Hello everybody, it's Sam from Financial Samurai and I'm really really excited in this episode because I think I found the best life hack for Americans now Sorry for folks who are not Americans about 98% of readers and listeners of Financial Samurai are Americans But I'm always looking for arbitrage opportunities to help readers make more money and live better lives You know at the end of the day money is not the end goal It's a means to the end right and the means to the end is living the life that you want on your terms happily ever after so that life hack really is to take advantage of Canada now, it's not new.

It's not new To think about Canada as an alternative to an American lifestyle after all Canada is a developed country They have a respectable GDP per capita $45,000 a year Very few people go through medical bankruptcies because health care is heavily subsidized if not free Well, it's free because the tax rates are so high.

Meanwhile, the average annual tuition for Canadian universities was only $6,571 in the 2018-2019 academic year So with all these good things in mind, I think it's a no-brainer for Americans to consider Moving to Canada, but not at any point in their lives Only after they want to settle down maybe start a family or retire early So I have a 25 year old friend in my San Francisco softball league.

He's from Vancouver, Canada Lovely place very expensive city. So he went to the University of British Columbia It's a top five University and the tuition was only fifty four hundred dollars in the computer science department So when he graduated he decided not to find a job in Canada But to come down to San Francisco where the computer engineering jobs pay much more He said I make twice as much in San Francisco as I would if I got a similar job in Vancouver And I said, well, don't you want to get back to your country?

I thought brain drain is a big thing in Canada and he said well, yeah But let me make some money first after five years in San Francisco making double the money I'll then move to Seattle with my girlfriend where my firm is headquartered. It's Zillow and Seattle pays similar amounts to San Francisco pay despite the cost of living being about 30% cheaper And then further Vancouver is only about a three-hour drive away So that sounds like a great plan and then he said Once I'm in my 30s and ready to start a family then I'll move back to Canada and live a less hectic lifestyle You know with a stronger government safety net.

I'll feel more comfortable raising a family back home and All this made a lot of sense I did feel a little bad for Canada for not getting the benefit of his productivity after providing him with 22 years of education but hey he can do what he wishes and You know since Canadians are buying US stocks buying US property and taking advantage of our job opportunities Why don't we just take advantage of them?

I mean, it's just natural to take advantage of each other, right? So I was thinking to myself well Healthcare healthcare is a big issue My family pays twenty one thousand a year for healthcare premiums plus co pays and co insurance And I don't think this is reasonable at all for a healthy family who never sees the physician to generate 21,000 in retirement income and a 4% rate of return requires me to first amass 525,000 in capital That's a lot of money folks.

And then further given the average college tuition is only six thousand five hundred seventy one dollars a year You know that that that means we no longer have to contribute 50,000 a year in our son's five to nine college savings plan to ironically make him a millionaire by the time he goes to college Just to pay for college We could easily just afford the four years of twenty six thousand dollars of Canadian University tuition just from our savings account So it's just mind-boggling that four years of tuition University tuition Canada is about eight to nine thousand less for one year of tuition for San Francisco kindergarten I mean, that's just crazy.

So saving fifty one thousand a year in health care and college expenses Just by moving to Canada sounds like a home run because that's one point two seven five million less in capital I need to amass at a four percent rate of return so in other words You can just go to Cal Canada and just automatically be a millionaire if you want to think about it that way But there's another thing.

This is the thing that excites me the most about Canada and that is their acceptance rates for their top universities So as a high school tennis coach for the past three years, I've seen my students juniors and seniors Grind away at taking SAT exams AP exams studying every night missing critical matches because they had tutoring and so forth and So one day I was at practice and I was talking to one of my favorite students who's going to Occidental College in Southern, California And he mentioned a classmate was attending McGill University in Canada And I was immediately impressed because I remember having a financial analyst classmate in 1999 at Goldman Sachs who had attended McGill University She was extremely kind she was smart and she was the only one in my class Who ten years later after the dot-com bomb and after all this stuff made managing director?

She was an MD at 33. So I was thinking myself Wow McGill University It's definitely the Harvard of Canada. I told him and he said well really How can it be the Harvard of Canada? How can that be right? Their acceptance rate is 50% and I said there's no way McGill University has a 50% acceptance rate And I said, I'll happily bet you 20 push-ups that it's 45% or less And I was saying myself, you know secretly that's like a home run win I was thinking McGill University would probably have closer to a 20% acceptance rate given the best universities in America have a single-digit acceptance rate So he took my bet and he looked up acceptance rate on Google on his phone and he immediately started dancing around because it said 46.3% ha ha ha time to do some push-ups coach and Given that I am very adept at SEO and all stuff Google related since I run financial samurai I noticed that the acceptance rate was from 2016 as Google often has old data in its featured snippets So I said wait, wait, wait, buddy.

I clicked on McGill's website I checked out their latest acceptance rate for 2018 and boom it was 41.7% ha ha ha so Never challenged the coach and he did 20 push-ups right there So I would say 41.7% acceptance rate for arguably the best university in Canada is Kind of a joke by US standards for the top school And if you don't believe McGill University is the Harvard of Canada in the top school in Canada Well, let's just look at some other universities UBC 52% acceptance rate Queens University 42% McMaster 59% Waterloo 52% Montreal 57% in University of Toronto a 40% blended acceptance rate Now in other words the best universities in Canada have an acceptance rate of 40 to 59% The top 25 schools none of them have an acceptance rate of above 40% If you look at the top 10 schools in America, you know The Harvard's Columbia's Juilliard Princeton MIT Yale and so forth.

The acceptance rates are all in the single digits We're talking four four to eight percent and the only one you get to like the 20th 25th school. It's like 10% So good luck getting into a top school in the United States unless you're a really rich legacy student Or you cured malaria while fighting gun violence And seriously, even some rich celebrity kids couldn't get in on their own merit They needed five hundred thousand dollars in bribes, you know to get their kids into schools like USC which is okay, but come on Georgetown great school, but you know, come on It's not that great and in the USC incident was like five hundred thousand dollar bribe for rowing and then the tennis Bribe was like seven hundred thousand dollars.

I mean, that's just nuts So I said it to you and to everyone else with kids What is the point of trying to grind so hard in middle school and high school to try and get into a top? American University with a 10% or lower acceptance rate when you can be an average student and still get into a top five Canadian University, I mean it's as if everybody gets a trophy in Canada and It's probably true for the universities because if you think about their customs and the government the way it's set up You know, they're very welcoming of immigrants.

They are Subsidizing they've got universal health care They've got high tax rates. So it's a much more socialistic society to help everybody and So given that's the case. It makes sense to go apply to Canadian universities with a 40 to 60 percent acceptance rate Given they're more accepting right?

But also the reputations of the top Canadian universities are higher than their respective acceptance rates indicate I don't think most Americans and most American employers realize how high those acceptance rates are and how big of a difference they are between American top universities So I recommend applying to these universities Look at my friend my softball friend.

He went to UBC. It's a great school but again 40 plus acceptance rate and he makes probably a hundred twenty thousand dollars as a software engineer here down in America and then my Goldman Classmate who probably makes or who's been making over a million dollars since she was 33 years old and she's now like 42 years old And she went to McGill University and some people have criticized me for saying well Look, you're not gonna be able to pay the local tuition rates of like sixty five hundred or five thousand dollars a year Well, that's true.

You've got to Immigrate to Canada and be a resident for one or two years to be eligible but I think that's worthwhile sacrifice to be instantly a millionaire or save on having to accumulate more than 1.2 75 million dollars in capital or Alternatively, you can just accept that you're gonna have to pay the international tuition Which is still about ten thousand dollars a year cheaper than comparable top rated universities while having a similar level of reputation so Canada Wonderful wonderful country I think all parents and students should consider and this is something that I've been thinking about so much since I became a father is What is the life of my son gonna look like in?

15 to 25 years given globalization because there's so much more competitive You know, there's wage stagnation It's just it just seems like a tough and competitive world in the future and I think this is one arbitrage opportunity that we're definitely going to encourage and That's to apply to Canadian universities.

So if you have any other arbitrage Opportunities that people aren't aware of maybe shoot me an email. Let's keep it private Let's not tell the world. Otherwise all arbitrage opportunities eventually get whittled away Thanks so much everyone and leave a comment in the post below. Bye