you to have a stable financial system, gives you high quality banking products, high quality investment products, has good laws that protect you, that protect you from fraud, that protect you from creditors, and that basically allows you to keep your money safe so that you don't worry about it.

And then your fifth flag is traditionally what they call your playgrounds. So these are the places that you enjoy spending time, and yet they may not be the places that you would want to live, but you spend time in those places as a tourist. And a country will generally treat tourists better than citizens, generally treat tourists very lightly, they won't impose a lot of laws or obligations on tourists, pretty much leave tourists alone.

And so you choose those places that you'd like to be in, maybe they're places that have great shopping or great lifestyle, and you spend your time in those places as a tourist. And to this day I still say that for those who want to kind of the maximum expression of libertarianism is probably that.

It's not the best lifestyle for most because it involves a significant degree of international relocation, but if you care about freedom it's probably the best lifestyle. And so I wanted to be prepared to be able to live that lifestyle if I chose to. It's much more burdensome to do that with children, and I think there are substantial downsides to doing it with children.

There's the sense of rootlessness and ungroundedness and lack of home that I think can be pretty significant, but that's the basic concept. And I wanted to be prepared for that. And if you have that I think it can prepare you to be basically free, to be a peaceful and honorable citizen of the world, living in a way that you believe is right and effective.

So that's the first set of reasons why I myself left the United States, is I wanted a plan B. The other factor was simply that it was convenient for me to leave the United States when I did. In 2018 my wife and I packed up our children and started traveling around the United States, and we wanted a break.

We wanted to do something different. I'd always wanted to travel around the country in an RV and figured why not do it now. Along the way we were open to the idea of living in other places other than Florida where we're from, but we never really found anything that fit us, anything particular that we wanted to do.

And we thought, and so along that way we conceived a child and we needed to have the baby somewhere. We didn't want to have the baby in an RV. And we'd already gotten rid of our house, gotten rid of our furniture, just had some things in storage. And I proposed the idea of birth tourism and she said yeah.

And basically it was convenient for us to leave the United States. We thought okay, let's go and do it. Let's go and do birth tourism. Because birth tourism was a good way of solving some of the issues that I was working on. So when we left we didn't have the plan to have a plan A and not come back to the United States.

It just seemed like a convenient thing. Let's go have a baby and then we'll figure out what the next step is. Well the next step happened to be a pandemic and we were doing fine. We'd found good infrastructure and we were enjoying traveling and enjoying it for a few years.

And so we thought let's just keep this up. And then kind of the final reason that I left the United States is it keeps my life interesting. I enjoy the challenge of change. I've learned about my personality type that I'm not the kind of person that is going to do the same thing for 20 years.

I'm the personality type that basically a few years, three, four, five years, and I've pretty much, it scratched whatever itch I have at the moment, I'm ready to move on to other things. And so having the idea of living in different places appeals to me. And I enjoy it.

Will I stay gone from the United States? I think probably not. I think probably not. And let me articulate some of those reasons. I've tried to give you the strongest argument in favor basically of leaving at least for plan B by just simply sharing what things I was looking for.

But will I stay gone? The longer I'm away from the United States, the more sensitive I am to how good things are in the United States. I don't believe that any one country is perfect. And I'm not looking for the perfect country. I think that there's probably on every issue, there's probably another country that does almost everything better than my own native country of the United States.

But when you look at the overall set of basically life, the United States does indeed offer a very compelling value proposition, especially for those who are culturally comfortable in the United States, especially for people who are English speakers, especially for people who feel some sense of connection or appreciation of those unique things in American culture.

On the whole, the U.S. offers a pretty good set of features and benefits for many people. I will compare it to my opinions on SUVs. I think that SUVs are pretty mediocre at most things. If you look at virtually any application, you can find a vehicle that's a specialty purpose vehicle that's better suited for that application.

If, for example, you want to carry a lot of people, an SUV isn't great. A van is much more comfortable. If you want to go fast, an SUV isn't great. A sports car is much faster. If you want to be comfortable on the highway, an SUV isn't great. A luxury car will probably give you a better ride and a better experience on the highway.

If you want a vehicle that can pull a big trailer, an SUV isn't great. A pickup truck is better. Basically, the place that an SUV shines is if you want a four-wheel drive, high-clearance vehicle to get you and six of your friends up to the top of a mountain on a rutted dirt road.

In that situation, an SUV does shine. You can still modify a van to be better. You can still modify a pickup truck to be better, but an SUV does shine in that situation. On virtually everything else, an SUV is mediocre. What an SUV does is it gives you the utility of pretty much being able to do all those things.

That's why people like it. It can hold seven people. It's not super comfortable, but when you need to hold seven people, you can put seven people in there. It's not great off-road, but it can go down a rutted road better than a car can, but it's still comfortable on the highway.

It does most things well enough. If you want a do-it-all vehicle, with the exception of gas mileage, then it can do it all well enough. Even gas mileage, you can argue, "Eh, it's good enough." That's how the United States feels to me right now, is that it's pretty mediocre at many things, not everything, and I can find a country on virtually all things that is better than the United States.

But if I'm putting together the list of benefits of things that are important for me, the United States has a pretty good package. While I might not choose it intentionally as an immigrant, since I already am an American citizen, since I already have my infrastructure there, etc., since I'm already culturally American, since I already have friends, I understand it, I speak the language, etc., it makes a lot of sense.

And I think that if you're an American listener, you would probably find that it's similar for you. So the United States is probably not the freest place in the world, but you do have a lot of freedoms, and at least for me, some of the freedoms that I care most about are significant in the United States.

I care about freedom of speech, I care about freedom of religion, I care about freedom of education, I care about freedom of healthcare choices, you know, this kind of stuff. And I can do most of that stuff in the United States really well. The United States offers a pretty good lifestyle.

It's not the cheapest place in the world, places that are cheaper, but it's one of the cheapest places in the world when you factor in all of the factors in terms of the lifestyle benefits. It's not the most, doesn't have the best cities in the world, but it's got enough good ones, just got good stuff all around.

And especially on some of the things that make life really livable, and especially on some of the things that make life really livable for me as a father with children. When it comes to culture, there are a couple of things that are really important. Number one is a sense of cultural identity.

And I've struggled with this one for many years, because if I live in the United States, I can give my children kind of a pretty decent American cultural identity. But I'm not myself kind of the flag-waving, like, nationalistic kind of guy. I do appreciate, it stirs my heart when I go to a Fourth of July parade, but I have struggles with some of the hardcore nationalism.

But I'm also not a destroyer, right? I don't fit in well, and I wouldn't be Howard Zinn's disciple. And so I'm kind of in the middle, where I appreciate certain things, and I'm skeptical of some other things. And so I can give my children a sense of American identity, but I can't really ever give them an identity of another country full-heartedly, because I'm still American through and through, right?

Country I'm living in says, "Put on a mask," and I go, "Grumble, grumble, I'm not gonna wear a stupid face mask. You can't tell me what to do, because I'm American." Just a goofy but true example. And so you have this weird third culture that you wind up making.

But more importantly, when you think about opportunities for your children, you think about cultural opportunities. Some of the things that really matter to me are easier to do in the United States than anywhere else in the world. And the stuff that I talk about on the show. Number one, from an educational perspective, educational freedom in the United States is higher than it is in most places.

And it's easier to access than it is in most places. You can do pretty much anything you want to do with your children's education, depending on what state you're in. And that means that you can be far ahead of the status quo, and you don't have to fight anybody to do it.

You don't have to sit down and create some random set of documents to prove that you've created an umbrella school that allows you to pursue the things that you want to pursue. You can pretty much do it. More importantly, there's access available. The United States is a very egalitarian society, it's a meritocracy, very strong meritocracy, with a cultural resentment of nepotism, which allows individuals to flourish at a very young age.

Recently, I was thinking about Cole... what was his last name? The... Summers, Cole Summers, who wrote the book Don't Tell Me I Can't, An Ambitious Homeschooler's Journey. And, you know, here he is, he's 14 years old, he tragically died a few months ago. And so this brought a lot of attention to his story.

That's where I first heard about him. But here he is, this child of handicapped parents, and he's a homeschooled, unschooled child, but he winds up owning a multi-hundred acre ranch at 14 years old, doing incredible things simply because he had the opportunity. And you can do that in the United States, you can't do that in many places.

I struggle with helping my children to earn money. In the United States, I can teach a 10-year-old how to make several hundred dollars per week just in his spare time, easily, without any like, not selling, just simple stuff. Around the world, it's much harder. You have much more significant laws, rules, regulations, and that stuff really chafes me.

In addition to the United States, you can get the best of the best of equipment, right? Any book your child wants to order, wants to read, it's on your doorstep the next day, even if it was printed in 1937 and it's stored on the other side of the world.

It's just amazing access to information, education. You have access to the best of the best, and easy access to the equipment you want, right? I'm trying to get a 3D printer for my children. In the United States, you can figure out what's the very best 3D printer and have it show up two days later.

In some other parts of the world, it's much harder to access it. And I just go on and on and on, but that stuff really matters to me. And so the lifestyle in the United States is really, really great. You look at classes, you look at, meaning, you know, hobbies, classes, etc.

If you're in a reasonably sized metro area, anything you've ever dreamed of is available. There's a parkour gym here, there's a BJJ gym there, there's an American Ninja Warrior course on the other side, there's a great world-class trainer the next lane over. And of course, you can find specialty stuff if your child is a very skilled athlete, but you can find all of it within the country.

Best coaches in the world, the best instruction, the best equipment, it's all right at your fingertips. This incredible convenience that makes the life of a parent, especially a motivated, engaged parent, really, really easy. In terms of recreation, virtually any hobby that you want to do, virtually any thing that you want to do, there's a whole community around it.

And there's that community is the best in the world, and all the stuff is available. And on a global basis, it's just not consistent. There are countries that have great opportunities, but even in the most, in the countries that have incredible consumer conveniences for my lifestyle, they're often not the consumer conveniences that I care the most about.

And so you have certain cities and countries of the world that have better city style consumer conveniences in the United States, but I'm not a big city guy. Like, that's not how I want to live. I enjoy more diverse hobbies, etc. And then in terms of my kind of people, right, when you really care about in the United States, when it comes to all the freedom stuff that I said, Americans get it, generally speaking.

Even if they don't agree, they get it. And there's a much higher percentage of people that feel like how I feel than what I find going around the world. And so for me, culturally, the United States is very, very comfortable. And I think this is the case for many in my listening audience.

I think that if you make a list of the things that you want from the potential of another country, most of those things are likely met better by simply another region, another state or another city within the United States. People underestimate how difficult it is to successfully expatriate to another place.

I have done this multiple times. I saw a course on it, I'll advertise the course at the end, but I have a fully established infrastructure for multiple countries with legal rights of residence, legal with bank accounts, cell phones, work rights, everything set up. So I've done it multiple times, more than two.

And it is so much work to set that stuff up. And even having all the legal rights doesn't satisfy knowing the culture, knowing the level of personal expression in the culture, understanding all the cues, facing the racial discrimination that you face for being a foreigner, not having all of the proper level of reserve or the proper level of openness and having all of that stuff.

I enjoy the international... I like those challenges. I like the challenge of figuring out how to be culturally couth in a foreign language and in a foreign culture. I enjoy that. It's fun, but it's hard. And I think most people it's much harder than you should want to do.

I need also to simply talk about the future and tell you this. Let me introduce this topic with a letter from a listener. "Hey Joshua, I'd like to enroll in your Bitcoin privacy course." "One of the most impactful podcasts I've listened to was your show on why a parent should stay home when children are young, and that it makes more sense to invest time with children above putting money into a college savings account.

After listening to that podcast episode twice and giving it quite a bit of thought, I decided I should stay at home with my children while they're very young." I'm thinking zero to four years old makes sense. "I gave up a very high paying job. I could have retired very comfortably with five to 10 more years of work and completely reoriented myself to a different kind of life I didn't even consider prior to listening to that episode.

I appreciate the holistic approach you take towards financial planning and keeping an eye on the extreme events that occur throughout history and will probably occur in our lifetimes. One piece of unsolicited constructive criticism, as someone who has studied geopolitics and traveled extensively, I think you underestimate the role the USA plays in global security and the extent to which we actually have it much better here in the US.

After listening to your recent post-COVID shows, I think you're coming around on the latter point, but probably still don't quite appreciate the former. As a large country with perfectly defensible borders, an ability to feed itself many times over, a river system that enables essentially free transport of goods, and an ability to generate enough energy to provide for our population, the United States dominates the world and, in my opinion, is the only reason we haven't ended in nuclear annihilation.

If the United States were to fall or break apart in the age of nuclear weapons and bioweapons, there wouldn't be a geopolitical player strong enough to enforce world order and conflicts would once again flare up. Indeed, since the USA is weaker on a relative basis and more importantly just not interested in enforcing world order, conflicts are beginning to rage and famine is once again looming.

I mention this because the idea of "getting out of the country" for US citizens is a false hope. If the USA were devastated, and somehow there were other areas of the world that weren't, world order would slip and it's difficult to think of places safer than certain parts of North America.

Certainly places like South and Central America would experience conflict without the USA imposing order from above. This might be a borderline offensive thing to read, but unfortunately it's true. It's likely that peace isn't the norm anywhere, even in South and Central America. If you're interested in understanding this, I'd suggest the works and Twitter page of Peter Zaihan.

His first book, The Accidental Superpower (2014) lays out this case in detail. His latest book, Disunited Nations, is prescient in its predictions, including Russia being extremely aggressive as its demography deteriorates. Though I 100% believe all of the above, you never know. So I want to own some Bitcoin anonymously.

Looking forward to the course. So that listener of mine I think makes some very important and cogent points. And I want to say very clearly that on economic issues and security issues, etc., once again, my appreciation of the United States has grown over the last few years. And I don't know if I could have experienced this without going abroad.

When you're raised or when you live in the cultural milieu of the United States, it's very easy to assume that things are better elsewhere. And because all you see is the problems of your own scenario. In some ways it's kind of like a relationship, right? If you're in a relationship and you see all the problems with your wife, like here's a long list of problems, and you assume because you only see other people at their best that other people don't have those same problems.

But a little bit of maturity would say that while it may be true that this particular wife that I have has her own unique set of problems, in general other people probably aren't as good as I might think. We all have our problems. In the United States it's easy to look around and say, well, the US dollar is going to disappear.

But the only frame of reference you have is the US dollar in many cases. And over my last three and a half years of living abroad, I've come to appreciate so many things about the United States. I appreciate deeply the banking system. The United States does not have the world's best banks, as measured by security, reserves, etc.

But in many ways the United States has some of the world's best banks. And for non-Americans, my first banking haven for them that I recommend is the United States. The US banking infrastructure, the global nature of it, the credit card industry, the banking products, the low costs, the zero tax on banking profits for non-American persons, is really, really incredible.

And while there are many good banks around the world, and I believe that all thoughtful Americans should have bank accounts in other countries, the US banking structure is really phenomenal. I continue to use the US banking system as my primary banking system because of its many benefits. One of the great benefits that Americans who go abroad have is that the United States has very different tax residency rules than any other country in the world.

Because the United States assumes that your tax residency or their right to tax you is based on citizenship rather than on residency, the line of whether you're subject to American taxes or not is very, very clear. You are. If you're an American citizen or a US person, you are.

You're subject to taxation. And the line of whether or not you can experience some tax exclusion for being abroad is very, very clear. You either qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion or you don't. And it's based upon your person, not based on anything else. This is different than the nation, the citizens of other countries.

So for example, if I were a Canadian and I wanted to become tax non-resident Canada, becoming legally tax non-resident Canada is much more invasive to my lifestyle than simply going abroad. If I want to truly be tax non-resident in Canada, I would be very well advised to eliminate ownership of all physical property in Canada, not only real estate, but even things in a storage unit and physical items.

I would need to end banking relationships, close out bank accounts, basically sever all ties with Canada and make it very clear that I don't live in Canada and I'm not coming back. And basically the only thing that I can keep is my passport if I want to truly be safe about tax non-residency.

Now the benefit is that Canadian can keep his citizenship and go abroad and not have any tax obligation to the Canadian government. That's an opportunity. That's a benefit that Americans don't have. But the benefits for Americans are simply that if you go abroad, you can get the foreign earned income exclusion.

And for an American, you can still keep everything in the United States. You can keep your house, you can keep your car, you can keep your bank accounts, you can keep your credit cards, you can keep all that stuff. And in fact, even if you weren't a citizen, you can pretty much keep all that stuff as well.

So having all the infrastructure in the United States is really, really powerful. And so when I go around the world and I look at banking products and I live as an international citizen, I'm very grateful to have the US banking infrastructure and system as my primary scenario. My MX works in any country in the world basically.

And that's a really powerful opportunity. Great exchange rates, no foreign transaction fees, everything is just simple, easy. It all works really well. The US dollar. It's one thing to say, what are we going to do when the US dollar loses its reserve, its status as a reserve currency in the world?

That's a very fair question. But what's going to replace it today? This is why the US dollar continues to maintain its power. What's going to replace it today? There are many good currencies around the world. I believe in currency diversification. I think there are other currencies that are excellent.

I go over some of those in my course. But the US dollar is still the safe haven of choice. And as someone who now looks at the world differently, I look at the US dollar as a safe haven. Because it's better than many other local scenarios. What about economic affairs?

Could the United States collapse? Well, let's do investing first. When you look at investing on a global basis, I believe that there are many good pockets of the world where you could get high returns in investments. My dream job when I was in college, I wanted to be an international correspondent for a mutual fund company and be like the man in the field, knocking on doors of companies and writing reports and work for a mutual fund that did international investing.

Never did it, but that was what one of my dream jobs was. Today, I think there's still those opportunities there. You can find countries that have exciting growth opportunities. You can find investments in those countries that have good growth opportunities, etc. But when you look at the power and the stability of the US markets, US stock market, huge, greatest companies of the world listed on that market.

Incredibly transparent, well-regulated market, incredibly researched, extraordinarily efficient. And those countries reflecting the global exposure that you get from those companies. I misspoke, I meant to say companies. The level of global diversification that you get from investing in these large companies listed on American stock exchanges is incredible. The shockingly low cost of investment, the low fees, the great customer service, though it's just a wonderful market to invest in.

And so while there may be pockets that may outperform temporarily the US stock market, today I have a very hard time believing that there's any better market given the totality of the factors. And I think that while 100% exposure to the US stock market is probably not right for people who have international exposure.

Meaning if I were, let's say that I'm living in, you know, Uruguay, would I put 100% of my money in the stock market? No. But I would not do that for the same reason I don't want 100% of my money in anything. But do I want the bulk of my money in the US stock market?

I would sleep very well at night having the bulk of my money in the US stock market. It just makes sense. It's just remarkable and powerful. And I don't want to understate that because it's very easy to go on and on and say, well, Cambodia has the best place in the world and the best opportunities in the world.

Maybe. But it's very hard for me to be confident, not being Cambodian, not speaking the language, not having all of those resources. Very, very hard for me to feel confident in that. And the safety there is a big factor. You can interpret how I mean safety, I don't need to clarify.

It's a very different scale. Now, what about personal security? The United States is not the safest country in the world. Certainly not. But interestingly, when you look at the totality of factors for personal safety and personal security, as long as you don't live in one of the inner city of one of the big democrat cities in the United States where there are major increasing levels of crime, the level of safety that you get in the United States is very, very high.

And the level of safety that you get at a very low cost is very, very high. There are many places in the world that have much better crime statistics than the United States. One of the safest places in the world is Dubai. There are many parts of Europe that are very safe, Eastern Europe, etc.

And you can live in those places very safely. You can live safely in many places of the world. But when you look at the low cost, the relatively low cost of a safe lifestyle in the United States for physical safety, it's much lower than many places. It's much cheaper for you to live in the United States than it is for you to live in Berlin, in pockets of the United States.

Of course, I'm very conscious of the idea that I'm painting with a very broad brush here. But I'm trying to make the point that when you consider the total lifestyle benefits and personal safety, the United States is exceedingly safe. In addition, what about long-term future? This listener of mine talked about the future of the United States.

And I think that his comments are accurate. He mentioned analyst Peter Zeihan. I recently mentioned I've been reading Peter Zeihan's newest book called "The End of the World as We Know It is Just the Beginning". And that book makes a powerful, powerful case for how the United States and the United States alone is positioned to flourish in the coming decades.

And while I hope that Zeihan is wrong in some of his most pessimistic predictions, and I think there may be factors that he hasn't considered that could upset his analysis and predictions, his arguments for the power of the United States are really, really strong. And I think I'll save some of those to cover in a separate episode.

But it's remarkable when you look at how unique, unique among virtually any other country, the United States has it all. The United States has it all with regard to energy independence, food independence. The United States has it all with regard to robust manufacturing and robust consumption. Natural resources and manufacturing ability, kind of finishing products as well.

The United States has a huge and powerful country that has a big enough population to actually use it effectively. The United States has, I think the United States is the fourth largest landmass in the world, largest is Russia. I think Canada next, then China, then the US. But what problems do those countries have?

Russia has a huge physical geography, it's a huge country, but they have two problems. Most of the country is unusable and unlivable, and they have a small population massively declining. Canada, huge country, but a lot of the population, a lot of the geography is unlivable because it's so northerly, so cold, and they have a tiny population and declining, except for immigration.

China, huge country, huge population, but facing utter population collapse due to the effect of their one-child policy, and also massive political problems with the cult of the leader of China. Whereas the United States has a huge country and all kinds of physical advantages, well-protected oceans, protecting it from invasion from abroad, a huge northern neighbor with a strong ally and unhabitable area to the north of that, and the ally is small and friendly to the southern border, is largely defensible because giant desert, very hard to invade, and a pretty increasingly okay relationship with a southern neighbor and a good symbiosis.

So good physical security, you got again cheap transportation, the river network, etc. And the US population is large, large, dynamic, and not collapsing as precipitously as the populations of many countries in the world. The demographics in the United States are not great, but they're not horrific, they're better than many other places.

And so going forward, these are very good reasons to believe that the US has a very strong and powerful future. So when you're looking for areas of the world, and then I mentioned famine, right? I'm very concerned about famine right now, very concerned. Week by week goes in, the news doesn't get better.

I keep hoping it's going to get better, the news does not get better on the global food situation, the global food supply. It just seems at this point, put it this way, if we avoid, I don't want to say the number of hundreds of millions, but if we avoid tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people dying in the next couple of years due to global famine, I don't know how, I don't see the solution at the moment.

And that's going to lead to tremendous unrest, tremendous problems on a global basis. But the United States and North America are best positioned to be protected from those things. So all that to say that while I currently live outside the United States, I'm still working on some immigration programs, I'm still enjoying my lifestyle, living well with my family, I've got a great living situation, etc.

I keep my American passport secure, and I keep all the infrastructure set up, and I keep an eye on the news. And if things got bad, then my plan B, my bug out plan, is to go back to the United States. Because I think that these are compelling reasons to appreciate the potential for the future of the country.

And I think that in terms of actionable advice, I think the United States as an immigration destination makes a huge amount of sense for many people in the world. I'm not sure that it makes the most sense for the highly educated or the very financially sophisticated and very wealthy of the world.

If I were very wealthy, had a big business already, I would not choose to go to the United States. But that's largely because the tax and regulation burden is really entangling at that level. If you're looking to get ahead, I don't know of a place that's easier to get wealthy than in the United States.

I haven't found it yet. But if you are already wealthy, I wouldn't pursue the United States for that reason. But I would definitely have bases there. I would definitely have a visa there. I would definitely have a second spot there. I believe that it's just too important in the global affairs of the moment to speak lightly of it.

I hope that I've done an accurate job in this episode. It was clearly a lengthy episode. But I'm trying to articulate in a way that is accurate the way I see these factors. Meaning, if I were creating a five-minute YouTube video, it would be easy to make a trite statement say, "US is the best country in the world" or "US is the worst country in the world." I don't believe that's accurate.

And I think it's irresponsible to paint with such a broad brush and stereotype so significantly. It's important to have texture and nuance to these discussions and to these conversations. And I hope that I provided some texture and some nuance so that you could then factor this into your own life and to your own lifestyle.

If you're an American thinking of going abroad and you have a culture that you think is better fit for you, for example, one of the biggest reasons that Americans leave the United States and go abroad is because they're looking for a progressive culture with features like national health care services, things like that.

If you're looking for that, I think that's a good reason to go abroad. I've known loads of Americans who've moved to other cultures that reflected their values and they've loved their lifestyle. They moved to downtown Amsterdam and they can enjoy pedaling the streets of Amsterdam on their bicycle and enjoying all of the lifestyle that comes with the European welfare state model.

They don't mind the high taxes because they feel like they're getting good benefits from that. I do think, by the way, this is going to be an increasing issue of political instability in the United States. The United States taxes can be high, not in all cases, but they're high enough and yet people feel like they're getting ripped off.

The health care situation and the health care cost is a major issue in the United States right now. And I don't know how it'll be resolved, but I do think it's inevitable it'll be resolved in the next decade or so. But I think that you can thrive in that situation.

You may love moving to Canada and enjoying the Canadian experience or something else and there are ways to do that. But if you generally feel culturally American and you've got a pretty good thing in the United States, I think before you go through the difficulty of fully expatriating and doing that as a plan A, your better, easier move is just to relocate inside of the United States.

Because virtually anything that you're looking for by nature of simply the geography of the country and the demographics, virtually anything that you're looking for, you can have inside of the United States. Even on the health care perspective, right, you can move to Massachusetts, you can move to California, you can move to Oregon, you can move to a place that reflects your progressive liberal values.

If you're a conservative and you're looking for more freedom, you can pick up and you can move to a place that reflects that. You can move to Florida, to Idaho, to Texas, to South Dakota, to some place that reflects that. And that transition will be vastly easier and much more comfortable for you than moving to Ecuador or moving to...

I'm not sure what examples to insert. Be careful when you think of just simply saying that it's all bad in the United States and I'm going to go abroad. If I had to sum up my experience over the last few years, I am now much more relaxed and much more sanguine about all the events.

I didn't even talk about politics. I guess I'll take a moment to talk about it. One of the things that I most appreciate about my time abroad is I think that I've finally severed the emotional ties that I've had to politics my whole life. I was a political junkie from the time I was a young boy.

My grandfather subscribed to US News and World Report and that was what got me interested in politics. I would read it every week. I just thought it was so interesting. And then I used to listen to NPR every day, every single day on the way to school and on the way home.

Probably one of the very few high schoolers that would come in morning edition on the way to school and all things considered on the way home by myself in the car listening to NPR. Did that for years. And so I was super into politics. I listened to Rush Limbaugh when I was in high school and got super into politics.

And I always cared a lot about politics. But along the way I woke up and I said, "Well, I believe politics matters. I don't think that politics is an effective thing of my life. This is just making me... it makes people unhappy." And maybe because I was such a junkie at an early age, I became very sensitive to how destructive excessive political involvement is.

But I didn't understand how people could sever their psychological connection to politics. I thought, "This stuff matters. This stuff is worth arguing about. And I believe it matters. I believe it's worth arguing about." But I was excessively devoted to it. And along the way I came to the point where I said, "I think it matters, but I can't let it control my life because my life doesn't change much depending on who's in president.

My life is pretty much the same under all the presidents and no matter what. It doesn't change much. So I can't let this control my life." But I still struggled with being addicted to the junkie side of it, arguing about it and telling people on the internet that they're wrong.

And I moved abroad. And I started... I said, "Let me get into politics in wherever I happen to be." I said, "Go find the talk radio station and use it to get involved. What are the local issues?" And you leave your home country and you go to a completely different place and you listen to different language sometimes and you listen to different arguments and you think, "This is a waste of time.

What are you guys arguing about this stuff over?" And over the years I just got to the point where I don't care. I don't care about your local politics. And of course also here you have the great joy of being an expat where you just don't have to care much about it.

You have this sense of freedom, right? That's what you get with PT theory is you don't need to worry too much about what any one government does because you're not beholden to the government. And it gave me this intense sense of freedom. Then going back to the United States, I still have my political opinions and whatnot, but I just am not going to bother arguing about them at this point in time.

It's not profitable use of my time. And it helped me to feel free. And so if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing that I've done over the last few years. It has been much more disruptive, much more expensive, much more difficult than I ever thought it was going to be to set up all the plan B's.

Today I could do it faster, easier, cheaper, but it was a painful learning experience. But having the plan B is really, really awesome. Knowing that I'm not beholden to any one country, knowing that my children aren't beholden to any one country is really awesome. But now I can appreciate much more the things that are really wonderful about the United States.

And I don't want to pat myself on the back too much, but I think that's the healthy perspective. Appreciate the things about the country that you are in. Taking action can help you to feel better and then appreciating things about the country that you're in is I think the right scenario.

So I hope that this in-depth nuanced discussion gives you what you need. I think that if you are inclined in the direction, set up a plan B. I don't think you'll regret that. If you are frustrated with where you live, I think look for a better place. And in some cases that better place will be outside the country, but in most cases I think the better place is probably just going to be a different city, different town, different state, different region than where you are right now.

Because the United States has so much going for it that it's a probably 20% of the people who want to leave that probably should leave and 80% who should stay. And I hope this helps you to understand some of the benefits and some of the reasons why. I do conveniently enough have more help for you.

If you are a person who still wants to have a plan B or even to have a plan A, I do have a course that I wrote that is available for you and you can get that at www.internationalskateplan.com. You've heard me discuss in detail my philosophy, what I've done.

What you haven't heard me do is give any discussion of the details of practical details in this show. And I wanted to create a product that would help you with the practical details of knowing what to do and how to do it. And that product is www.internationalskateplan.com. If you buy that course, I will walk you through a four-phase approach to leaving your country.

And I am agnostic about which country in the course. Of course, I'm an American so I talk some about that, but it can be any country. And I go through the different phases. Everything from just planning to be a tourist where, "Hey, I gotta leave because there's some inflation crisis going on or hyperinflation or something bad and I'm just gonna go be a tourist with a passport living on tourist visas," all the way through to being a complete expat.

And I do it in a phased approach, extremely sensible. And I talk you through the good money and the bad because there are some things that you can do that are really inexpensive and there's some things that you can do that are expensive. And I give you good sound advice in that course on how to think about the cost of what's right for you, what's not right for you, etc.

And in my opinion, it's probably the most level-headed, honest discussion of these issues that you will find. So if you're interested in practical advice on how to do it, go to internationalescapeplan.com and buy my course, internationalescapeplan.com. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale.

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