- Big Boyz Comedy Kings is coming to Yamaha Resort and Casino Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughley. - That sweater so tight, it look like a snap between the legs. - Cedric the Entertainer. - Once we stop running, I'll find out what it was we was running about. - And Paul Rodriguez.

- What is it about old Mexican men? They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight. - Hosted by my man Eric Blake and a special performance by Mario. Big Boyz Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamaha Resort and Casino. Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com.

This is a 21 and over event. - Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. ♪ ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today on the show, we do Q&A. That's a...been missing these. Understandably, is how I hope. But I'm glad to have an open phone line today. And so far, we've got one caller on the line. So we'll start there and see how it goes. ♪ ♪ Any Friday that I can arrange an internet connection and a quiet place to record and all of the appropriate technical details, I open up the phone lines to do a Q&A show.

These shows are open to patrons of the show, people who sign up to support the show on my Patreon page. You can do that at patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. That gives you access to the shows and you can call in and talk about anything you want to do, want to talk about.

Sometimes they're wide open, sometimes they're very full, but today they're wide open. So we begin with Ryan in Florida. Ryan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Hey, Joshua. My question was about...it was kind of hoping to have you elaborate on a previous Q&A show that you did.

I don't know. It was a few months ago now. And it was basically you were talking about the state of the United States and I think it was called the Growing Debt Bomb. And then maybe you tied it into a Q&A later. But anyway, I've been thinking about some of your suggestions as far as preparing for, you know, a financial crisis and talking over with my wife.

And she actually thought of this question and it was about how you or what type of solution you would use for medical insurance. We have two kids, another one on the way. And so that's a big deal for me. Not that I'm necessarily considering moving or, you know, doing, you know, three months in, you know, one country and three months in another.

You know, whatever situation you find yourself in today, it's probably not going to be for me anytime soon. But one of the issues that we thought about was, you know, we have great medical coverage here in the U.S. And, you know, being able to find a good doctor in another country, first, how you would even go about...

You know, I don't know anything about the health share ministries. And I know you use one. And so I thought maybe you could elaborate on that and the solution that you came up with for yourself and your family. - Sure. Do you and/or any of your family members have any significant ongoing health conditions, any major chronic diseases or acute illnesses that you're facing?

- No, we don't. We actually happen to be pregnant right now. - Congratulations. - But no, thank you. Nothing that we're concerned about right now. I have some back issues that I've had for a while, but I don't intend to have surgery. I hope that I never have to.

But it's in the back of my mind that someday that could be the case. But no, to answer your question, there's no cancer, you know, heart issues, anything like that. We're healthy for the most part. - So the reason I want to begin with that question is because most of the time, people who ask a question related to health insurance, especially on a show like mine, are simply very thoughtful, careful people who like to be prepared for all situations.

And I like that, right? That's a great character trait to have. It's a great quality to have. But what I have observed over the years is, I don't know why, but there just seems to be this almost obsession with being protected from any kind of medical issue that could happen, and I have observed that sometimes it keeps people from doing things that could otherwise be done.

For example, I have a friend of mine who, in his case, he does have significant medical issues, but he has worked for 15 years at a job that he doesn't like, that he isn't well suited for, and he works there exclusively for the medical insurance because it's a good government job.

Meanwhile, he's miserable and he's going to die because he has no quality of life. And I'm convinced, not being a medical professional, I'm convinced that if he would just simply quit his job and pursue an alternative path, that he could improve his health so much that he wouldn't need his extremely expensive ongoing health care stuff that he has.

Now, he isn't interested, and so he doesn't do it, and I think all of us should be free to make our own choices. But I've just observed so many people make life decisions that really don't make much sense all around this idea of having medical coverage. And I've especially observed this among healthy people, healthy young people who have an idea for something they want to do, for that job they'd like to change, or a business they'd like to start, and they can't figure out, "How do I afford the health insurance?" And I have to concede, although I will never be advocating for governmental solutions, I have to concede that one of the arguments that really I think is compelling in favor of the government-provided health care options is simply that it can free people up from worrying about chasing their, from worrying about trying to do something so that they can maintain health coverage.

So statistically, if you are young and healthy, and statistically if you're in good shape and you don't have any ongoing major health issues, you're probably not going to need anything significant. I mean, it's probably not, you're probably not going to have major health expenses. Now that would be different if you were 75 years old and you had a whole bunch of risk factors, but most young families don't have a lot of health expenses.

So that's a little wordy, but I want to put things into perspective that chances are you're probably going to be fine even if you didn't have any kind of health coverage. And even if you didn't have any health insurance, you didn't have a plan, you didn't have anything in place, you're probably going to be fine.

Legally speaking, in today's world, in the United States, you're still going to be especially fine because now that there's no pre-existing condition clauses for any official health insurance policies, as long as you can make it to an open enrollment period, no matter what happens with your health, you can always sign up.

And if you have a fullness of understanding of the law, of everything that I talk about in this show, then going without health insurance is not that big of a risk. Now, being a cautious person, being the kind of person who always wants to pay my bills, being that kind of person and wanting to give that good kind of advice, I'm not advising to just say, "Throw caution to the wind and dump the health insurance." Who cares?

But I am trying to get people to think about it because for whatever reason, I've heard so many people that live in fear of losing health insurance and it doesn't seem that big of a deal to me. At least if somebody doesn't have an ongoing condition or some other major risk factor in place.

Now, secondly, I would point out in what you're alluding to of a discussion around the subject of having an economic crisis, I'm not advising people to leave the United States and go elsewhere unless they want to. I can tell you how to do it if you want to do it.

It's what I've done, it's what I think is a good idea for many people, but that's not my major focus. My major focus in what I've talked about in the past is to be prepared to survive an economic crisis and there could be many reasons why somebody would face an economic crisis.

One reason could be a health condition. Many people face personal economic crises because they get sick, they get hurt and they can't work. So, I want you to be prepared for that and one way to be prepared for that is to have good health insurance, which is why in the course that I have called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis, we talk a lot about that and it's not all about leaving.

It's not all about running away and going somewhere else. So maintaining good coverage is important, but it's also important to have backup plans in case you can't maintain good coverage. The most likely economic crisis that many people are going to face is simply the loss of a job. Economic goes up where you live, you lose your job, your industry goes into a slump, your region goes into a slump, etc.

and you've got to pick up and move somewhere else. And so, if you face something like that, you're going to be facing it no matter whether you go to the next state over, the next town over or the next country over. So these are normal common problems and there are solutions to them along the way.

I would not recommend somebody that you just leave a disaster zone, you leave where you are just for fun. So if you actually are facing a crisis, it's going to be apparent. And one of the crises that many people are going to be facing is the loss of healthcare payment systems, healthcare coverage.

That is a basic component of what I talked about in the shows that I did on the debt bomb, basically. The fact that no one wants to talk about the debt crisis. Especially for older people. There are three big entitlement programs that the United States government runs. They are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Social Security is currently the one that is making the news. Various articles in the past months about the future insolvency of Social Security. But Social Security is the most solvent of those three big entitlement programs and Social Security is the most easily solved. Meaning that what they will do, in my opinion, this is not a guarantee, this is just my guess on what they will do, is they will institute a number of different changes to try to bring Social Security back towards actuarial solvency.

They will raise the retirement age, they'll do means testing if you have over a certain amount of money you can't get it, they'll change the benefit structures. So that's fairly easily solved. What's not easily solved is Medicare and Medicaid. Medicaid is kind of a different animal, let's just focus on Medicare.

The basic problem of Medicare is that retirees are given massive health benefits that are not paid for by the retiree and there aren't enough current tax revenues to provide the health benefits. So you have people living extremely long lives but yet paying massive amounts of medical expenses throughout those long lives.

And that can't continue, it can't be sustained. And so even people who have a government paid system like Medicare, they're going to, in my opinion, face the problem of decreasing coverage. What that looks like I don't know. Maybe it looks like more stringent scrutiny of bills, maybe it looks like fewer things covered, maybe it looks like just decrepit government run hospitals is the only place you can get care and nobody goes to them because they don't function.

I don't know what it looks like. But the crisis could be caused by lack of health care. Now that's a little far afield from your question. So I'd bring it back and say today, the cool thing is in today's world there are enough tools that nobody's life decisions should be frozen because of lack of access to health care coverage.

I just, I can't comprehend why anybody should have their life choices frozen due to lack of health care coverage. There are so many different ways that we can exploit the system that we can figure out a plan for you and me as individuals to do well. Even if you were chronically sick, we could work on a plan to allow you to do almost anything you need to do even if you're chronically sick by exploiting some of the things that we could figure out in your context.

But for just an average person, there are really neat options available. So first, since some of the liberalization that has happened in the last year or two, once again you can purchase high deductible health plans that have very high deductibles. This is really important. And this is, they're marketing these.

So to back up for a little bit, prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance industry could offer different types of medical insurance plans. You could purchase Cadillac policies and you could purchase stripped out lien policies. For people who are healthy, what I always like people to do was just to get a high deductible health plan that had a very high deductible but had a large coverage limit but that would be very cheap.

So a few hundred dollars a month, you would get something that had an unlimited or a million dollar cap on the total benefits that the policy could get. But then you had a 10,000 or sometimes hopefully you could get a 20 or 30,000 or higher deductible up front. That covers you from the really catastrophic risk of a catastrophic health condition.

A person who is healthy and who is financially prudent should be able to, in an emergency, pay out of pocket 10 or 15 or 20,000 dollars for health expenses in an emergency. What they can't pay out of pocket for usually is a million dollars of health expenses. So those were available.

Then when the Affordable Care Act passed, it completely disrupted the individual health insurance marketplace with all of the mandates that had to be paid for, all of the care, etc. Those policies basically got removed from the marketplace. It was when those policies disappeared that I actually got out of the health insurance business.

I previously had a health insurance license. I would sell some individual health insurance and I just got out of the business because nobody was happy, the premiums were skyrocketing, etc. So you couldn't really get those. Now I have not stayed super in touch with the marketplace, but a few months ago I started pricing again.

I started talking to health insurance brokers to see if in the wake of some of the liberalizations that happened when the Republicans took control of the Congress and President Trump was elected, I started checking to see. And yes, again, you're starting to see those kinds of policies available. So I priced one out to see what they were and it wasn't unreasonable.

It wasn't as good as it was before, but you can today get a policy from some of the big major insurers that gives you basically that catastrophic coverage. And I think that's something that a lot of people could find useful. Now what it'll be labeled as, I think they call it a short-term health plan.

It was previously kind of a stopgap plan and they did that to come around some of the rules of the ACA and they're still marketing it, I think, as a short-term health plan. But with policies like that, most people can afford to keep health insurance in place. Now you alluded to the fact that I don't use health insurance myself.

I use a healthcare sharing ministry and I really, really love the concept of the healthcare sharing ministries. I really would like to promote them more in the future because I believe that they provide a very useful alternative for people to look at. I like them from an ideological perspective because first, they rightly align the incentives of the consumer with the medical industry.

So I don't have health insurance. I always say I don't have health insurance. I tell a doctor or someone, I don't have health insurance. If I have health needs, I simply pay cash for them and then I take those expenses and then some of those expenses may qualify for reimbursement under the terms of my healthcare sharing ministry program.

I also really want to support them because they give people the right of choice. You get to choose the types of procedures that you're involved in. You get to choose the type of people you do business with and that's extremely valuable. It's a totally different experience working with a healthcare sharing ministry than any insurance company.

My wife and I just had a baby. This was our second baby that we've had using a healthcare sharing ministry and I actually literally at this moment have sitting on my desk a big stack of cards from all the people who sent us money for all of the medical expenses.

I've got this handful of cards here and I wasn't planning this. I was just sorting through paperwork here but this is the kind of notes that we got. We got Paul and Karen wrote us a note with a card with their check. Praise God for new life. We pray for you that you're doing well and that God's precious gift to you will be such a blessing and they go on.

There are other cards here. Greg and Janet wrote us a note with congratulations saying they were praying for us with the arrival of our baby. One of our fellow healthcare people wrote us a whole long page long letter with all kinds of resources that they'd found helpful and parenting tips and some books and things that they'd really liked and they wanted to share some of those ideas with us.

I find that refreshing. It's so different than our first child I had on a health insurance policy and it was just dealing with the billing department all the time. It was brutal. It's really, really wonderful. Now to expenses. One of the nice things about Samaritan Ministries that I use and I assume the other healthcare sharing ministries is you can do some things.

They have a little more leeway sometimes than the health insurance companies seem to do. For example, we did birth tourism. We didn't have the baby in the United States. With birth tourism there are various reasons why you can do birth tourism but one of the things you can do with birth tourism is you can save massive amounts of money.

If I didn't have health insurance paying for bills in the United States, I don't know why I would have a baby in the United States. The medical system in the United States is so broken especially around childcare. It's insanely expensive. You can go to Mexico and you can have a baby for a hospital birth or even if you had a cesarean in Mexico your total fee is under $3,000 versus $15,000 to $30,000 in the United States.

Well, under Samaritan Ministries all of my expenses are covered no matter where in the world I happen to give birth. They don't care. There's some details there in terms of they don't cover – you have to work out the cost comparisons and things like that but there's a lot more leeway with things like that.

So I can use Samaritan Ministries, I can submit my bills for reimbursement no matter where they are. And then I would finally point to just one more factor. Don't forget that when traveling you have access to totally different medical systems. The US medical system is broken. It's absolutely broken.

Now we can argue as to why we think it's broken but I think most of us would agree that it's largely broken. I guess that the people who wouldn't say it's broken would say, "Well, you can get decent. You can get really world-class medical care." And I think that's true.

You can get really world-class medical care. But in terms of the feasibility of that, the costs are so astronomical and it seems like every time a new thing develops, a new opportunity where expenses can be saved, it seems like another bureaucrat comes in with more regulation that messes up that part of the market as well.

But the rest of the world is not like that. There's a massive booming medical tourism business in Mexico. There's a massive medical tourism business in Central America, in Asia. You can get world-class medical care. You can save so much money by going abroad to have procedures done. Now that doesn't work really well if you were just in a car accident and you got to be stitched together by a surgeon.

But it does work really well for any kind of elective procedure or any procedure where you have advance notice. So just because you leave the United States doesn't mean that you can't get good medical care and in fact I'm more and more a proponent and an aficionado of people leaving the United States to get their medical care.

And if you're paying out of pocket for it or you're using some kind of useful interesting arrangement that provides for medical tourism, you can get it cheaper, better, abroad than in the US. So it's just not a concern. There are doctors everywhere in the world and I think most of us who've traveled reasonably extensively would say there are some places where we really don't want to get sick, where things are just primitive.

Nobody denies that. But in many cases there are many times I think many of us would say if we're going to get sick we'd rather get sick outside the United States than inside the United States because for every place that's primitive and really really rough there are equally a number and perhaps more places that you can get world-class care and not have your finances ruined by it.

You got some response to that Ryan? Follow-up questions? I kind of gave you a little monologue there. Yeah, yeah. So that's great and I actually do have a follow-up question if you have time to take it. It's related to the Defon that you've talked about before. I think we can pretty much all agree that something more than likely it's going to be the tax man coming after you and I don't necessarily think it's going to be coming after your paycheck but rather your overall wealth and so I think that retirement plans, pensions, everything, anything that could be considered your wealth is probably going to be taxed in order to pay for all of these liabilities that we can't afford.

And so my question is about avoiding some of that taxation not necessarily on your income because on one of your previous podcasts, you talked about doing tourism or perpetual tourism or whatever in countries that won't tax your income or tax your business or whatever but what about taxing your assets or what about if you want to do perpetual tourism and you just want to live on say a combination of your retirement accounts, your savings account and a pension that you formerly had in the United States and then what countries would be on the Joshua Proof list to consider for doing something like that?

Well so I think let me just clarify a couple of things because part of the problem that I have is I taught through this stuff systematically in my course but I didn't do it on the show. I kind of just alluded to ideas. So first, perpetual tourism, the way that I define perpetual tourism is a strategy of moving from country to country and not becoming a resident and specifically not becoming a tax resident of any one particular country.

That's the concept of perpetual tourism. Now for some people that seems really exciting. For other people that's not really exciting. You know the phase of life that I'm in for example and that you're in Ryan it sounds like when you've got two young children and you've got a third on the way, I would guess that your wife is probably not too thrilled about the idea of hey let's pick up and get on an airplane every three months and move from country to country.

Most of the time in our stage of life that's not usually a very conducive idea. Now there are people that go do it. They go to spend a year with their kids traveling but just in terms of planning on that as a long term plan it's usually not very exciting.

That's different than a lot of times single people they want to go out and live that kind of strategy and I've interviewed people on the show who've done it and you can do it. How I alluded to that in the context of economic crisis was probably simply to say that if your home country is going through a massive global worldwide, sorry not global, countrywide economic crisis.

Like let's say that you were, Venezuela is a bad example because it's just so dire there but let's, I don't know a better one right now so let's just go with that. You're from Venezuela and a year and a half ago, two years ago before the government ran out of passports, passport paper and stopped issuing passports you got your passports together and you left the country.

Well as a Venezuelan maybe you don't have easy access for a residency permit in another country but if you just spent your time traveling among a group of countries that give you access as a Venezuelan with a Venezuelan passport then you could just simply keep moving from time to time and stay outside of Venezuela thus avoiding the starvation and the violence and all of that while simultaneously being able to stay within the law of other countries until you could ultimately get a residency permit in another country.

So I don't know all the Venezuela passport restrictions but if you put together a little tour of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and you know that's enough and you just spent three months in each of those four countries then you would not violate any visa agreements and you would be able to live.

So US Americans could have this as a good backup plan. So hey if there's a problem in the United States of America I can get out and I can go to Canada, I can go to England, I can go to New Zealand, I'm focusing on English speaking countries here and I can just kind of bounce between those using just simply tourist visas.

So that's what I alluded to with perpetual tourism. Now from a tax perspective let's come to taxes. One of the advantages that US Americans do have with a US passport is you don't have to become a tax resident of a certain country in order to qualify, in order to activate the foreign earned income exclusion as we talked about for US taxes.

Other countries do. So if you're Canadian and you want to leave the Canadian tax system you have to go and become a resident of another place. You can't just bounce around the globe but US Americans don't have to do that. Americans are going to simply be out of the country and as long as you're out of the country more than 330 days per year you can qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion and you can avoid the US income taxation on about your first hundred thousand dollars of foreign earned income for the US tax code.

So you can go and set up in another place. Now that doesn't solve the wealth problem because you're still going to pay capital gains taxes, you'll still pay dividend taxes, etc. and if there are changes in the US tax code then you would be subject to those and you cannot avoid those as a US citizen.

You cannot avoid those simply by changing your residency. Even if you moved from Florida to the Bahamas which has no income taxes, which has no wealth taxes, which has no inheritance taxes, even if you did that as long as you retain your US citizenship you will still be subject to US income taxes, US wealth taxes if new ones are instituted, inheritance taxes such as the estate taxes, etc.

as a US citizen. So your only pathway to avoid wealth taxes is, well let me say, your only legal pathway you could always do tax evasion and play the game of they're not knowledgeable about my assets that's a risky game but probably doable to some extent. But the only legal way to do it is going to be to renounce US citizenship.

So what I would say is this, I don't think that the fear of going and I don't think that the fear right now of moving abroad and the fear that in the future the United States will impose wealth taxes and start taking more tax money from your IRA and from your Roth IRA, I don't think that the fear of that should be sufficient for you to say well that's it I'm done being a US citizen.

But I do think the potential of it should have you working on a plan to make sure that if you ever did want to renounce US citizenship you have that as an option. And I would say that this is the only practical solution that I see for avoiding the taxes and for helping your children.

Because at this point in time what do people say? Nobody thinks that you and I are going to pay the bills of the United States, unless we're young. But most 50 year olds say well it's obvious to us that the United States government is deeply in debt, it's obvious to us that we're never going to pay this debt back.

But we're putting it onto our children and our children's children. Well my solution Ryan, if you want your children and your children's children to have a choice you've got to set them up so that they can move themselves out of from under the US tax system in the future if taxes become onerous into another tax system.

And there are, if you study the tax systems to your question of jurisdictions, depending on the makeup of your wealth there are many jurisdictions that you could choose that would be favorable to you. Let me give you a couple of examples. In the three part series that I talked about I alluded to choosing different jurisdictions based upon income.

If somebody earns, I don't know, a modest amount of money I think they would be well served, just a little bit of money, I think that they would be well served by staying in the United States because everything is cheaper in the United States generally than most places around the world.

And so somebody earning $40,000 or $50,000 is going to probably be better off in my opinion in the United States than moving to another country. Unless they have an affinity for that and they can live cheap in the other country. But most people, you can get things so much cheaper in the United States that quality of life is probably going to be higher.

So but there's no reason not to move to a no state income tax jurisdiction if you can. Now then I talked about going international. I said if you're earning, I don't know, a few hundred thousand dollars of taxable income then going outside the United States is a really good solution to save you on taxes.

Then I went one step further with the Puerto Rico taxes and I said going to Puerto Rico is not good if you make $100,000 a year but if you make a million dollars a year then Puerto Rico could serve you really well. Now I didn't go on with the series and assume that it's for non-US citizens but if you go on one more step and you start to look around the world then you can find other jurisdictions.

There are jurisdictions that tax income but don't tax capital gains or don't tax dividends. So if your income is primarily capital gains income and not earned income you can do very well as a resident there. Think Singapore here for example. Or if your income is largely earned income but not capital gains income then you need to go to a destination that doesn't tax earned income.

My action step for you Ryan is simply this. I don't think you should worry about it. I think what you should do and you and your wife should talk about is let's say that our children, our two young children and soon to be born third, if our children are in a situation where their taxes are doubling and tripling and they're connected to it with a country that has a military empire that can follow them to the ends of the earth then how do we set them up so that they can move abroad, so that they can move to another citizenship and so that they can renounce their US citizenship and eliminate the tax net.

Now that's not to say that taxes can't change right now. You owe exit taxes. If you haven't, there are a few different triggers but the big one is if you have a net worth of more than two million dollars the US government will impose exit taxes on you when you renounce citizenship.

But at the very least Ryan, go have a baby in Canada or go have a baby in Mexico and make sure that you're on the track. Your baby has a second citizenship from birth. Put your other family on track for a second citizenship. Have you ever thought about this or researched this area of line of thinking Ryan?

Ryan Neuhofel I mean it's entertaining to me to think about but honestly I couldn't see my wife signing up for having a baby in another country. I mean just with our parents alone they'd probably, who knows. So it's fun to think about. It's a great thought experiment but I can't see it happening.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people are in that situation and I don't do it if she doesn't want to. But let me just give you just a couple of thoughts on it. So first of all, it is possible. People go and have babies all the time in other places and depending on the type of birth experience that you and your wife like to have, that can put you in different jurisdictions.

If you, for example, like to have a hospital birth, hospitals all pretty much look the same no matter what country you're in. It doesn't look, you know, a hospital in Florida looks about the same as a hospital in Toronto. It's a hospital. But the only difference is if you have your baby in Toronto, then that baby is a Canadian citizen by birth.

That doesn't do anything for you immigration-wise to Canada for you but it does mean that your child can have a Canadian passport or Mexico if you have your baby in Mexico. Mexican hospitals, you might need to speak a little Spanish. That's different than the Canadian hospital but if you have your baby in a Mexican hospital, then your baby will automatically qualify to be a Mexican citizen by birth and you can think and register him as a dual citizen.

And the advantage of a Mexican, if you have a Mexican baby is if you're the parent of a Mexican baby, then you can apply for Mexican residency and be issued a resident permit for you and your wife and your other children as well without any other tests necessary simply due to their reunification of family theory.

And there are other countries around the world that you can look at as well. Now I will be the first to concede it's not easy. So if you're in a town where everyone is there, you know, it's not easy. But it is doable and it's something that I think I want to encourage more and more people to pursue it and to research it and to think about it because I think it's really, it's the only practical solution that I can see is to help your children develop secondary citizenships so that if in the future they need to leave a confiscatory tax regime, then they have already in place a second citizenship so they can renounce their primary citizenship.

And it's not anything against the US or any other country, it's just a reality. In the United States, most US Americans don't think much about it, but much of the rest of the world does because they've seen the value of it. But it's really the only solution that I see.

The most famous big money example of it was Eduardo Saverin, one of the early employees at Facebook. He was Brazilian, dual citizen by birth, born in Brazil, became a US citizen and then was able to renounce his citizenship from the United States and in his case I think he became a Singaporean citizen.

Now he had to pay a lot of exit taxes on the way out. He was taxed very heavily by the United States, but he still saved, I don't know if it was tens of millions or hundreds of millions, but he still saved a massive amount of money by renouncing his US citizenship prior to the IPO of Facebook.

And so I think of it like that for children. If they have the choice, they may never need it, but they're not hurt by having it. But you don't have to just do birth tourism, you can buy second citizenships, you can go and establish residency abroad and work on a residency program and I think it's just well worth having in the back of your mind because in my opinion the only answer to your question of how do I avoid a wealth tax, if you live in a country that taxes you on your worldwide income and your worldwide wealth like the United States does, the only solution is to simply leave and get yourself out from under their taxing authority.

>>TED: Okay, I mean that makes sense. >>STEVE: You don't sound super excited. I don't think you're going to successfully convince your wife, but that's okay, you don't have to. But I'm sure there are other listeners who will be interested. >>TED: Yeah, so it's not something that I'm thinking of imminently.

I mean you mentioned in your podcast you see the debt bomb exploding in your lifetime. Well, I kind of feel the same way. I don't feel like, I mean I think we can do QE four, five, six and seven before truly no one's going to extend us any more credit and the debt bomb's going to explode and who knows how many years that could be.

I just want to be thinking about these options as maybe I'll be in retirement by the time that happens. I just want to be somewhat prepared, at least have some of the stuff before it comes due. >>STEVE: Yeah, I agree with you. And so I don't see, and I think the fact that you are thinking about the solutions is probably about all you need to do at this point in time.

And I think there are some basic things, as I talk about in the course that I made, there are some basic steps that can be taken and should be taken. But just simply thinking about it is more than most people. Most people are not thinking about it. They're not considering it.

So I'm not worried about anything in the near term. Certainly I think we always face the potential for short-term economic problems. But I think more likely is just kind of a slow malaise and a long, slow period of not much fun and excitement happening. But I don't see any kind of short-term scenario.

So I would just say, as your wealth grows, just keep an eye on it. If you have $100,000 of net worth, there's no point in doing much other than focusing on building your net worth. When you have a net worth of a million dollars, just start to look at it.

I think by the time you get to a net worth of a million dollars, a good portion of your assets should be internationalized. But that's not as hard and fast rule. As you start to get to a couple of million dollars, I think you should be looking carefully at it.

Even at a couple of million dollars, I wouldn't do anything. But if you start to get much more than that, you should be paying attention. And in my mind, the only thing that we can do at this point is just watch the news, watch the tone in the country, and see what people start to do.

Now I don't have much optimism that things will change, because as best I can see, it seems like in the United States we have developed a citizenry of people, or a voter base at least, of people who believe that what belongs to other people belongs to them if they can just vote for it.

Now at the moment, it seems like it's just more talk than it is action. You know, it's watch the 2020 presidential elections, watch the next few election cycles and see what happens. But I do think that if you live in a citizenry of people who are greedy and jealous and think that it's all your fault just because you're rich and all they have to do is get together with a few million other neighbors and take from you, then that should be illustrative.

Now if we see somehow some kind of principled resurgence of a live and let live and, you know, I'm not going to steal from my neighbor some kind of conservative political revival, I don't see any way that can happen. But if that happens, then I would be less worried.

But in your own personal decisions, there may come a time when you have a job option and you're looking at taking a job in Jacksonville, but you're also thinking about taking a job in Zurich. And you look at it and say, you know what, I'm going to pursue the job in Zurich.

There's no reason to stay. Go to Zurich and start setting up a life there and just start the process little by little. My hope is that just by exposing people to the ideas and the concept that they'll start to look and then if the cost for you becomes significant, that's when you start acting.

I don't think it makes sense to take big decisions if you're not actually paying a personal price. If you don't have a big tax bill or they're not coming after your wealth, then why go through all the expense of leaving? But if you do start to develop significant assets, then keep in the back of your mind, how would I get out if the climate becomes worse?

Your guess is as good as mine. I think we just watch and see what happens. >> Ryan: Great. Thanks. That's very helpful. >> Chris: Any other questions, Ryan? Any other comments or questions? Did I clarify the stuff on the medical tourism thing? >> Ryan: Yeah. I think that makes sense.

>> Chris: Here would be my only comment. My only comment is you're talking maybe with your wife and for anyone else that's in the situation. I have a lot of good things to say about the United States of America and I think we should be cautious about thinking that it's just better other places.

It's easy to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence until you actually go to the other side of the fence and check out the grass. I would just say on some metrics, there's another place somewhere in the world that's usually better on almost any one thing.

But if your wife is, let's say that you could probably as you talk with your wife, try to figure out what the things are that would be important for her. I would just say the first thing is that most Americans can do is most Americans should go and just simply travel a little bit more.

I don't know. Have you traveled a lot internationally, Ryan? Not internationally, no. Okay. So what I would recommend... I've been to Canada. That's it. Yeah. So that doesn't... It counts a little bit, I guess, but not much. So here'd be my recommendation. Don't go to Mexico. I like Mexico, but don't go to Mexico.

Don't go to South America. Schedule a family vacation to Asia and take a little tour of Singapore and Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. Schedule a... Go to Dubai. Schedule a family vacation to Dubai. Go to China. Go to Shanghai and start to see what's happening in the rest of the world.

The first time I went to Hong Kong, I had never been to... As I can remember, I'd not really been to a big city outside the United States. And I always thought that the United States was great. I thought that New York was great. And then I had been to England, I'd been to London, but it didn't do anything for me.

But I remember the first time I went to Hong Kong. And I got on the Hong Kong Metro. I can't remember what they call it, the subway system. And I was just stunned at how incredible the subway system was. And I walked around downtown Hong Kong on the island, and I could not believe what I was seeing.

And it made New York look like the armpit of the earth. It just was terrible. Everything was bigger, everything was nicer, everything was fancier, everything was cleaner, everything was faster, everything worked better. And then it just went on from there. I haven't been to Dubai yet, but it's on my list.

I'd like to get to Dubai. But I've seen the pictures of Dubai, and you look at what's happening in some of these centers, and it's very hard to go back to the United States and make the argument that the future is in the United States. Now I think that it would be false to do it just based upon the cities.

But if you are impressed by big cities and things, just get a plane ticket, schedule family vacation, and don't go to a beach. Go to some place where you start to see, wait a second, the rest of the world hasn't been sitting around doing nothing. I could live very happily in Singapore.

I could live very happily in Kuala Lumpur. I could live happily in a lot of places. But in Mexico City, there's so many wonderful places. And I think that's the big thing that you can start to do, is just start to travel a little internationally, pay the money, and it'll probably start to change your perspective on the United States.

I think the United States is going to be in a long, slow decline over the coming decades. That's the best I can see. I don't see any reason for kind of cultural optimism. Basically we have developed a citizenry of people who are, in my opinion, fairly lazy, fairly entitled, have this concept that basically everything, we're the best in everything.

And I don't see any foundational standpoint for a lot of optimism. But that doesn't mean that the rest of the world is standing still. So get out and travel, and see if you agree with me, see if you disagree with me. But that's what I would do. Probably not the best time to start, but research, at least think about birth tourism, but at least get out and travel, and see what you guys think about the rest of the world.

- Great, yeah, thank you. - I hope, it's always troubling to make broad sweeping statements like I've just made. I hope I've given enough caveats and such to say, when I'm talking about this stuff, I don't mean anything acute, I'm talking about long term. I guess I just want to point out one more thing.

The key is you as an individual. Question is, where can you succeed? Because what I think is happening in the United States, you can succeed like crazy in the United States. There are so many opportunities for so many people to be successful in the United States. That's different than the general population.

I think if you go back and you look at Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart, he traced this out so perfectly, I don't know what other resource I could cite, where he clearly, and in my opinion, overwhelmingly demonstrated the fact that the upper class elite in the United States are doing better than ever before.

And frankly, that's probably who you and I are. But that doesn't mean that the country is necessarily going to do better than ever before. So you try to figure out where do you succeed. Good chance for many of us, most of us, that's in the United States. But you got to work within the system and recognize that just because you're doing well doesn't mean that everybody's doing well.

And that could be dangerous in a population where you're doing well, but the people are not doing well in general. That could be very dangerous, could be dangerous to your health and wealth. But you might not want to live in Dubai, you might not want to work in Singapore, you might not want to go to some of those places.

In which case, just enjoy the lifestyle benefits of where you are. So I made some big sweeping statements. I think they're right, but time will tell. We watch over the coming years and see what happens. But my only thing, I love the United States, I wish nothing but good things for the United States.

I just don't see the source of those good things on a large level. I think that small groups of people who live very counter-culturally can do very well. But on a broad basis, I don't see the reasons for optimism on the broad basis. Hopefully that was enough backpedaling and whatnot to make it come through.

Thank you all for listening. I'll be back with you very soon.