(Sorry, not sorry.)

If you have the capital and no plan to move full time, buying residency can still be the right tool.

I just don’t like it when the first thing out of anyone’s mouth is “Golden Visa” before they looked at any other options.

If you do buy residency, you need numbers:

• What you pay in 2026 (government fees included)

• Whether the money comes back (or is gone for good)

• Whether you have to live there to keep it (or can spend time elsewhere)

This list answers all three, country by country.

I hold residency in five countries and only one of them I bought.

Keep one thing in mind as you read.

Buying residency and moving somewhere are two different decisions.

None of the six asks you to live there.

Three want a visit now and then, once a year at most.

What we’ll cover:

• Six countries where you can buy residency today, from $27K to $465K

• Whether you buy permanent residency, a renewable permit, or only a visa

• The ones I would skip, even if I had the money

Let’s start.

1. Thailand

The cheapest option on this list, and the only one where you pay a fee instead of making an investment.

Thailand Privilege (the old Elite Visa) is a membership, not an investment.

You pay once and get a long-stay visa with no visa runs and no annual extensions.

The Gold tier costs 900,000 baht (about $27,000) for five years. Platinum is 1.5 million baht (about $45,000) for ten years.

I hold this visa myself.

The membership years don’t count toward Thai permanent residency.

If you want permanent residency, you need a different visa first.

Thailand asks for three consecutive years of one-year extensions before you can apply.

2. Malta

The lowest entry price for permanent residency in the EU, and you never have to buy property.

Malta’s permanent residence program (MPRP) charges a €60,000 administration fee, a €37,000 government contribution, and a €2,000 donation to a Maltese charity.

In total, that’s €99,000 (about $115,000).

On top, you rent a home for at least €14,000 a year for five years, or buy one for €375,000 or more.

You also have to show €500,000 in assets, €150,000 of it liquid.

What you get is permanent residency for life, no minimum stay, and visa-free travel across Schengen.

Citizenship by investment is off the table.

The EU court ended Malta’s passport sales in April 2025.

If you want citizenship in Malta, you have to use your MPRP years in the country, and work your way toward naturalization.

I covered Malta’s other routes here.

Read more

The final takeaway was one sentence:

That was advice from experience.

This week’s article shows why.

On January 11, 2027, a new EU banking rule called CRD VI takes effect.

From that day, a bank headquartered outside the EU can’t take deposits from you or lend to you while you live in the EU, unless it has a licensed branch in the country you live in.

The rule looks at where you live:

• A retired American in Lisbon lives inside the EU, so every non-EU bank she uses falls under the rule.

• The same American, still in Ohio, lives outside the EU, so her banking is none of the EU’s business, no matter what she opens or where.

Very important nuance:

The rule targets banks, not you.

No account becomes illegal, and no money gets taken from anyone.

The question it creates is which banks will still have you as a client once you’re an EU resident.

So if you plan to retire in France, Portugal, Spain, Italy or Greece, and you want part of your money outside the EU (your US accounts, or an account in Switzerland, Singapore, Panama or the Caribbean), the order you do things in is now more important than ever.

Why?

Because while you still live in the US, you are not an EU resident yet.

Banks can take you on, and this rule has nothing to say about it.

The day you register as a resident in the EU, you become the person this rule covers.

From that day, a bank outside the EU needs a licensed branch in the country you live in.

But there are few exceptions we’ll get to later in this article.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• What the EU decided, and who it applies to from January 11, 2027

• The two exceptions written into the law, and why one of them closed on July 11, 2026

• What to do if you’re moving in 2027, and what to do if you already live in the EU

We start with the rule itself.

What the EU decided

In May 2024, the EU adopted the sixth version of its main banking law, the Capital Requirements Directive, known as CRD VI.

For you, the whole law comes down to one article inside it:

Article 21c.

It says that a bank headquartered outside the EU must open a licensed branch in an EU country before it can provide “core banking services” to people living there.

Core banking services means three things:

1. Taking deposits

2. Lending (including consumer loans and mortgages)

3. Issuing guarantees (e.g. the bank promising a landlord they'll get paid)

In plain terms:

Holding your money and lending you money.

What the rule does not cover matters just as much.

Investment services are excluded.

Your brokerage account and your managed portfolio fall under a different EU law (MiFID), with its own regime for foreign firms.

Nothing in this article applies to them, so keep the two questions separate.

The rule applies in all 27 EU countries.

Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein agreed in March 2026 to adopt it as well, and it takes effect there once their national procedures finish.

Now, the part I find remarkable (but not surprising):

EU countries had until January 10, 2026 to write this rule into their national law.

Only five of them made the deadline.

In March 2026, the European Commission opened infringement proceedings against the other 22.

By August, twelve countries had finished the job.

EU countries are known for having extensive summer holidays. Combine that with ancient bureaucracy, and you understand why I’m not surprised.

None of that changes your date.

The rule applies from January 11, 2027 everywhere, finished paperwork or not.

A bank that wants EU-resident clients has three options:

1. Open a branch in every country where its clients live

2. Move those clients to a subsidiary inside the EU

3. Fit them into the exceptions written into the law

Skadden, a law firm advising US banks on this rule, expects most banks to use subsidiaries and exceptions.

Almost nobody opens branches in ten countries for a handful of retail clients.

Those exceptions are your options, so that’s where we go next.

The two exceptions

Exception one:

Grandfathering.

Contracts signed before July 11, 2026 keep working as they are. The bank can service them across the border, no branch needed.

Two things here, before you get overly excited about it.

First, the date already passed. If you signed before it, you’re protected. Nobody can get this protection anymore.

Second, the protection covers the contract as it stands, not the relationship. Law firms advising banks warn that material changes can break it. For example, extending a loan’s term, drawing additional credit or turning the product into something else. The safe assumption is that a grandfathered contract stays grandfathered for as long as you leave it alone.

Because the EU published all three dates back in 2024.

If protection had run until January 2027, every non-EU bank would have spent late 2026 signing up EU clients as fast as possible to lock them in.

The lawmakers saw that coming and closed the window early.

The directive says transition measures must be framed narrowly “to avoid instances of circumvention.”

Exception two:

Reverse solicitation.

When you approach a non-EU bank at your “own exclusive initiative,” the bank may serve you without a branch.

It comes with three conditions:

1. The initiative must be entirely yours. If an agent the bank pays brought you in, the law says that no longer counts as your initiative.

2. The bank has to prove it. Regulators can demand records, so the bank keeps proof on file that the request came from you.

3. It doesn’t extend to new products. The bank can keep providing what you asked for, but it may not market new product categories to you.

And here is what separates this exception from grandfathering: the bank decides whether to use it.

Some banks will rely on it for their EU-resident clients and keep the files. Others will decide the paperwork isn’t worth a few retail clients and decline.

A real case from my client work:

An American living in Greece opened an account at a non-EU bank in August 2026.

Grandfathering doesn’t cover her, since the date had passed a month earlier.

Reverse solicitation does, since she requested the account herself, in writing, and the bank onboarded her knowing where she lives.

From January 2027, the bank can keep serving her on that basis for as long as it’s willing to keep the file.

What to do now

Three situations.

Open every non-EU account you want before you register as a resident.

The US accounts, the fintech accounts, the account in a third country.

All of it.

As a US resident, you’re a normal customer everywhere in the world. No exemption needed, no compliance file, nothing to document.

One extra step I now build into this:

Ask the bank (in writing, via email is fine) how it treats clients who later become EU residents.

How a bank behaves after you move is its policy decision, and you want its answer in your file before you move, not a surprise after.

Don’t touch them.

Grandfathering protects the contract as it stands.

Closing and reopening, upgrading to a different account type, extending a loan: each of those can turn a protected contract into an unprotected one.

If you need a change, ask the bank first how it affects your grandfathered status (again, in writing, always).

Reverse solicitation is your path.

The law sets one condition:

The initiative must be yours.

That means you decided you want the account, and nobody selling for a bank talked you into it.

You can contact a bank directly, or you can hire someone to find the right bank and handle the whole application for you.

And here the law hands you a useful test for anyone you might hire.

The exemption is then invalid, and the bank can’t take you.

An adviser paid only by you leaves the exemption intact.

So ask one question before you hire anyone:

“Does any money flow to you from the bank?”

I also got this question from people, and my answer is always the same:

“I don’t take referral fees from banks, because it would compromise my neutrality.”

Expect some banks to decline anyway.

I had cases that were harder than others, but I always find a way to open an account for my clients.

Here is one of them (Wendy), speaking about her experience with her offshore account opening with me (full case study coming soon):

Conclusion

That’s it.

The whole rule:

• From January 11, 2027, a bank outside the EU needs a licensed branch, an EU subsidiary, or one of the two exceptions to hold deposits for EU residents.

• Grandfathering closed on July 11, 2026, and reverse solicitation belongs to the bank’s compliance department, not to you.

• Your residence date is the one lever you fully control: open your non-EU accounts before you register, and the rule never applies to the account opening.

One thing to do this week:

Appreciate having you here,

— Ben

PS

Her US banks had spent years making her life difficult, and every bank she approached on her own had said no.

She wanted her life savings at a bank with no reason to shut her out.

On paper, she should have been an easy client.

In practice, almost every document needed a second round:

• Her proof of address wasn’t in the format the bank wanted.

• The reference letter from her local bank couldn’t be confirmed: nobody picked up when the new bank called.

• The review took so long that her utility bill became too old to use, and she had to send a new one.

None of that was her doing.

She sent everything we asked for, every time.

In late August, two months after we started, her account was approved.

Here she is, speaking about her experience herself:

Last September, I wrote about the document stack that you need when you move abroad.

Digital Citizen

8 Documents You Need Before You Move Abroad (+Templates You Can Use)

Which documents do you need when moving abroad…

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a year ago · 64 likes · 4 comments · Benjamin Hies

Those are the “admin papers” for the move itself.

Today is the second stack: the “money documents” for the bank.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The complete document stack, in the order the bank will ask for it

• The bank reference letter: why statements get rejected, and the two templates you can hand to your banker

• The six questions the bank asks on the onboarding call, and how long it all takes

First, why banks put you through this at all.

Why the bank asks

KYC stands for “know your customer.”

Before any serious bank takes your money, its regulator requires it to prove two things:

1. That you are who you say you are.

2. That your money came from somewhere legal.

And the process works in your favor.

The bank that spent two months checking my reader’s file applies the same checks to every other customer at that bank.

Compliance is what keeps the bank clean, and a clean bank is the entire point of moving your savings abroad.

The banks that ask few questions attract the customers who prefer few questions.

(And you don’t want your retirement at THAT kind of bank.)

All of it is reported, twice.

You file an FBAR with the US Treasury for any year your foreign accounts combined top $10,000, and the bank reports you to the IRS under FATCA.

Legitimate offshore banking is legal (and yes, a little boring).

The KYC file is what makes it that way.

Here’s what belongs in the file, and afterwards you get the templates to download and use.

The document stack

The full file is ten documents, and you have most of them already.

1. Passport photo page. A clean color scan. Every other paper in the file has to match the name on this page exactly.

2. CV. That might surprise some of you. The bank wants your career and education to explain your money: a retired dentist with $2 million reads differently than a file with no history. I’ve had a bank send a CV back because it didn’t list the client’s education.

3. Phone number and email. These go on record as the contact details for the account. Use ones you plan to keep for years, not a work email that dies the day you retire.

4. Proof of residency. The card or visa for the country where you legally live. If you haven’t left the US yet, this part is easy.

5. Tax numbers. Your Social Security number, always, because you’re American. Plus the tax ID of any country where you’re tax-resident.

6. Proof of address, under three months old. A utility bill or bank statement showing your name at your address. Two wrinkles here. If the utilities are in your spouse’s name, add your marriage certificate so the bank can connect you to the address. And the three-month requirement means you pull this document fresh when you apply, not when you start collecting. (This is the one my reader had to replace mid-review.)

7. Your last tax return. It shows your income with your Social Security number on it, which makes it the anchor for everything about your money.

8. Papers showing where the money was made. Sold a house? The sale contract or the deed. Earned it through a company you own? The ownership papers. Salary or pension? Pay slips or employment records.

9. Statements showing where the money is now. From the bank or brokerage holding it today. (Moving it over later is its own article.)

10. A bank reference letter. A short letter from a bank that knows you. It held up my reader’s application, so it gets its own section next.

All ten papers have to match each other.

If the money you deposit is bigger than the income on your tax return, the bank wants the paper that explains the difference (like the deed from a house sale).

Some banks want certified or apostilled copies of specific documents, often the passport or the marriage certificate.

Which ones varies by bank, so wait until yours asks before paying an apostille service.

The bank reference letter

Your new bank wants a note from a bank that already knows you.

That’s what a bank reference letter is.

A few lines on your current bank’s letterhead saying:

This person has banked with us since 2011 and has been a good customer.

Signed by a real employee, with a phone number.

The new bank will call that person to check the letter is real.

Three things that won’t work:

1. A balance printout.

2. An account screenshot.

3. The form US banks like to offer instead, called a verification of deposit (“VOD”).

None of them carry a person the new bank can call, so all three get rejected.

Go to your branch and ask the manager:

“I need a bank reference letter for opening an account abroad.”

Small banks and credit unions usually write it.

Big banks usually don’t, because there’s no branch manager who knows you, just a call center.

If every bank says no, ask your accountant or your lawyer instead.

A letter from a professional who has worked with you for years does the same job, and banks accept it.

Print them, and you are prepared for what comes next.

The interview and the wait

One step remains after the documents:

A short call with the bank.

Every serious bank does this before approving a new client. Someone from the bank asks, you answer.

The six questions:

1. What is your profession, and what did you study?

2. What will you use the account for?

3. Where does your money come from?

4. Where will you send money, and where will you receive it from?

5. How much do you plan to keep in the account?

6. How much will move through it in a year?

You already gave every answer in your file.

The call checks that the person matches the folder. Answer plainly and use the same round numbers.

Then you wait.

Most accounts open within a few weeks.

Some take up to two months in compliance review, like my reader’s did, usually because one document needs a second round.

And everything happens remotely at reputable banks:

The call is a video call, the documents are PDFs, and nobody has to travel anywhere.

What comes next

That’s it.

The whole system is a folder of PDFs and one phone call.

• The file decides. Ten documents, and nine can be ready before any bank ever asks.

• A reference letter counts only when the bank can call the person who signed it. Balance printouts and screenshots get rejected.

• Expect a few weeks, sometimes two months. Everything happens remotely, and a no from one bank says nothing about the next one.

Your step for this week:

One PDF per document, clearly named.

When a bank asks, you answer in minutes instead of weeks.

And if you want the account opened with me preparing and submitting the file, that’s the work I do with clients.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

And sometimes it is.

I lived in Cyprus for a year, and I have plenty of good memories from living there.

And every place I moved to, I always brought my parents over at least once. They loved Cyprus as well, although I doubt they would have loved the hot summer months.

Not every island is worth retiring to.

Don’t be fooled by the typical pictures of a hammock, a palm tree, water in that exact shade of turquoise.

What most stories leave out is the visa paperwork, the bank deposit you have to freeze, and the ferry timetable that ruins your winter if you pick the wrong island.

For this comparison, we are using the same rules as the European cities list from July.

What we’ll cover:

• What a retired couple spends a month (Numbeo figures)

• The visa each island takes, and the income or deposit you need to qualify

• The tax angle or the catch, from Malta’s 15% pension rate to Thailand’s remittance rules

Starting in Thailand.

1. Koh Samui, Thailand

Thailand’s second-largest island, in the Gulf of Thailand, an hour’s flight from Bangkok.

Warm all year, with everything from a $500 one-bedroom to a pool villa.

A couple lives well on around $2,000 to $2,800 a month.

Most retirees come in on the “O-A” retirement visa.

You have to be at least 50 years old with 800,000 baht (about $24,000) parked in a Thai bank, or 65,000 baht ($1,950) a month in income, plus health insurance of at least $100,000.

It renews every year, and the 800,000 baht has to sit in the account two months before you apply.

The other route is the Thailand Privilege Visa, which I hold myself.

900,000 baht ($27,000) buys you five years, with no income proof and no deposit.

It usually takes a few months to get it, but the process in very straightforward.

Since 2024, Thailand taxes foreign income you bring into the country if you spend 180 days or more there in a year (Social Security is exempt).

2. Mauritius

An island in the Indian Ocean, about 1,200 miles off the east coast of Africa.

English is the official language, but French and Creole are what you hear at the market.

A couple lives well on around $2,000 to $2,500 a month, more in Grand Baie in the north.

The retiree route is the “Retired Non-Citizen” permit.

You have to be at least 50 and transfer $2,000 a month ($24,000 a year) into a Mauritian bank account.

The permit is valid for 10 years, no work allowed, and after 5 years you can apply for a 20-year permanent residence permit.

Mauritius only taxes foreign income when you bring it into the country, at 0% to 20% for almost everyone.

The US has no tax treaty with Mauritius, so you rely on the foreign tax credit instead.

3. Gozo, Malta

Malta’s smaller island.

Gozo is a 25-minute ferry from the main island, with fewer than 40,000 people.

English is an official language, so the lease, the doctor, the bank, and the tax office all work in English.

Quieter and cheaper than Malta itself.

A couple lives well on around €2,000 to €2,500 a month.

The retiree route is the “Malta Retirement Programme”.

You need a pension that makes up at least 75% of your income, a home on Gozo (bought for €220,000 or more, or rented for at least €8,750 a year), and private health insurance.

You also have to spend at least 90 days a year in Malta on average.

The reward is a flat 15% tax on the pension you bring into Malta, with a minimum of €7,500 a year.

I went through Malta’s three residency paths with an immigration attorney here.

Gozo is quiet from November to March, and serious healthcare means the ferry to Mater Dei hospital in Malta.

The minimum tax doubles to €15,000 a year, the rent floor rises to €14,000 a year, and a purchase has to be €700,000 or more.

The status also stops being permanent.

Malta grants it for five years at a time, and each renewal costs €2,500.

If you apply by December 31, 2026, you keep the current terms until the end of 2031, even if the approval only arrives in 2027.

4. Madeira, Portugal

A Portuguese island in the Atlantic, about 600 miles southwest of Lisbon and closer to Morocco than to mainland Europe.

Spring weather most of the year, steep hills, and English everywhere in Funchal, a leftover from two centuries of British wine merchants.

A couple lives well on around €2,500 to €3,000 a month.

Same “D7” visa as Porto and Lagos in the July list.

About €920 a month in steady income for one person (€1,380 for a couple) from a pension, Social Security, dividends, or rent.

The benefit when it comes to Madeira is a nonstop to New York (about seven hours with Azores Airlines).

5. Las Palmas, Spain (Canary Islands)

The capital of Gran Canaria, in the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco.

Yes I know, Las Palmas was on the July list too.

I’m still repeating it on this one because it has the mildest winters in Europe, around 70°F (21°C) most of the year, with a beach in the middle of the city.

I ran the Las Palmas marathon in 2018 and the climate is made for being outdoors.

A couple lives comfortably on around €2,300 a month, and Las Palmas is one of the more affordable cities in Spain.

The visa is Spain’s “Non-Lucrative Visa”.

About €2,400 a month in income for the main applicant (plus €600 for a spouse), and you have to show you won’t work.

(I’ve had enough calls about this to say it twice.)

Spain has no special tax deal for retirees.

It taxes worldwide income, so of the five islands this is the least tax-friendly.

However, the Canaries charge 7% sales tax instead of the mainland’s 21%, which makes day-to-day spending cheaper.

Conclusion

Three things to take away:

• Three of the five only tax the money you bring in (Thailand, Mauritius) or give your pension a flat rate (Malta’s 15%). Portugal and Spain tax worldwide income.

• Check how you get on and off the island before you go apartment hunting. Madeira has a seven-hour nonstop to New York, while Mauritius is 20 hours with a stopover.

• Small islands do not have the same healthcare infrastructure as bigger ones. Gozo and Koh Samui both send serious cases to the bigger island or the mainland, by ferry or by plane.

Question for you:

Which of the five would you pick?

Tell me in the comments, I read them all.

Thanks for reading, and as always, appreciate having you here.

— Ben

PS

Near the end of that piece, I dropped one line and kept going:

“And even money that has to stay in US custody, like an IRA, has options.”

Several of you asked me what those options are.

So here is one of the five.

And the answer starts with a problem:

Your IRA cannot leave the country.

By law it sits with a US custodian, and if you pull the money out to move it yourself, the IRS treats that as a withdrawal.

Income tax on the full amount (for a traditional IRA), plus a 10% penalty if you're under 59½.

There is a workaround.

It’s called a self-directed IRA

And if you search the term, half the first page of results is custodians who earn a fee when you open one.

My view is this:

It’s the right answer for a small group of people.

It’s the wrong answer for almost everyone reading this.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why your IRA is stuck in the US, and what “self-directed” actually changes

• The ownership chain that gets IRA money into a Swiss account (legally, fully reported)

• What it costs, what can blow it up, and the number below which you should walk away

First, what the word actually means.

Read more

The US, Portugal, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Spain, Mexico, the UK, Sweden, Greece, Serbia, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Cyprus and Switzerland.

You also called me from several states:

California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Minnesota, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, Missouri and North Carolina.

A few of you had already moved and wanted help with the next step.

Most of you are still in the US, looking for the best way out.

My calendar says 122 discovery calls since January.

(Most go for around 30 minutes, although sometimes I can’t help but ramble on and they go up to 45 minutes, those topics are just too interesting.)

I get to hear what people plan to do with the next 20-40 years of their lives, and many of the stories I hear include exciting scenarios.

Today I want to share some questions that I hear often, so that all the people I haven’t yet talked to also get answers.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• The 10 questions I hear most often on these calls

• My honest answer to each one, and one key takeaway (in purple)

• The one question almost nobody asks (and it might be the most important one)

Starting with the question I heard more than any other.

#1 Where do I open a bank account outside the US?

The question I hear on almost every call, usually within the first ten minutes.

Most people assume the answer is “in the country I’m moving to.”

You will need a local account there eventually, for rent and groceries.

But banks in your destination country rarely open accounts for people without residency and a local address, so it usually can’t be your first move anyway.

Why?

• Because your US bank can restrict or close your account once a foreign address shows up in your file.

• Because the bank in your new country has their own reasons to make your life harder (residency regulations, regulatory changes for foreigners, you name it).

An account in a neutral third country has neither problem.

I made the full argument in The Bank Account They Can’t Touch.

Also, I clarified the difference between the mechanics of an offshore account vs. a local spending account in this video:

#2 Will I be taxed twice if I move abroad?

The fear behind almost every money conversation I have.

The answer:

The US taxes its citizens no matter where they live (the only other country that does this is Eritrea).

Your new country will usually tax you once you become a resident there.

Now, there’s a difference between becoming a “resident” and a “tax resident”.

If you residency has a low minimum stay requirement (e.g. a “Plan B”) you might become a resident, but not a tax resident.

And sometimes, even becoming a tax resident can still mean not paying local taxes, if the country e.g. has a territorial tax system.

Tax treaties and foreign tax credits then decide who gets what, so the same income isn’t fully taxed twice.

Sounds confusing?

How much you are taxed depends on the income type.

Social Security, a government pension, an IRA withdrawal, and rental income from a US property all follow different rules, and every treaty handles them differently.

That’s why “how are taxes in Portugal?” is impossible to answer without knowing what your income looks like.

And those rules change constantly, so make sure what you read is up to date.

I broke down the full system in How Taxes Work When You Retire Abroad.

#3 What happens to my IRA and 401(k)?

Nothing.

It stays where it is.

Getting the money out means cashing out, and a cash-out is a distribution and a taxable event (Roth excluded).

(One exception: a self-directed IRA. The account itself stays in the US with a US custodian, but with the right structure, it can hold assets outside the country, including money in a Swiss bank account.)

Two things need your attention before you leave:

1. First, your custodian. Big US brokerages close accounts when a foreign address shows up in your file, so move your IRA to one that accepts Americans abroad while you still have a US address.

2. Second, your investments. The IRS punishes Americans who buy foreign mutual funds (look up PFIC if you want to lose an afternoon).

#4 Which country should I pick?

Half of my callers ask this with a country already chosen.

The other half have a spreadsheet with twelve.

A country is a set of trade-offs, and the right one depends on inputs only you have:

• Your monthly budget

• Your health and the care it needs

• How fast you want to reach your kids

• What you want a normal Tuesday to look like

Write those down first.

I ask my Blueprint clients almost 100 questions in our first session.

You can check how it works here.

#5 Will my US bank close my account when I move?

Some of them will.

Since FATCA passed in 2010, every bank in the world has to report its American customers to the IRS.

Serving Americans abroad became an expensive compliance job, and banks hate expensive compliance jobs.

A foreign address in your file is enough to start that process.

The answer:

1. Open accounts outside the US.

2. Move your account to an institution that accepts foreign addresses.

3. Set up a “bridge” for converting currencies, so you’re not paying crazy fees.

The full setup is in The 3 Bank Accounts Everyone Retiring Abroad Needs.

#6 Is my money safer outside the US?

Depends on where you move it to.

“Outside the US” is not one place.

How much capital banks must hold, and what happens to depositors when one fails.

Whether your deposits are protected, and who pays for that protection.

Some countries set the bar far above international minimums.

Others barely have a bar.

I ranked the best options, by currency strength, bank capital, government debt, and track record, in The 3 Safest Countries To Park Your Money.

#7 Can I still work a little on a retirement visa?

Sometimes you can.

Often you cannot.

Some visas ban work of any kind, for example Italy’s Elective Residency Visa or Spain’s Non Lucrative Visa.

Some include the right to work, such as Portugal’s D7.

Which is a bad trade for a few consulting hours.

So decide before you apply.

If remote income is part of your plan, digital nomad visas exist for exactly this, with income minimums that you need to meet.

I compared the 4 European options in The 4 Best Retirement Visas In Europe.

#8 How does healthcare work abroad?

There are three strategies.

1. Public-Primary

   You join your new country’s public system once you’re a legal resident. Cheapest of the three. The trade-off is waiting, both to qualify and for non-urgent care.

2. Private-Primary

   International private insurance from day one. Fast access and your choice of hospitals. The trade-off is that premiums climb with your age, and insurers care about your medical history.

3. Dual-Track

   Both at once. The public system as your base, private cover for speed and comfort. It costs more than public alone but still far less than what you pay in the US today.

I broke all three down in 3 Healthcare Strategies Expats Use Abroad (And Which One Fits You).

#9 Can I split time between countries without becoming a tax resident anywhere?

Yes.

This is actually a real strategy, one of eight I deploy for my clients.

The anchor is the 183-day rule.

Spend less than half the year in a country and, as a general rule, you don’t become a tax resident there.

Days are only one test.

Tax offices also look at your ties such as a home, a spouse, a bank account, a registered business.

Treaties call this your “center of vital interests”, and it can make you a tax resident at less than 183 days if your life is anchored there.

When two countries both claim you, tax treaties have tiebreaker rules that decide which claim wins.

The full set of rules, including the reporting requirements most people miss, is in The Tax Residency Cheat Sheet.

#10 Do I have enough money to retire abroad?

The question is very hard to answer without knowing a lot of things about who I talk to.

I know people who retired on $500k and make it work.

I also know people who had millions and blew it, because they did not plan it right.

But a good starting point is to:

1. Estimate your cost of living abroad, e.g. with this prompt: How to Estimate Your Cost of Living Abroad.

2. Map out scenarios for what your investments will yield over the next decades (best case, middle case, worst case).

3. Always plan for a buffer, and unexpected things happening.

At the same time, don’t let your “worst case scenario” bring up so much anxiety that you scrap your idea of moving abroad altogether.

The question almost nobody asks

Ask yourself this:

I’m not trying to make that country work for you.

I ask because of what comes after.

When you say Fiji, I ask why.

And then the real answers show up:

• The food

• The pace

• The ocean

• The people

• The taxes you’d leave behind

Those reasons become our compass.

Conclusion

That’s it.

This truly is the work I was meant to do, and I enjoy every minute of it.

If you ever want to book a call with me to bring clarity into your moving abroad plans, you can do so here.

I don’t work with everyone.

If you show up with good energy and you’re ready to do your part, we’ll get along well, and the process will be more fun than you’d expect.

Here’s what they say about our work together:

Appreciate have you here,

— Ben

I walked into a branch with my passport, and 20 minutes later it was done.

I figured banking abroad would always be that easy.

(It wasn’t.)

A few years later I did an internship in China and got turned down at every single bank (half the time because my Chinese wasn’t good enough to explain what I wanted, and this was before fancy translation apps).

Since then I’ve opened accounts across Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Asia and made most of the mistakes I now warn readers about.

Today, my money sits in 7 countries.

But I built all of that on a German passport.

You’ll be building yours on an American one.

FATCA makes you expensive to service, so foreign banks hesitate and US banks push you out.

In 2025, US banks closed an increasing amount of accounts held by Americans living abroad, most of them for nothing more than a foreign address on file.

So today I’m giving you the full setup, start to finish:

• The institutions that work for Americans abroad

• The 4 money roles, and which account does each job

• The exact order to open everything (most of it happens before you leave the US)

We start with the framework.

The 4 money roles

Every dollar you own is doing one of four jobs, whether you manage it that way or not.

I broke this framework down in How To Move Your Money Abroad, so here’s the short version:

• GROW is the money working for your future, such as retirement accounts and your brokerage.

• PARK is the money you protect, like savings accounts and term deposits that pay little and lose nothing.

• MOVE is how money gets from one country and currency into another, whether you travel or stay somewhere long term.

• SPEND is the card in your pocket and the checking account behind it. Money you use to pay for everyday expenses.

Right now, all four roles are probably in one country.

Your IRA grows, your savings sit at your bank, Zelle moves money between friends, and your debit card spends it.

Moving abroad splits every role in two.

From here on, every role has a US side and an International side, and your setup only works when both are covered.

If that sounds too complicated already, I recorded a short video below explaining the logic.

We build them in reverse order, starting with SPEND.

SPEND: the money you live on

Daily money works with two accounts, one on each side of the border.

The US side comes first, and it starts with a decision about your income.

Social Security pays directly into foreign accounts in most retirement destinations.

So no, you don’t need a US account for the check to arrive.

I recommend one anyway.

The reason is control over the amount and the timing.

Paid into a Portuguese account, your full benefit becomes euros at that day’s rate, every month, whether you need it all in euros or not.

SSA’s own sign-up form for Portugal states:

“The account must be in euros, and the payment converts automatically.”

If you deposit it in the US instead, you decide when dollars become euros, and how many of them.

Direct deposit abroad suits people who are fully settled and spend every cent locally, and the conversion rate itself is fair.

The second decision is which US bank.

Most big banks don’t want customers with foreign addresses.

Chase and Bank of America have both closed accounts over one. The standard answer for expats is Charles Schwab.

Their checking account accepts foreign addresses, charges no foreign transaction fees, and refunds ATM fees worldwide.

The abroad side is the local account.

Every country has its own payment system that locals use for everyday transfers:

• In Mexico it’s SPEI

• In Portugal it’s MB Way

• In Thailand it’s PromptPay

These systems only work with an account at a local bank.

I keep two accounts here in Thailand for spending money and the local payment systems.

Opening a local account usually takes a passport, your visa or residency permit, and proof of a local address.

Some countries let tourists open accounts, most don’t, and requirements change by branch as much as by bank.

By now, the setup looks like this:

How the money gets from Schwab to your local account is the next role: MOVE.

MOVE: getting money across the border

The tools you use to move money today stop working at the border.

Zelle and Venmo are domestic only.

Your bank will happily send an international wire instead, for $25 to $50 per transfer, converted at an exchange rate 2 to 4% worse than the real one.

If you do this every month, you lose money (simple as that).

You connect your US account, convert dollars at the mid-market rate (the one you see when you Google “USD to EUR”), and send the money to your local account for a fee under 1%.

The same transfer often costs way less than sending a direct wire from your US bank.

And you control the timing.

This is the Social Security argument from the SPEND section.

Dollars sit at Schwab as dollars, and they become euros only when you decide.

Wise lets you set a rate alert, so you convert when the rate is good instead of when the calendar says so.

Now the warning.

Wise is not a bank.

There’s no branch, US balances are insured only through partner banks and only if you opt in, and accounts do get frozen over verification issues, and there's no branch to walk into while you wait.

Move money through it, never store wealth in it.

With MOVE in place, the typical month finally works:

1. Social Security arrives at Schwab.

2. You send it to Wise (and you decide when).

3. Then you convert it to euros and send it to your Portuguese account.

4. Local rent goes out by IBAN transfer, groceries go on the local debit card.

Now spending is covered and money moves.

Your setup looks something like this by now:

The next role is where your reserves sit: PARK.

PARK: the money that sits safe

“MOVE and SPEND I get. But what is PARK supposed to be, Ben?”

Fair question.

PARK is the money you’re not spending this year and not investing either.

You already have it, you just call it something else:

• “Your emergency fund”

• “The cash bucket for bigger purchases”

• “Money you keep ready, not invested in the market”

That money probably sits in a high-yield savings account.

And those are the first accounts to close when you move.

Ally’s own account rules require "a U.S. street address."

Marcus and the other online banks paying the best rates work the same way.

So the accounts holding your safety cushion are the most “residency-sensitive” accounts you own.

Your checking account might survive the move.

Your HYSA probably won’t.

PARK gets rebuilt on both sides, and you choose how.

Keeping part of it in the US works fine.

Interactive Brokers accepts foreign addresses and pays interest on cash that just sits in the account.

Just know that the US share is optional.

American obligations (the IRS, the credit cards) might already go through your US checking account.

The international side is where I would now add another form of de-risking assets.

Most movers want to park the cash in their new country.

Don’t.

You already keep one to two months in the local account, and the rest has no business there, for one reason: you might leave.

Maybe the tax rules change, maybe the grandkids pull you back, maybe year three feels different from year one.

If your reserves live in the country you’re leaving, you rebuild the whole setup from zero.

Disconnect PARK from your new country and it stays the same, even when you move again.

The third country means a stable jurisdiction where you don’t live and never have:

• Switzerland or Singapore for larger amounts

• Panama, Georgia or the Caribbean for simpler remote openings

How much goes where is personal.

Keep half in the US and half in the third country, or a low amount (or zero) in the US.

Any scenario works.

What matters is that your reserves don’t all sit in one country, and that none of them depend on the country you happen to live in.

Your setup now might look something like this:

Now, this leaves the biggest role of all.

Your 401(k), your IRA and your brokerage.

Who grows your money once you’ve left, and in what exact order should you open everything?

The next section: GROW.

Read more

(No politics here.)

But a lot of you are looking around and asking:

Why is this so hard?

Healthcare costs are through the roof.

Rent prices (even in mid-tier cities) cross new thresholds.

And every year brings new compliance requirements, new reporting thresholds, new reasons to consult yet another specialist.

Some of you stay and push back.

You call your insurance company, haggle with landlords, spend weekends on hold with the IRS.

Others are asking a different question:

Is there a place where I can just live without all this?

Countries where government stays in the background.

Where nobody tracks your address or audits your income.

Where the default setting is “let people live.”

And at the same time, where you can eat at a restaurant without wondering if something bad is about to happen.

This piece covers five options across four continents.

But some of them might spark your interest.

What we will look at:

• What “hands-off” actually looks like (visas, reporting, enforcement culture)

• Whether each country works as a place to live beyond the “light touch”

• The honest trade-offs that come with each (nothing is perfect)

What “hands-off” means

Every country has rules.

The difference is how often those rules affect your daily life.

For each country in this piece, we looked at four things:

• Do rules change often?

  Annual updates to tax codes and visa requirements make planning impossible. Stable policy for a decade means you can actually build a life.

• Does the government track you?

  Bank transactions, border crossings, phone data, digital IDs. How much gets recorded? How much gets shared between agencies?

• What do you owe?

  Income tax, wealth declarations, worldwide reporting. And what happens when you miss a deadline?

• How often do you see the government?

  Police checkpoints, permit requirements, inspections, random ID checks. Can you go a month without interacting with an official?

Now, the five countries.

#1: Georgia

Americans get 365 days in Georgia without a visa.

The policy has been this way since 2015.

365 days visa-free is generous.

What happens after you land is even better:

1. There’s no address registration.

   On the 365-day visa-free stay, there's no address registration. You rent a place, move in, done. Nobody in government tracks where you live.

2. There is no tax on passive foreign income.

   Passive income from abroad isn’t taxed. Investments, dividends, interest, crypto gains. If you’re retired and living off a portfolio, Georgia takes nothing.

3. Banking takes 30 minutes (but you need to go in person).

   Walk into Bank of Georgia or TBC with your passport, open an account same day. No proof of address or local tax ID required upfront.

4. Foreigners can buy property (with the same rights as Georgians).

   Registration takes 1-3 days and costs 1% of the purchase price. No residency requirement.

Now:

Does anyone actually want to live here?

Tbilisi is far from polished like Prague or Lisbon.

Buildings crumble next to new construction. Stray dogs roam everywhere.

But there’s a warmth to the place that’s hard to explain until you’ve been there a few weeks.

The cost of living is low.

One-bedroom apartments in the center are around $600-750/month, while places outside the center are more like $450-550/month.

Groceries are cheap.

A full meal at a local restaurant costs $8-12, and the food is good. Khachapuri, khinkali, grilled meats (and great wine with everything).

Georgians take eating seriously.

Internet is fast ($15-18/month for fiber) and the expat scene has grown enough that you will find your people.

A single person can live well on $1,200-1,500/month total.

When you want to get out of town, there are great options as well.

The Caucasus mountains are a few hours north and Black Sea beaches (Batumi) reachable by train.

Wizz Air flies out of Kutaisi (4 hours west) with $50 fares to Europe. Tbilisi's airport costs more but has direct flights to most major cities.

Now, the downsides.

Georgia has problems you can’t ignore.

In late 2024 there were street protests.

The country is caught between Western aspirations and Russian pressure, and that tension is public and ongoing.

Daily life for foreigners hasn’t been disrupted that much, but the political situation is genuinely unstable.

Infrastructure outside Tbilisi gets rough.

Poor roads, spotty internet, old buildings without central heating, while winter temperatures drop below freezing.

Also, the regulatory window is changing in some areas.

Which is normal to a degree, and not a reason for general concern (but worth mentioning).

One example: since March 2026, foreigners who register as Individual Entrepreneurs need a work permit.

If you're retired and living off investments, or holding crypto, Georgia is tax-free.

If you're actively working remotely, that's where it gets more complicated.

#2: Paraguay

Paraguay grants temporary residency without asking how much you earn.

The process of obtaining temporary residency takes about a week, and a few months later, you hold the card in your hands.

After two years you can convert to permanent residency, and since April 2026 there is also a direct route for investors (with permanent residency from day one).

What happens once you’re a resident:

1. There is no tax on foreign income. Paraguay has a territorial tax system since 1991. Pensions, Social Security, dividends, capital gains from abroad: 0%. No wealth tax, no inheritance tax. Local income is taxed at 10%.

2. Nobody checks where you live. No address registration, no 90-day reporting, or check-ins. You declare an address once during your application and that’s the last time anyone asks.

3. The presence requirement is near zero. Temporary residency allows absences of up to 12 months. Once you have permanent residency you can stay almost three years abroad.

4. Citizenship becomes an option. Three years of permanent residency makes you eligible, if you actually live there (you need to stay 183+ days per year in order to qualify).

Now:

Does anyone actually want to live here?

Asunción is hot, the country is landlocked, and the expat scene is small.

But your money goes far.

A one-bedroom in central Asunción is between $450-700 per month. Lunch at a local spot costs $6-8, fiber internet $30-45. A single person lives well on $900-1,400 per month, total.

Healthcare is limited.

Private care in Asunción handles routine needs at low prices, but for anything serious, expats fly to Buenos Aires or São Paulo.

And the rules are tightening a little.

A 2026 resolution added a documented-income requirement to the permanent stage, and background checks slowed down after Paraguay strengthened Interpol verification in late 2025.

Nothing dramatic, but the days of “residency in a week with almost no questions” are ending.

#3: Albania

Albania offers Americans a full year, visa-free.

(Only Georgia and Palau matches that number.)

The difference:

Albania’s rule applies to US citizens specifically.

Most other nationalities get 90 days.

I covered it in my roundup of visas that need no degree, job, or investment, and it still stands in 2026.

Here’s what the year looks like:

1. No application, no forms, or fees. You show your passport at the border and you’re in. The US Embassy in Tirana confirms this.

2. No registration for the entire stay. Albania requires no address registration for stays under one year. When you rent an apartment in Tirana or Saranda, no government office needs to know.

3. The tax threshold follows the 183-day rule. Spend more than 183 days in a calendar year and you become an Albanian tax resident. Stay under it, or split the full year across two calendar years (arrive July 1, leave June 30), and Albania has no claim on your income or your filings.

4. There is a path past year one. Leave for 90 days and come back for a fresh year, or apply for a residence permit from inside the country (retiree is one of the categories). Permanent residency is possible after five years.

Now:

Does anyone actually want to live here?

Cost wise, Albania makes a strong case.

A one-bedroom in central Tirana runs €500-750 per month, €350-520 outside the center. A full restaurant meal costs €8-15 and fiber internet €15-25.

A single person lives comfortably on €800-1,200 per month.

When you want the sea, the Albanian Riviera around Saranda and Vlora is a day’s drive south, with Corfu a 30-minute ferry away.

Now the trade-offs.

Infrastructure gets rough outside Tirana.

Healthcare handles routine needs cheaply, but for anything complex, expats cross to Italy or Greece.

Be careful when it comes to taxes.

Albanian tax residents owe tax on worldwide income: dividends at 8%, interest and capital gains at 15%. Albania exempts foreign pensions for EU/EEA citizens and people of Albanian origin, but a regular American does not qualify.

One more thing for your future plans:

Albania is an EU candidate in accession talks, aiming for membership around 2030. EU members follow EU visa policy, so the US-only year probably has an expiration date.

#4: Philippines

The Philippines sells permanent residency for a $15,000 bank deposit.

The program is the SRRV (Special Resident Retiree’s Visa), run by the Philippine Retirement Authority.

It was restructured in September 2025.

The current terms work in your favor if you’re over 50:

1. Permanent residency for a deposit, not a purchase. At 50+, you park $15,000 in a Philippine bank and show a lifetime pension of at least $800 per month ($1,000 for couples). Without a pension, the deposit is $30,000.

2. The government stops asking about you. Regular foreigners in the Philippines file an annual report with the Bureau of Immigration. SRRV holders are exempt: no annual report, and no alien registration card either. You leave and re-enter as often as you want, no permits needed.

3. Foreign income is not taxed. The Philippines taxes foreign residents only on Philippine-source income. Your US dividends and capital gains are tax-free, and the SRRV adds a written exemption on foreign pensions and annuities.

4. Renewal is a fee, not a process. $360 a year to the PRA and your status continues.

Now:

Does anyone actually want to live here?

One thing I like about the country: English is an official language.

Doctors and bank staff speak it fluently, and contracts come in English.

Doctors, contracts, and bank staff usually all speak English fluently.

A one-bedroom condo in Cebu costs around $500-800 per month, $300-400 in quieter districts.

A meal at a local eatery costs under $4.

Most foreigners live comfortably on $1,200-1,800 per month.

The trade-offs are healthcare and traffic.

While private hospitals in Manila and Cebu are good, outside those two cities, coverage is thin.

And if you’re looking at Manila (the capital) you can brace yourself for some brutal traffic.

#5: Panama

Panama grants permanent residency on day one.

If you have $1,000 a month in lifetime pension income, you qualify for the Pensionado (Social Security counts as well).

I broke down Panama’s two main residency routes in July.

What makes Panama hands-off:

1. Permanent from day one. No temporary stage. The status you get at approval is the status you keep for life.

2. Your only obligation is showing up. Enter Panama once every two years and your residency stays alive.

3. Territorial tax. Foreign pensions, dividends, interest, capital gains: 0%. If all your income comes from abroad, you don’t file a Panamanian return at all.

Panama is also the most livable country on this list.

Punta Pacífica hospital in Panama City is affiliated with Johns Hopkins.

Boquete and Coronado have decades-old American communities, and the Pensionado card cuts 25% off restaurants and utilities, 50% off hotels, 20% off doctor visits.

But, you pay for all that.

A one-bedroom in central Panama City costs between $900-1,500, and a realistic single budget is $2,000+ per month (at least).

Two more things:

1. Outside Panama City’s expat circles you need (at least) functional Spanish.

2. And opening a bank account is a slow, document-heavy process, even more so at the best banks.

One Question For You

Conclusion

That’s it.

Three things to take away:

• Countries that leave you alone still exist, and getting in is easier than you think.

• What they have in common is that nobody tracks where you live. And in three of the five, your foreign income is completely tax-free.

• None of them are perfect, you always need to pick trade-offs you can live with.

One thing to do this week:

Draw three buckets:

• Money

• Lifestyle

• Freedom

You have 100 coins, distribute all of them, no even splits.

If most of your coins land on Freedom, this list is your shortlist.

Where did your coins land?

Reply and tell me. I read every single one.

Thanks for reading, and as always, appreciate having you here.

— Ben

PS

If you’re thinking about retiring abroad in the next 5 years but not sure what happens to your money when you leave, you can book a free call with me here.

We’ll look at your situation and map out what to sort before you make a move.

Portugal’s D7 lets a single applicant in on €920 a month.

Spain’s non-lucrative visa requires €2,400, and France’s long-stay visitor visa sits between the two.

Greece requires €3,500 a month in passive income, plus 20% on top if your spouse comes with you.

I still like Greece despite the higher threshold, because of its tax regime:

7% flat on foreign income for 15 years.

Italy has a similar deal, but only if you settle in a southern village of under 30,000 people.

I’ve only been to Greece once (to Athens), and lived in the Greek part of Cyprus for a year.

I loved Athens, and also tried to learn Greek for a few months, but can’t reproduce much more than the occasional “Kalimera” by now.

This guide has two angles.

First, I want to talk about the paths and requirements, and who Greece makes sense for.

Second, I want to talk about the tax deal, and how it compares to the other ones European countries offer.

Along the way I will look at 1) the income definition from the September 2024 ministerial decision, 2) the savings-account “fallback” if your income falls short, and 3) what a tax treaty signed in 1950 fails to cover.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• What the FIP visa requires in 2026 and how the application works

• When the golden visa makes more sense, plus the family route

• How healthcare and the 7% flat tax work once you hold the card

Subscribe now

Why Greece and who this guide is for

Greece is a good choice if you want Mediterranean life on your own income, with an attractive tax deal attached.

The main residency route requires stable passive income.

What qualifies as passive income are the following:

Social Security, pensions, IRA distributions, dividends, rental income.

There is no need for a job offer (work is not allowed on the main retiree route), and you don’t need to buy property (unless you go for the golden visa).

Who this guide helps:

1. You are retired (or close) and live on a pension or Social Security.

2. You are financially independent and fund your life from savings or investments.

3. You work remotely and want to know which Greek route covers that.

4. You own or want a vacation place in Greece and keep hitting the 90-day Schengen wall.

5. Your spouse or partner is Greek or holds Greek residency.

6. You have wanted to live in Greece for years and want to know what it takes.

One more group deserves a mention: if you have a Greek parent or grandparent, you may have a citizenship claim by descent.

The citizenship by descent path will not be covered in this article.

What you will get:

1. A map of the routes that fit the situations above.

2. The status each route leads to and what it lets you do.

3. Typical timelines and costs, plus the traps that show up in practice.

4. Official links so you can verify every step.

What to know up front:

1. Rules change and consulates differ, always check the latest updates (if you comment with updates in three months, this article will be updated too).

2. Confirm the details with your consulate or a Greek immigration lawyer before you act.

The permits

An American can be in Greece two ways:

1. As a tourist

2. As a resident

Tourists get 90 visa-free days per 180, and those days can’t be turned into residency from inside Greece (one exception, at the end of this section).

Becoming a resident follows a sequence, and this is it:

The long-stay entry visa, issued by the Greek consulate covering your US state, before you move.

You apply for it under a specific route (e.g. FIP, Digital Nomad visa), and the consulate will ask you for the same evidence as that route’s evidence.

To make this a little bit easier to understand:

• Person A applies for the type D, and wants the FIP visa after. To get the type D, Person A shows the evidence needed to get the FIP.

• Person B applies for the type D, and wants a Digital Nomad Visa after. To get the type D, Person B shows the evidence needed to get the Digital Nomad visa.

Basically the type D is the “middle step” for any type of visa that comes after.

Makes sense?

The consulate issues the type D for up to a year, and it lets you live in Greece that whole time (unlike a tourist stamp).

Your Greek tax number, and you need it no matter which route you take.

Greece requires an AFM on almost any contract you sign there: the apartment lease that becomes your proof of accommodation in step 3, and the bank account you’ll pay rent from.

The AFM has nothing to do with your immigration status and anyone can get one (even a tourist buying a holiday house).

You might ask:

Why is it so easy to get a tax number?

To which I would say:

Well, who benefits from you getting a tax number?

… Exactly.

The tax number is not a bottleneck, so you can get it after you land.

While your type D is still valid, you file for the residence permit (άδεια διαμονής), the card you’ll actually live on.

The moment you file, you get the blue certificate (βεβαίωση), a receipt that keeps you legal while the ministry decides, which can take months.

The FIP card is valid for three years at a time; the golden visa card for five.

And if you complete step 1 but never file for the card, nothing dramatic happens: the visa expires, and you’ve paid consulate fees for a long test run.

The exception: the golden visa does not need step 1.

Investors can enter on tourist status and file for their card from inside Greece.

Still with me?

• Route = what your plan is (retire, invest, work)

• Type D visa = middle layer (don’t need it for golden visa)

• AFM = tax number (not a bottleneck)

• Blue certificate = receipt showing you applied for residence permit

• Residence permit = what you want at the end, “the card” (e.g. FIP card)

Route 1: the FIP visa

This is the retiree route, and the main event of this article.

Read more

Local accounts, fintech accounts, investment accounts, IRAs, brokerage accounts.

I’ve made my share of mistakes along the way, and I’ve written about them here before.

Then a client of mine, a retired American, set out to move roughly $1 million out of the US.

Most of it headed for a private bank in Switzerland.

Everything arrived, and the fees were small.

But it took some time.

Sometimes, wires between countries route through a third bank in the middle.

Her US brokerage needed a month (!) to find the one person who understood how to send securities to a foreign bank.

And two bank holidays almost delayed a visa deposit with a deadline attached.

And still, every dollar landed exactly where she wanted it.

Today I’m walking you through that move from the inside, so yours goes faster.

We’ll cover:

• Why a six-figure wire (almost) never travels straight from bank A to bank B

• The transfer her US brokerage couldn’t complete for over a month

• Five things that you should note down, if you plan to do the same

The plan

My client wanted two things:

1. Less of her wealth tied to the dollar

2. Banking spread across more than one country

(The logic of splitting money this way is in How To Move Your Money Abroad.)

The split looked like this:

• Roughly $200,000 went into a three-year CD at a Panama bank, the deposit behind her residency visa there.

• About $50,000 went to a second Panama bank.

• And roughly $750,000 in securities moved from her US brokerage to a private bank in Switzerland, the first transfer of several, with more of her portfolio following the same route.

All of it stays visible to the US, of course.

Foreign accounts come with FBAR reporting, and larger holdings with Form 8938.

Before any of it moved, she had to pick a structure.

There are about five ways an American can set this up (that I recommend), depending on where your bank sits, where your assets sit, and who manages them.

They range from keeping everything US-managed to going fully Swiss.

She went fully Swiss.

The decision took a few conversations.

Executing took months, and the rest of this article is about the gap between those two.

The middle layer

Her first wire went from her US bank to the Panama bank holding her CD.

It did not travel directly.

Most banks in different countries have no relationship with each other.

So the money routes through a correspondent bank in the middle, a larger institution that holds accounts on both sides and passes the transfer through.

None of this is a red flag.

It’s how cross-border payments have worked for decades.

But it surprises almost everyone the first time, because nothing about a domestic wire prepares you for it.

My client had sent international wires before.

She still described the route as “convoluted.”

Her US bank, her in-country lawyers, and the receiving bank each walked her through the steps more than once before the money moved.

Each bank in the chain can charge for its part:

• The sending bank charges to send.

• The correspondent can take its cut on the way through.

• The receiving bank charges to receive, and in her case the Panama bank took about $31.

On a six-figure wire, $31 is a rounding error.

On a small wire, those same flat fees start to eat real percentages.

Her rule now: never wire less than $2,500 to $3,000 at a time, so the flat fees stay small relative to the transfer.

She also checked whether Wise gets around all this.

For transfers like hers, it doesn’t. The wire fees still applied.

I use Wise every month and I’ve written about where fintechs fit and where they don’t.

One more thing to expect: after ordering every international wire, her US bank called to confirm she wasn’t being scammed.

Every single wire.

US banks screen large international transfers for fraud as a matter of routine, so take the call as a sign the system is paying attention, and answer your phone in the days after you send.

Bank holidays in three countries

The $200,000 CD was more than a savings decision.

It anchors her Panama residency application, and the deposit had a date attached.

(Why she picked that route over Panama’s more popular visa is its own article.)

Banks don’t process wires on holidays.

And if your wire passes through three countries?

Each one has its own holiday schedule:

• The sending bank closes for US holidays.

• The correspondent closes for its own.

• The receiving bank closes for Panama’s.

Her transfer window happened to contain two bank holidays, and a wire with days to spare suddenly had almost none.

The money landed in time, but it was close.

Now she does two things differently:

1. Anything with a deadline gets a week of buffer.

2. Before she sends, she checks the holiday calendar of every country the wire touches, including the correspondent’s country (which is the easy one to miss).

By the way, the same thing can happen with a property closing, a tax payment abroad, or renewing your residency permit.

Always plan with some buffer time.

What her brokerage did not understand

Now the most interesting part.

The $750,000 sitting in stocks and funds at her US brokerage.

She did not want to sell them, because selling means paying capital gains tax.

She wanted to move the securities themselves, as they are, into the Swiss bank.

That is called an “in-kind transfer”.

Between two US brokerages, this is routine.

There is a system for it called ACATS, and it runs mostly on its own. You fill out a form, you wait a few days, the assets show up.

Sending securities to a bank outside the US works differently.

The Swiss bank is not part of that system.

The transfer needs the receiving bank’s DTC number (an ID for routing securities in the US system) and people on both sides who handle it by hand.

Her US brokerage did not know how to do it.

The first people she reached had never seen a transfer like this (her own broker doubted the Swiss bank was real, imagine my surprise).

Finding the right person at the brokerage took more than a month.

Once she had them on the phone, the transfer closed in under a week.

While all this dragged on, her securities sat untouched in her account. The delay cost patience, and nothing else.

Two things made it work in the final week:

• First, the letter of instruction. This is a letter to the brokerage that lists every security she was moving and the exact details of the receiving account. If the letter is complete, the transfer moves. If details are missing, it stalls, and every correction costs days.

• Second, the route. The securities did not go straight to Switzerland. They went first to a US sub-custodian bank (a US bank that holds securities on behalf of the Swiss bank) and from there into her Swiss account. That middle step is normal for this kind of transfer.

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If you’re planning a move like this

I recommend writing these five down somewhere:

1. Start at your brokerage. Ask one question: who here handles transfers to banks outside the US?

2. Prepare the letter of instruction before you approach the brokerage. Work with the receiving bank to list every security and the exact details of the receiving account.

3. Give every deadline a week of buffer. Check the bank holidays in every country your wire touches, including the correspondent’s country.

4. Answer your phone after every wire. Your US bank will call to make sure you’re not being scammed (this is routine).

5. If the receiving bank works in another language, line up local help. An English-speaking banker at the branch is enough.

More than one way to do this

My client’s setup is one version of this.

There are more ways to do it than most people think.

You can go fully Swiss, like she did.

You can also keep your accounts in the US and have them managed from Switzerland.

And even money that has to stay in US custody, like an IRA, has options.

You can change who holds it and how it’s invested without moving it abroad.

Between those ends sit the five setups I mentioned earlier, and one of them fits almost every situation I’ve seen.

None of this is “hidden” money.

Every account gets reported to the US.

The best time to start this is now.

Completing this process takes 1-2 months, and the sooner you have your money in a safe place, the better.

What comes next

That’s it.

Moving seven figures out of the US took her months, and the hardest part was one fight with her brokerage over a transfer type they didn’t know.

Nothing was lost, nothing was frozen, and the money now sits in the structure she chose.

It required patience and people who knew the route.

Banks she trusts, and a guide who had done it before.

Where are you with your banking setup?

Reply in the comments, I read every single one.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

PS

I flew in for a hair transplant and flew home four days later with a shaved head and a fresh hairline.

The dollar bought 9.2 lira that month.

Today it buys 47.5, more than five times as much.

That sounds like good news.

More lira per dollar should mean cheaper rent and cheaper everything else, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Turkish prices rose 31% in the year to July while the dollar gained 17% against the lira, so what you buy in Istanbul got about 13% more expensive in dollar terms.

A collapsing currency might be great for a four-day trip.

It is a problem when your rent and your medical bills are priced in it.

On June 4, 2026, Turkey’s Official Gazette published Law No. 7582, which lets new residents pay zero Turkish tax on foreign income for twenty years and cuts inheritance to a flat 1%.

Twenty years is longer than any offer in Europe.

(By the way, Turkey is only 3% in Europe by land, so don’t think I classify Turkey as a European country.)

But for comparison’s sake:

• Cyprus offers a 17 year tax deal (called the “Non-Dom Regime”)

• Italy offers 10 years at 7% in southern towns under 30,000 people

• Greece offers 15 years at 7% for foreign retirees, anywhere in the country

So 20 years is genuinely long.

But…

I would still pass.

And today I will explain why.

Here is what we’ll cover today:

• What Law No. 7582 actually says, including two details most articles leave out

• Why the exemption is worth less to an American than to almost anyone else

• What you are signing up for when you commit to six months a year in Turkey

Let’s start with the law itself.

What Law No. 7582 actually says

The exemption sits in a new article of Turkey’s income tax code, GVK mükerrer 20/D.

Become a Turkish tax resident, clear a three-year test, and every dollar you earn outside Turkey is exempt from Turkish tax for twenty years.

That covers foreign salary, foreign business profits, dividends, interest, rent on a house in the US, and capital gains in your brokerage account.

None of it goes on a Turkish return.

Turkish-source income however, stays fully taxable.

If you buy an apartment and rent it out, it is taxed at normal rates, so between 15% and 40%.

A residence permit and tax residency are different things, and confusing the two gets expensive.

The exemption is connected to tax residency.

Getting a Turkish residence permit (or a passport) does not exempt you automatically.

What counts is Turkey's tax residency test, set out in Article 4 of the income tax code.

You pass it one of two ways:

1. A Turkish domicile.

2. More than six continuous months inside a single calendar year.

The three years before you arrive

You also need to meet two conditions, both measured across the three full calendar years before you become resident.

1. No Turkish domicile in any of those years.

2. No Turkish tax liability in any of those years, with one carve-out: prior Turkish tax on rental income, investment income, or capital gains still lets you in.

For example:

Two things the May announcement left out

Read more

If speed is all you care about, the answer is short:

Go buy one.

The five fastest passports in the world are all for sale.

But what if you don’t have $100,000+ to spend?

In that case, there are other options.

For example claiming a passport through your ancestors for a few hundred euros. Or actually earning one by living in the right country for a few years.

This list ranks the fastest passport on each route.

Buy, claim, or earn.

Here’s what you’ll find for each:

• Timeline, cost, and requirements in 2026

• What the passport gets you (and what it doesn’t)

• One thing to know before you commit to any of them

First, the fastest passport money can buy.

#1 Vanuatu (donation)

Vanuatu’s Development Support Program launched in 2017.

A Pacific nation of 330,000 people runs the fastest legal route to a second passport anywhere.

A Digital Citizen guest author bought this exact passport and wrote about the whole process.

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Timeline:

• 30 to 60 days from application to passport

• Biometrics can be given in Vanuatu or at approved locations abroad. No residency, no visit beyond that.

Requirements:

• $130,000 donation for a single applicant, $180,000 for a family of four

• Proof of at least $250,000 in bank assets

• Clean criminal record

Benefits:

• Citizenship for life, passed on to your children. Dual citizenship allowed.

• No income tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax in Vanuatu

• Visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 91 destinations on the Henley Passport Index, including Singapore and Hong Kong

How to apply:

• Through a licensed agent only, as the government accepts no direct applications.

One thing to know:

• This passport is weaker than what buyers got three years ago.

• The EU suspended Vanuatu’s Schengen access in 2022 and removed it permanently in December 2024.

• The UK now requires a visa too. The price, however, stayed the same.

#2 Turkey (real estate)

Turkey grants citizenship for a $400,000 property purchase. Among the fast passports, Turkey is the only one where you get your money back.

You buy property, hold it three years, sell it after (or keep it). The passport stays either way.

Timeline:

• 3 to 6 months from investment to passport

• It used to take 8 to 12. Since February 2026, biometrics, residence permit, and citizenship application happen in a single visit to Turkey.

Requirements:

• Real estate worth at least $400,000, with a three-year resale restriction on the title deed

• Alternative routes at $500,000: government bonds, a bank deposit, a business, or fund shares, each locked for three years

• Certified criminal records for main applicant and spouse

• In-person biometrics for both

Benefits:

• Visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 113 destinations, including Japan, South Korea, and most of Latin America

• The investment comes back: rent the property during the hold, sell after three years

• No residency requirement, no language test, dual citizenship allowed

• Since June 2026, Turkey also has a 20-year tax exemption on foreign income for new residents. Mostly irrelevant for Americans, who stay taxed by the US wherever they live.

How to apply:

• Buy through a government-approved valuation process, then apply via the Presidency of Migration Management.

One thing to know:

• Citizenship-targeted properties are routinely overpriced.

• Developers know why you’re buying, and some price the passport into the apartment. Get an independent valuation before you sign anything.

#3 St. Kitts & Nevis (donation)

St. Kitts & Nevis has sold citizenship since 1984.

I covered St. Kitts in 4 Passports for Sale in August 2025.

The program is the oldest of its kind in the world, and still the fastest route to a passport that gets you into Europe (but maybe not forever, and this is mentioned below).

Timeline:

• 4 to 6 months from application to passport

Requirements:

• $250,000 donation under the Sustainable Island State Contribution, covering a family of up to four

• Around $286,000 all-in for a family of four once due diligence and processing fees are added

• Real estate alternative: $325,000 in approved property, held for seven years

• Interview for every applicant 16 and older, in person or via video

• Biometrics enrollment in person

Benefits:

• Visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 157 destinations, including the Schengen area, the UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong

• No tax on foreign income or wealth

• Spouse, children under 25, and parents over 55 can be included

How to apply:

• Through an authorized agent; the government’s Citizenship by Investment Unit processes the file

Important to know:

• The EU wants this program gone.

• On June 25, 2026, the European Commission sent letters demanding that St. Kitts and the four other Caribbean CBI states phase out their citizenship programs by June 1, 2028, or risk losing visa-free Schengen access.

• The five prime ministers met on July 10 and responded without accepting or rejecting the deadline.

• If Schengen access falls, the main reason to buy this passport falls with it.

#4 Ireland (descent)

One Irish-born grandparent gets you the strongest passport on this list.

More than 30 million Americans claim Irish ancestry.

The route for those with the right paperwork is called “Foreign Birth Registration”.

If you can prove the chain from your Irish-born grandparent to your parent to you, Ireland adds you to its register of citizens.

I walked through the full process, and every other way into Ireland last year.

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Timeline:

• The official processing time is 12 months

• Add a few months up front for hunting down long-form certificates, and a few weeks at the end for the passport itself

Requirements:

• A grandparent born on the island of Ireland (Northern Ireland counts), or a parent who was already an Irish citizen when you were born

• Long-form birth, marriage, and death certificates for every person in the chain

• €278 application fee for adults, plus around €75 for the passport at the end.

Benefits:

• Visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 185 destinations, 4th strongest passport in the world

• Full EU citizenship: the right to live, work, or retire in all 27 EU countries

• The right to live in the UK too, through the “Common Travel Area”. No other passport on this list opens both.

• Ireland doesn’t care that you keep your US citizenship

How to apply:

• Start online at the Department of Foreign Affairs, then mail a certified document pack

One thing to know:

• Getting the documents together usually takes longer than the application itself. You need long-form certificates for three generations, and one name mismatch between records sends you back for more paperwork. Start collecting before you apply.

• Also worth knowing: your citizenship starts on the day you’re registered, not at birth. Children you already have can’t claim Irish citizenship through you. Only children born after your registration can.

#5 Argentina (naturalization)

Argentina naturalizes foreigners faster than almost any country on earth.

Two years of residence, set in a law from 1869.

This is the one you earn.

You have to move to Argentina, live there, and petition a federal judge.

Timeline:

• Two years of continuous legal residence

• Then a judicial naturalization case, typically several months to a year depending on the court

• Realistic total: about three years from arrival to passport

Requirements:

• A residency visa first. The Rentista pegs its income requirement at five times Argentina’s minimum wage (plan on roughly $2,000 a month to be safe); retirees use the Pensionado.

• Two years of actually living in Argentina

• Clean criminal record and proof you support yourself

Benefits:

• Visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 168 destinations, including the Schengen area, the UK, and Japan.

• Argentina taxes residents, not citizens. If you leave after a few years and get residency elsewhere, the passport creates no Argentine tax bill.

• Nobody asks you to give up your US citizenship.

How to apply:

• Residency through the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, then the citizenship petition through the federal courts.

One thing to know:

• This route only works if you actually move.

• The judge looks at whether Argentina is really your home: your address, your time in the country, where your life happens. A few weeks a year in Buenos Aires doesn’t count as residence.

Two that almost made the list

Both are donation passports, both cheap and fast, and both too new to rank.

Nauru (donation)

Nauru launched its citizenship program in 2025 and cut the price to $90,000 in February, down from $115,000. Processing takes 3 to 5 months, fully remote.

What you get is a passport from an 8-square-mile Pacific island that opens far fewer options than the Caribbean ones, issued by a program that has existed for barely a year.

São Tomé and Príncipe (donation)

São Tomé and Príncipe started selling citizenship in August 2025: $90,000 plus fees, passport in 6 to 8 weeks.

That would make it the second-fastest on earth, behind Vanuatu.

It gets you into 61 destinations.

I will go deeper into those options once they have a bit more of a track record.

Conclusion

That’s it.

Five passports, five price tags:

• Vanuatu is the fastest there is: 30 to 60 days and $130,000, for a passport that keeps losing destinations.

• Turkey takes 3 to 6 months and $400,000, and it’s the only one that hands the money back.

• St. Kitts & Nevis is the strongest passport you can buy, in 4 to 6 months, with a 2028 question mark hanging over its Schengen access.

• Ireland costs €278 and a year of patience, if you have an Irish grandparent in your family tree.

• Argentina is the one you earn: two years of living there (realistically three, start to finish) for a top-15 passport.

Notice the pattern:

Almost every option on this list got pricier or more restricted in the last three years.

Get your Plan B in order, before you need it.

And it doesn’t have to be a passport right away. There are great residency options that you can get fast and cheap.

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If you have questions, ask me in the comments.

I read and answer every single one.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

Portugal, Spain, and France.

Until a few years ago, Portugal was the deal.

Then it ended NHR, the 10-year tax holiday, and the deal got a lot smaller.

Still, moving on the D7 visa remains one of my favorite setups in Europe.

Spain is still incredibly popular.

But Spain is also one of the few countries that impose a wealth tax, amongst other things that need careful planning and sequencing.

Today, I want to look at France as the third option, and evaluate what it does better than the other two, and where it falls short.

I’ve been to Paris, to Lyon and to Montpellier myself (Paris was my least favorite).

One thing I noticed in conversations with expats from both countries is this:

• In Portugal, the conversation is about what the country costs.

• In France, the conversation is about what the country is.

The food, trains, healthcare, the fact that a small town of 3,000 people still has a bakery, a pharmacy, and a Tuesday market.

Two angles I want to include in this article.

One is the U.S.-France tax treaty, which can be very favorable for Americans.

The second one is the public healthcare system.

The fact that it takes you in after three months can make a big difference, if healthcare is one of your top priorities.

While researching, I found three things you won't find in the usual France guides.

The official answer France gave on remote work just four weeks ago, the legal reason retirees are exempt from the new renewal cap, and the “payroll trap” that might changes your work-from-France plan.

Apart from that, here’s what we’ll cover today:

• The visitor route step by step: income, insurance, paperwork, renewals and things to watch out for

• How five years of residency turns into the 10-year card, and when citizenship follows

• How healthcare and taxes actually work for an American retiree in France, and what each has in benefits

Let’s start with why France, and who this guide is for.

Why France and who this guide is for

France is a good choice if you want to live in Europe on your own income, with healthcare that will not bankrupt you.

The main residency route asks for stable income with a manageable threshold.

There is no need for a job offer (on some routes you’re not allowed to work at all), and you don’t need to park six figures in a fund somewhere.

Passive-income visas like this are standard across southern Europe.

Portugal’s D7 asks for about €920 a month, Spain’s non-lucrative visa wants €2,400, Greece wants €3,500, and Italy’s elective residence visa wants around €31,000 a year.

France sits near the bottom of that range.

The difference is how your income sources are treated, once you live there.

Portugal now taxes American pensions at normal progressive rates, since the NHR tax holiday closed to new applicants.

Spain has a wealth tax, and although it does not tax all income directly, the amounts you receive are added to the total taxable amount (this is called “exemption with progression” which the tax nerd in me has to mention).

Add public healthcare from month three, and France wins in some categories, compared to its neighbors.

Healthcare deserves its own paragraph.

When I asked 25 of my clients and callers in June what worried them most, 10 said they had no idea how healthcare works outside the US.

France answers that question better than almost anywhere, and we will get into the specifics further down.

Who this guide helps:

1. You are retired (or close) and live on a pension or Social Security.

2. You are financially independent and fund your life from savings or investments.

3. You work remotely for a U.S. company and want to know whether the visitor route covers you.

4. You own or want a second home in France and keep hitting the 90-day Schengen wall.

5. Your spouse or partner is French or holds French residency, and you plan to join them.

6. You have wanted to live in France for decades and want to know what it takes.

What you will get:

1. A simple map of viable routes for the above use-cases.

2. The status each route leads to and the rights it gives you.

3. Typical timelines, costs, and common delays.

4. Official links so you can verify every step.

What to know up front:

France is not a citizenship-by-descent country like Ireland.

France is residency-first:

• You move

• You live there

• You earn permanent residency (and later, citizenship)

Where Ireland has “Stamps,” France has the “titre de séjour” system.

We'll break down the residency cards you'll actually deal with when we get to the routes.

What this guide will not do:

1. It will not sell you shortcuts or loopholes (never have, never will).

2. It will not bury you in legal jargon (plain and clear language only).

3. It will not go deep on tax (but you get the essentials and the sources to check).

The next sections walk you through your options with clear steps and timelines.

The cards you’ll deal with

France works with three documents, and the whole system makes sense once you see how they are connected.

The long-stay visa (VLS-TS) is your entry ticket.

You apply at a French consulate in the US before you move, and once you validate it online after arrival, it doubles as your residence permit for year one.

The carte de séjour is the renewable residence card you switch to from year two.

For the visitor status this card is annual, every year, by law.

France has multi-year cards (2 to 4 years) for employees, students, and family statuses, but the visitor category is explicitly excluded from them.

The carte de résident is the 10-year card, available after five years of continuous residence.

This is the card that ends the annual paperwork.

A simple example:

Every route in this guide is a variation of that skeleton.

Route 1: the long-stay visitor visa

This is the retiree route, and the main event of this article.

Read more

Since then, the same question keeps landing in my inbox:

Fine Ben, but where?

“Offshore” covers everything from Liechtenstein to Belize, and the difference between those two is the difference between a vault and a storage unit with a padlock.

So today I’m ranking.

(One of my favorite things to do.)

Three countries where savings are safer than anywhere else on earth, measured by things you can verify:

• Currency

• Bank capital

• Track record

• Government debt

• Deposit protection

But the safest jurisdictions are also the hardest ones for Americans to enter.

After FATCA passed in 2010, most of the world’s best banks decided American clients weren’t worth the paperwork.

There are still ways to get in, though. “Hard” doesn’t mean “impossible”.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• The three countries, ranked, with the numbers behind each one

• Will they actually take you as an American citizen

• What it takes to get in, and which paths are still open

Let’s start.

The filter that eliminates the usual suspects

Every “safest banks” list starts in the wrong place.

They score capital ratios and credit ratings, and those matter.

But none of them ask the question that decides everything for you:

Will the bank take an American?

Use that filter, plus the five criteria from above, and see what is left.

Luxembourg is probably one location everyone expects to see in this ranking.

AAA rated, more than $8 trillion parked in its investment funds, the largest fund center in the world after the US.

All true, and none of it helps you.

Luxembourg is built for institutions.

The $8 trillion belongs to pension funds and ETF providers, not to people with bank accounts, and there is no practical path for an American retiree.

On paper, Luxembourg is one of the safest places in Europe. In practice, it is very hard to get in.

Another one I often hear people mention is the infamous “Cayman Islands” account.

But the Caymans have the same problem as Luxembourg.

They are built for institutions.

Most of the world's hedge funds are (legally) parked on the islands, while personal banking for a foreign retiree barely exists.

A jurisdiction that has no use for your kind of money has no place in this ranking.

Which leaves us with a short list.

Countries with their own rules, strong currencies, banks holding capital far above the required minimums, and at least one working path for US citizens.

#1 Switzerland

Switzerland has not fought a war since 1815.

Two hundred and eleven years of staying out of everyone’s craziness, and by now, it has something to show for it.

When the world gets nervous, money moves to Zurich.

Start with the currency.

In 1970, one dollar bought 4.3 Swiss francs.

Today it buys less than one.

The franc gained another 13% on the dollar in 2025 and hit an 11-year high this year.

Call the franc boring, but when I hear “boring” and “money” in the same sentence, it is music to my ears.

The foundation is just as solid:

• Government debt below 40% of GDP (the US is above 120% and climbing)

• Deposit protection of CHF 100,000 per client per bank, funded by the banks themselves

• Bank capital requirements stricter than the international minimums, known in the industry as the “Swiss finish”

And the system has been tested, recently.

In March 2023, Credit Suisse, 167 years old and the country’s second-largest bank, went down in a single week.

Here is what happened to depositors:

Nothing.

UBS absorbed the bank over a weekend, accounts kept working, and not one depositor lost a franc.

Shareholders and bondholders paid the bill instead, including $17 billion of wiped-out bank bonds.

Now the problem.

Walk into a Swiss private bank on your own with a US passport, and the answer is usually no.

Money does not fix it.

One of my clients tried recently with $3 million, and still got complimented out of the door.

A small group of Swiss firms exists specifically to bring in American clients, and the right one walks you through the institutional entrance.

I wrote about how that access works in How The Swiss Stay Rich.

The problem is that from the outside, these firms are nearly impossible to tell apart.

Some are excellent.

Some are paid by the banks they recommend, which means they work for the bank and not for you.

If you want a Swiss setup without guessing which firms actually work for you, this is what I help clients with.

And you do not need to be “ultra-rich” for any of this.

A managed Swiss setup becomes realistic from about $1 million, far below the numbers most people imagine when they hear “Swiss private bank.”

#2 Singapore

Singapore is the only country in Asia rated AAA by all three major rating agencies.

The US lost its unanimous AAA in 2011. Singapore still has one, and only around ten countries on earth can say that.

The government spends less than it earns, the regulator (MAS) is the strictest in Asia, and behind the state sit official reserves of roughly US$380 billion plus two sovereign wealth funds, one of which is so discreet it has never published its size.

The currency (SGD) is strong.

In the early 1980s, one US dollar bought 2.2 Singapore dollars. Today it buys about 1.3.

Four decades of slow, deliberate appreciation, managed by a central bank that treats stability as the product.

The numbers for you to check:

• AAA from S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch, the only such rating in Asia

• Deposit insurance of S$100,000 per depositor per bank (raised in April 2024)

• DBS, the country’s largest bank, named Asia’s safest bank by Global Finance 16 years in a row

And now some history, on how the system performed under pressure.

When the Asian financial crisis tore through the region in 1997 and broke the currencies of Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea, Singapore needed no IMF rescue and lost no banks.

Remember 2008, when Washington bailed out Wall Street?

Singapore’s banks required nothing.

And again, the practical reality.

Out of the three countries in this ranking, Singapore is the hardest for Americans to use.

Most banks decline US persons at the retail level.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but this is the hardest route out of the three.

One thing to know is that the deposit cap here is the lowest of the three.

The Swiss and Liechtenstein schemes both cover CHF 100,000, which is roughly US$120,000 at today’s rates, while Singapore’s S$100,000 works out to about US$75,000.

The counterweight is the capitalization of the banks themselves, which is why they top the safety rankings year after year.

And just for the record, I would always look at capitalization of a bank first, before any “paper promise” like deposit insurance or FDIC rules.

But that’s just me.

#3 Liechtenstein

Liechtenstein has 40,000 people, no airport, and a government with almost no debt.

The whole country is smaller than Washington, D.C.

It has been run by the same family, the House of Liechtenstein, since 1719, and it pays its bills from reserves, not borrowing.

S&P affirmed its AAA rating again this year, pointing at exactly that:

Low debt and deep reserves.

What I also find very interesting is this:

Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc.

It has since the 1920s, through a currency and customs union with Switzerland.

So you get the same currency that won against the dollar for fifty years, in a second, separate jurisdiction with its own banks and its own rules.

And those banks are built like bunkers:

• Tier 1 capital ratios above 20% across the sector, roughly double what international rules demand

• Not a single Liechtenstein bank needed state aid in 2008

• Deposit protection of CHF 100,000 per client per bank, same level as Switzerland

• LGT, the largest bank, has been owned by the Princely House of Liechtenstein for over 90 years

That last point is my favorite.

When the owner of the bank is the family whose name is on the country, reckless banking is a personal problem.

One of the Swiss banks I work with has the same principle.

The people who founded it still own it and still run it.

When my clients visit Switzerland, an owner greets them personally.

And they invest their own money in the same things my clients invest in, which is exactly the incentive structure you want from someone holding your savings.

I still trust my spreadsheets (I love them), but I trust that even more.

For Americans, Liechtenstein is harder to enter than Switzerland.

Some of its banks are small enough to make their own calls, and a few built their business around clients the big Swiss names reject.

For most of my clients, Switzerland ends up being the practical answer.

Managed or parked: how to choose

Not all money abroad has the same job.

Parked money is cash in a transaction account.

It sits in a strong jurisdiction, sometimes in a second currency, and waits until you need it.

Setting it up is cheap and fast, with entry from about $10,000.

I wrote about that here.

Managed money is a portfolio.

A private bank holds your investments, a professional runs them, and the structure is built to last decades.

That is what Switzerland, Singapore, and Liechtenstein actually sell, and why access is restrictive.

The product is measured in generations, and entry starts around $1 million.

Not the $10 million people assume.

Here is how I would use this ranking:

• If you are moving serious retirement money, the top three are the destination.

• If you want a parking spot first, you have more options, and they cost far less to enter.

Two honorable mentions from my own practice: Panama and the Bahamas.

Panama has run on the US dollar since 1904, so there is no local currency to worry about.

The Bahamas sit a short flight from Florida with a long history of banking American money.

Neither makes the top three once you cross into seven figures, but both have solid track records, realistic minimums, and paths that open for US citizens.

I help clients open accounts in both.

And you don’t have to choose between parked and managed.

Most of my clients end up with both, and I covered the mechanics of getting money across borders in How To Move Your Money Abroad.

Conclusion

That’s it.

The three safest places on earth for your savings:

• Switzerland survived the death of its second-largest bank without a single depositor losing a franc. The hard part is access, and even walking in with millions gets you a polite no.

• Singapore is Asia’s only unanimous AAA, home to the region’s safest banks 16 years running, and the toughest of the three for Americans to use.

• Liechtenstein pairs the Swiss franc with banks capitalized at double the rules, in a country run by a family that can’t afford a scandal.

One action step for this week:

Decide which job your money abroad needs to do first, parked or managed.

Everything else (country, bank, currency) follows from that answer.

And if the answer is managed, you already know the problem.

The safest countries are highly restrictive, and a US passport makes it even harder.

I help clients get access to routes that are actually open, Switzerland most of all, so the people managing your money answer to you, not to a bank.

If you want that handled, book a call and we’ll go through your situation together.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

PS

• Visa launches

• Rule and fee changes

• Travel access changes

• Citizenship & investment news

Here is what changed in the last four weeks.

Italy’s Ancestry Fight Just Landed At The EU’s Top Court

If you have an Italian parent or grandparent, your case moved again in July.

Recap: the 2025 Tajani Decree capped citizenship by descent at two generations and treats many people born abroad with a second nationality as if they never held Italian citizenship at all.

In May, Italy’s Court of Cassation ruled that the right to claim never expires, and that a blocked consulate appointment is enough reason to take a claim straight to an Italian court.

On July 23, Italy’s Constitutional Court made Order No. 147/2026 public.

The judges paused the constitutional challenges against the decree and referred the core question to the EU Court of Justice:

Does cutting off people who were born before the law took effect comply with EU law?

A ruling against the decree could reopen thousands of blocked cases.

I would not celebrate yet.

The decree stays in force while Luxembourg deliberates, and an EU referral usually takes well over a year. But a claim that looked legally dead in June now has Europe’s highest court examining it.

What this means for you:

1,260 Investors Just Took Portugal To The Ombudsman

In April, I covered Portugal’s parliament voting 152 to 64 to double the citizenship timeline from five years to ten.

The law took effect May 19.

Two details made it worse than a timeline extension:

1. The clock now starts when your residence card is issued (time spent waiting in AIMA’s backlog counts for nothing).

2. Parliament rejected every protection for people still waiting on residence permits.

Back then I wrote that the conflict over pending applications was unsolved.

Now, 1,260 people are forcing the issue.

In late June, nine Portuguese law firms filed a collective complaint with Portugal's Ombudsman on behalf of 1,260 golden visa investors.

Their demand:

Refer the new law to the Constitutional Court and press the government for a transitional solution for everyone who applied before May 18 and is still stuck waiting on a permit through no fault of their own.

On July 24, the group set a deadline.

If nothing moves, legal action starts in September, and the plaintiff group is expected to grow to around 2,000 investors.

My view: this fight matters far beyond golden visa holders. If Portugal can restart the clock on people who applied under the old rules, every pending applicant in every program inherits that risk. If the investors win a transition scheme, everyone stuck in the backlog gets a template to point to.

What this means for you:

Read more

Ireland announces new visa rules for three countries: St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and Nicaragua.

Starting June 15, their citizens need a visa to enter.

Two of those three countries sell citizenship. A St. Kitts passport costs around $250,000, and visa-free travel is the main thing it has been sold on.

And Ireland is not an outlier.

Norway has been turning away Caribbean passport holders at the border since 2025, without changing a single written rule.

Behind both is Brussels.

In November 2025, the EU rewrote its visa suspension rules.

Selling citizenship can now, by itself, justify cutting a country’s visa-free access.

The Caribbean feels that pressure already. I mentioned some of the measures (St. Kitts asking for fingerprints, Dominica announcing in-person visits) that are taken here.

Now, “villain” is a big word.

Europe hasn’t banned anything (yet).

What changed is the posture:

The EU now treats bought passports as a security risk, and it built the legal tool to act on that view.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• The new EU rule that names bought passports as grounds to suspend visa-free travel

• Why the passive, never-visit passport is ending (St. Kitts and Dominica now want you there in person)

• Two ways to respond, depending on what you actually need

First, the legal tool that the EU has built.

The EU tool Ireland used first

The tool has a name:

The visa suspension mechanism.

The mechanism is how the EU cuts visa-free access for a country on its list.

Vanuatu already went through it.

The EU froze its access in 2022 and revoked it for good in December 2024, after years of warnings about who was getting its $130,000 passports.

On November 17, 2025, the Council of the EU gave final approval to a rewrite of that mechanism.

Three changes are relevant.

A country can lose visa-free access for granting citizenship to people with “no genuine link” to it.

Check that phrase against the Caribbean model:

1. Pay a fee.

2. Pass the checks, never set foot on the island.

Does that sound like a “genuine link” to the country?

The EU counts how a country’s citizens behave inside Europe.

How many get refused at the border, how many overstay, how many file asylum claims, how many commit serious crimes.

Under the old rules, one of those numbers had to jump by 50% year over year before Brussels could start suspending visa-free access.

Now a 30% jump is enough.

Twelve months instead of nine, extendable by another 24.

None of this names a specific country yet. The mechanism is a “loaded gun” on the table.

Ireland shows the “climate” around it.

Ireland is not in Schengen and didn’t need Brussels to act.

It announced its visa rules under national law, and they cover ordinary, diplomatic, and service passports, plus airport transit.

Migration Minister Colm Brophy called it:

“A carefully considered decision that brings Ireland more closely in line with the approach taken in the United Kingdom and across Europe.”

The UK had already cut Dominica and Vanuatu in 2023, then stripped Nauru of visa-free access in December 2025, each time pointing at citizenship sales.

Look at the timeline:

1. The EU finalizes its mechanism in November.

2. The UK cuts Nauru in December.

3. Ireland cuts 3 countries in June.

Three moves in eight months, all in the same direction.

The old bargain is collapsing

One of my partners Andrew made the same point recently, and I strongly agree:

For decades, the Caribbean citizenship countries operated under an “unwritten deal” with the West.

St. Kitts, St. Lucia, and Dominica are former British territories.

Small islands, small economies, and one export that always sold: citizenship.

The deal was simple.

Run your programs cleanly, cooperate with Western authorities, stay aligned, and your citizens keep their visa-free access.

They held up their end.

After the UK cut Dominica in 2023, all five Caribbean programs signed a common-standards agreement in March 2024.

They tightened screening, shared data, and revoked citizenships from applicants who had hidden past visa denials.

And they’re getting cut off anyway.

Notice what the recent cuts have in common.

The UK didn’t point to a Nauru scandal when it moved in December.

It pointed at the existence of the program.

The EU’s new rules work the same way: selling citizenship to people with no genuine link is, by itself, enough.

And the pressure is no longer abstract.

In late June, the European Commission wrote to all five Eastern Caribbean CBI states demanding a phase-out by June 2028, with Schengen access on the line.

This phenomenon can also be observed in international banking.

The OECD keeps a public list of citizenship-by-investment programs it flags as high-risk, and the Caribbean programs are on it.

Compliance departments read that list, naturally.

Walk into a Western bank with a Caribbean CBI passport as your only citizenship, and the conversation starts in the risk department.

The passport still works at most airports.

At the bank counter?

Less and less.

What this tells me is one thing:

The West doesn’t like people who create options for themselves. And it starts putting the screws on them.

The passive passport is dead

Europe is one half of the story.

The programs themselves are ending the other half:

The promise that you never had to show up.

St. Kitts has the oldest program in the world, selling citizenship since 1984.

It now requires biometric enrollment, done in person at an approved center.

This covers everyone who bought the passport, family members included.

I covered the rollout of the new centers that have been established in the June mobility roundup.

In January, Prime Minister Terrance Drew announced the program will shift away from pure pay-and-done citizenship toward routes built on residency and real participation in the country.

Not law yet, but the direction is public.

St. Kitts is building exactly the “genuine link” the EU says is missing.

Dominica, on the other hand, made it concrete.

On June 10, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit ended the fully remote model that defined his program since 1993:

“You will have to come to Dominica to receive and renew your passport as a citizen.”

The legislation is still being drafted.

But the “no-visit passport”, Dominica’s signature product for 33 years, is done.

The five Caribbean programs have also proposed a common rule. New citizens spend at least 30 days in-country during their first five years. Not law everywhere yet, but Antigua has already written it into a bill.

And if you want to see where the cheap end of the market goes, look at Nauru. Their $90,000 discount window closed June 30 (the program continues at $115,000).

At first glance not a bad price for a second passport.

But look at what it gives you.

Roughly 90 destinations, with the US, Canada, the UK, and Schengen all missing.

My read: two different things are happening here, and I only welcome one of them:

1. Stricter rules are healthy. Biometrics, tighter screening, in-person visits, real presence. Programs that take this seriously are the ones that might survive.

2. Cutting access is the wrong move. The people losing visa-free travel bought legally and passed every check. Cutting their access after they spent all that money doesn't sit right with me. It’s the same kind of betrayal that Portugal did with extending the citizenship timeline for people who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Golden Visa, just to then get screwed afterwards.

Two ways to respond

Say you were shopping for a bought passport, or you hold one already.

There are two ways to play this.

You hold a US passport.

It still opens nearly every door you care about, and nobody in Brussels is threatening its visa-free access.

If your plan is residency in Portugal, Panama, or Thailand, the CBI crackdown costs you exactly nothing.

The Caribbean passport was never the right tool for that plan anyway.

Don’t buy insurance against a problem you don’t have.

For most of my readers, this is the whole game.

A residence permit in a country you’d actually live in delivers what the bought passport promised:

A place to go and a legal right to stay.

Plenty of solid residency programs cost under $10,000 in fees. Not $250,000.

And time works in your favor too.

Live in your residency country long enough and naturalization opens up.

The passport arrives as a byproduct of a life, with a genuine link no EU lawyer can question.

Conclusion

That’s it.

Three things worth keeping:

• The EU can now suspend visa-free access specifically because a country sells citizenship. Approved November 17, 2025. Ireland’s four-day cut shows how fast this moves now.

• The “passive” passport is finished. St. Kitts wants your fingerprints by July 2027, and Dominica wants you on a plane. Buy-and-forget no longer exists.

• A bought passport is only as good as the countries still honoring it. That list got shorter twice in the last eight months, and the EU now has the tool to shorten it further.

And a question for you:

If you could only have one, a passport that gets you into 150 countries, or the permanent right to live in the one country (but no passport) which one would you choose (and why)?

Tell me in the comments. I read them all.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

PS

Seventeen thousand square feet, designed by the architect who built half of Argentina’s landmarks.

He enrolled his kids in local schools and sat down with President Milei.

When a man who can live anywhere chooses Argentina, people pay attention.

And the question keeps landing in my inbox:

Should I get an Argentine passport too?

Argentina has two fast routes to a passport, and they work nothing alike.

The first is old.

Live in Argentina legally for two years, then apply. Written into the 1853 constitution, it is one of the shortest timelines on earth.

The second is new.

Created by presidential decree in July 2025, it promises citizenship for an investment of around $500,000, with no requirement to set foot in the country.

A tax change from March 2026 attaches to that second route.

“Investor-citizens” can pay Argentine tax on Argentine income only, not on everything they earn worldwide.

A fast passport and a light tax bill?

On paper it reads like the best Plan B deal since Portugal’s golden visa in 2012.

I’ve been through many residency programs and promises myself.

I’ve learned to slow down when an offer looks this clean.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• Whether the “fast track” is real, or still half-built

• The tax angle every other Argentina explainer leaves out

• Who this passport is actually worth it for, and who should walk away

I will start with the part people get wrong.

Two fast tracks (and only 1 of them works today)

The other Argentina explainers blur these two together.

But they need to be kept apart.

Route one has existed since 1853.

Argentina’s constitution lets any foreigner who lives there legally for two years apply for citizenship.

The two years is the residence you need before you can file.

Then a federal judge reviews your case, and processing adds roughly six months to two years on top.

Plan on three years to a passport in hand, not two.

Even at three years, that’s close to the fastest naturalization on the planet.

Most of Europe makes you wait five to ten.

I’ve gone through residency approvals in several countries, and three years to a passport is genuinely fast.

The “cost” is time on the ground, meaning renting an apartment, spending real time in the country, and building a paper trail a judge will accept.

This route rewards people who want to be there.

Route two is the one making headlines, but it barely exists yet.

So what does exist?

In July 2025, Milei’s government signed Decree 524/2025.

It created a path to citizenship through a single investment of around $500,000 into approved sectors like energy, agribusiness, tech, and infrastructure.

There is no residence requirement and applications are decided in 30 business days.

The problem?

The program is not really running yet.

The government issued the tender in December 2025, nearly awarded the four-year contract to a consortium on March 5, 2026, then cancelled the whole tender on April 14 after bidders challenged it.

A new executive director (Aixa Granara) was brought in to redraw the framework.

No new launch date is set, and a realistic estimate now is December 2026 at the earliest.

So today, one route is real and the other one is a “promise with a decree number”.

What the tax change really does

Every other Argentina write-up mentions the “tax break”.

Almost none explain what it actually does.

If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know that your passport doesn’t usually decide where you pay tax (except for the US and Eritrea).

Read more

Pretty photos with sunsets, and almost every line starts with the “relaxed pace of life.”

And almost none of them answer the questions that actually decide your move:

• What does a month really cost?

• Can you actually get a visa there?

• Does the place suit you and your priorities?

This list answers all three, city by city.

I’ve spent six years collecting residencies (five active ones to be precise), and I talk to people planning a move abroad every week.

These eight are the ones I’d point a friend toward (and I have visited all of them myself).

Keep one thing in mind as you read.

Where you live and where you become a tax resident are two different decisions.

Some of these could be home, others you might just spend a season in.

What we’ll cover:

• The exact visa each city takes, and the income you need to qualify

• What a retired couple actually spends each month (not the brochure number)

• The tax angle or the catch, from Greece’s 7% deal to Cyprus’s non-dom setup

Let’s start.

1. Porto, Portugal

Portugal’s “second city”, on the Douro river in the north.

Walkable, and noticeably cheaper than Lisbon. A couple lives well on around €2,500 to €3,000 a month.

Most retirees come in on the “D7” visa.

The visa requires about €920 a month in steady income for one person (€1,380 for a couple) from a pension, Social Security, dividends, or rent.

Portugal closed its NHR tax scheme a while back, so foreign pensions are taxed at normal rates now.

The lower cost of living makes up for it, and plenty of retirees still spend less here than they did at home.

A nice side benefit is Porto flies nonstop to Newark in about seven hours.

2. Lagos, Portugal

On the Algarve coast in the south.

The most established American and British retiree base in the country. Warm, walkable, and English gets you a long way here.

A couple lives comfortably on around €2,500 to €3,000 a month outside the prime resort streets.

Same D7 visa as mentioned above.

One thing I would do: Sign an annual lease, not a seasonal one. Summer rents on the Algarve climb 20% to 40% in tourist season, and a year-round contract avoids that.

3. Bilbao, Spain

A city in the Basque Country, on Spain’s north coast.

The north is cooler and wetter than southern Spain.

It rains often, which keeps the area green. Bilbao is known for its amazing food (!) and the Guggenheim museum.

A couple lives well on around €2,000 to €2,500 a month.

Spain’s main route for retirees is the “Non-Lucrative Visa”.

The requirement is about €2,400 a month in income, and you have to show you won’t work.

Spain has no special tax deal for retirees.

It taxes worldwide income, foreign pensions included, arguably one of the least tax-efficient deals in all of Europe.

4. Las Palmas, Spain (Canary Islands)

A city on Gran Canaria, in the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco.

It has the mildest winters in Europe.

Around 70°F (21°C) most of the year, dry, with a beach in the middle of the city. I ran the Las Palmas marathon back in 2018, the climate is extremely suitable for outdoor activities.

A couple lives comfortably on around €2,300 a month.

Las Palmas is one of Spain's more affordable cities, though not the very cheapest. That would be Lugo, up in the rainy northwest, but with almost no expat community and no (real) airport, so I wouldn't point you there.

Visa-wise the same route as Bilbao. The NLV, about €2,400 a month in income, no working allowed.

I had quite a few calls with clients about the possibility of working on the NLV, and want to emphasize how strict this policy is.

No work really means no work.

Not even remote work for an employer outside of Spain.

One local difference: the Canaries use a lower sales tax, 7% instead of the mainland’s 21%, which makes day-to-day spending cheaper.

5. Montpellier, France

In the south of France, a short drive from the Mediterranean coast.

Sunny most of the year, with a walkable old center and a fast train to Paris in about three and a half hours.

A couple lives well on around €2,300 to €2,800 a month.

France has no dedicated retirement visa.

Retirees use the Long-Stay Visitor Visa (“VLS-TS Visiteur”).

The income requirement is linked to the French minimum wage, about €1,480 a month as of mid-2026, and you sign a pledge not to work (similar to Spain).

Private insurance is needed for your first year, after that you join the public system (PUMA).

One benefit is that the tax treatment is very friendly for Americans.

6. Bologna, Italy

Bologna is situated in the north of Italy, between Milan and Florence.

A medieval city under miles of covered arcades, with real four seasons and cold winters.

Bologna is on the high-speed line, so Florence is about 35 minutes away and Milan about an hour.

A couple lives well on around €2,800 to €3,200 a month.

Italy’s route for retirees is the “Elective Residency Visa”.

The requirement is a steady passive income of at least €31,000 a year for one person, more for a couple, from pensions, dividends, or rent.

No working allowed, and the income has to be passive (not a paycheck).

A word on the famous Italian “7% tax”.

This only applies to small southern towns under 30,000 people. Bologna doesn’t qualify, so you pay normal Italian rates on your worldwide income.

7. Chania, Greece

On the northwest coast of Crete, around a Venetian harbor.

Warm, walkable, and one of the cheapest places on this list. A couple lives well on around €1,800 to €2,200 a month.

Greece’s route for retirees is the “Financially Independent Person” visa.

It asks for about €3,500 a month in passive income, more for a couple, from pensions, dividends, or rent.

And (you guessed it) no work is allowed.

The tax benefits outperform many other European programs.

Move your tax residence to Greece as a foreign retiree and you pay a flat 7% on all your foreign income (pensions, dividends, and others) for fifteen years.

This might sound exactly like the deal Italy has, but in Greece it applies wherever you live, not just small towns.

8. Paphos, Cyprus

On the southwest coast of Cyprus, warm and dry almost all year.

English is spoken (almost) everywhere, a holdover from British rule, and the retiree community is large and established.

A couple lives well on around €2,400 to €2,900 a month.

The retiree route is “Category F Permanent Residency” (for people with steady foreign income).

The issue is that the visa is badly backlogged, sometimes years, so in practice most retirees live on the annually renewed “pink slip” while they wait.

On tax, Cyprus is one of the friendliest in Europe.

Foreign pension income can be taxed at a flat 5%, and as a non-dom your foreign dividends and interest are free of income tax and the usual defence levy for 17 years (you do need to pay the 2.65% health contribution however).

I lived in Cyprus for a year, lovely island, and easy to make connections with other expats (and locals).

Conclusion

Three things to take away:

• Where you live and where you pay tax are two separate decisions. Some of these make a full-time home, while others are better as a base for part of the year.

• No place “wins” in every category. The cheapest aren’t the warmest, the warmest aren’t the most tax-friendly, and the easiest visas aren’t always where you’d want to stay.

• Many of these visas don’t let you work. They are for people living on a pension or investments, so the income has to be passive. If you still need a paycheck, you need a different visa (and a different strategy).

That’s it.

Question for you:

Which city would be your pick?

Tell me in the comments, I read them all.

Thanks for reading, and as always, appreciate having you here.

— Ben

PS

Ireland will “pay you” to move to a small island and fix up an old house.

This spring the government expanded the scheme again, which is why the story is resurfacing.

Ireland has run this for a couple of years now, but in case it’s news to you:

The payments are bigger on the remote islands off its coast, and that “island version” is what the 2026 headlines are built on.

But the renewed hype leaves out one thing.

The version of the grant, that pays out the most funds, has barely been used.

Since it opened in June 2023, only 29 people applied and just 20 were approved (as of 2025).

One reason locals give is that you need permission to live in Ireland before the grant is worth anything, and that permission comes from the immigration office, not the housing office that pays the grant.

Whether you’re allowed to live in the country is decided by a different part of the government, and its rules may cancel the grant the moment you take it.

I read the scheme rules and the immigration conditions, and wasn’t sure what to make of it.

So I put the question to both departments directly.

And one of them answered me within 24 hours.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why the $156,000 number some outlets hype is clickbait

• What the grant actually pays you, and why it’s (only) a refund

• Whether you can use it alongside a visa and actually move there

• Whether an American with no Irish passport and no residency can get it

First, what Ireland is really offering.

What the grant actually pays

The real name is the “Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant”, paid through the Croí Cónaithe Towns Fund.

For the purposes of simplicity, let’s just call it “the grant”.

It works like this:

You buy an old, empty house and fix it up, and the government pays you back for part of the cost.

How much do you get paid back?

• An empty house = up to €50,000.

• A run-down one that needs structural work = up to €70,000.

• On the offshore islands, both amounts go up by 20 percent, so a run-down island cottage can reach €84,000, which is about $96,000.

But the government does not hand you a check.

The grant is a refund.

You buy the house first, you pay for the renovation first, and the money only comes back after the work is finished and approved.

Say you buy a run-down island cottage and spend €120,000 fixing it up.

First, you pay all of that yourself.

Then, if everything qualifies, up to €84,000 is reimbursed.

Where the $156,000 comes from

I saw a bigger number going around.

Some versions of this story promise $156,000, almost double the real island figure.

That number comes from adding the refurbishment grant to Ireland’s separate energy grants for things like insulation and heating, then converting to dollars at a friendly rate.

Technically, you can hold both grants on the same house.

That part is true.

What you cannot do is use both to pay for the same work.

Ireland’s rules are clear:

" […] any home energy upgrade can only be funded by one of the schemes."

Meaning, if an energy grant pays for your wall insulation, the refurbishment grant cannot pay for that same job (and you also have to tell the local authority you're applying for both).

Which is why the $156,000 line is misleading (and quite frankly, clickbait).

Any energy grant you claim has to cover work the refurbishment grant did not, and in a single cottage those jobs overlap heavily.

So the realistic combined total lands well below $156,000, and the honest headline number is still the €84,000 refurbishment grant, which is about $96,000.

Can an American with no visa get it?

Nothing in the rules says you have to be Irish, or live in Ireland, or hold any kind of visa.

On paper, a foreigner with no ties to the country can apply.

But there are two versions of this grant, and the version you use changes the answer completely.

Read more

We would stay close to the mountains, take the gondola up to the glacier, and go hiking.

Everything was calm and orderly in a way that stuck with me, even as a little kid.

Years later I went back for work, this time as a management consultant. Unfortunately, that period was more work and less hiking.

Switzerland has been “in the background” of my whole life.

The reason I never thought of moving there is simple. I like warm weather all year round, and Switzerland gets cold.

But somehow, I can’t let go of it.

I went there on holiday as a kid, went back for work as an adult, and even though I now live across the globe, many of my business relationships are still tied to it.

I hold very fond memories of Switzerland, and I would describe it as the first place I truly admired.

The admiration I had for its beauty slowly turned into admiration for what it does with money.

It taught me, and continues to teach me, many lessons.

Some of them I want to share here today.

Last month I wrote about the fourth bank account, the one you open in a country you don’t live in.

I called it “your own personal Switzerland”.

Some of you wrote back with the same question:

Why Switzerland? Why not just say “somewhere safe”?

So let me shine some light on it.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• Why the “boring” Swiss approach still grows your money

• Why spotting a conflict of interest can save you a fortune

• The two things the Swiss own that most Americans never think about

The first rule is the myth almost everyone still believes.

#1 The “secret” Swiss account is a myth

Forget everything the movies taught you.

And forget those clowns trying to sell you things that simply do not exist (seeing things like this makes me want to see my breakfast a second time).

The numbered account nobody could trace died in 2009.

That version of Switzerland is gone.

That year, under US pressure, UBS handed the names of around 4,500 American account holders to the Department of Justice and paid a $780 million penalty.

After that, more than 80 other Swiss banks lined up for the same deal, paid over $1.3 billion combined, and turned over their clients.

Secrecy was the product.

But since FATCA took effect in 2014, every Swiss bank reports its American clients straight to the IRS. Since 2018, Switzerland automatically shares account data with more than 100 other countries.

So if you are American and you open an account in Zurich tomorrow, the IRS knows. You report it yourself anyway (on your FBAR and Form 8938).

Having said that, privacy is not dead.

But “privacy” and “secrecy” are not the same thing, and people use them interchangeably.

You can legally keep your name private and shield your money from lawsuits. What you cannot (or should not) do is hide it.

That road only ends in a courtroom, and not a numbered account.

None of that makes Switzerland worse.

You would just be going there for what it actually does well.

The money I keep tied to Switzerland is not hiding from anyone.

That way, I sleep fine.

Keeping something “secret” would not make me sleep fine.

#2 Stability first, then growth

The first thing I noticed working with a family office in Geneva is what they don’t talk about.

They almost never mention “beating the market” or “we’re up X% this quarter”.

One line that comes up often, and that I will never forget is:

“We think in generations and decades.”

Most people measure money in quarters. Public companies do the same, panicking when a single quarter comes in soft.

The Swiss measure money in the lifetime of your grandchildren.

One of my clients has a young son. The family office set up the parents’ portfolio, and then opened a second one for the kid.

He’s part of those important conversations from a young age, which is priceless education.

They are already teaching him how the banking works, so that by the time it becomes relevant, he knows what is really important.

The fastest way to destroy a plan built for decades is a single bad loss.

Lose 50% in a bad year and you need to make 100% just to get back to where you started.

One ugly year can wipe out a decade of gains.

When you plan in decades, avoiding unnecessary risk matters more than any hot streak.

It helps that the ground under them is solid.

Swiss government debt sits below 40% of GDP (the US is above 120% and growing).

Inflation there has been low for decades, so your money keeps its purchasing power without you doing anything.

So the money still grows.

It just grows without having heart attacks, every time you open the news.

#3 The franc itself is an asset

I do not earn francs, nor do I spend them.

Yet, I keep some of my money in francs.

I hold them for one reason:

Over time, the franc keeps its value better than many other currencies.

Most people never think this way.

If your whole life is earned in dollars and saved in dollars, you never stop to ask whether the dollar is the best thing to hold.

The Swiss ask constantly.

To them a currency is something you own, like a stock or a piece of land.

And by that measure, the franc has been one of the best things you could have owned.

In 1970, one US dollar bought about 4.3 Swiss francs.

Today it buys less than one (think about that fact for a second).

The dollar lost most of its value against the franc over my lifetime, and it is still happening.

The franc gained around 13% on the dollar in 2025 and hit an 11-year high in 2026.

When the world gets nervous, money runs to Switzerland.

Why?

Because it has low debt and a central bank obsessed with protecting the franc.

I am not telling you to bet everything on francs (all of this is purely educational content).

The franc pays almost no interest (in contrast to the USD), and in calm years it just “sits there”.

My point is that holding different currencies makes sense, to de-risk relying on a single one that constantly loses value.

#4 Hold what can’t be printed

Most people have never held a gold bar.

The Swiss built an industry around it.

Around two-thirds of the world’s gold passes through Swiss refineries.

Names like Valcambi and PAMP sit in peaceful valleys, melting and recasting bars for central banks and customers.

Precious metals are one of Switzerland's biggest exports.

The Swiss franc itself was backed by gold until 2000.

A constitutional rule kept at least 40% of the currency covered by gold reserves, and Swiss voters only ended it in a 1999 referendum, decades after the rest of the world let go of gold.

A dollar in your bank account is a promise.

It is just a number on a bank’s ledger, and if the system runs short, the government can print more any time it likes.

Gold is different.

Nobody can print it (and it does not care who is president).

More and more clients that I connect to Switzerland are asking for physical gold, in addition to making their portfolios “truly global”.

A real asset is something you actually hold, that exists whether or not a bank is open or a government is steady.

Metal is one. Property is another.

That is why, next to a strong currency and metal, I keep part of my wealth in property in Thailand.

It will not double overnight, and I cannot spend it at the store.

But it is mine, sitting in the physical world, not a number someone can freeze (or inflate away).

#5 The bank works for the bank (and not for you)

The first time I understood this, I was standing in my parents’ living room about twenty years ago.

A bank statement was lying on the coffee table.

It was a life insurance policy the local bank had sold them. I picked it up and read the numbers.

The returns were tiny. The fees were enormous.

Twenty years later, I can still see that coffee table.

I remember exactly how angry it made me (it still does).

My parents had trusted the friendly man at the bank, and the friendly man at the bank had sold them something built for the bank.

The first time I went into business with one of my Swiss partners, the line that sold me was this:

“Often there is a conflict of interest. With us, it is not like that.”

A bank earns from its own products.

So the person across the desk has every reason to steer you toward the funds and policies that pay the bank the most, whether or not those are the cheapest or the best for you.

In the US, this is perfectly legal. A broker at a bank is not your fiduciary.

Since 2020 they have to recommend something in your “best interest” when they recommend it, but that is a lower bar than the duty an independent, fee-only advisor owes you.

They can still push whatever earns the firm more (as long as it is disclosed somewhere in the fine print).

Another “trick” I see often is the myth of the global portfolio.

US banks love to say they build “global” portfolios, but a lot of that money still sits in US stocks and US funds.

Maybe global on the brochure, but local in the actual account.

None of this makes every advisor a crook.

Fee-only fiduciaries exist, and they are the ones to look for.

But the person selling you products inside a big bank is paid by that bank, and it pays to remember (!) whose name is on their paycheck.

#6 Access is the real product

The wealthy have one real advantage with money, and it is access.

At the top end, they will not even open a file for you below a few million dollars.

Walk into a private Swiss bank on your own and you are a “walk-in,” an unknown, treated as high risk and quoted retail prices (or turned away).

As one of my partners put it: “Good luck with going direct”.

Come through an institution that already parks billions at that same bank, and things change.

This way, you go through the institutional door, at institutional prices, the kind of access normally reserved for eight-figure fortunes.

They can also open investment opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach.

Some people seemingly offer access for “free,” or bundled into a shiny package.

I would be very skeptical.

If something is free, you are always the product.

They are almost always taking a silent kickback from the bank, which is the exact conflict of interest from the last rule.

The bank pays them, so they work for the bank.

I do it the other way, and I am not shy about it. I charge real money upfront (and my rates are not cheap).

I can stand behind my pricing for two reasons. I only work with the best people and institutions, and I take nothing from any of them. No referral fee, no cut of anyone’s assets.

I am paid by my clients, which means I answer to them, and not to the institution holding their money.

When you pay for access honestly, you always know whose side the person opening the door is on.

Conclusion

That’s it.

Six rules, from a country I have loved since I was a kid.

If you remember nothing else, remember these three:

• Forget the “secret” account. Switzerland’s real edge is a strong, stable currency and real things you can hold.

• The Swiss protect the downside first and think in decades. A single bad year can undo ten good ones.

• Whoever handles your wealth should be paid by you, not by the bank. If access is free, you are the product.

Those are my money rules.

Question for you:

What are your own money rules, and where did they come from?

Tell me in the comments.

I read every one.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

PS