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What factors should internationalization play in your plans? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I thank you for being here. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Today's show is going to be an interview with Andrew Henderson, founder of Nomad Capitalist. And today we're going to stick with the theme of the show and move over to the more radical and I call it juicy side of talking about finance.

I hope you enjoy. You know, there's a an interest that I've had for a very long time of looking at the more hardcore people who are willing to actually put their money where their mouth is and pursue some of the more radical sides of personal finance, which is clear if you've listened to even a single instance of the show.

And there's nothing that I consider to be more interesting and more radical than talking about some of the the ways that you can move internationally and getting outside of the context of the US American reality. But it's an area that I have almost no knowledge in, other than just simply casually reading a little here and there.

And so I've gone out and brought to you the very best person that I could find on it. And it's a man named Andrew Henderson, who writes over at Nomad Capitalist.com. He has an excellent website. And so we brought him on to teach me and teach all of us some of the places to start when it comes to internationalization.

Andrew, welcome to the show. Joshua, thank you for having me. I have to tell you, that intro music is way too hip and way too laid back for me. You know, I ran I found that so randomly when I was I did I had to get intro music, I got to get into music and I found it out randomly found it on a website for somebody.

And I just it gets me dancing. So it usually gets my gets me my energy up when starting the show off. And so I figure it's a win win if it gets me energetic, so I'm glad you like it. I'm ready to roll. So let's start with just give us a little bit about your story.

Where did you are? Have you always been Mr. International Man of Mystery, Mr. James Bond, living abroad, growing up abroad as a foreign expat or share with us a little bit about your story and background? Well, you know, I've shared this story. I'm glad you asked. I grew up in Ohio of all places.

I grew up in the Midwest. It's a place that has a lot of advantages. But also, I think a lot of people, they just kind of it encourages people to kind of nestle in and just kind of look within rather than externally. I was always a little bit different when I was 12 years old.

My parents unwittingly taught me. We were driving around and they taught me what I now call the five magic words. And that is go where you're treated best. They said, listen, we see the trajectory that this country, the United States is heading in. And we believe that there will be a time that people like yourself who want to be successful, who want to accomplish something, who want to be leaders will no longer be welcome here.

They'll no longer be able to do what they do and just to be kind of to be left alone. And obviously, they were very, very right. And so, you know, I took that advice to heart. I did not travel or live all over the world as a kid. I did go to different places in Europe.

I saw some of the things that were happening there when I was 9, 10, 11 years old. And I realized some of the problems that were happening there. But I never entirely knew what direction that my life would take. And so, it wasn't until my early 20s, I just started traveling and experiencing these things and realizing that there is a reality outside of the US propaganda machine, outside of the US financial system, that there are opportunities, there are different ways of thinking, and that you actually can make a living, can survive.

You're not going to get eaten by crocodiles if you set foot outside of the arbitrary lines that our government establishes for us. I feel like I've learned some of my most important lessons from traveling. And you're totally right about, you have a lot of times you have these misconceptions that I don't know why they're built into us, but they certainly seem to be part of the US American culture.

I know we have some international listeners as well, so I don't want to be too US American focused. But we have this idea that somehow we're the best, we're the best in the world, and everywhere else is just scary and dangerous. Until you actually go travel, then you find out that, A, we may not be the best in the world, at least at some things.

There are lots of places that are cleaner, that are more modern, that are more amazing to be, that seem like more fun, and that have way more opportunities. And I don't know why that, it seems to be just a hallmark of so many people that if they go on walkabout, as the Australians would say, if they go on walkabout, they get exposed to a whole new way of thinking.

I know travel certainly did that for me. Well, and here's the problem. You see stuff posted all over Facebook and everywhere else that talks about, "Oh, the US is the wealthiest country and here's why." There's a total disregard for statistics in the Western world, and in the US in particular, because the US is so geographically isolated from other countries, that the United States is not the wealthiest country in the world.

By some standards, it's 12th, it's 13th, whatever the case may be, but there's this need to be number one. No one wants to pay attention to statistics. I'm a numbers guy. I want to go, as I said, go where I'm treated best. Where are the best banks, the most stable banks?

Where is the best place to set up a company? Where is the most free economy? And even for entertainment, where is the best classical music? Where's the best place to live? I don't want to be in the 12th or the 13th best place merely because I need to satisfy some kind of propaganda.

But even if it was, here's the important distinction. Even if it was the wealthiest country in the world, I was just in Hong Kong hosting an event for members of my private club last week. And we had a guy who's a venture capital guy there talking about the difference between hiring in New York City and hiring in Hong Kong, both highly international financial centers, great places to live.

But Hong Kong's way better, in my opinion. I haven't lived in New York, I haven't lived in Hong Kong, but I would move to Hong Kong in an instant before I moved to New York. You're absolutely right. The weather's better, the gambling nearby is better, a lot more diversity, better.

I'm 100% with you. But you hire a guy in New York, fresh out of college, average salary, 60 grand. You pay 20 or 30 grand in payroll tax, because of other nonsense. He goes out, the government takes 20 or 25 grand of his check, then he goes and tries to find an apartment for rent in Manhattan.

Well, he's got 36 or 37 grand left of that money. He's working in Manhattan. Well, guess what the cost of rent in Manhattan just so happens to be? 36, 37 grand a year to live near his office. Isn't it interesting how water seeks its own level? Sure. You go to Hong Kong, you hire a kid out of college for 45 grand, you pay like $1,000 in social costs.

He goes out, he pays very little tax. He's got more money left over than the kid in New York. The employer's happier, everybody's happier. It really comes down to those kinds of things. Where can you go and be treated best? Where is your money treated the best? That's the reality that Western countries don't want to understand, Joshua, is that capital is very fungible.

It goes where it is treated best. That's why it's all in Hong Kong, it's all in Singapore. It's leaving places like New York, like London, even Switzerland, because it's found a better place where it's more well-respected. I learned this in two ways that I found interesting, and I'm sure you would have experience with both of them.

One of them, I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, and I worked professionally as a financial advisor here locally for about six years. As part of that work, I had opportunity to sit with a portfolio manager for a private family office for a Palm Beach family. I used to walk across Palm Beach through the financial district and around Worth Avenue when I was growing up in college just for the evening walk to get to the beach.

I got to meet a few different people that work in some of the local family offices for some of the wealthy families. I got to be closer with this one person, again, who was part of about a five-person team for this private family office for one individual family. He shared with me some of the projects that they were working on.

This was during the real estate bust in the United States about four or five years ago. They were actively building a bunch of real estate projects, but all of them were condo projects in India. It opened up. It's something that most people, the average client on the street would talk to and say, "Well, real estate's a terrible investment." Well, wait a second.

Real estate's not necessarily a terrible investment. It's just you might not want to be building condos in Miami at the moment. That's a glutted market. But there are some very smart people, very sophisticated, building some amazing real estate projects in India. You just have to have your eye open to it.

I always think of that example when I read your work because it seems like that's what you're heavily focused on. Boy, you're exactly right. You know the phrase, "There's always a bull market somewhere." People get so bogged down. For years, I was bogged down with this minutiae as well, where you live in the United States and you say, "Boy, I hope Mitt Romney gets elected and he solves all the problems and he's going to make it great for business again." It's like, "Great." Look what happened the last time.

You elected a guy and you lowered tax rates from 39.6% to 35%. Like, woo-hoo, pop the champagne. You still have Bibles upon Bibles upon Bibles of regulations just from one agency to where you can't build your company's warehouse on somewhere where there's a spotted sparrow that used to live and lay eggs in the 17th century.

That's not gone anywhere. But somehow, if we elect the right people, that's going to solve all of our problems. So rather than get bogged down on that, I finally realized, "Listen, there are places where you can go and not only do they treat you better, lower taxes, lower cost of living." You and I were talking before the show how I had to go to the hospital today here in Malaysia.

It cost like a tiny fraction of what it would cost in the United States. On top of that, yes, there's always a bull market somewhere. So I'm looking at places like Cambodia. I'm looking at places around Asia, some places in Eastern Europe, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, a lot of countries that used to be communists or socialists or have dictators that have learned their lesson and they understand now where their bread is buttered.

Joshua, just look at where I'm at in Kuala Lumpur. You go down 45 minutes by air to Singapore, a country that just celebrated what, almost five decades in existence. They broke away from what was then Malaya, now Malaysia 50 years ago. Look at what they've done in 50 years.

Look at what they did. Nobody thought they stood a chance, 236 square miles of land in the middle of the ocean on the tip of Southeast Asia. Now that Britain was gone, who was going to help them? What was going to happen? Well, they realized we know what motivates people at their core, not government, not taxes, not, well, you should just pay your fair share.

No, they understood that bringing business in, bringing capital in, having people store their gold there, having people bank there, that's what would generate wealth for the people who live there. They understand what really motivates people. And that's what you have to understand. And when you understand that, you can figure out where are people moving, where are people becoming middle class, where are the middle class becoming upper class, where are people becoming new consumers?

And you can go there and invest your money. And the average person will think that you're insane, that, oh, Colombia, that's like, you know, the drug hotspot. But, you know, in my mind, that means that you're doing something right. Right. I have a question about Singapore. I haven't been there yet.

And, but my dad says it's his favorite city in the world. I've been to Disney World before. I have. It's the same thing, but with more banks. Okay. I believe that because I've been to Hong Kong. And I know that at least on Hong Kong Island, that's kind of how I picture much of Singapore being, except prettier, probably, and greener, if that's possible.

How, in your experience being there, because my understanding is that Singapore is incredibly liberty-minded, economically speaking, but incredibly dictatorial when it comes to how they govern the populace. And it seems to be this, almost like the brilliant success of a benevolent dictator. I don't remember who the guy is.

I've got his biography on my reading list of the guy who was, I don't remember the name, but the person who kind of was single-handedly responsible for that transformation. How does Singapore integrate that personal liberty and economic liberty balance and do it so well? Well, I mean, it's a great question that you asked, and it really comes down to the concept that we talk about on Nomadic Capitalist, which is flag theory.

And again, diversifying your different affairs around the world to benefit from the best that each place has to offer. I mean, listen, I personally would not live in Singapore. I don't think. It's expensive. It's almost too clean for me. I like a little bit of grit. I like in Hong Kong where guys are throwing fish across backs, alleyways, and there's some grit, even amongst the great wealth that's there.

But in Singapore, you're right. People are very restricted. They don't sell chewing gum there, for instance. If you drink bottled water on the subway, it's a $500 fine. How do they manage that? I mean, again, listen, at the end of the day, I mean, I sound like, what's the guy in The Simpsons?

I don't watch TV, but Mr. Burns, is it? Because it's all about the money all the time. But in reality, when it comes to economics, it is all about the money all the time. They're not, you know, it's not so anti-liberty that you can't live there, but it's not a place that I personally would want to live.

So how do they manage it? Well, I mean, people there, they're perfect for the banking and the financial services industry. There is a growing bed of entrepreneurship, but it's not the most entrepreneurial country because it is kind of robotic in that sense. But I mean, the answer to that is not to think of it in the way that my parents wanted me to do when I was 12 years old, where they said, "Well, go to New Zealand, that's the next best place." No, you go to New Zealand and you cherry pick the best parts.

You go to Singapore and you cherry pick the best parts. Then you come here to Malaysia and you cherry pick the best parts. So you diversify your affairs to where you're only keeping your money in Singapore, but you're not living there. You're not paying $5,000 a month for an apartment.

You're not paying $80,000 a year to register your car, or I guess $80,000 once to register a car every time you buy one. I mean, you're not doing any of that. So listen, every country on earth has the benefit of a certain number of tax slaves living within its borders that largely are just going to stay there and do whatever they're told to do.

If you want to be different and you want to escape that system and you want true personal and economic freedom, you have to know how to harvest the best things that each place has to offer. Explain the concept of flag theory and share as far as where you see some for instituting for each flag, where you see some of the global opportunities in today's world.

It started out a number of decades ago as three flag theory. And I believe that the three was, you have your business based somewhere, you have a residency in a country with low taxes, you have citizenship in a country that doesn't tax your worldwide income. And so basically what you do is you basically work as this perpetual tourist where you're not really a formal resident of wherever it is you live.

So I mean, if you're running a business that is global in nature or online in nature, you can have that business in a place like Hong Kong or Singapore, which is low tax and very well developed. You can have it in a jurisdiction that's no tax like Nevis, Seychelles, there's all kinds of them popping up now.

Gambia is trying to become an offshore financial center. So you have your company there and then you live in a country, for example, where I live in Malaysia, where income I earn outside of Malaysia is not taxed. They have a territorial tax system. If I were to get a job here, I would pay tax.

But if I have money from a Hong Kong company, that money's not sent to me here in Malaysia, I don't pay any tax. Then if you can get a citizenship that doesn't tax you based on where you live, for example, anything other than the United States, basically, then you don't have to report any of your income overseas to that country.

And so those are some of the ways that people do it by getting second passports, by getting residencies in low tax countries, moving their business offshore, moving their banking offshore. And there are so many other flags that you can do from the location that your website server is in for greater privacy.

I mean, there's so many different things that you can do from banking, where you store your gold, a country that respects gold ownership. I mean, you can think of any number of different things to protect yourself, all the way down to, as I said, we do have a Philharmonic here in Kuala Lumpur.

But when I want quality classical music, quality opera, I go to Vienna, I go to Riga, I go to Budapest. So figuring out how to make that work for you can really enhance the quality of your life and put a lot more money in your pocket to where that 60 grand a year that you might make in New York, it all becomes your money to do what you want and make the change that you want to make.

We spend a lot of time on my show talking about the nuts and bolts of good planning, especially good tax planning, how to legally avoid as many taxes as possible through effective planning. And I don't even mind going over to the tax evasion side. I've interviewed one person on that, and I find it a topic of great interest.

But I do certainly think sometimes about the value of just simply saying, "Why don't we just dispense with the whole US-American tax code? If I don't like it, why don't I just go somewhere else?" But the problem is that the US, is it the only country in the world that taxes your income, or is it just one of the few that taxes your income no matter where you are in it, no matter where you are, that basically as long as you're a US citizen, you've got the hooks in you.

You're a slave, you're a tax slave. It is basically the only country where you are a slave until you cease to be a United States citizen. There are some countries that make it a little bit harder where you have to cut all of your ties, Canada, Australia, where you actually need to prove certain things in order to get off the hook.

But other than the war-torn country of Eritrea, which was a breakaway state from Ethiopia, it was in civil war, in a bloody coup for years, other than Eritrea, which doesn't even enforce their policy, the United States is the only one that does tax people based on their worldwide income, and that makes it difficult.

There are ways to get around it, and I'm not a tax guy. I go around the world and spend all the money I have to meet all the experts and to bring together their knowledge and aggregate what they know, so I'm not the tax guy. But if you live overseas and you're spending all of your time out of the US, even as a US citizen, you can exempt about $100,000 a year from US income tax.

If you set up some of the offshore structures that we talk about, there are different ways that you can do that, and you can get pretty intricate. You don't really need to in most cases, but you can. And you can exempt more of that money to where-- I mean, look at what Google and Apple and Facebook and all those companies do.

They make money. They run it through Ireland. Then they bounce it to the Netherlands, down to here and over there, and then they pay 2%, 3%, 4% in the EU. They park it there, or actually, they move it down to the Caribbean and park it there. And then as long as it sits there, hey, that's how it works.

You can use a much simpler version of that structure to essentially live tax-free. And I think that you're exactly right, Joshua. I mean, look, people are in-- they're outraged right now in the United States. All the politicians, all the socialists are all shooting their mouths off about how evil it is that Burger King or Walgreens wants to leave the country.

Who forced these companies to be there? Who forced any of us to pay a tribute to the mafia merely because we were born within their borders? I mean, if you live in Compton, if you're born in Compton in California and you're in some drug gang's neighborhood, do you have the right to leave and not have to pay them to, quote-unquote, "protect you" anymore?

Of course you do. But somehow when it comes to countries and governments, it's considered unpatriotic to leave, and it's your lifetime obligation to pay, something that you never signed up for. And that's where I say, no. You have the ability and the right to go wherever you want to go where you feel is right for you and play by their set of rules, because one mafia set of rules isn't better than the next.

It seems so strange to me, because when you actually look at the whole tax debate, you have basically two camps that are at least—the two camps that are giving media exposure in our country is, A, people who say, "Listen, everybody should pay their fair share," and fair share is defined as more for the rich, so therefore raising taxes isn't going to hurt revenues, and so we should just simply raise taxes and tax everybody and have the services and benefits we need.

On the other side, you have people that say, "Listen, everyone's paying too much in taxes. We should lower taxes across the board, and then that will stimulate economic activity." And so depending on where you are in the political cycle, you have this constant battle where people are going back and forth and saying—the people who say, "Hey, listen, lower tax rates.

That'll stimulate economic activity." The other people saying, "No, it doesn't work. Trickle down doesn't work." But then what happens is that everyone seems to acknowledge that it works when it's politically convenient. So that means that if your municipality is run by a very confiscatory person, a left-leaning person who says, "We're going to get the money," well, as soon as we have an opportunity to attract a major sports team, then the first thing that we do is we say, "Well, we're going to give you a tax holiday.

We're going to waive these taxes to attract the sports team." Or you have, what was it, Obama with the, "Well, we need to stimulate the economy, so we're going to lower employment taxes. So we're going to drop the Social Security tax rate by two points for individuals, and that's going to stimulate." And so you look at it and you say, everyone is lying through their teeth, and it's almost like there's an entirely false argument where everyone acknowledges that a complete laissez-faire trickle-down theory, yes, it certainly has perhaps problems.

There are certainly things that need to be accounted for, and it's not quite as simple as the people who espouse that theory would say. But on the other hand, everyone, when you need growth, everyone agrees that, "Well, we've got to cut taxes." I don't understand why we don't just simply transform the entire system.

And one of the things I'm most excited about is the news that the corporate inversions are getting right now, like you said, with Burger Kings, with Walgreens, because this is another one that is so blindingly obvious, is that there is so much money on the large U.S. corporate balance sheets that just sits abroad.

And unless there's another repatriation holiday, the money just sits abroad, and they never bring it back to the U.S. So I don't understand why—I mean, I do understand. It's called politics, and it's called promises, and it's called perception. But it just seems—I scratch my head at it, and I throw up my hand and say, "I can't fix the system, but I can fix my situation, and I don't have to participate, and I can simply choose to live the good life, and I'm not interested in supporting an empire.

It doesn't work for me." Look, you're exactly right. And the question is, who owns you? Are we sovereign individuals? Should we have the right to do as we please, provided that we're not hurting other people? Or are we supposed to be the tax slaves of these mafias that draw stripes in the sand and say, "This is our territory"?

And so, I mean, you made a very good point. I was talking to some people who moved here from France yesterday, and they were talking about how there's not very many small businesses there, there's not very much entrepreneurship there. And why would there be? Because to start up a business, you have to pay a gazillion dollars in taxes, registration fees, go through a Byzantine approval process with every regulatory agency, with obnoxious bureaucrats who weigh you down the entire way.

Then you hire people, and you can't fire them in most circumstances. You have to prepay salaries. You have to pay, if you're successful, if you manage to go through all that and have a business that people want, and you can find anyone in France with two shekels left to pay you to buy your product because they haven't been taxed into oblivion, then for the privilege of you creating jobs and a successful business, you get to pay 75% of your income at the high levels.

And so, gee, I wonder why there are no businesses there. But let's put that aside, Josh. I mean, sure, that's why there's not entrepreneurship in France, and there is entrepreneurship in Singapore. But at the end of the day, who cares? Whose right is it to take your money? If the principle of slavery is that someone comes and forces you to work for them and takes 100% of what you earn, then does that mean that we're half slaves if we're giving the government 50% of our money?

You're exactly right. You don't owe it to anybody to contribute your wealth. Now, I guess you can do the going galt route, and you can say, hey, I'm just going to stop producing. I believe that's also economically immoral. You have the obligation to do the best for yourself. So if you're capable of producing, you should not just stop and say, I'm just going to live under a bridge somewhere.

You should go somewhere where you can do what you want to do, do what you were meant to do, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. And there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. And of course, these politicians have a big problem with it, because they're on the other end.

And guess what? As you mentioned, yes, they take the money and they give it to their cronies. You, the business guy, who has no political connections, is getting screwed against the wall. But meanwhile, the guy who owns the big sports team, the guy with all the money that they claim to hate, the evil rich guy, he's getting kickbacks from his crony politicians because they're in bed together.

There's a word for that, Joshua. It's called fascism. Hard to admit, though, right? Land of the free and home of the brave. I would say with all of these things, it strikes people, even just when it comes to whether taxation or all these things, at least for me, my personal path, I'm not quite as prone to...I think a lot.

I don't necessarily get upset about a lot of things, I just think. But the interesting thing is that I feel like I have been so conditioned that, just simply growing up in the US American culture, I feel like I've been so conditioned that even to ask questions, people jump on you.

So it's interesting. When I ask questions about the history of education, the history of tax policy, the history of government, when I ask questions about the history of the big ideas, concepts like patriotism, where did this whole idea of patriotism come from? What does it mean? I just start thinking through it.

What happens is that in most conversations, our knee-jerk reaction, or at least what I've experienced is that most people's knee-jerk reaction is to simply say, "Well, just to jump on you instead of engaging with the idea." And it's really remarkable to me because you start asking questions and you just simply say, "Well, why does this exist?

Why do I give over this authority?" And like I said, you just get people to immediately jump on it instead of stopping and saying, "Oh, wait a second. Why do we do things that way? Why don't I just simply choose to do what's in my best interest?" >> Again, I love these countries that have overcome adversity.

And it's unfortunate what some of these people have gone through. I mean, you go to Cambodia, it's very heartbreaking what they've gone through. But I think that a good reset every once in a while is important in a culture for people to be reminded of why things are the way they are.

I talk frequently about the idea that the United States is the Paris Hilton of countries or the socialite of countries where they're kind of rich, not as rich as they think they are, but they're relatively wealthy, but they don't know why. And so what they do is they dump on everything that made them wealthy in the first place.

I mean, go back 101 years in the United States, no income tax. Somehow, there were roads, there was a post office, people were going to school, things were being invented. I mean, how long ago was it that they said, "Let's shut down the patent office because we've invented everything that could possibly ever be invented." Somehow, all of that was done with no income tax.

People were left alone. But everyone got away from that. They forgot about that. And you're right. When you mention now the concept that, "Hey, maybe this place is going in the tubes," even the people who agree with you, "Yeah, we've got our problems," but they'll say, "It's still the best country on earth." It's such an egotistical thing.

Now, if you want to be egotistical and you want to suck off the government doll and have your job and have two cents left over at the end of every paycheck and be a drone, that's one thing. It's a great system for you. But imagine the odds. I mean, the ego these people have to think that out of 194 countries, they just so happened to be born in the best one.

I mean, isn't that fascinating that you, of all people, were born in the best country? Do you think maybe it's because it's the only country that you know? No, of course not. Are these people doing empirical data? Are they studying? Like, "Hey, look at this number." No. It's emotional.

It's nothing but emotional. Well, you see the same thing in the United States. I mean, the amazing thing about the United States or Canada or Europe is that—well, Europe is not a good example—but Canada, U.S., Australia, large China, large individual countries where there's a huge land mass all under one flag is that you can live easily, easily move anywhere from anywhere in the United States to anywhere in the United States with the minimum of fuss.

The only upset to your situation is going to be your social structure, your circle of contacts and the people that you are with. But if you don't like the city, you can easily move to the country. If you don't like the heat, you can easily move north. If you don't like the humidity, you can move west.

But yet, how many people actually are willing to sit down and say, "Ah, the small town where I grew up or the big city where I grew up, what I'm familiar with might not be the best, and it might be simply easier just simply to move and save a ton.

Why don't I move out of Chicago and move to Texas? Or why don't I move out of Chicago, and if I want to keep the same climate, move west or move east or move to somewhere else where I can get treated a little bit better but retain the things that are important to me?" We usually don't start with this comprehensive planning idea.

Rather, we just simply stay stuck with what we know. I've been interviewed on a lot of shows like yours, both the political side and the business entrepreneurial side. When people say, "Well, what's your advice to the average person listening?" I can't motivate people. I can't force you to make a change in your life.

The answer is, you just have to do it. Everyone has an excuse. "Oh, I got four kids. Oh, my parents live here. Oh, well, in three" – whatever it is, do you want to be free or do you not? Look, I'm a pragmatic guy. I'm willing to make a few compromises for the point of enjoying my own life or whatever the case may be.

But you talk about these big countries. I'd love to be from a small country. I mean imagine if you were a citizen of Uruguay or something. Do you think that the IRS of Uruguay – and I'm not encouraging people to break the law because the laws in most of these countries are much more favorable than where you're from.

But do you think that the IRS of Uruguay is chasing people around the world? "Hey, you don't have a bank account in Singapore, do you? You better tell us. You better pay us. You better give us our cut." No. I mean being from small countries in many cases is much, much, much better because again the smaller countries are more responsive to people's needs.

I mean you can't do this as an American anymore. But for years places like Liechtenstein and Dora were the best places for people to bank because those places had nothing to offer but banking. So they became the best at banking. Imagine if you were from a place like that.

Imagine if you banked in a place like that. Imagine if you had a website in a place like that. To protect your privacy, stuff like that. I mean it's oftentimes the smallest countries that offer the best advantages to people because they understand they don't have a choice. They have to treat you well.

Countries like the US, Russia, Brazil, I mean places like this, they have hundreds of millions of tax slaves. They don't – I mean they have to be competitive to a certain extent but they can also just milk the system to a certain extent and just suck off the fruits of all their citizens' labor.

And as long as they can keep their citizens in the blissful ignorance of thinking that rah, rah America, let's pay our money to the government because if we didn't we would just be like those savages in Singapore where they're living in mud huts and walking down streets of dirt and all kinds of horrible – tigers are attacking them.

Imagine if we didn't pay taxes, we'd be like those people, those uncivilized hunks. But that's what they try and convince you to do and that's why some of these smaller countries are oftentimes better. That's why the smaller countries like the Caribbean, what have you, are the ones leading the stuff that I talk about.

Why did you choose Asia? I've been all over. And personally I think that Latin America, South America, there are a lot of great opportunities there. I happen to be very impatient and there's nothing better to me than flying into Hong Kong airport, getting off that plane, going into like the 7-Eleven and you're in and out of that cash register in three seconds.

I mean it's just hurry, hurry, hurry, rush, rush, rush. I love that. I love the efficiency of it. I'm an efficiency guy which for me the Latin world is a bit too slow. But witnessing what's happening right now in Asia is amazing and I would feel like I was missing out if I wasn't being a part of this transformation because I really think it is one of the most significant economic transformations in modern history.

What's happening right now in Asia and especially here in Southeast Asia where you've got people in China going from lower class to middle class. You've got 40,000 millionaires being created all the time in China. You've got places like Cambodia where again, I mean 40 years ago the place was an agrarian utopia so they said which was as we know, government uses code word.

That was code word for take everyone into the bush and shoot them. And look at what they're at now. I mean they're slowly and steadily growing and becoming wealthier and wealthier. Now they're buying cars. People who have motorbikes are moving up to cars. People who are walking with the motorbikes.

There's so much happening here. There's so much opportunity. I love being a part of it and on top of that it's a fantastic place to live because you can live a New York City lifestyle in cities like Kuala Lumpur for a fraction of the New York City price. You get left alone.

The governments here aren't perfect but you can live the kind of lifestyle that I talk about where you're not really on the radar. You're here as kind of a visitor and you can have a lot of freedom that way. Do you have to have an online business or do you see opportunities for people to set up local businesses that are bricks and mortar type of operations?

I'm a big fan of bricks and mortar. I'm not really the biggest advocate of online. I mean obviously I think it's a great model for those who want to do that but I think that you can absolutely do more than that. I mean before I even realized it, I had a location independent business when I was very young.

I ran a broadcasting business where we helped radio stations sell their unsold inventory and it became a rather influential company in its industry before I exited that company. But once I got that off the ground, I would be traveling in Vienna and making phone calls at night and night to guys in Chicago where it was two in the afternoon.

So if you have a consulting business, if you have things where you sell products to other businesses, if you're doing import and export, you can absolutely run that location independent. It doesn't have to be based online and I think there are a lot of very successful online businesses that are merely using the online aspect or the app aspect as a conduit, i.e.

Uber, Airbnb. Those services all deal in physical product, physical deliverables but they're using the online model to facilitate that. But I do think there are also a lot of opportunities. I mean I've talked at length about Cambodia. Columbia is another place I think where you can go and start a business and be very successful.

It depends on how far down the totem pole you're willing to go. I mean Laos is a place where people are clamoring for pretty much everything you can possibly imagine because it's either not available there or it's super duper expensive and anyone who wants it flies to Thailand. That's just one example.

There are countries like that all around the world where you can go in and say, "Listen, I'm going to deliver jeans to people's houses on a motorbike and that's my business." I think there are a lot of brick and mortar opportunities. Again, the further undeveloped you go, Laos, Africa, Myanmar, places in South America like Paraguay.

I mean the less developed, the more opportunity, the more money that can be made. Mongolia was one of them at one point. But there are places that are a little bit more developed. Cambodia really doesn't seem very adventurous to me anymore. Places like Chile, Panama, there's still plenty of money being made there.

I talk to guys every day who are members of my private club who come to my events. Some of them are doubling their money every year. They're starting businesses and selling them for 10, 20 times a couple of years later. I mean there's so much money being made outside of the US and it's so much easier to get started because you're not paying the higher rent in San Francisco.

You're not hiring people for 60 grand a year. I'm glad you brought up the point about like you alluded to it more but I'd like to just emphasize it. Online businesses, I think, online business is in many ways becoming maybe a misnomer. It seems to me that in the past people would think about online as, "Oh, it's a separate thing." And now if your business doesn't have a strategy, online is just simply becoming in some ways just a communications medium.

And so I think there are many, many more types of businesses that can be pursued, that can be run virtually that aren't traditional virtual businesses. The earliest example that I thought of, that I can remember personally coming across is I knew somebody, I think I met them eight or nine years ago, and this person was an attorney in Chicago and a corporate attorney so mainly involved with documents and mergers and dealing with all the paperwork, appropriate paperwork for on the corporate side.

No litigation and nothing like that. And this attorney was doing well and he enjoyed spending time down in Mexico. Well, he wound up--he committed some crime of some kind and he could--he basically can't come back to the U.S. If he comes back to the U.S., he's got to deal with this crime.

It's a fairly minor crime. I think it was a non-violent, some stupid drug crime or something like that. And he--all what he chose to do is this was back when, what was that, Vonage was brand new and he just got a Vonage phone number for Chicago area code, got a decent access internet connection, and he continued to simply run his entire law practice just simply from Mexico, working with the Chicago clients.

They didn't care if whether they saw him or not. They just needed the documents to be right. And he's able to do the entire thing from abroad and multiply the effect of his income because of living abroad, spend less time at work, and have a better lifestyle. And even in the six years that I was doing financial planning, working with clients, I noticed a--and this was from 2008 to 2014.

I noticed a dramatic change in people's comfort level with virtual connection. When I started working as a financial advisor, A, the technology was still a little bit clunky and you needed to do in-person meetings. You needed to establish rapport. You needed to have that face-to-face connection. I switched to where in 2013, I almost never left my office.

And I preferred, as long as a client had some connection with me previously, I preferred to never meet in person. And they preferred it because our lives are so busy, so hectic, and so it was easier for them to schedule an hour, sit in front of the computer, do an online meeting, and a phone presentation, and it was actually more effective than being together in person.

Well, there's no reason why I can't do that from the Cayman Islands. There's no reason why I can't do that from anywhere in the world. And everything, it seems, is going that direction more and more, with the exception of something where you need a physical service provided or a physical--yeah, a physical service.

And even that, there are ways to improve that process with the virtual environment. I mean, it just opens up a world of possibilities for any attorney, any CPA, any financial advisor, things like that, as long as you can deal with the regulation. And that's what always happens, is the regulation gets in your way.

But smart people have been getting around regulation since regulators first started making it. And that's the point. Of course, that's the point. I mean, right. I mean, just get rid of the whole bunch of it, nothing would change. But you make a very interesting point. Listen, there are always going to be guys who they want to move to Cambodia and they want to spend five grand or open a bar on the beach.

The good news is you can do that there. And when you ask people, "What about minimum wage? What about regulations? What about permits?" Huh? So, I mean, that aspect is easier if that's the kind of life you want to lead. But let's be honest. I mean, you have to have the confidence to say, "Here's who I'm targeting," and not be everything to everybody.

In my business, in Nomad Capitalist, we do have some guys in my club called the Nomad Society that run eight and nine-figure businesses all around the world. But that's not really my target market. I'm glad they have them. They contribute a lot. I mean, the members get a lot of value from them.

But the reality is I'm someone who's trying to reach out to the digital nomad, the younger guys, the entrepreneurs, people who have half a million dollars, a million dollars, and they need to protect it and they need to grow it. That's my niche. So if you're the family office, look, I practically flunked out of a party school, please.

I mean, no family office wants me advising them. They want guys with better pedigrees than I have. So I have the confidence to say, "Hey, here's my market." And that's what you can do too. There are, I mean, how many guys out there, how many people like me who are entrepreneurs living all around the world here in Asia, in Bangkok, in Vietnam, all over, need help with their taxes?

To them, it's a commodity. They just need someone who knows it. If you set up a website and say, "Hey, listen, I got the gold, the silver, and the platinum package. Pick which one you want. Send me your documents. Scan them. I'll review them and I'll send it back to you." I mean, what do they care?

You just have to have the confidence to say, "That's my market. I'm going to be the guy for that group of people." And in a world of essentially 7 billion people, when you're essentially opened up over the coming decades, granted many billions of those don't yet have internet connection and many billions of them are going to speak other languages, but in a world of 7 billion, if you only need one in a million to be your client, you have a huge marketplace and you really can specialize.

And when you take instead of the search function, I went out to my driveway yesterday and somebody had dropped off the local yellow pages, but they hadn't tied the bag well and it rained. And so the thing was soaking wet anyway. And so it made the decision easier instead of thinking for a moment, "Oh, maybe I should keep this thing," which I have never used.

It made the decision easier to simply toss it right in the recycling bin and it didn't even go into my house. So… How did you find me then, Joshua? Exactly. I mean, your marketplace with a few keywords and some expertise and then building it up, you really can build a huge, huge attraction marketing for anything that you're doing.

It's an amazing world we live in. And again, I mean, listen, if you're the guy who is the buy here, pay here car lot or the ambulance chaser targeting the Hispanic community, like maybe you need a physical presence. Although I do think that some of those companies are going to be innovated in the same way that every other industry has seen innovation.

And there'll be someone who comes in and says, "We're the ambulance chaser. You don't even have to come in and see. We'll just handle your case remotely." So I think that'll happen. But there's so many opportunities to also just be the kind of me too and run businesses. And again, I mean, I just flew the other day.

I try and avoid them because I like to fly a little bit more class. I'm kind of a snob in that way. But I flew back to Kuala Lumpur from Japan the other day on AirAsia. It cost me 83 bucks for a seven-hour flight. I mean, think of how far away these two places are.

Eighty-three bucks. What's one of the secrets that AirAsia uses to keep its fares amazingly low? One of the secrets is they're incorporated in Labuan, which is the low-tax hub here in Malaysia, where you can basically cap out your entire company's tax at about $6,000 a year. Now, if you're running a very small online business, that's $6,000 too much in many cases.

But nevertheless, imagine the advantage that AirAsia now has against United Airlines, which flies from Japan to Singapore, who has to pay U.S. tax and deal with all the regulations and have U.S. flight crew and seniority and labor unions. Who do you think is going to win? I mean, if you had to choose which airline you wanted to fly in, forget about the fact that AirAsia has 23-year-olds in tight red skirts and United has women who are 63 years old and barking at you with a megaphone.

Forget that. Who's going to pay five times the price to pay for United's obligations to labor unions and big government? I certainly am not. And the market is saying that because United and other American carriers are retreating from this market largely. They may be flying more flights from San Francisco to new cities, but they're not flying any of their older routes largely from point to point within Asia, because they can't compete, because they have this burden.

And so, I mean, if you're a guy who says, "Listen, I see an opportunity for something that's already being done well by another business, but they're based in San Francisco. They're hiring guys for 100 grand a year. They're paying California taxes," which I call brutal prison rape. I mean, you can come in and just by the virtue of setting up shop in Labuan, for instance, you can shave 30 percent off right off the top, probably more.

Right. And for anybody who's never flown a non-U.S. airline, once you fly a non-U.S. airline, you will never ever want to fly a U.S.-based airline again. I was on a low-cost carrier flying from Hong Kong to Vietnam last year, an hour and 45-minute flight. I got two meals. And they're like, "Oh, can we get you anything else, Mr.

Henderson?" I mean, the service is amazing. And then you get into Turkish Airlines, Singapore Airlines. I was in the Istanbul lounge waiting for a business class flight, the guys playing a piano next to the brick oven cooking pizzas. That's amazing. I'm going to give you one of my projects, and I'm interested to hear where you would go with it.

I think a lot about the idea of how to get a world-class education. And I do not care about certification. I care about education. If you were to design an international MBA project, and this is an entirely self-designed education in international business, and I'm going to give you a $60,000 budget, and you can have anywhere from two to four years, and if you need to stretch the budget a little bit beyond that.

We're going to take care of all of the academic knowledge with books and actually spending our some time reading and learning. If you were going to go back and, knowing what you now know, encourage someone on how to develop a knowledge of international business, what course of study, where would you encourage them to go?

How would you approach that project? Again, remember you're talking to a guy who at 18 years old said, "I slept through much of high school. I should have done much better, but now my grades are such that I can either go and start a business right now, or I can go and hang out with girls who wear shorts with one-inch seams, and that's why they moved to Arizona.

I'm the guy who flunked out of that school practically. International MBA, I'm like a scrappy entrepreneur, Joshua. I don't design a program. How your brain works. Here's what I tell people all the time when they say, "Well, what should I do to find an opportunity?" Let me tell you.

I was just meeting with about a dozen guys who were in my club in Hong Kong last week. I came out of there with a dozen different business ideas. I was in Cambodia for a week last month, and I probably had a dozen different business ideas that could all probably be pretty successful.

When people say, "Well, what should I do?" 60 grand. What is this? Donald Trump overlanding helicopters in the top of buildings, Joshua, please. Save up five grand. How badly do you want it? Go and live in—I mean, save up three grand. Go and live in a place with no hot water if that's what it takes, and just live and move through some of these emerging economies.

You won't need two to four years. You might need two to four months. You might need a year. Obviously, not every venture is successful. For me, I'm all about results. That's all that matters to me. I went to the school of press one for sales because sales matters more than everything else.

If you don't sell, you can't do anything else. My MBA program is get on a plane, do whatever it takes, live as cheaply as you have to to make it happen, and figure out where do you want to focus. Do you want to focus in Asia? Do you want to focus in Latin America?

Do you want to focus in Africa? What is it that you want to do? You go there, and you just kind of—it sounds like management by walking around, but it's kind of like learning through osmosis. You just kind of sit, and the opportunities just kind of come to you in these places.

I mean, it's really that easy. From there, I'm all about intuition and instincts. You got to try something. You got to get on the ground, try something. Start a bar with $1,000. See what happens. See how you can—see how to market. See how to—what different things drive sales more than others.

You'll begin to develop this entrepreneurial intuition to understand what it is that drives sales and drives consumer behavior. From then, once you have that, I mean once I developed that, I could be in radio. I could be in home services. I could be in financial services. I've started numerous businesses in each of those industries and helped people start other businesses as well because I had that basic intuition that could only be gained not in a classroom, not from books, but from actually being there, doing it, seeing what worked, and seeing what smacked me in the face.

That's an excellent—I agree with you 100%. It's an excellent non-answer. No, I'm glad you went that way. I see so many times—I see these threads, and you see so many people, not everybody, but so many people. They just go and spend some time traveling. I read a book in high school called Adventure Capitalist, and this was by Jim Rogers.

Jim Rogers made his mark as an investor, and then he sat down, then he went, and he built this ridiculous four-wheel drive Mercedes convertible and hooked a trailer to it and then drove around the world with his girlfriend and just talked about—in that book, Adventure Capitalist, talked about what he learned from that trip.

You're exactly right because we place such a precious—we place too little value on experience and too much on book knowledge. I'm a victim of this myself, is that a little bit of experience brings a lot more actual knowledge sometimes than all of the book learning put together, so it's a good answer.

Here's the other thing. Listen, you see this frequently discussed on, for example, the TV show Shark Tank. I enjoy this show. It's becoming too Hollywood, but they talk about the concept that if you don't create a business that sells, you can't help anyone. This speaks to what I talk about in the offshore world.

You see these guys who come on, and they say, "I'm not willing to manufacture this product in China." They say, "Why?" "Because I want people in Lebanon, Tennessee to have jobs." "Well, what if you're priced so uncompetitively that no one wants it and you can't create any jobs?" "Well, that's the way it goes." You're an idiot.

You have to create wealth. You have to create success before you can enjoy this other stuff. I'm not opposed to book learning, but I think that having accomplished what I've accomplished now, I'm in a much better position to go out and say, "You know what? I'm going to go out, and I'm going to study Buddhism," or "I'm going to go and learn from a master tea expert in China about how the tea is steeped and how to enjoy the tea and how over each course of drinking the tea, the flavor changes." Right now, I'm seeking out an expert on scotch for when we do an event in Ireland.

I'm going to fly over to Scotland. There's a lot of book knowledge that I'm interested in learning about how different things in the world work, but for me to go to some program and learn how that stuff works and have it forced down my throat, I don't think it helps anyone.

To me, it's really the same thing as saying, "You have to learn philosophy alongside learning business or else you'll never be a successful business person." Total nonsense. Learn what you want to learn. It's the true free market of knowledge. I love it. Last question, and then with the last question, I'll give you a chance to mention your site and any resources and things that you would like people to know about.

The last question is this. The reason I live where I live is because of the social environment that I'm engaged in, and I think that's probably the same for most people. What have you learned? Let me not prejudge. It seems to me that you've had to change your social environment as far as who you're spending time with and where you're spending time in order to live the kind of lifestyle that you live.

What have been the good things about that? What have been the tough things about that? How have you handled some of that? How would you encourage somebody who is seriously considering making a dramatic change in their lifestyle in order to pursue a more off-the-beaten path, but they're worried about their social environment?

It's one of those things that I don't know that I can talk to you about how you should deal with it. You just have to deal with it. I look at, for example, when I was in the radio business, the talent side. So many people said, "I would love to be on the radio, but I live here in Los Angeles.

How do I get started?" The answer was always the same. You need to move to the middle of nowhere in West Virginia, work at a 500-watt AM radio station broadcasting the agriculture report, and you need to work your way up. Now, with the internet and all that, that's becoming an antiquated model and then we can have a podcast.

For years, that was how the model worked. Everyone said, "Well, what am I going to do about my friends?" Well, apparently, you don't want to be on the radio that badly. There's a mantra that I use in my life. It's a great success tip. The people who are successful do things that unsuccessful people aren't willing to do.

Do you want to be successful or not? How badly do you want it? So I can't tell you that your social life won't change. What I can say is I personally enjoy and I've been able to meet people from all around the world and see so many different cultures and have a greater understanding of why things work the way they do.

To me, that's much more valuable intelligence because you can always make new friends. I mean, you really get to choose where you want to go. I'm a big city guy, so I'm not going to go and live in the rice paddies of Laos like one of my friends does.

That's the social circle he wants to be in. I want to be with people from all over the world. I live in Kuala Lumpur. It's a very diverse city. So you can recreate the social structure anywhere. Obviously, with today's technology, it's not like I've told all my friends, "You're dead to me," and I never speak to them again.

I speak to them frequently on things like Skype. But I mean, the question really boils down to, I mean, do you want to make excuses or do you want to take action? Which is more important to you? If living in your town is more important than saving money on taxes or seeing the world or marrying a Filipino wife or whatever the case may be, then that's your personal decision.

Everything has consequences. But I can tell you that I think that the payoff is much better in terms of knowledge, in terms of freedom, in terms of wealth. You just have to decide which of those things is more important to you. It's certainly easier today to keep contact with people than it was five years ago.

It's an amazing world we live in. Andrew, thank you for coming on. Any last words? Mention your websites and feel free to plug anything that you would like to plug, any resources that you have that would be helpful to people who would like to get to know more about you and your work, any products that you have.

Feel free to share any of that with the audience. Nomadcapitalist.com, we've got all kinds of daily field reports. We've got, I think, more words than the Bible now in terms of information on how to go offshore, how to get second passports, how to do all the stuff I'm talking about, live a more free life.

What I'm doing in January of 2015 is I'm putting on my second big event. We're doing a live event in Cancun called Passport to Freedom, which is an encore presentation to the first one we did in Las Vegas, where I had Peter Schiff and a lot of other names come together, and it was a great event.

We're doing the second event next January in Cancun, PassporttoFreedomevent.com. You can get all the details. This is basically the Woodstock of internationalization, where we're going to have 30 guys dealing in foreign real estate, foreign investments, moving your gold overseas, opening offshore bank accounts, second passports, second residencies, how to start an online business, how to move your business offshore, all that and a lot more.

Basically, ways to grow and protect your money outside of your borders by using the world as your oyster. We're going to have all those guys together in Cancun. PassporttoFreedomevent.com is the website for that. It's a very limited 150-seat event, because I want everyone to be able to have the chance to interact with the speakers personally and actually take action, not just to come and just to learn everything and then go home and not do it, but to be able to come and actually open an offshore bank account before they even get back on the plane.

That's going to be a great time. If someone's serious about doing some of this stuff, the networking opportunities are amazing, because we've got so many highly successful guys who are going to be there, and girls too, of course. I'd love to see some of your listeners in Cancun. That sounds like my kind of event.

Who knows? Maybe I'll show up. I would enjoy it. I'd love to have you. Andrew, thank you for coming on. Keep doing the work that you're doing. Also, I just want to mention you do have a podcast, right? I don't know how regularly you release that show, but if anyone's interested, you do have it as a podcast listener.

You're available in the podcast directories? We do have a radio show on iTunes and absolutely, the Nomad Capitalist Report. We're putting that out every week now. It's my latest rants and raves on the madness that's going on, but we throw in some good actionable information too. We just talked about, interestingly enough, New York real estate, how CNBC is saying how it's going through the roof, and I called them out on how full of crap they are.

That's what we talk about on the show. I appreciate you mentioning it. Awesome. Thank you for coming on. We appreciate it. My pleasure, Joshua. Well, I told you it'd be interesting. Hopefully, you found some ideas that will be helpful to you in your life. What I'd encourage you to do is not think so much about the specifics of what Andrew and I talked about, but more think about the general ideas.

You may not be interested in moving to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I certainly don't plan to move there today, although you never know. But no, it's not on my list right now. So don't worry too much about the specifics, but consider for yourself, is there a way that you can implement the ideas in a way that works for you?

For some of you, that very well may be moving to Southeast Asia or moving to Central America or moving to an insert place that you want to move to here. For others, maybe it's just simply changing states. There's no reason why you have to be in a high-tax state or setting up your own version of flag theory here in the United States, living in a state with no state income tax, doing business.

You get the idea. Now, the other thing is you've got to figure out what's appropriate to you at this point in time. If you are just getting started, you're not earning a huge amount of money, then maybe this is all unnecessary. You've got to look at the cost versus the benefit.

And that cost versus benefit analysis will change over time. So consider what you can implement in your own planning, but don't be scared of some of the ideas. Check out Andrew's stuff. I hope you'll find it interesting and helpful. I know that I enjoy reading and at least just considering some of the information.

He's got resources about getting second passports. He's got resources about offshore banking, offshore trusts, setting up offshore companies. Again, depending on where you are in your wealth journey, if you have a higher level of wealth, then that type of resource may be more substantial for you. If you're just getting started, it's probably not worth percent spending time pursuing a second passport, but if it's something that you can fit into your life, feel free.

Hope you enjoyed the interview. Thank you so much for being here. Be back with you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you.

This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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