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 joined by my friend, Mikkel Thorup.

And we're here today to talk about internationalization and specifically the great nation of Panama as we prepare for our forthcoming Panama adventure in January. Mikkel, welcome back to Radical Personal Finance. - Joshua, I am super stoked to be here. I think this is gonna be a fun conversation today and hopefully help your audience and inspire them a little bit and hopefully meet them in January.

I think it's gonna be a great opportunity. - I'm excited about it. I've been wanting to host events as part of the Radical Personal Finance work for a while. And with having a bazillion small children, it's been difficult to do. And so when we had the idea of, hey, Mikkel will organize the details, he'll organize the tour, he does this kind of thing quite frequently, and I'll come and I'll bring my audience and we'll hang out, I jumped on the chance.

- You do not just Panama, you've been doing these kinds of investment tours all around the world, right? Tell us about that. - Yeah, absolutely. So we just got back from one in Uruguay last week or so, and it was amazing. We had 26 clients who came down with me.

We actually met here in Panama. I took everybody out for dinner. We flew down as a group, business class all the way, had buses pick us up and take us out to the coastline. And it was just an amazing experience. The response has been fantastic. Actually, we just put out a video about the Uruguay trip.

So if anybody's thinking about, maybe what is the Panama trip gonna be like? This one we just did in Uruguay is a great example of that. So maybe you might be able to share with people. Now we do other trips to Brazil and Colombia and other things like this.

We've got a lot of experience about it, but Panama is my home base. So this is the flagship trip, the flagship place. It's really special, it's gonna be amazing. - You've got all the people. I think meeting in Panama is great. One of the things that I love about Panama City, I consider there to be basically two capitals of the Americas broadly.

One is Panama City, the other is Miami. And then possibly we could come into something like Mexico City in terms of the impact that it has. But Panama City has a great location for that and tremendous connectivity between South America, Central America, North America, Europe, et cetera. Why did you move to Panama?

'Cause you didn't begin there, you started in Canada. Why did you move to Panama originally? - Ooh, okay, long, long story, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible. So I've actually been living overseas for, I'm going on 24 years now. So I've lived in nine different countries.

I was in the South Pacific for four years. I was in Asia for a while. I lived in the Middle East for just under a decade. I was in Abu Dhabi. And originally, I've always been very attracted to tax-free type of places. And I needed to find another place when we decided to leave the Middle East that was gonna tick that box.

Now there were other reasons. I wanted to homeschool my kids. I got a couple of kids on my own, not as many as you do, Joshua, by the way, everybody. I met Joshua's kids and his family in Panama a couple of months ago. Amazing, your kids are brilliant. You've done such a fantastic job raising them and teaching them different languages and stuff.

I was super, super impressed with your family. - Thank you very much. - It's truly amazing. But I wanted more opportunity for my daughter at the time. And I wanted to be away from some of the conflict zones and we can kind of get into the geopolitics and what's going on in the world maybe a little bit later in our conversation.

But I could see what was going on in the Middle East and possible war with Iran and things like this. And I wanted to be in a more food-independent, water-independent, energy-independent country. So we started looking around and I needed it to also tick a couple of boxes, like a good immigration plan and the taxation, like I mentioned.

We had a short list of countries and we were looking at moving back to Singapore or to Thailand or different places like that. But over and over and over again, Panama kept coming to the top of the pile. Now my wife had never been there. She had never experienced the country before.

I had been to Panama 20 years previous on a trip through the region. And I really remember it speaking to me and having fond memories of it. So we took a chance and we came down here and we've loved it. We've been really stoked with our decision. We've been here going on five years now, which means actually next year, I get to make the application for my citizenship.

I was just in with the lawyers talking about it on Monday or Tuesday of this week, mapping it all out. So there is a path to citizenship for people. We've got our life here. We've bought real estate here. We have friends here. We learned the language. It's just been a tremendous experience.

And I'm very, very happy with Panama. And I'm super happy to share it with other people and show everyone what we figured out. - Yeah. When you compare, it sounds first of all, that one of the attractions for you was a city. You mentioned a lot of cities along there.

Do you think that Panama is best suited for people who are attracted to the urban lifestyle or the kind of sitting on the beach kind of lifestyle as well? - What an interesting question. So, okay, let's take even one step further back. First and foremost, I believe that Panama is an excellent plan A.

I think that it's a great place for people to live to, to move to. Now it does work really well as a plan B, and we can get into the details of this reason why. But on top of that, Panama has it all. Okay, we've got the Caribbean side.

We have the Pacific side. We've got the mountains and we've got the city, Panama City, like you mentioned before, one of the hub of the Americas. So it doesn't really matter what type of lifestyle you're after. You can have any one of those things, or like me and my family do, we have a combination.

So we have the beach property, which is an hour's drive. And I'd love to show your audience if they come on down on this trip, we're gonna take the drive out there. We're gonna see the beach area. We're gonna go and view real estate, rental properties for short-term, long-term, everything like that.

We're gonna be looking at stuff in the city. I have a place in downtown Panama City. I actually bought a new place in downtown Panama on a man-made island right here. Just like if you guys think about the palms in Dubai, if you've ever seen those pictures, we have two man-made islands off the coast of Panama City, like right there.

I just bought a new place there. And we have a place in the mountain, which is being built right now. And that's maybe 90 minutes, 75 minutes drive from Panama City. So you can see these things are really, really close. So even if you decide, you know what? I don't want the hot weather.

I wanna be in the mountains. I want cooler weather, but I want access to all of the infrastructure. Perfect. Less than an hour and a half, and you're in downtown Panama City with the best shopping, the best malls, the best cinemas and restaurants and cafes and everything like that.

And even if you didn't wanna drive so far, you can drive down the hill 15 minutes and be in a town that still has all your grocery stores and all those amenities. So it's quite a compact place, but it speaks to many different types of lifestyles. Does that make sense?

- Yeah, I agree. And the thing that has impressed me a lot about Panama City specifically, where it's most visible, I think it applies broadly to the whole nation, but Panama has developed very, very quickly. I mean, you said you were there 20 years ago versus when you moved there five years ago.

I've traveled a lot in Central America, South America, and you go one place, some cities you go and you visit, and then you come back 10, 15, 20 years later, and it's exactly the same. Panama City has not been that place. It has completely transformed itself over the last few decades.

- Yeah, 100%. I mean, so in 2003, 2004, I took 18 months and I hitchhiked and backpacked through Latin America. So I went to Belize and Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Costa Rica and Honduras, Panama. I mean, if we compare a couple of those countries, like, okay, Costa Rica has gone up, it's growing, but not a huge amount.

Belize has kind of stood still. Belize is trapped in a time capsule from 20 years ago or more. But Panama is totally different. They've done all these reclaimed land projects, like Avenida Balboa is reclaimed land. They've done Santa Maria, which is by the mangroves, huge development there. We're doing the man-made islands that we just talked about.

Casco Viejo, which is like a world heritage site, has had hundreds of millions of dollars rammed into it. So it's restoration of all these buildings. It's like a living museum. If you guys have gone to Cartagena before in Colombia, it's like Cartagena, but on a smaller scale. It is right here in Panama, like a hub destination.

So it's cafes and rooftop bars, and it's just, it's growing so much in the years. And what does this mean for people like us? Well, it's a great opportunity to get in on a trend with any of the investment because rising tide lifts all boats. This is new ferry terminal, cruise ship terminal, new convention center, Casco, which we mentioned.

All these types of things are huge infrastructure projects that raise all of the value. - Yeah. It seems to me, you mentioned the tax efficiency. There are many people who that's very important, and many people who it's unimportant to. But one of my observations over the years is that in many cases, tax efficiency is one of those, I don't know if it's a leading indicator, but it's certainly one of those things that goes along with a lot of development.

Because if a country knows, every government knows, okay, we can pass whatever tax laws we want to, whatever thing we can force the people to accept. We could put 97% income tax rates. We could put a two or three X value added tax or whatever we want on our products.

But when a country makes the intentional choice to say, we're going to tax very lightly and very thoughtfully, they're doing that because as I see it, they're rolling up their sleeves and going into the world of competition. And they're inviting people to say, hey, consider us as a destination.

And that's something that Panama has embraced for many years. It's very much part of the culture. And so boat registrations, banking, international business corporations, et cetera, has all gone, a lot of businesses flowed there. And in response, Panama, I think, has done a good job of seeking to develop it.

They've tried to build out the transit. The airport is nicely connected to the city with a train. The airport itself serves well, the whole downtown. And so I think people often have this misunderstanding, especially those coming from the high tax world, a misunderstanding that, well, if you go to a place where taxes are light, nothing works.

That's not true. We've seen it Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Panama, countries that know they have to compete, they actually roll up their sleeves and start competing. - A hundred percent. I mean, and those countries that you've mentioned, I've lived in all of them as well. I've spent considerable amount of times in those, and I've seen what happens when they deregulate, when they lower taxes, and when they're, as you said, a lot more thoughtful with these types of things.

It's massive amounts of foreign direct investment. You can build a life in these places, and you can really participate in something that's exciting and new and fresh and lively. And it's just amazing to watch the changes and watch the grow. And I'm addicted to that. I love that feeling of growth, of expanding.

So I think it's really, really amazing. So I think that Panama has all of those things, except it's not like Singapore, which is kind of, I wouldn't say done, but I mean, it's well-established. Singapore is like super well-established. You want to go in there. It's a couple million dollars just to get started.

Panama's heading in that direction, but your ticket to the ball is not a couple of million dollars, it's considerably less than that, maybe a hundred thousand, couple hundred thousand dollars if you want to get the immigration here. But I mean, there's so many options. So it's like, don't wait for these things for five years or 10 years or something like that.

That you've missed the boat. I mean, you need to identify what the trend is and then take a risk and put some time and energy and effort into this place. And this is what we're going to be doing. This trip that we're doing together is going to be a massive opportunity for people to really get educated about this.

Not just for me, like, okay, I've been here for five years, but all of the lawyers that I work with, the property developers, the banks, the service providers, all of these people, you're going to meet all of the network. This is not a conference with 500 people there and you just listen to someone talk at you.

This is a small group, say 25 people, 30 people, maximum, maximum. So every day we get to share with you, me, the lawyers, get your questions answered. It's a shortcut. I think that's the best way to put it. It's a shortcut on all of this type of stuff. - And there is still, even though we have so much access to good media, there's no substitute for going somewhere and seeing it and being in a place.

That's what I've been doing very intensively over the last few years is systematically going and I take my children with me, but going to places and seeing things because once you are actually in a place, you can very quickly judge for yourself whether the information that you read online or the information you were given yourself is right.

When I was with you in Panama City, immediately after touring Panama City with my family, we flew directly to Mexico, sorry, to Cuba. And it was an important trip for me because I had spent from 2005, when I had a bunch of left-wing, I had a professor of mine that was very influential and he was this hardcore leftist, very much a hardcore leftist, a liberation theologian and whatnot.

And he praised to the mountaintops, Venezuela and Cuba at this point in time as like being the paragon of development and human rights, et cetera. Well, I've watched and have a good amount of experience with Venezuela, but I had not ever been able to get to Cuba. And so finally I went and took my family to Cuba and we spent a week there.

And you just get off the airplane and you go into the town and you can immediately feel in about 60 minutes the truth or in this case, the absolute non-truth of what that particular professor was sharing. And it made me sad. It was not a fun trip. I didn't, it was a very difficult trip, but it was a very poignant example of how important it is to get your boots on the ground and feel the place.

I wanna go back because these terms, plan A, plan B, et cetera, are probably really comfortable to those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about internationalization and plans and going around the world. But I don't think they're very normal terms among a lot of people. How do you define the term of plan A and plan B?

And why is that definition important in internationalization? - 100%, we need to make sure that everybody understands the lexicon and what we're talking about here. So let's actually do it in reverse order. A plan B would be someone who's listening to this, you're in the United States, you're in Canada, you're in Australia or New Zealand or wherever you guys are.

And you like your life there, okay? You have a nice job or you got your business, you got your family, you hang out with your friends from college. Amazing, that's fantastic. But at the same time, you're kind of looking around at the world and you're going, there's some worrying things going on.

There's wars, there were lockdowns, there's a whole bunch of stuff that maybe you agree with or don't agree with, but you can understand that these are, how to say this politely, these are troubling times, let's just put it that way. You can identify this. Now, have you talked to your spouse about it?

Have you talked to your friends about it? Maybe, maybe not. But I think you probably recognize that there's something weird going on in the world. And you as an individual or a sibling or a parent or whatever, you have a responsibility to you and your family. Part of that responsibility is, okay, yes, having enough water and food in the house in case there is a hurricane if you live in that type of a belt.

But another type of plan B or backup is a political one. What happens if things happen in your country? Where are you going to go? You can't just get on an airplane and go to another country without a residency there. I mean, you can under a tourist visa, you could spend 30 days there, you could spend 60 days there, maybe 90, but at some point they're gonna kick you out.

You're gonna be overstaying your visa. You'll be illegal in the country. You don't have a legal right to live there or work there. You might not even have a legal right to purchase property. So what do you do? Well, we need to set those things up in advance. And that's what we affectionately call a plan B.

And inside of that plan B ecosphere is the banking, the corporate structures, the immigration, the tax planning, and the investment. Traditionally, or at least from my standpoint, the investment side is real estate, making sure you have something tangible that will be very difficult for someone to take away from you.

So that's kind of the idea of a plan B and where it comes from. It's political insurance or insurance on yourself for moving to another country. Now, a plan A, you would think, "Okay, well, if I move to Panama, I've got my plan B." No, Panama has now turned from your plan B into your plan A because it's your primary destination.

It's where you actually live now. It's where your kids go to school and all these things. So now we might wanna set up something on top of that. Now it might not have to be as many things. Like I have plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D, plan A.

Like I have real estate in eight different countries. So I'm not saying you need to be as crazy as I am with all of these things. I tested out, I'm a Guinea pig and things. But I think at the very minimum, we need to have a hard look at what your plan A is and be setting up a plan B, full stop.

- Yeah, when I think about it, I just think what occurs to me, and I do think it works better to start with kind of plan B versus plan A. Because if people think, "Well, in order for me to engage in flag planting," meaning work with different countries and do something outside of my own country, I have to move there.

That's just not, that's not the world we live in anymore. And it's not even the wisest course of action. Moving and living somewhere full-time 365 days a year can be extremely disruptive to your life. But you don't have to move to a place to start putting down some connections there.

So I would compare it, let's say someone is living in the United States and they're thinking about moving to another state or another city in another state. Normally they'll start by going to that place and visiting, and they'll go and take a vacation, spend a week or two there, and they realize, you know what, really like the feeling of being here.

Then they'll dig a little bit deeper, they look at the economy, look at what job options are available, and they might want to start making some connections, networking with some people, going and attending a local church, a local business organization, seeing what the opportunities are in that area. Now, when you do that within a country, pretty much the day you decide to move, you can deal with all the legal stuff later.

Your bank account works just the same whether you're living in Florida or in Tennessee. Your driver's license is just a matter of reaching out to the state government and saying, "Hey, can I have this?" And you have the legal right to live in a country. When you're going international, it's not that much more difficult, but there are a few more points.

You have to get the right to live there. You have to sometimes step through some hurdles to set up local infrastructure. You may need a tax ID number in order to activate your local utilities or open a local bank account, et cetera. And so my preferred approach is to say, "Where are some places that I'm interested in?" And then choose to set up plans, plan B of, "Hey, if I ever needed it, I could go and live in this country." So I have a couple of complete, basically I think of them as packages of, here is a country where I have a complete local plan B.

I have a residency card that gives me the permission to live there. I have a driver's license that gives me the ability to travel there and drive there. I have a bank account. I have everything set up. I have a phone number that's with that. So I have everything set up for my identity there.

And if I wanted to move there, I can just simply get on an airplane and go. And from day one, I'm ready to go because everything is established for me. And that does solve, just having that, even if you don't move, it solves some of those big picture ideas.

In many difficult situations, your best bet is to be prepared to stay at home or relocate locally. But there are a lot of national level issues. Political issues are an enormous risk. Various economic issues that affect the entire country. Issues such as national legislation, we saw during the pandemic, the country you lived in made a big difference in your experience.

And so being prepared to have another country that you can go to, solves very elegantly some of those extreme situations that really nothing else does. But you don't have to move to a place. Moving to a place is your plan A. And that's where you say, I really wanna build my life here because of the opportunities that are gonna be there or how my lifestyle is gonna be superior.

And people can pick and choose as they like. And for most of us, I think we start off down a road of, let me try it here. Let me try opening a bank account. I remember the first time I opened a bank account abroad, I felt like a criminal.

I felt like a terrorist or something trying to do something like crazy and sneaky. And then I put my money in there and I had my debit card and I started using it. And I realized, why was that such a big deal? But I only realized it wasn't a big deal when I actually did it.

- For sure. And I think that there's a lot of emotional stuff that's going on in the world right now. And for a lot of people, there might feel stress or anxiety, watching mainstream media and seeing what's happening. With a lot of the clients that I work with, once we set up this plan B, as you said, the immigration, the banking, the structuring, actually a lot of that stress and anxiety starts to go away because they realize that they're actually a lot more prepared than anybody else around them.

So just that mental feeling that things are gonna be okay, I think that's worth its weight in gold as well. - Absolutely. I struggle with whether I'll move back to the United States in the future. And I'm much more open to it than I ever was in the past.

But what I realized is that in order for me to feel comfortable with the idea of living in the United States, I had to leave and know that I don't have to live there. And now I can look at it and say, you know what? That country has many good things about it.

But the peace that came with knowing I could divorce that country and never deal with those bozos again in my life, I would happily repay all of the money and all of the time and all of the energy that it put in. I'd do it twice over just to regain that sense of peace.

- It's optionality. It gives you options. This type of lifestyle, learning about these things, getting educated about it, it gives you options. And with options, you're a lot more resilient. And I think with the resiliency, you're gonna feel a lot better. So I think it's well worth coming and at least learning about the stuff, getting educated about it.

- Absolutely. During this event that we're holding, we're gonna do in-depth seminars on a lot of subjects. We're gonna, and we're gonna tour a lot of different aspects of Panama. But I'd like to talk just about some of those areas where Panama really shines. What are some of the ways that Panama can be useful, even for those who aren't fully relocating and living in Panama City as your neighbor?

- Perfect. So let's talk first about the taxation, just so you guys have a little bit of an understanding of how the tax works here. So Panama is what's called a territorial tax system, which means that Panama is not taxing you on income, which is generated outside of the country.

So if you have a coaching business or consulting or Amazon FBA or drop shipping, or you work for a company and you travel or any of these things like that, you bring the money into Panama, they're not gonna tax you on any of that. Now, if you cut hair for a living and you wanna cut hair in here in Panama, okay, that's locally sourced income, and you will definitely need to pay tax on that.

But any of the foreign sourced income, there's no tax on it. Now, if you're a US person, well, we need to talk about that piece of the puzzle, but that is also ways to navigate that legally. And there's some programs by the IRS to make sure that you pay as little as possible.

We'll cover all of those in the program. But back to Panama. The other amazing thing here in Panama is the residency programs here. So the residency is your legal right to live and work in another country. Now, there's different, every country has their different programs and different timelines and costs to get involved.

One of the really nice things about Panama is once you get approved for your residency, to keep it active, you have to visit the country one day every two years. That's it. So you fly down from the States or from Canada or whatever, it's a few hour flight. You come down, you have dinner, you go to the beach for a day or a week or whatever you want, and you leave.

If you can do that every two years, two years, you will keep it active. There's other programs where you have to spend 183 days in a country, which means you become a tax resident, which means now you have additional tax obligations. There's some countries where you have to spend almost every single day in a calendar year to keep your residency active.

There's ones that have time limits on them. They're a two-year residency or a five-year residency. This is a permanent residency. You can have it for the rest of your life and you only need to spend one day every two years. In the world of Plan Bs, this is excellent.

This is like incredibly good. Then there's a lot of the reasons that we already discussed, the economic trends that are happening in Panama, massive amounts of foreign direct investment, infrastructure projects. You mentioned also the subways. They're putting in new subways and train lines. They're putting in new highways, all of this.

There's a lot of big projects from the banking side. I mean, we have one of the largest banking sectors in the world here. I think it's 93 international banks. It's mostly down on Calle Cinquenta, basically Road 50. There's lots and lots of options from the banking side. Then there's lots of reasons I think that Panama hits this.

Then, okay, the last one and the obvious one, and I leave it for last, kind of funny, is the Panama Canal. I mean, this brings in billions upon billions upon billions of dollars into this country. It's now administered by the Panamanians. It's an engineering marvel. It's incredible to go and watch.

Actually, I'm going to take our group down, Joshua, to see it because I think it's such an economic driver that people have to see it on the trip to really understand. But it adds so much stability to the country. There's so much product that's coming in here. They've created free trade zones and special economic zones based around this.

So Panama's an important player in the world. And with being so well-connected and so easy access to the states, I mean, it just ticks a lot of the boxes. - Yeah. Don't underestimate the importance, anybody, of the connection of easy access. Most of my audience is in North America and in Europe because most of my content is, virtually all of this content is in English language.

And that's where the dominant English language approaches are. When I first started internationalizing, I thought, well, I'm willing to go wherever it takes. I'll do whatever it takes. I like to travel. I like to get on airplanes. Well, at this point, buying seven airplane tickets and traveling from Miami to Singapore, I love that travel, but it's not so easy with young children.

The numbers add up quickly. It's not the kind of thing that you can just say, well, let's just go to Singapore this weekend and meet with my banker. Panama, on the other hand, has incredible connectivity. I mean, for me, being from Florida, I'm spoiled. You've got all the low-cost airlines that fly there and basically 200 bucks round trip and you're there.

Even for many other parts of the United States, it's relatively inexpensive to get to, it's short flights. The time zones are incredibly convenient being on Eastern time zone. And even just the US dollar parity, Panama has its own currency, but it's pegged to the US dollar. And so that brings a stability to the financial supply and the currency.

It's really nice. And one of my favorite things actually about Panama City, which even the canal zone, it is probably one of the more welcoming kind of familiar feeling places in Latin America. I love the Spanish colonial architecture. I love visiting different places that feel very unlike where I'm from in the United States.

But there's no question that going to Panama, because of the heavy influence of the Americans for so long, it just feels very welcoming and very friendly and feels very familiar in terms of how the infrastructure is set up. So it's a really great scenario. - We're going to talk in more, I think Panama, one of the unique benefits though, is Panama, even for non-residents is useful.

You mentioned banking, people all around the world use Panama for banking, but Panama is enormous in terms of foreign incorporation, as well as trusts and foundations as well. Mention a few more things about those, even in the usefulness of that, even for people who don't live in Panama. - Sure, so Panama is a civil law country.

So what that means is you can basically think of a common law country comes from the UK, civil law is Roman law or European law. Because of Latin America is pretty much all colonized by Europe, by Spain and Portugal and things like this, it's all civil law countries. So what we have is the foundation down here.

Now, this is an excellent way that you can organize your assets, organize your financial life, especially if you want to invest in other countries, real estate or banking or precious metals or stock accounts offshore, those can all be done through these type of vehicles. And you rightly said, Joshua, Panama is one of the largest incorporation destinations.

So it's one of the largest offshore jurisdictions. Now, okay, Hong Kong is very big as well, but Hong Kong has come into problems over the last five or six years. There's some other countries in the Caribbean, which are big ones as well, but they don't have the larger economy to back them up.

They don't have the population. They don't have the human capital in a lot of those places. Panama is what I would call, and I don't mean this as an insult to anybody, but Panama is a real country. This is not a tiny little Caribbean speck with like 40,000 population for the entire country.

Panama is a real country. I mean, there's a lot going on here. So even if you decide, you know what? Okay, forget about, I don't want to live here. Okay, I don't even want to get residency here. There's still things here in Panama that speak to people who decide or who understand that they need to have a portion of their assets overseas.

They can't have all their eggs in one basket. They can't just have a stock portfolio at Schwab and then think that that's diversified. They realize that there needs to be differences in asset class, different in structures, difference in currencies and different programs. Like we can open multi-currency accounts here.

You can have access to Swiss francs and different things like this. So it's just perfectly geared towards this type of lifestyle. And then, as you mentioned, you don't need to fly for 18 hours to get to the place or take four connections to get there. Like I lived in Abu Dhabi in Dubai for almost a decade.

I loved it over there. It was fantastic, but it is a complete pain in the butt to be eight hours, 10 hours time difference from all of my clients and my friends and family and everything like that. And 13 and a half hours flight to New York or 12 and a half hours flight to New York.

That's a long way. But if you can come down here in three, four hours, I mean, you come down in the morning and we'll go out for lunch in the afternoon. It's perfect. I mean, there's no jet lag. You're basically on Eastern Standard Time or Central Time the entire year.

Panama doesn't change, the US and Canada change with daylight savings and stuff. But you can go North-South really easy. East-West becomes very challenging. - Yeah, absolutely. So you've been doing these investment tours. I think it best if you just walk through the itinerary quickly, 'cause this is something you've done multiple times you've ironed out a lot of the wrinkles and the troubles and you've learned from doing these tours, these one week tours in Panama and Uruguay and Eastern Europe and the Channel Islands, et cetera.

You've learned what really works. So go ahead and walk us through the itinerary of what we'll be doing during our time in Panama in January. - Perfect. So yes, we've got a lot of experience with these things. What I have found works really well and is really special is to keep the group small.

This is the number one thing. This is not a conference where it's like nine hours a day of someone talking at you the whole time and you're just in the receiving end of information. No, everything is together. Everybody is together every moment. So we're sharing our meals together. We do breakfast together in the mornings.

It's kind of a free flow when you get up but everybody's always sitting together. Then we do conference material for two to three hours in the morning with a nice long break in between. Now, this is not a rehearsed presentation that I've done a hundred times and I'm gonna hit every correct word on this step and blah, blah, blah.

No, I mean, I do my presentations. You have a question, you put your hand up or you interrupt me, I don't care. And we deal with that issue in real time. So it's more of a conversation back and forth. Now, if you're really curious about the immigration on this particular piece, then perfect.

We'll dig into that. The important point is that you get your questions answered. Now, after we do a couple of hours of conference material in the morning, we take a nice leisurely lunch. We all sit together, we relax and then we go and do a field trip. So some examples of the field trip that we'll be doing in January is I'm gonna take you guys out to the private man-made islands.

That's gonna be one. We're gonna do a real estate tour. That's another. We're gonna go out to my friend's gold vault, a gold depository here. I've known these guys for years and years. They give us special permission to actually go inside the vault. These are things that hold, you know, two, $300 million worth of precious metals.

You won't even find the place on a map. It's super highly protected, but we have special permission for everybody to go and view it. We're gonna take you one day, we're gonna go out to the beach area. We'll spend some time out there. So you get to relax on the beach, see the coastline.

We'll have a bit of a party, some food. You'll see some of the real estate options there. We're gonna go out to a self-sustaining community, a gated community that I'm building with a business partner. It's out in the mountains. So you see the city, the beach, the mountains. We're gonna go out to the Panama Canal, as I mentioned.

So these are all the different field trips that we'll be doing for the week. And then at night, everybody gets together for dinner. These are real restaurants. This is not, "Hey, we're gonna serve you some buffet slop type of things." This is like, "We're going out for steak dinners.

We're gonna drink a nice bottle of red wine, and we're gonna brainstorm and make connections with one another. I'll be there, you'll be there. Our friend Gabriel's gonna be there." So we'll take different times and we'll sit with different people each night. And then you're gonna get to meet other people on the tour.

So learn about their lives, what they're doing, what their businesses are. Network and make connections with all of them. And we're going for a week. So the relationships, Joshua, this is what it's about. Education, okay, awesome, great. But the relationships, you can't replace that. You can't get that in any other type of format.

But in this, it's center stage. It's at the center of everything that we're doing with the trip. And the success we have with these trips, the response we get is phenomenal. People go crazy for these trips. And as I mentioned, we just published a new video from our trip last week.

You guys gotta see this. You see this, you go, "Okay, I get it now. I get what Mikel is talking about." But it's a tremendous experience. - I'll make sure to share that on all of my profiles. Dates of this event are January 22 to January 28. And that'll be January 20 of the year 2024.

So January 22 to 28 of the year 2024. It'll be a one week event, a beautiful time of year. I gotta admit, we did pick it intentionally when it's cold and snowy. You wanna come for a tropical vacation and enjoy some time in the sun. But I'll be there, Gabriel will be there, and Mikel will be there.

And I'm making myself fully available. I'm not gonna bring my wife and children. I'll be full. So for me, I'm gonna be on vacation. She's got the hard work at home. I'm gonna be hanging out on the beach, chilling with you guys till midnight, talking about everything under the sun.

Mikel brings an enormous experience, a level of personal experience to this discussion and professional experience. He's done this, he consults with people. He has the connections all around the world. And so it's a great place to bring your questions, bring your comments. Mikel, anything we missed that I should have asked you about?

- No, you're an amazing interviewer. You're a professional, my friend. I think we did a great job of covering everything. I guess my last comment is I'm super stoked to be meeting everyone in just a couple of months. I mean, January is just around the corner. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

I can't wait to meet everybody and share a drink and share some meals. And yeah, very welcome. Everybody's very welcome to join us. - Absolutely. Sign up now at expatmoney.com/radical. I will put the link in the show notes as I do every time. expatmoney.com/radical. All the information, all the additional details, everything is there.

expatmoney.com/radical. Sign up today. Look forward to seeing you guys in Panama. Thanks, Mikel. - Thanks so much, Joshua. I'll talk to you soon.