What Grandpa Never Understood About Planting Flags Offshore
The schedule for my Offshore Wealth Summit taking place in Panama City in October is nearly finalized…
And it’s powerful.
We’ll be welcoming many new A-level offshore pros to the stage with us for the first time… while also reconnecting with long-term contacts, resources, colleagues, and friends from key jurisdictions.
The program is built around a series of panel discussions to address every opportunity available to you as you work to diversify your life and your investment portfolio across borders.
In these discussions with the world’s leading experts in their fields—from taxes and banking to residency, citizenship, and expatriation—we’ll lay out all the pieces you need to build your own bulletproof Plan B.
Then, in the most important session of the program, I’ll lead a conversation about how to connect all those dots.
Early on, as you’re planning and strategizing your international life, you’re dealing with a couple of dots. They may or may not connect directly.
Maybe you open a bank account in Panama to hold a CD earning 4% to get some money out of the United States. Great idea that doesn’t necessarily connect to anything else you’re doing.
However, as your plan evolves and matures, connecting the pieces becomes critical. Each piece of your offshore life can create consequences—good or bad—for other pieces of your puzzle.
Investments have tax implications. So does how you choose to take title to a piece of property, for example. Some structures are better for certain agendas than others.
Planting Flags
The old-school name for the steps associated with diversifying your life offshore was Planting Flags. Likely you’ve heard that phrase before. It’s been around for decades.
A guy who called himself Grandpa used to write to chastise me for using his term. He said he’d invented “Planting Flags.” I always wondered if he wrote to everyone else talking about offshore topics to scold them, as well, as the term became ubiquitous in the industry.
Today, for me, the term is obsolete. It doesn’t represent the big opportunity. Planting Flags is about a bank account in one jurisdiction… an offshore corporation in another.
That’s a limited and dangerous approach.
Everyone’s Plan B must be a unique strategy… because everyone’s situation is different.
And every piece of that strategy must be considered in the context of every other piece and, important, of the overriding agendas and objectives.
Not everyone wants or needs to plant all possible flags. Others see value in multiple bank accounts, residencies, and citizenships.
The more pieces in your personal Plan B, the more important it is to connect them strategically. You don’t want random bank accounts, structures, investments, properties, and residencies, each just a piece on its own.
Every piece needs to be part of a big-picture, ever-evolving plan.
That’s the goal of my Offshore Wealth Summit. To work with you to make that happen.
I haven’t heard from Grandpa in years. I wonder if he’s still around. If he is, maybe he’s reading this now… and will be pleased to hear that I’m retiring my use of the phrase Planting Flags.
We’re not planting flags.
We’re building legacy lifestyles.
Lief Simon