♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. - 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 on today's podcast, I'm gonna round out my series on why I left the USA. I've shared with you some of the reasons that many people leave that weren't my reasons. I shared with you that it's fun to go and have an adventure and face challenges around the world.

Number two, I shared with you some of the things that I wanted to protect my children from, and in today's podcast, I'm gonna share with you my most important reason for me personally, and also share with you my thinking or my reasoning on it. I think you'll find it interesting if you are one who thinks about things like living with integrity, et cetera, and if you're one of those people who enjoys a little bit of philosophy and just basically considering how you can live a life of integrity in a world full of difficult situations.

Quite simply, the reason that I left, or a reason that I left, a very important reason that I left, was to be able to not owe the US government taxes. Now, that's not a surprise in the internationalization space. The world of expats is full of people wanting to go from here to there to save taxes.

What might be surprising to you is how my own reasoning differs from a lot of people, because I wasn't just trying to put money in my pocket. I quickly acknowledge that putting money in your pocket is a benefit, and if that's a reason that you wanna do it, go for it.

It's a very valid reason. But I'll comment at the end of, or in the latter part of this podcast, on why I don't think that's such a great idea. I don't think going abroad just to save taxes is a smart move, especially not for wealthy people who actually owe taxes.

What I wanna share with you, though, is my own path, which was much more a matter of avoiding onerous taxes or avoiding morally evil taxes. All taxes are not created equal. The actual impact to your budget may be the same. If you pay 40% taxes here or 40% taxes there, then the impact to your budget may be the same.

But all taxes are not morally equivalent. Say, for example, that you live in a country that has government-provided healthcare. You live in a country that provides all kind of welfare services for poor people. You live in a country that has huge amounts of government infrastructure, has government colleges and universities that citizens can attend without cost, has government transit that's free for all the citizens to use.

Just the list goes on in terms of the things that you can spend money on. If you live in a welfare state like that, you will often have a very high tax rate. But while certainly that takes a lot of money out of your pocket, it's hard to be too upset at those particular things.

You can make an argument, as I would sometimes make, that maybe welfare is not great for people or maybe welfare doesn't discriminate enough, and as it is, you might cause problems in people's lives, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if you see a poor person and that poor person is getting free food, or you see a person who is sick and that sick person is getting free healthcare, who gets upset about that?

Nobody gets upset about that. You're grateful that it exists. And if you're the one who's making money and paying for those things, there's a long stretch of time in which you're probably gonna feel quite happy about that. You might grumble a little bit, you might feel like they take too much, you might feel like they're a little bit wasteful, but there's lots of people in welfare-based societies all around the world that pay high tax rates and they figure, hey, it's my duty, it's my way of supporting the common wheel.

And while some of those people might eventually change their situation in order to lower taxes, or they'll certainly exploit anything they can do to reduce their legal tax rate, they're not often getting upset about what their tax money is used for, because it makes you feel good to contribute to the lives of your neighbor.

But there are other things that governments spend money on that don't have those same characteristics. And there are a couple of these things specifically that have been very bothersome to me. The first one over the years is simply military spending or war spending. It's probably no surprise to any listener of radical personal finance that I struggle with the morality and ethics of the amount of money that my government spends on military spending, on war, et cetera.

After all, probably in the first 15 episodes of the show, something like that, I interviewed a tax protester who doesn't pay taxes because of war taxes, and he maintains a website devoted to it. So reading about that stuff is certainly nothing new to me in thinking about it. But war taxes themselves specifically, or my frustration with them, have never been enough to push me over the edge personally.

And that's because of the fact that there's always two sides to a story, or there's always at least one counter argument. So you could make the argument, well, the amount of money that the United States spends on war and defense and military spending and whatnot is egregiously high, and the country is evil and does evil things.

But you can flip that around, and you can look and appreciate many good things that are done with it, and huge amounts of peace and prosperity that have been wrought by the military industrial complex in the United States. In almost any war, you can look at it, and you can find good things and bad things that are done on both sides.

And so choosing who to support and making ethical decisions in light of that is famously difficult if you're serious about it, and if you're serious about listening to people. A lot of times your opinion on a matter is shaped simply by how much information you have on it. And so those who are the most in the know and have the most responsibility for making decisions often have the most information, and they're doing their best.

The more I go through life, I just believe that many people are doing the best that they feel that they can. And they're trying to make good decisions with the information that they have. And so whenever I've listened to just strident anti-war activists and whatnot, either, they just, they often sound hollow and uninformed and kind of delusional in certain circumstances.

So while I'm sympathetic to that, that's never been enough of an issue for me to be all that concerned with. However, there is another moral issue that came to the forefront of my thinking, especially in about the year 2015 and 2016. And this particular issue is unique because it involves a crime in which there is always a completely innocent party.

And what's worse is that in this crime, it is always the innocent party who is hurt. In many crimes, in many moral issues, in many issues of immorality and evil, when you look to assign blame, it's very rare that if you have two parties involved, you could say that 100% of the blame is on one person and 0% is on the other person.

Maybe there are those situations, but a lot of times, even in the clearest examples, you might, a guy goes down the street, sees a little old lady with a nice purse and sticks out a knife and steals her purse. Well, certainly, you're not gonna assign the little old lady any moral guilt in that, but you might say to yourself, well, should she really have had her nice purse that day?

And so you might say, well, it's 99.9% the bad guy and 0.01%, she could have just gone out with her wallet. Or she could have ridden the bus that day. And I'm trying to use an example that you'll understand that most crimes, even when they get close to 100%, there's not somebody who's actually completely innocent in it.

And most are far clearer, I mean, excuse me, far more unclear than the little old lady and the purse snatcher. But what is that crime in which the innocent person always pays the price and the guilty person always gets off scot-free? That crime is abortion. When a baby is aborted, the baby is 100% of the time, the innocent party.

And yet 100% of the time, the baby is the one who pays with his or her life. The baby is the one who winds up dead. It doesn't matter the circumstances of conception. It doesn't matter if the baby was conceived by loving parents who were excited for his or her arrival.

It doesn't matter if the baby was conceived in violent rape or horrific crime of some kind. The baby is always the innocent party. And it doesn't matter the reason for the abortion. The baby gets killed because she happens to be a girl. But what did the baby have to do with that?

The baby is 100% of the time innocent, completely and utterly innocent. And yet the baby always dies. Sometimes other people pay the price. Sometimes a violent rapist gets put into prison, judged in front of court, et cetera. Sometimes the mother pays the price. At the very least, she bears the scars of what she has done for the duration of her life, et cetera.

But at the end of the day, the baby always pays the ultimate price. So what does this have to do with taxes? Well, in 2015, there was a presidential election. And in that presidential election, the front runners of that election were, at the time, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, two former senators of the, or two senators of the United States.

And both of them were running for president. And in that election, both of them pledged that if elected president, I will abolish the Hyde Amendment. And the Hyde Amendment is a piece of legislation that gets passed regularly in the United States that ostensibly bars the use of US taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion.

And that's something that was put in as a compromise to try to keep people who didn't want to pay for abortion, keep them paying their taxes and not rise up in a tax revolt or something like that. And yet both of them vowed that they would abolish that. So in 2016, I was sitting there as a young man, father, thinking about these issues.

And I'm asking myself this question, like how do I, if Hillary Clinton wins, as I expected her to do, if Hillary Clinton wins, how do I write a check to the US government to pay my taxes? How do I do that? How do I look myself in the mirror and know that not only do I face some form of moral guilt for knowing what my neighbor is doing and not necessarily knowing how to stop it, knowing that babies are being murdered around me and I can't do anything about it, but now the resources of which I am a steward are now being used to kill the most innocent people in our society.

How do I do that? How do I look myself in the mirror? How do I look God in the face at the end of my life? How do I look my children in the face and know that I'm letting that happen? How do I do that? And I hope you understand why having the moral clarity that you and I have on the subject of abortion is so important to confronting this particular issue.

Because like I said, almost any other issue that you might be frustrated about, you can make a counterargument. Well, maybe we had to go and invade those terrorists because they were gonna come after us. Maybe it's better that the war happens over there. And after all, those hundreds of thousands of civilians over there that died because we invaded their country, well, they had it coming 'cause they should have kicked the Taliban out.

Okay, well, maybe, right? Or, well, I don't really like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but well, I'll just go ahead and pay them and at least just go into them. Sorry, I don't know why I'm doing the accent. But as you can see, you can justify most of anything, most anything.

Well, I don't think they should be running that drug program and giving away free needles and syringes, but well, who knows? Maybe it would do some good. And after all, we'll collect some data. Almost any other issue, you can make a counterargument. The single most clarifying, morally obvious issue in our society is abortion.

Because the baby, the innocent party, always dies. And that's what makes it so different. So again, back to the thing, it's like, what do you do about that? Lots of people think that, they believe that, but the question is, what do you do? And you've watched people try to figure it out.

You've seen the pro-life movement and people do all kinds of things to try to change that. But it's one, there's a difference between knowing something is happening and you're not involved in it versus you being forced to now pay for it. There's a difference between those things. There's a difference between your neighbor going off and killing her baby, and you being required to pay for your neighbor to kill her baby.

Those two things are very different. And so you get into the world of, what do I do? What do I do? So let me explain to you my thinking on the subject and how I tackled this, starting in about 2015, again, 2016. The issue was, am I guilty of sin if I am paying tax money that is being used to pay for abortion?

Am I morally responsible for what my tax money is paying for? Now, my answer to that is no. To this day, it continues to be no. I don't believe that you are morally responsible for what is done with your tax money. Let me explain to you why, 'cause that may sound a little funny or strange based upon what I'm about to say.

You don't have any choice in the taxes that are taken from you. Taxation is inherently violent. I don't love the saying that taxation is theft, but there's a real point to that say, that when taxes are taken from you, they are taken, and there is implicit violence in it.

You don't say, "I want to give you money." The money is being taken from you. You're told how much you owe, and that money is taken from you. And so if we use an analogy, let's say that somebody comes and steals your car out of your front yard. They take the car from you without your permission.

So they steal the car from your front yard. And let's say that they drive it down the street at 100 miles an hour, and they run over a little girl who's crossing the street, and they kill her. Are you morally responsible for what has been done with your property that has been taken from you?

In my example, I don't think you are. I really don't. And so whether your car is stolen from you or taken from your driveway and used to kill someone, or whether your money is taken from you and used to kill someone innocent, I don't think that you are morally responsible for that.

But let me change the circumstances just a little bit. Let's assume that you have a car, and the car is sitting in your driveway. And for whatever reason, maybe you came from the country or you wanna prove how safe your city is, you have developed a habit of just leaving your keys in the car.

After all, you don't wanna be bothered going and looking for them in the morning, so you just leave your keys in the car. And your living room is near your driveway, and you like to sit in your living room in the evening and read books with the window open.

And you hear some young teenagers coming down the street, and you hear these young teenage men saying to each other, hey, look, look, look, there's a car with keys in it. Hey, man, we should take that car. And another one says, ah, no, man, come on, that'd be wrong, that'd be stealing, let's not do that.

Oh, okay, and they go on down the road. Then the next night, you're sitting in your living room reading your book, and you hear those boys coming down the sidewalk. Hey, hey, hey, look, look, look, those keys are in it again. This guy must leave his keys in his car every night.

And the other guy says, no, no, no, don't touch it, man. Come on, that's not right. And this goes on for a while. And then you continue to leave your keys in the car. And then one night, the boys come down the sidewalk. They decide to take the car.

They take the car, they drive it 100 miles an hour. They run over the innocent little girl crossing the street, and they kill her. Are you morally responsible for the death of that girl? My answer is yes, absolutely you are, to some degree. I don't know to what degree.

You're certainly not as responsible as the boys who stole the car are. And I don't know what the proper penalty is for that. But if I'm sitting on a jury, and somebody described the circumstances that have just been described, I would vote guilty of something. Again, I don't know what legal thing it would be, but the heart of justice rises up and says, like, you're a competent man.

You should understand that you shouldn't put temptation in front of people like that. And what's worse is you had warning. Not only should you have known you don't leave your keys in the car, you're not proving anything by this little thing, but you heard these boys being tempted to steal your car.

And as a mature, competent man, you knew that nothing good could come of that. You had fair and ample warning of the harm that could have come from your actions. And because of your non-action and your unwillingness to change the circumstances of your life, or to do even the smallest thing to diminish that risk of exposure, or excuse me, diminish the temptation, you're guilty of some moral wrongness in that situation.

So bring it back now to taxation. This was what bothered me. I don't think that you are morally guilty for what is done with your tax dollars. And if you're making $50,000 a year, and you're paying, at that rate, you're not paying any federal income taxes, but let's just say you're paying a few thousand dollars of taxes that are being used to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Okay, fine, there's no moral guilt. And if you're making $100,000, and there's a little bit of federal income tax that is taken from you, well, you might bear some, you know, it's taken from you. You're not guilty. But what if you know you have the potential of making a million dollars a year, $10 million a year, or whatever the number is?

So let's assume that with previously, you may have contributed financially to the death of one innocent baby every two years. But now you're gonna make a lot of money, and now you're gonna fund the death of three innocent babies per year. Do you not bear some moral guilt of some kind for making it easy for them to take your money, and making it easy for them to take lots of money?

Again, there's a difference between a bicycle being left out in your yard and a car. This is my analogy. If you leave a bicycle in your front yard, and you hear some boys talking about it, well, the smart man would go and put it in the backyard. But you don't necessarily have to lock up the bicycle every single day, and take all kinds of care and caution about it, 'cause it's a bicycle.

On the other hand, a car is a dangerous machine. It's an extremely dangerous implement that is capable of causing death and destruction. And so you absolutely have to lock up a car and take it more seriously because of its size. So it's one thing for the guy whose wages don't result in much tax money to not worry too much about it.

It's another thing for the guy who's gonna put millions of dollars into the government coffers to not even think about it. And that was what I spent a lot of time thinking about. Now, when Donald Trump won the election, I felt a great sense of relief because my moral crisis had been slightly averted.

And that was something that was greatly encouraging to me. But it still bothered me that I had been possibly put into this situation. And I said, "I gotta do something about this." But I didn't know what to do. Over time, my business was making more money, but my goals were, at the time, shifting from just building a lifestyle business to making lots more money.

And I thought, "I should put a plan in place." And with all the other factors that I've said as well in previous episodes, this was a big moral factor that motivated me. Because I saw how, if I could create a way to not owe the US government tax, then I could keep my conscience clear and follow the law.

And to me, that is something we should always strive for. We want to follow the law and keep our conscience clear. I believe that we should try our very best to heed both things. It's not always possible. There's a famous quote by Friedrich Bastiat that I read in "The Law." And you can find my recording of that pamphlet in the "Annals of Radical Personal Finance." Again, Bastiat, B-A-S-T-I-A-T, "The Law." You can search and find it.

But in that, he said, "When law and morality contradict each other, "the citizen has the cruel alternative "of either losing his moral sense "or losing his respect for the law." And I believe that is true. But we should not hasten the arrival of that thing if at all possible.

We should try to maintain our moral sense as well as our respect for the law as far as we can. And the world of internationalization offered me kind of an elegant escape. Now, I never saw anybody talk about this. My own path into the world of internationalization was very different than most people's.

Mine started with a book. I read the book "P.T." by W.G. Hill. Couldn't tell you today how I found it. I had previously been a fan of Harry Brown and some of his work and his book on how I found freedom in an unfree world, et cetera. And he and his ilk were involved in kind of the movement of the 1980s that was encapsulated in the old book by W.G.

Hill called "P.T." But although that book was written with a very aggressive tone and very much a matter of get out and get up, get what you want and protect yourself and all that stuff, I found the ideas in it compelling. And that was the thing that sparked my own journey into internationalization because I realized that there was a lifeline, that internationalization was a lifeline to my ability to maintain my sense of respect for morality, to clear my, to keep a clear conscience, as well as to maintain a respect for the law.

And let me explain why. Let's assume that you are considering becoming a tax protester. You're considering not paying taxes for some reason. Maybe it's something like abortion. Maybe it's something like war. Maybe it's just, you don't think you should. You have two basic pathways that you can pursue. You have the pathway of illegal tax evasion, or you have the pathway of legal tax avoidance.

So I think of that as illegal. I'm gonna break the law, knowingly, intentionally break the law, or I'm going to follow the law, but just use the law to my benefit. So let's go down the illegal pathway first. Let's assume that you are considering not paying taxes. You said, "I'm gonna get paid in cash.

"Not gonna report my income, "not gonna file tax returns, et cetera," whatever your pathway is to illegal tax evasion. Well, I think there's a couple big problems with that. For me, I face a moral problem, and the moral problem is I can't do it because I'm a Christian. And the Christian scriptures are crystal clear.

Basically, every single place that you turn, that Christians have a duty to pay their taxes. It's basically inescapable. I have searched and searched and searched for an alternative, but if you are one who is seeking to follow the guidance of Christian scriptures, there's no out of it. Every single time, in the Gospels, Jesus said, "Pay your taxes." In all of the New Testament letters, every writer says, "Pay your taxes." Peter says, "Pay your taxes." Paul says, "Pay your taxes." Every single one of them says, "Pay your taxes." And they say it in varying ways.

"Pay your taxes and honor the emperor." It's said again and again and again in all kinds of different ways. And so your counter-argument might be, "Well, that's because they had, "you know, their government wasn't as bad as mine." Ha! (laughs) Think about who you're talking about. Jesus was a subject of the Roman government.

The Roman government, one of the most barbaric, violent empires of all time. The early Christian writers, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, et cetera, they're writing in a time when, I mean, for crying out loud, Nero is dunking Christians in oil and sticking them up as torches in his garden. I mean, the persecution of Christians is enormous.

Christians are dying left and right. And still, the early Christian fathers are saying, "Pay your taxes." And so how do you get more evil than Nero? I don't know. I hope we never, ever again see someone like him. But the point is that I don't find any escape in that.

So Christian conviction makes me say, "I need to follow the law." Now, I wanna quickly say that I'm not sure that that always is 100%. There may be times in which that just can't be done, but it's certainly 99%. It's certainly, if a Christian is going to not pay tax that he legally owes, it had better be done with a whole lot of conviction and not just a casual, "Well, no big deal.

"It's not a big deal." It is a big deal. And what's interesting, too, a very brief sidebar, is I think this is one of the things that God has designed to help, I mean, the message flourish. I always think of the Jews when they were sent into captivity. And there's an amazing verse in, let's see, they were under the Babylonian Empire, I think, at the time.

And there's a verse that says, listen, God's sending you into captivity in judgment. Build houses, plant gardens, and seek the good of the city. That even when the Jews were forced into captivity, were taken as slaves, they were instructed to seek the good of the city. And all of the Christian encouragement to slaves, to literal slaves in the New Testament, is to be a good slave, to honor your master, to be obedient, to seek what's good.

And I think that it's a perfect example of how turning the other cheek and doing good to those who hate you and revile against you is such a fundamental thing. So I can't condone illegal tax evasion for that reason. On a practical reason, I think illegal tax evasion is dumb because you lose all your energy looking over your shoulders all the time and you cause yourself to be vulnerable.

And what the machine always wants is tax money. Famously, it's often taxes that result in catching criminals. And it's the tax enforcers who have the energy to chase down the criminals. The most famous, of course, would be Al Capone, where they finally nailed him for tax evasion. But taxes are a big deal to rulers.

And if you don't pay them their taxes, they will come and bring their armies and put you in prison. And what's the point of having money if you wind up sitting in prison? Tax evasion causes you to not get the real fruit of wealth, which is peace of mind and safety and relaxation, et cetera.

And so if you get rich because of tax evasion, you got problems. You never sleep well at night and it's just not worth it. So I don't think there's any point in going down the illegal path. I guess I would add one more argument against it. If you're gonna go down the path of illegal tax evasion, you have to be prepared, mentally prepared, to sit yourself in prison because that's probably what's gonna happen, especially if you're high profile.

Every year in the United States, the IRS pursues high-profile tax evaders. They put them in prison. They get as much news out of it as they can because they try to share by intimidation. Look, this is what happens if you are a tax evader. And so people wind up sitting in prison.

And I just imagine my children, Mommy, why is Daddy in prison? Well, Daddy didn't wanna pay his taxes. Why not? Why didn't I wanna pay his taxes? Daddy didn't wanna pay for abortion. Well, what good does Daddy do to us if he's in prison? It just doesn't fit. So there's no, what's the point of sitting in prison?

That doesn't do any good. It doesn't do my children any good. It doesn't do my neighbor any good. It doesn't even do my cause any good. My sitting in prison, if I'm in prison, it better be for a good reason. So let's come back from the illegal path. Let's go down now the legal path.

Let's say that you don't wanna pay tax, but you're committed to following the law. Well, you got a couple of options for that. You can live in the United States and you can live completely income tax-free or mostly income tax-free. And there are a variety of ways to do that.

In many cases, you would be restricting yourself to a relatively low income. So somebody who makes just a little bit of money generally is not gonna pay a lot of tax. You got a bunch of children like I do, you can earn quite a decent amount of money and not pay any tax 'cause your child tax credits and things like that.

If you own a business and you can deduct some of your business expenses through your business, you might lower your taxes. You can live in a very tax-efficient lifestyle. I mean, just imagine a guy out homesteading in the wilderness. He might have a job where he works a couple days a week, earns a few thousand dollars a month, but he grows a big garden, he gathers his wood from the forest.

He has a very low imprint on the land and he himself doesn't owe much. He doesn't owe any taxes because of the way that he's done his lifestyle. If you're smart, you can earn a pretty decent amount of money and still do it with tax-free. You can have a pretty decent amount of real estate and with your depreciation expenses, eliminate your tax.

You might do things like doing tax-free kinds of wealth creation where instead of creating income, you create asset value. You might do things like buy a house, fix it up, move out, sell it, shelter the taxable gains in your Section 121 exclusion, et cetera. And you can do pretty decently for yourself.

You might have a handful of businesses that are carefully selected to have benefits both of lifestyle business as well as profit-generating businesses, et cetera. So you can do it living in the United States. And I think that would be a fine way to do it. The problem that I myself faced when I thought about that is basically you're still, you're kind of committing yourself to, you're at least committing yourself to the possibility of continually being poor.

And I had a hard time just thinking of staring my kids in the face like, "Mommy, why are we poor? Daddy, why are we poor?" "Well, 'cause I don't wanna pay tax." "Why don't you wanna pay tax?" "I don't wanna pay for abortion." "But aren't you like a financial advisor?

Shouldn't you know something about how to make money?" "Well, yeah, but still, I'm just gonna stay poor." It doesn't seem very honorable to me. So that was a path, that is a path. And I think that's a potential path for some people who have those concerns, but it doesn't seem great.

So then we flip. What if you move? One of the things that I realized was, by reading PT, (laughs) was that almost anything you want to do is legal somewhere. Almost anything you want to do is legal somewhere. And while I certainly don't, and I'm not a libertine and I don't wanna be one, but I appreciate the work those '80s libertarian, libertine playboys did of pointing that out.

The classic example is, let's say, during Prohibition in the United States. If you wanted to drink alcohol, all you had to do was leave the United States. So you could leave the United States and go to Cuba. Drink your alcohol, no risk of arrest. You could leave the United States, go to France, go to Mexico, you'd go to any number of places to drink alcohol, and there was no fear of arrest.

And so this thing that is forbidden in one place is perfectly legal in another place. Recently, I was in Amsterdam. I'm sitting in Amsterdam, the entire, I was staying in a kind of a hostel type of thing. It was a hotel, but it was a hostel. It's hard to find rooms when you need seven beds.

And so I wound up with a hostel there because it had six beds in it, plus a crib for the baby. And the whole hostel is just full of druggies coming into Amsterdam from all over Europe to party for the weekend. They stank like crazy, and I'm just sitting in the elevator listening to them, and they're going on about all the things they're doing.

But it's a perfect example of, hey, you wanna do drugs? Well, we'll go to Amsterdam and do drugs 'cause we can't do the drugs we wanna do at home. It's a lot smarter to do that than it is to do drugs at home and face the risk of getting arrested.

Wanna drive your car at 150 miles an hour? Well, there's places in the world where, I mean, the Germans believe that's your God-given right. Don't have many other rights, but that's your God-given right. And as long as you go on the stretches of the Audubon where you can do it, that's fine, or any number of things.

And so any vice that you want to indulge, you can find someplace in the world where that vice is accepted, nay, celebrated, and thus you can avoid your legal issues. Anyway, as I thought about that, I realized, wait a second, taxes are optional. And while I may be under a Christian duty to pay the taxes that I owe, I do not see any Christian duty to live in any one particular place, unless I personally feel a strong call from God to be there.

That's a separate thing. But on a broad-scale basis, no preacher's gonna stand up and preach a sermon that you gotta live in this particular place. So if I have the freedom to move, then I have the freedom to choose whether or not I owe tax. And I don't wanna, this is such an unusual conversation, I know, but I don't wanna go on too long, but I do wanna let you know that brought me an incredible sense of peace and freedom, because I realized I can follow my conscience and I can follow the law.

That, after facing this black chasm, this enormous moral dilemma that I didn't know the answer to, and I don't wanna over-speak, like I don't wanna make it sound like I'm sitting around for hundreds of hours just doing this, but it is a big deal to me. I'm not willing to murder babies, and I'm not willing to pay for the murder of babies.

The babies are innocent. No one else is, but the babies are innocent. So we can come to agreement on that, and we can figure out how to stop that. And it's ridiculous in the United States. I mean, for crying out loud, Hamas went into Israel some weeks ago. Hamas is smart enough to murder the babies of their enemies.

The United States Army doesn't even murder the babies of any enemies on purpose, but Hamas murdered the babies of their enemies. But we're so stupid that though we tell our army not to murder the babies of our enemies, we murder our own babies, tens of millions of them, and it's horrific.

Not only is it morally horrific, but it's practically horrific. The US population should be 500 million, 600 million by now, but we've murdered hundreds of millions of babies, probably 87, what is it, the current number, 70, 80 million by surgical abortion, bazillions more with chemical abortions and pills and whatnot.

It's terrible. We have this country that probably needs a billion people, maybe two to start getting traction. We have an incredible society that could do this. We have incredible resources, and we squander it all. And we destroy our own children. It's the most barbaric, evil thing in history. So it is a big deal to me.

And the idea of being involved in that and being forcibly involved in that, I find pretty horrific. So back to the point. When I realized I could leave, I said, "I have a choice. "I have a choice." And to have a choice and then make a different decision, I think is really key.

So for example, I talked to you about being drafted. I think to have the choice to know I could leave, but I'm not going to, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna serve in the military, that's the right way to do it, to know you have the choice to leave but not do it.

For someone to know I have the choice to avoid this tax, but I'm going to choose to pay it because I believe something is more important, that's the right thing. I have the choice to leave this country where everything is bad, but because of my love for my neighbor, I'm going to choose to live here.

I have the choice to run away and save myself, but I'm gonna stay. If you think about honor, this is one of the things that's so integral to our culture. Why do we expect men to lay down their lives for women and children? Why do we expect men to put women and children in the lifeboat and stay on the sinking ship?

Because we know those men have a choice. Those men could toss all the women and children in the water, they could all get on the boat themselves and row away, but they don't. They put the women and children in the lifeboats and they sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

So to me, I see having the choice to leave or having the choice to stay is the honorable thing and then you have the choice to, you can make the choice when the individual circumstances present themselves. Remember that when I was thinking about this from an international perspective, I'm not worried, I wasn't worried about, once the 2016 election passed and I was not abroad at that time, then I wasn't worried particularly about this at that time.

And then amazingly, then of course, Roe v. Wade was overruled, et cetera. And so there were a few kind of short-term gains for the pro-life people, et cetera. Long way to go yet on that issue in the United States. But it was more a matter of where could we be in 10 years?

Where could we be in 20 years? Where could we be in 30 years? And I believe that you should always prepare far in advance. It's easy, that's when it's easy, that's when it's cheap, is when you don't need it. And so because of the circumstances in my life, I said, I'm gonna go and do that.

Now let me just finish off, forgive me, I got a little sidetracked because I got emotional, but let me just finish off. How does leaving the United States for a US citizen solve the tax problem? Well, first of all, you can use the foreign earned income exclusion to shelter some of your tax money.

And so it's about a little over $120,000. But in that situation, I could earn $120,000 living abroad and completely shelter that from tax just using the foreign earned income exclusion. And that can be done with all tax if I work for a foreign company, so that's nice. But then of course, my wife may work as well.

It seems she might earn $120,000, so then we start to get into some useful money. There are more ways that you can shelter more than that. But at least I said, at least if I never renounced my US citizenship, at least I could earn some decent money and my children wouldn't be poor.

Well, daddy, why don't we live in the United States? I don't like to and I don't wanna pay for abortion. Okay, fine, at least we're not poor. We can deal with that. And then they can choose to go to the United States if they want to and we can visit and et cetera.

And I could still be a loud mouth activist or something if I wanted to, but at least I followed the law as best I was able to. Or I could ultimately, if I got another citizenship, I could ultimately renounce my citizenship. And that is something that I thought a lot about and I wanted to be prepared for that.

Because if you're not a US citizen, the world of tax planning opens up in just a completely different way. It's only US citizens that have to pay taxes on their global income based upon their citizenship. Every other country in the world, except Eritrea, every other country in the world lets its citizens leave.

And if you leave, you don't owe taxes. And so, the obvious thing, you leave and you move to the Bahamas or to Dubai or to various other zero tax jurisdictions or to various territorial tax jurisdictions or various lump sum tax jurisdictions. You can live in many of those places and you can choose your tax rate.

You can choose your tax rate and where from zero to as high as you want based upon what you value. And for all non-US citizens, the world is basically a menu. And so, I imagine myself making $10 million a year. At least I can make $10 million a year and live tax-free.

I can live in the Bahamas, live in St. Kitts and Nevis, be somewhere close to the United States if I wanted to be, I could renounce my US citizenship, hold simply a foreign citizenship. I could have a visa to visit the United States. My wife can still be a US citizen.

My children could be US citizens. We could still come and go in the US. And now I can make $10 million a year, pay $0 of tax and have everything squared away. It's a great option. But I couldn't do that if I didn't have another citizenship. And so, that was where I realized if I'm gonna do this ever, maybe in 30 years or something like that, I'd like to have the choice.

And that means that I've gotta go. I've gotta go and I've gotta get another citizenship, which is gonna make me have to move abroad. And that was where birth tourism came in, where I said, "Hey, we're having a baby. I knew a little bit about birth tourism. Let's go use birth tourism as a way of getting residency.

Let's turn that residency into citizenship. And then things will be better off." And even if we come back to the United States after that, then we'll have had a little bit of an adventure. We'll have enjoyed some time abroad. My children will have options. And though this never, ever be necessary, who knows, 75 years from now, it may be necessary for one of my descendants.

And that, in sort of a nutshell, is my story. There are other things, there are other factors and other reasons. I've watched so many people be imprisoned unjustly, especially in the United States over the last five years. It's just astonishing how many people get imprisoned unjustly and other things.

There are other things that I could say, but those were my reasons. And to recap, reason number one was just, it sounds kind of fun. It's an adventure. Try it out, test it out. Reason number two was I want options for my children. I want my children to be freed from something like a military draft, if that were ever imposed on them.

And I want them freed from having to pay a lifetime of tax burden for a sinking empire. And then reason number three was I have this moral problem and I saw an elegant way through it. And for me, that brought me an enormous sense of freedom. And that sense of freedom has only continued.

When I left the United States, I didn't know much about internationalization. Basically, I had read PT and scarfed around, tried to find some other stuff on it. And we were having a baby, so I learned a little bit about your birth tourism. I got on a plane and went.

I didn't know much at all. Didn't hire anybody. I did it all myself. Along the way, I read everything I could. I studied everything I could. I'm not the world's greatest expert, but I've done a lot. And since then, I've put in place a bunch of flags, solved all my problems and got it all done.

And it's been fun. It's been hard. It's been more time consuming than I thought. If I were doing it over again, I would spend more money and less time. That's one of the things that I did. I said, "Well, I could spend time and not money." Today, I would spend more money and less time.

And there's other things as well, but I don't regret it for a bit because it has brought me that sense of freedom. And what price do you put on a sense of freedom, on a sense of peace? I've gained all kinds of other benefits that I never anticipated from going abroad.

I've gained greater appreciation for the country of my birth. I've gained a much more relaxed, kind of even-keeled perception of reality. And what's interesting is I recognize this a lot of times now, sometimes in my consulting calls or listening to people. People are freaked out about the direction of the country, et cetera.

And I recognize that that sense of fear, that sense of being freaked out, is in many cases an indicator of lack of preparation. And once you start preparing for the thing that you fear, you will gain some measure of preparation and then some measure of a sense of fatality about what you can't prepare for.

But you have to go through the process of preparing for it. And I think being prepared to leave your country is something that solves a lot of other issues. And I talk about those other issues in my course. It's funny, in one course, I stuck in this little comment on abortion that I've just shared with you.

Other than that, in five years, I have never shared this publicly. Most of my other stuff has been on more practical stuff. But I decided it was time and I would go ahead. It's just quite personal, right? And so I thought I'd go ahead and share it with you, the honest truth of what was important to me.

So I just beg you, if you want any of that stuff, if you want any of that sense of freedom, make a plan for internationalization. Your plan doesn't have to be my plan. In fact, it probably shouldn't be. I have some unique benefits and things that made it easier for me to go abroad than other people.

I was already living in an RV, so I didn't have to get rid of all that much stuff 'cause I'd already gotten rid of most of my stuff. I have an internet-based business, so that was a benefit. My wife was cool with it. We were having a baby, so she's up for an adventure.

I didn't have to force her and drag her kicking and screaming to another country or anything like that. And so there's been many other aspects of it, things that made it a little easier for me. There's no question that it's hard for some people who are very static and stuck, and I don't think that everybody needs to internationalize.

Excuse me, let me rephrase that. I don't think that everybody needs to go and move abroad. In fact, I think most people probably shouldn't. I've become more skeptical of moving abroad since being abroad, not for me, but for many people because I've seen a lot of people try to move abroad and then wind up going back to their home country.

And I've learned a lot through coaching them, through listening to them, et cetera. That's why in my course, International Escape Plan, I teach phases. And so I think everybody should do phase one. I think that 98% of people should do phase one and phase two. Then it drops to maybe 35 to 40% of people should do phase three, and I don't know, 10% of people should do phase four.

But it's something that you have to choose. But for me, I have found a huge amount of freedom on these issues by doing what I have done, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. It's brought me just a sense of knowing. And then if I go back, I probably, the next one in this series, I'll go ahead and record a show.

I wanna be careful. Am I ready to say this? I guess I will. I'll go ahead and record a show on why I might or probably will move back to the United States in the future. But that's only possible for me after having made a plan to leave. Because if you don't, again, if you're stuck, it's hard to feel good about it.

But if you know you have the choice and you can leave at any time, and you can leave and go and come back, I mean, we're in the smallest world we've ever lived in where an airplane flight and you're there and it's done. And when you're a citizen of a place, it's great.

You just show back up, everything picks up. It's one of the things I tell expats in general, unless you need to do it for tax planning purposes, you wanna maintain a whole infrastructure. So I maintain an entire infrastructure in the United States. I have a US passport, I have a US driver's license, I have a US mailing address, I have US credit cards, I have US banking, I have US phone, et cetera.

And so I'm just, it works. I don't have to, I walk into the country and I'm set up. All I need is a place to live. And I got that covered on Airbnb in about 10 minutes. So this stuff is a lot easier once you start going down that path.

Let me end it there. Thank you for listening. I wanna promote for just a moment as I go, lend me your ear, please. I do have a course, internationalskateplan.com. If you've never thought about internationalization or you're looking for the fastest answers, internationalskateplan.com, buy my course, internationalskateplan.com. Remember also that in January of 2024, I am hosting an event.

You have to sign up now. I'm hosting an event with Mikkel Thorup and Gabriel Custodiat in Panama City, Panama. And I really want you to come to that. I really do. I think we're good on signups, but we do have space for a few more. And I really want you to come to that.

I want you to come to that just so we can hang out. I promise you it'll be worth your while. You're gonna love it. Panama City is a great city. It's a world city. It's fantastic. It's got lots and lots going for it. Panama itself is an awesome plan B or plan A for many people.

And I haven't gone deeply into the benefits of Panama just 'cause I like to be fairly even handed, but we're gonna do all the benefits of Panama. We're gonna talk about the use of Panama as a residency designation. They have various super simple and straightforward, easy residencies. You can get a residency.

They have great banking options, great business options. It's an extremely tax-friendly place, very well-connected place. It's a great option. And so if you're interested in Panama, you definitely should come to this event. Even if you're interested in Panama, but mostly interested in even just global stuff, still come. Because we're gonna be together for a week and we'll talk about everything.

There's not gonna be anything that's off the table. It's gonna be a great networking opportunity. I'm gonna be there. My friends are gonna be there. I really want you to come. I think it's a great deal. I forget, if I remembered the price off the top of my head, I would tell you, but I think it's a perfectly, it's a great price.

Everything's taken care of for you. I've just gotten back from six weeks of traveling. Let me tell you, I appreciate all inclusive and planned out for you trips more than I ever did, because my head is exploded of all the reservations and everything that I've done. So please go to expatmoney.com/radical.

That gets me credit for it, for your signing up. expatmoney.com/radical. Sign up today, expatmoney.com/radical. - The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions, old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

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