Back by popular demand, today we welcome Jim Rawls to the show. He is the founder and editor of survivalblog.com, which is the largest and most popular survivalism-focused blog on the internet. He's been running that for many years. He came on the show previously and discussed survivalism as an economic plan.

Today we talk about moving as an economic plan and how you can improve your life and your lifestyle and lower your cost by moving. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. I thank you for being here. Today is Thursday, December 18, 2014. Today we're going to dip our toe over into the survivalist waters a little bit.

Fairly popular in our culture right now. Just look at any magazine rack or TV listing and you'll see that survivalism is a great focus. Today we've got one of the leaders in that industry with us. I thought it was really fun on the last show. I had a lot of feedback from many of you that really enjoyed the way of talking with Jim about economic planning through the lens of survivalism.

He offered to come back on if I wanted to have him and I asked him to do so. I hope you enjoy. You might want to go back and listen to the previous episode before listening to today's show. That previous episode was episode 102. If you haven't heard that, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/102 and that will give you a bit of an introduction to Jim.

Today's show we just kind of jumped right in without a lot of preamble, without a lot of introduction. Go back and check out that episode for some back story. This interview is all about moving. Moving to improve your life and your lifestyle. At the beginning of it we talk a little bit about moving within the United States.

Jim is a proponent of an idea that he calls the American Redoubt. This is a concept. He explains it in the interview. He's also an expert on international expatriation. He wrote an entire book called Expatriates as one of his novels. He digs pretty deep into ideas and ways of researching essentially different international contexts.

The international ideas are in the second half of the show. Here's Jim. Jim, welcome back to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you're coming on again. Thank you for having me on Joshua. Our last show was really popular. I got a lot of good feedback from I think both of our audiences.

There was some cross proliferation of our listenership and readership and I got a lot of great feedback from our last conversation. I think today is going to be really fun as well. I brought you back to talk about the topic of strategic relocation. I want to talk about this both from the US centric perspective but also from the international perspective.

I think about this mostly from lifestyle, from tax cost, from those kinds of things. I know you think about it from that perspective as well and also from safety, potential future economic basically bulwark. Where is the best place to be for the long term? Let's start with the US focus and then move international.

You've invented a concept called the American Redoubt. What is that concept all about and why did you come up with it? The American Redoubt is a relocation concept that's geared toward Christians and Jews and Messianic Jews encouraging people to relocate to an inland portion of the northwestern United States with the aim of consolidating what is already a very conservative area and making it even more conservative.

Essentially turning red states into a deeper shade of red. I chose a particular region in part because of the existing demographics and in part because of climate and population density as the ideal area for this American Redoubt. That includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and then the eastern half of Oregon and the eastern half of Washington states.

I consider that pretty much the safest place to be in the event of any major societal disruption because it's well isolated from any major population centers and it's a fairly diverse economy and it also is a hydroelectric power exporting region. In the event of most situations that could drop the three American power grids, the American Redoubt area will probably be immune from power failures.

Why did you not, so you mentioned, there's almost two different things. You first talked about the people groups and then also the, what's the term, the resilience I guess of the region. But from that perspective, why not jump onto for example the Free State Project in New Hampshire? That's a political movement for freedom.

Why not combine what you're interested in promoting with what some other people are already promoting? Well I think that New Hampshire unfortunately in the long term will not be viable either politically or economically in terms of safety just because of the general high population density of the entire region that New Hampshire sits in.

It's just far too close to New York and its teeming masses to be truly safe in the event of societal disruption, whether it's economic collapse or whatever. I commend the Free State Movement and also the Free State Wyoming Project as being very worthy goals, but I just don't consider the Free State New Hampshire Project to be particularly viable.

So one of the challenges I think is, so I'm a young man and when I look at okay where am I going to set up my lifestyle and my family, one of my challenges with the survivalist line of reasoning is the certainty of an impending economic collapse. Is this idea that it's going to happen and so because I know that it's going to happen, therefore I need to make all of my provision for that.

I think in terms of, I can't feel comfortable betting my future on something that in my mind may or may not happen or it may or may not look like what we think it looks like. The upper inland northwest or whatever the western states that you described, they're not generally known as being a hotbed of economic activity, a hotbed of innovation, a hotbed of entrepreneurialism.

So then when I'm thinking about where should I establish my lifestyle as a young person, which I think is one of the most important decisions that we as young people make, it just doesn't stand out to me from the perspective, it just doesn't stand out as a place that I'm going to plant my flag.

What say you? Well in terms of economic collapse, I do think it is inevitable because of our government's addiction to debt and their wholesale destruction of the U.S. dollar as a currency unit. At some point the piper must be paid and I think it's just about inevitable that we're going to see a collapse in confidence in the U.S.

dollar and along with it a collapse in the Treasuries market and in the stock market and just a general economic breakdown is pretty much a certainty. The huge question is how soon will that happen? How much longer can they keep up this charade of this so-called economic recovery? How much longer will they be able to keep interest rates at an artificially low and in fact absurd zero interest rate?

At some point things are going to have to turn around and they're going to turn around for the worse and I just assume already be living in an area that I know for a fact is going to have a, from an actuarial standpoint, a better chance of survival in the event of an economic collapse.

Now in terms of lifestyle and economic vibrancy, yes there are parts of the American redoubt that I would consider economically pitiful because of mainly the decline of the timber industry in the past 20 years. A lot of the sawmills have shut down. The federal government is no longer issuing timber cutting permits in a lot of the national forests and it's pretty well destroyed the economies of some of those towns.

But there are some definite bright spots, mainly in the college towns in those states and also in the Bakken region of eastern Montana. Now that's a, eastern Montana and the adjoining portion of North Dakota are in a tremendous economic boom right now. In that Bakken region where they're extracting oil shale, it is very difficult to find a house to buy or an apartment to rent.

A lot of people are living in fifth wheel trailers simply because they can't build houses fast enough to house the workers for the oil fields. So there are definitely some economic bright spots in the American redoubt and granted it's not for everyone. The climate is not South Florida. I would say not.

But it does have a lot of things going for it and I genuinely enjoy the lifestyle here. I live on a remote ranch that's a 25 mile drive from the nearest small town and it's an hour and a half drive to the nearest decent shopping. But we're surrounded by national forest.

We have a wonderful lifestyle here. We're largely self-sufficient. We raise cattle and lots of other livestock, including a lot of small livestock. We have a huge garden. Again, we're surrounded by national forest. We have a river running through the back end of our property that's just full of trout and we love it here.

It's a lifestyle that I would never trade in. We love homeschooling our kids. We love really knowing our neighbors. Even though we live in a lightly populated area, we literally know all of our neighbors within a five mile radius by name. Most people in the suburbs can't say that.

I think that it's important that people seriously consider relocating and they have to make a relocation choice, however, that matches their own life, their own lifestyle, their religious background, their stage of life. If someone is elderly or has a chronic health condition, their choice of locales may be quite a bit different than mine, for example.

They may need to be near a major medical center and that's going to make their relocation choice substantially different. One of my motivations, previously I was running a financial planning firm. The financial planning firm was largely local. I had been working hard to transition that into a virtual business in the sense of I tried to work with many of my clients with virtual meetings instead of in person to give myself the options of traveling or moving if I ever choose to.

One of my lower priority motivations, but it is still a motivation of building the Radical Personal Finance, is to allow myself that location independence so that if I want to go to Montana for the summer, I'm not sure my wife's going to go for the winter. But if I want to and if I need to have a cabin and if somehow I need to be out there because the South Florida economy changes, then it's a long trek out there, but at least I would have the ability to go there and not have my business fall apart.

I think that we have these opportunities, especially where I want to focus on primarily is economic arbitrage. There's a real important concept that probably the one who popularized it was Tim Ferriss in the four-hour work week when he was talking about taking advantage of geo-arbitrage, location arbitrage. If you can earn money in a strong currency and spend money in a weak currency, that helps you.

Or if you can live in a place, if you are working online like I am, I'm living a consciously higher cost lifestyle living in South Florida right now than I would be if I moved to rural Mississippi. So I could gain immediately a several thousand dollar a month decrease in my living costs without affecting my income.

I think that we've got some opportunities from an economic perspective both within the U.S. and outside of the U.S. to maybe enhance our lifestyle. So within the U.S. context, what would you say, how would you advise people looking to increase their lifestyle and the benefits of it and decrease the cost, how to think through that and look for opportunities within the U.S.

and then we'll go to outside the U.S.? Sure. Well, here within the United States, a key issue is not just local economic development or local or state inducements to move companies or even individuals into states. But beyond that, you have to look just at basic numbers of taxes. Taxes are a crucial issue in the United States.

And for your listeners overseas, they may not be familiar with just how different things can be moving from state to state. In most countries, the tax codes are fairly uniform. And no matter, you know, whether you live in Pretoria or Johannesburg or Cape Town, South Africa, your taxes are basically going to be the same.

But here in the United States, state laws vary widely and levels of taxation in particular segments vary widely. And by simply moving for geolocational arbitrage, as you call it, people can vote with their feet for lower taxes. And I'm a big believer in that. There are some states where there's no personal income tax, like Washington state, for example.

And, you know, there's advantages to Texas, to Florida. A lot of different states have income tax advantages. Other states have sales tax advantages. States like Oregon and Montana, for example, have no sales tax. Other states have particularly low real estate property taxes. And for someone who wants to have a lot of land, that might be the key consideration rather than income taxes, because if someone is structuring their life where they want to be a cattle rancher and they can basically fine-tune their income each year based on how many cattle they sell, but the key factor for them might be property taxes.

They want to have a low property tax rate. So I would recommend that people do a lot of research and look into car registration, property taxes, homeschooling laws, home birth laws, the cost of doing business for a company. Of course, personal income taxes has got to be right near the top of the list for most people.

But look at all those different taxes, all those different factors. Even things like fuel taxes are getting to be a big issue. And, in fact, it's something that's just been highlighted by the plummeting fuel prices right now, 'cause there's basically an oil price war going on as we speak.

The price of fuel is not going to come down substantially in states like California, where they have these huge taxes on gasoline and diesel. They can't come down, because every time the price of fuel drops, these states raise their state fuel taxes. It's an almost intolerable situation for a lot of people.

So all I can say is be prepared to vote with your feet, but do so intelligently. Do your research, figure out what is the most important factor for you, and plan and make your move accordingly. I'll give you two pieces of data. I mentioned these on recent shows, but I think you'll like them, and also it'll benefit the audience as well.

There was a neat example. Tony Robbins just released a book on money, and I reviewed it in detail on the show a couple weeks ago. But one anecdote that he had in there is that when a few years ago California increased its state income tax, and they increased it retroactively and made it retroactively applicable, so even some of the planning ideas couldn't be done, 'cause they made it go back.

Tony Robbins finally, after being a lifelong Southern California resident and a fairly liberal, liberal progressive guy, finally said that enough is enough. So he went on this, and he tells a story in his book of how he went on this massive national hunt of looking at all of these properties.

Well, he wound up in Palm Beach, and he found the only brand new home that was available on Palm Beach at the time, 200 feet of oceanfront, intercoastal front access, which is basically the primo part of Palm Beach where you've got water on both sides. And he said the best thing about it is he's paying for the cost of his new Palm Beach house, mansion, with the tax savings alone in six years.

Wow. And that's amazing. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And I don't think his story is unique. A lot of people are finding some really big benefits in relocating. But again, you have to do so intelligently. And you also have to plan ahead in terms of what your life is not to be like not just next year, but in the next couple of decades, the stage of life that you'll be in and what your requirements will be.

And things like property subdivision laws may make a big difference for someone who has some wealth and plans to pass it on to their children. But if you move to a place where you can't subdivide a property smaller than 10 acres, then you may be very limited in terms of, you know, if you want to have your own kind of bunk port or whatever and have a family compound with contiguous parcels of land, you have to plan ahead in terms of picking a county in a state that has favorable subdivision laws.

Right. Another anecdote on the tax thing that I thought was interesting is just last Friday on my show, I reviewed a Maryland physician, resident physician who was just in residency, sent me a note and he's earning $125,000 and taking home about $75,000 after tax. And I looked up the Pennsylvania income taxes and they're about 5%, 5% marginal bracket.

But what that meant for him, there's a great new website that I also discovered from Tony Robbins book called save taxes by moving.com. And somebody has gone on there and just made a very simple scenario. I'm moving from this state to this state. My filing status is married, filing jointly.

I'm this year, this I'm 30 years old and I earned this amount. And I put on there $125,000 income. This resident physician, after he's finished with his residency, could easily move to another state and just moving from a state like Pennsylvania to Texas or to Florida or to Washington where he could save that five and the other states, the three or four, he could save that $5,000.

Theoretically over the course of his career, if he just invested that $5,000 at a reasonable rate of return, he would have an extra million dollars of net worth at retirement age. And those taxes compound every year. That $5,000 invested at a reasonable rate of return, that's a million bucks.

And so your decision is not $5,000 because I'm living in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or whatever. The decision is $5,000 compounded every year. New physician jobs in South Florida or Texas or Washington state or wherever at $125,000 a year, they're a dime a dozen. But the $5,000 of taxes that makes him make a major difference in your lifestyle.

In the long term it does, yes. And I think people need to have a broad horizon in all of their investment planning. They need to think not just in terms of the next year, the next decade, but multi-generationally. And if you look at family empires, they've always had that perspective, that long term view.

And of course if you look at the basic doubling rule for investments, it really is multi-generational when you come right down to it. I want to move international with the time we have left, but before we do, I do just want to mention how in the United States, you're familiar I'm sure with the concept of the multiple flags theory on an international basis.

And I think that can be applied both internationally and in the United States. And so there are some interesting arbitrage opportunities. Right. I would refer to that as the state line jumping game. And my favorite here in the American Redoubt is to take advantages of states, contiguous states where you have one state with no personal income tax and a contiguous state with no sales tax.

That's the ideal situation. And for example, Washington state has no personal income tax and a very low corporate tax. And adjoining Oregon, just across the Columbia River, has no sales tax. Talk about a huge advantage. Right. And considering that sales taxes probably average out to 5 to 7 percent depending on the state, that's essentially 5 percent of everything that you're buying if you can buy it in a no sales tax state.

And then if state taxes average 3 to 5 percent probably across the nation maybe, that's another saving. So there we just save 8 or 9 percent of your income expenses. It's a big, that can be a big deal. Right. You know, you're probably familiar with the television series The Sopranos.

And Tony Soprano is as famous as having been quoted as talking about avoiding this and that entanglement with the law. But then talking about federal taxes, he was famous as saying, "Them you gotta pay." Well, you know, federal taxes are basically inescapable. But you could avoid a lot of state taxes by voting with your feet and very wisely choosing your location.

So let's flip to escaping the federal taxes. I'm not quite to the point of being a tax protester to the point of not sending in payments and telling them I'm not doing it out of protest of what they're doing with the money and the violence inflicted on others around the world.

But I'm sympathetic to that. I'm not there yet myself. But I do think a lot... What's that? As public figures, we'd probably be some of the last two to be tax protesters, per se, because the old Japanese proverb is, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." Exactly. But I do think about expatriation.

And in today's world, it seems easier in many ways to do than it has ever been before. In years past, if you were going to move to the other side of the world or to another country, that basically meant losing all connection and contact with your local community. But in today's world, it's easier and easier.

Have you ever thought about expatriating yourself to another country? Yes, I have, but more or less as a contingency plan in case things were to deteriorate substantially politically here, and especially in terms of First Amendment freedom. As a blogger and as a novelist, I value my First Amendment rights very highly.

And if we ever reached a point in the United States where I wasn't able to freely speak my mind, I would already be gone at that point. That's the key decision point for me, is the First Amendment. But for a lot of other people, there's other things that'll push them offshore, primarily taxation.

And people have to think very seriously about that. I don't think that people should discount expatriation, but it isn't for everyone. And as I mentioned in our last conversation, it's important that you move to a country that is going to be friendly to foreigners, not just now, but also in the event of a global economic downturn.

Because just as I was saying before, I see the U.S. economic downturn as inevitable. And because we have inextricably linked economies, I think when the U.S. economy crashes, it's going to throw the entire world into a global depression that'll probably last ten years or more, maybe even twenty. So plan ahead in that regard as well.

So that means moving to a country that has a lot of English speakers, unless someone is quite fluent in a foreign language, and also moving to a country with a very sound economy and a country that has a low crime rate. And if you take all three of those factors together, there's actually precious few countries that are worthy of relocation.

And then, of course, you know, beyond that there's climate and lifestyle and so on. For a lot of people, homeschooling laws might make a difference, gun control laws may make a difference. And in that last regard, that narrows the number of countries down tremendously, because very few countries have the same level of firearms freedom that we have here in the United States.

Do you have any, like, countries that are at the top of your list? I know that would vary depending on which metric you're considering. Yeah, there's a few. In terms of firearms freedom, two countries that are probably near the top of my list would be Finland and the Philippines.

Really? Yeah. Finland? Finland. Finland has surprisingly lax gun laws compared to most of Europe. Had no idea. In Finland, you can walk into a gun shop, buy a silencer with cash, and walk out with no paperwork whatsoever. It's just considered a safety accessory. They're just murdering each other in the streets, though, every day, I assume.

Oh, yeah, blood in the streets every day. No, Finland is actually a very peaceable country. It does have, you know, a major threat, though, with Russia right next door. And a couple times in the last century, they had some problems with Russia. And it's not beyond the realm of imagination that that might reoccur in this century.

So that's something to consider. In terms of firearms freedom, I think Finland is right near the top of the list. Switzerland is also quite gun-friendly, but unfortunately, they don't extend firearms freedom to resident aliens as well as Finland does. So Switzerland is great. All your neighbors will be well-armed, but you won't be until you have full Swiss citizenship, and that takes years.

Interesting. What about on the other metrics, other countries, whether it's economic strength or crime or English speakers, those other metrics? New Zealand is probably right near the top of the list in terms of economic freedom and low crime, and it is indeed, of course, English-speaking. I think New Zealand definitely has some attributes, but unfortunately it also has now a full heritage of socialism behind it, which is difficult to break from and which has a long-term debt burden associated with it.

So I'm not a great fan of New Zealand. And of course, New Zealand's gun laws are pitiful. So if you're looking for firearms freedom, New Zealand is not the place to go. But if you own a small business that can be relocated, I would look very seriously at New Zealand.

Do they have favorable tax rates? They're moderate. It depends. I haven't researched the most recent changes in New Zealand law, but the problem with New Zealand is not so much taxes as the high cost of living. Where gasoline costs $8 a gallon, it's not a particularly friendly place to live in terms of cost of living.

What about Latin America? I spent some time in Costa Rica when I was in college, and it seemed as though there were more gringos walking around sometimes than, especially the central cities, and that's well known as the surfer destination and the retired pensioner destination to go down and spend their money in Latin America.

Do you have any opinions on that region of the world? In Central America, I do like Belize, I like Costa Rica, I like Panama. But the level of banking privacy in those countries has definitely dropped in recent years. I hate to use an overused slang expression, but they're going to narc on you just as well as an American banker will.

There's not a lot of banking privacy left in any of those countries. In South America, there are some definite possibilities in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay. They're all worthy of a good look, but I would say that would be primarily for people who are excellent Spanish speakers and preferably people who have close familial ties to someone already in the country.

Essentially, the best way to expatriate to one of those countries is to marry into one of those countries. Come with a built-in family if you can marry in. I enjoy spending time in Latin America, but if you want to get anything done, you need some connections. Exactly. You need some really deep connections, both politically in the banking world and with local policia.

You need to really be on the inside track. Unless you marry into a family, it would take many years to develop those kind of relationships, and you'd still be known as the gringo. But if you marry into a family, at least not necessarily for you, but for your children, you'd be seen more or less as a local.

Back to banking privacy. This is a research project. I haven't been able to get it done, but it's a subject of interest. As some of the traditional private abilities to bank privately as the U.S. government has eroded those laws, if someone is interested and focused on banking privacy and the ability to do business internationally and to mind their own business, are there regions that are up and coming or that should be considered to serve that purpose for U.S.

citizens? I haven't done any really recent research. Unfortunately, banking law is very fluid. There are international agreements made. For example, we mentioned South America. In South America they have a group of countries that's called the Mericorsur countries. They keep changing their banking law so quickly it's hard to keep track of it, and it applies to five or six different countries overnight.

So there I would say I would claim ignorance and say that I'm not up to date on all the latest changes in banking laws, and someone really should get involved with a group like the Sovereign Society, for example, or get a subscription to International Living magazine. If you want to keep track of the changes in the banking laws, you really need to have your finger on the pulse and be prepared for changes, because primarily because of the pursuit of narco-trafficking, which is a very large group of narco-traffickers, banking laws pretty much around the world have clamped down on banking privacy, and even the long-term bastions of banking privacy like Switzerland and Luxembourg have now essentially rolled over and played dead.

They're now fairly willingly handing over banking records to governments, and not just their own governments, to international taxing authorities. We live in unfortunately a very rapidly changing world, and the windows of opportunity for things like banking privacy unfortunately are closing as we speak. Are you sensing, as we kind of wrap up here, are you seeing an increase in the number of people that are looking into things like renouncing their citizenship?

I guess I could just ask the question, are you seeing that, and why do you think that's happening? Well I think people have a recognition that although people still say it's a freak country, nobody really thinks that anymore. Nobody really believes it, and for good reason. We have a country that has a very nosy government.

It's getting increasingly nosy. It's tying more and more databases together. It's getting to the point where it scans your license plate when you're driving down the road. There's basically no more private travel left in the United States. Then we have a whole of TSA debacle where people are being forced to consent to a gross violation of their Fourth Amendment rights just for the so-called privilege to travel by air.

It is no longer really a free country, and people are increasingly telling me that they're looking at offshore options just out of rational self-interest. It's not so much a lifestyle change, and it's not even just the opportunity to have the first 100 K or so be tax-free. It's the freedom thing.

I increasingly am hearing from my readers and from my consulting clients that they're looking very carefully at at least getting a second passport and having that as a reserve, just as an escape hatch, or preemptively relocating now. It's happening in increasing numbers, and it's not just the super wealthy.

One of the nice things about expatriating to places like Central America or the Philippines is you really don't have to be rich. You can take a middle-class income or middle-class retirement and retire practically in splendor in South America, Central America, or the Philippines, where here hardly anyone can afford to have a maid and a cook.

You move to a place like the Philippines or Panama, almost anyone can afford to have both a maid and a cook. There's definitely some advantages in that regard. I'm hoping. I've thought it through. There's a lot of interest in the community of this show. There are a lot of people on this show who are early retirees, and part of their early retirement plan is perpetual travel or extended travel.

That allows them some options to arbitrage their money and to earn it in the U.S. and spend it in less expensive regions of the world. What I'm hoping is in the same way that I think it's starting to show up that people are starting to move because of taxation among the states in the United States.

It's so easy to pick up and go to another state. Yes, it's tough to change your family circumstances, but it's not that big a deal. You don't have to get a new citizenship. All you've got to do is just move. What I'm hoping is in the world where more and more knowledge work can be delivered virtually, I'm hoping that more of that international competition will come to mind.

When I actually sit down and look and say, "What are the benefits of a U.S. citizenship versus a cost?" That scale is weighted at the moment in favor of benefits, but if you can disconnect your economic earning power from one location and as some other countries and regions of the world start to change and offer additional benefits, my hope is that there's already a move of money.

That's usually reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but as far as the move of people, my hope is that competition can keep everybody more honest. I agree with you, Joshua. I'm a big believer in that. In terms of second passports for someone who wants to be a perpetual traveler, say someone who's a musician, an artist, a consultant, a writer, who can live just about anywhere, my favorite second passport would probably be from the island nation of St.

Kitts and Nevis. There they have a really neat program for second passports that is not very expensive. It was all developed to fund the transition of their national economy away from a sugarcane economy into an international banking economy. People should look very carefully at St. Kitts and Nevis and take full advantage of that opportunity.

I have a feeling it may go away in five or ten years, because second passport programs may be looked on in disfavor by international tax authorities just the same way as international banking accounts. Take full advantage of the second passport programs while they're still available and while they're still affordable.

And again, St. Kitts and Nevis is at the top of my list. And my final comment, and I'll give you the last word, is a lot of times people, if they're not consistent in thinking about these type of topics, I think it can feel a little bit odd. But we have a time-honored tradition in the United States of tax protesting.

And I think that sometimes some people need to put their money where their mouth is. And in today's world, the rhetoric is becoming increasingly harsh and unpatriotic. It's unpatriotic to consider things. But my favorite example, think about Sir John Templeton. He was another thing that came out of last year.

He saved, at least according to Wikipedia, $100 million of tax by renouncing his US citizenship and becoming a naturalized British citizen living in the Bahamas. And that's $100 million that he put toward philanthropic, charitable causes. And I would much rather have my extra $100 million not go to fund the excesses of these things.

I would rather have my tax money go to the US government if I can choose to invest that into something that may have some potential benefit for good. So Jim, I'll give you the last word. Sure. Well, Joshua, I just want to say that the ultimate form of protest is voting with your feet.

And people ought to seriously consider that, both domestically and internationally. One of my novels focuses on expatriation. In fact, the novel is called Expatriates. Now, that came out a year ago. I think people might want to take a look at that novel. And I'm also in the process of drafting a new series of novels that's also set in the future but a different scenario that's going to feature perpetual travel, second passport, and even the establishment of new nation states for the purpose of expatriation that will essentially be almost virtual citizenship.

That'll be featured in that new novel series. People need to think very seriously about relocation. And as a Christian, I think I've always approached things from a position of prayer first. And for any of your listeners who are of deep religious faith, I recommend you start with prayer. Pray first, and if you feel strongly convicted to make a move, then don't hesitate.

At that point, you need to dig in, do your research, and then if you feel convicted to move, go ahead and make the move. And from a survival standpoint, that's crucial because it takes a long time to get established in a new locale and to do things like build up livestock, build up orchards, and that sort of thing for self-sufficiency no matter where you move.

So don't hesitate, make the move soon. Jim, I thank you for coming back on the show. This has been really fun, and I appreciate your making time. Well, thank you for having me on, Joshua, and I pray the 91st Psalm for you and all your listeners. As we go today, I'd like to give you just a couple of additional ideas of how maybe you can take some of the ideas that Jim shared and apply them to your own life.

I want to encourage you, look around you, look around yourself, where you live, to see if there are any very simple and easy ways of improving your lifestyle with geographic arbitrage. For example, and it doesn't have to be moving across the country, it doesn't have to be moving to the other side of the world.

I think those things are fun to talk about, but these little ideas exist in many parts of our various countries if you just look for them. One example for me, where my wife and I considered, is we live in Palm Beach County, Florida, and in simple terms, the Palm Beach County, Florida tax rate is about 2%--real estate tax rate is about 2% of the property values.

Just north of us, in Martin County, Florida, the real estate tax values are about 1%. So there would be a 50% decrease in annual real estate tax cost if we lived in Martin County instead of Palm Beach County, and these are very close. Interestingly, there are a couple of little fingers of Martin County that extend down into Palm Beach County, and so there are ways that we could actually be right in, basically near in Palm Beach County, but just by being across that county line, we could cut our real estate tax bill in half.

Now ultimately we decided not to do that, and the reason was when we bought the house where we live, even though the property taxes were higher, I was at that time, I was planning on maintaining my financial planning practice, and to be able to continue my financial planning practice, I wanted to be close to my office.

So this house that we live in is actually under half a mile from my office, so I would be able to walk to work every day. And in that scenario, I decided and we decided that it would be far better for us to pay a little bit more in property tax than to live farther away and commute for multiple reasons.

Number one, there's just the time and the lifestyle component of being able to walk to work, walk home, I could come home for lunch every day, that was important to me. And I valued that more than necessarily just the economic savings. There was also the cost of commuting, and the cost of commuting is a non-deductible expense.

So I would have to operate a vehicle with extensive cost every day by living 15 or 20 miles away, and that is a non-deductible expense. However, by buying a house right next to my office, I could go ahead and deduct those higher real estate taxes, and so I turned that expense, which was actually cheaper than the cost of commuting, and I turned it into a cheaper deductible expense.

So that was another aspect. So look for yourself, look to see if there's something like that right in your town. Is there a county right next door or a city that you can move into that has a lower tax bill? These things make a big difference over time. It's important to get to think in terms of compounding things.

If you think always in terms of compounding money, you can see what a big difference savings will make in your life over time. If you only look at the cost today, many costs will seem fairly small. So $1,000 a year of extra property tax by choosing to live in one county versus another county, that seems like a fairly small number.

But if you extend that out, so let's say as an example that you save that money instead of spending it. So we put $1,000 per year, and we put this into an investment account. Let's say we do it for 30 years. Let's use 10% interest starting with nothing. At the end of 30 years, $1,000 per year savings can be $181,000.

At the end of 40 years, that can be $486,000. At the end of 50 years, that can be $1.2 million. So a small and seemingly small decision, such as which county am I going to choose to set up my life in, if you were to buy a house at the age of 30, live in it until the age of 80, and then die and leave the money to your kids, if you just took that savings and set it aside, that could result in you leaving behind an extra $1.3 million for your kids over the course of 50 years.

That might be a very major impact. And that's one of those structural costs I like to talk about, where you're setting in place a cost that's not easy to change. Once you've set up your household, it's not easy to change. At this point in time, my wife and I, we don't have any plans to move, but frankly, we both like the house, and my wife loves it.

So it was easier before buying the house to say, "Well, where do we want to live?" Now it's not so easy, because we like it here, and she really loves it. So it's not to say that we won't at some point in time consider moving, but a simple small decision like this could make a big difference for you.

So look for one of those inefficiencies in your own life. Consider, if you're the kind of person who's running a large firm, at this moment I don't have any reason or need to expatriate from the United States from the perspective of tax savings. But if you're running a large company, or you expect to be running a large company, think in advance about how to do that.

And if you can get out from under the US tax law, that may be advantageous to you. If you can set up your company in a way that's outside of the United States, that may be advantageous to you. So consider these ideas. You have to apply them to your personal situation, but consider them and see if they might be helpful for you.

That's it for today's show. I thank you so much for listening. I really enjoyed this interview. Tomorrow I'll be doing Q&A, so a Friday Q&A show. I've got some really great questions lined up that should be really fun to talk through. So I'll be releasing that show tomorrow. Next week I will be releasing some interviews while I am away.

I've got an interview with a permaculture designer named Ben Falk, and we're going to talk about how to essentially organize and design your life from a comprehensive perspective. Also an interview with Dr. Vern Poythress. He is a professor and he has done something very interesting with his two boys about transitioning them from children to adults at the age of 12.

I think you'll enjoy that. On Friday I plan to release an interview with Jeff from the Sustainable Life blog about investing in sustainability instead of investing in, investing in, my brain is going blank, other asset classes and things like that. So I think you'll enjoy that. Also then the following week I have an interview with Eva from Teens Got Sense blog, and she's a really dynamite young lady.

Paul Merriman will be on Tuesday, December 30th, and then Tim Stobbs, an early Canadian retiree, will be released on Friday, January 2. If you'd like to get in touch with me, email me joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Thank you guys so much for listening. I appreciate each and every one of you. Have a lovely day.

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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