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

I’ve been back many times since. Madrid, Barcelona, Andalucía, Santiago de Compostela, Seville.

I love the country, and I understand everyone who wants to retire there.

More than 50,000 Americans now live in Spain, the most ever, and the number grows every year.

All of this despite the fact that for a retiree with $1 million or more, Spain is one of the heaviest tax setups on the Mediterranean.

Portugal, Italy, and Greece (often) charge less (depending on the specific residency program).

Spain also comes up a lot on my client calls.

And I tell everyone on the call the same thing:

Great choice, if you set it up right.

Most people don’t, because the rules that decide what Spain costs are spread across visa and tax law.

There are some clever things you can do before and during your move to Spain, which will save you time and stress.

Today I’ll walk you through the eight things I make sure every Spain-bound client knows:

• The visa rule and the holiday rule that decide your tax residency

• Why Spain gives retirees no special tax regime, and what that costs you

• The moves that make Spain work anyway: what to sell, when to arrive, where to live

Starting with the biggest one.

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#1 Spain has no tax deal for retirees

Greece, Italy, and Portugal all created special tax deals for foreign retirees:

• Greece taxes new foreign residents at a flat 7% on everything they earn abroad, locked in for 15 years (pensions, dividends, rental income, capital gains).

• Italy charges the same 7% for 10 years, with a catch. To take advantage of it, you have to settle in a southern town with fewer than 30,000 people.

• Portugal had the most famous deal of all, the NHR. It closed at the end of 2023. The replacement program targets researchers and startup hires, not retirees.

And Spain?

Spain has never run a program for retirees.

The only special regime it offers is the Beckham Law, which is a flat 24% for foreigners who move to Spain for work.

So from your first tax-resident year, your worldwide income can be taxed at up to 47% (and even more in some regions).

There are a few exceptions and workarounds for that rule, we’ll get there in the second half.

#2 The visa decides your tax status

Most Americans retire to Spain on the Non-Lucrative Visa.

It is the classic route:

Prove passive income, and agree not to work in Spain.

But the NLV is a residence visa.

To renew it, you have to prove you actually live in Spain, meaning more than 183 days in the country, backed by utility bills, bank activity, flight records, and your “padrón registration”.

And 183 days is the exact line where Spanish tax residency starts:

• Go over it, and Spain taxes your worldwide income.

• Stay under it, and you can’t renew the visa.

There is no version of the NLV where you hold the visa and stay a tax non-resident for long (your arrival year can be the exception, more on that in section 6).

If you’re planning to split the year between Spain and the US, this is the first thing to solve.

#3 Staying under 183 days is not enough

Let’s assume you are a snowbird, spending extended time outside of the US, and Spain is one of your destinations.

Two 90-day tourist stays put you in Spain for about half the year, and still under 183 days.

That alone doesn’t keep you out of the Spanish tax system.

Why?

Because the day count is only one of three tests.

Test one is the 183 days.

Test two looks at your life instead of your calendar.

If your spouse lives in Spain year-round, or your main economic interests are there, Spain can treat you as a tax resident no matter how few days you spend in the country.

Test three is the holiday rule called “ausencias esporádicas”.

Once Spain considers you “habitually based” there, your trips abroad count as days in Spain.

To be clear about what “based there” means:

A holiday home alone doesn’t make Spain your base.

Thousands of non-residents own Spanish apartments and never become tax residents.

The question is your pattern of life:

• Where your family is

• Where your money is managed

• Where you spend most of the year

Day counting only becomes dangerous when the rest of your life already points at Spain.

The “good” news is, you’re a US tax resident by citizenship.

So wherever you live, you can request Form 6166 (Certification of U.S. Tax Residency) as long as you file your returns in the US.

The certificate is strong protection. But it only settles paperwork, not disputes.

If your life visibly runs in Spain, the country might graciously volunteer to be your tax home anyhow.

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#4 The Roth problem

I’ve written about this before in How To Move Your Money Abroad, but it belongs in any honest article about Spain, so I keep it short.

With a Roth IRA, you pay tax on the money going in, and withdrawals are tax-free coming out.

That rule comes from US law, and it only applies abroad if a tax treaty makes the other country accept it.

Spain doesn’t accept it.

Spain treats your Roth like any other investment account, and the Spanish tax agency confirmed in a formal ruling that withdrawals are taxable.

I’m not a tax advisor, and I’m not claiming to be one.

Tax experts are still debating how exactly those withdrawals should be taxed (as savings income at 19% to 30%, or at the general rates of up to 47%), and I’ll stay out of that debate.

For your planning, two facts are enough:

1. Spain taxes Roth withdrawals that are tax-free in the US.

2. The Roth balance counts toward the wealth tax calculation.

There are ways to handle this, and they all involve acting before you become a tax resident.

We’ll look at those below.

#5 What Spain can’t touch

Now the good news.

Read more

Her first words:

“I love this place. It feels like home.”

Three weeks earlier, this town wasn’t on her itinerary.

And 18 years earlier, the plan was New Zealand or South Africa.

The destinations kept changing and the research kept piling up.

The move never happened.

She is 60, lives in upstate New York, and had a very big career. The kind of person everyone assumes can figure anything out.

Her words:

“Everybody said, oh, if anybody could do it, you can do it. It’s not true.”

When we started working together earlier this year, we laid 46 residency and citizenship programs on the table.

Within weeks, she was on the path to three countries.

Permanent residency in one, citizenship in a second, and a 10-year visa in a third.

This is how she did it.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• Why 18 years of research never produced a decision

• The trip that turned a shortlist into her first real option

• Her full 3-country setup (and what it teaches about building yours)

First, the “research trap”.

The “research trap”

My client is not a beginner.

She has traveled all her life. She has friends in Japan, Australia, and South Africa and had already visited most of the countries on her list.

And still:

“You can search the internet until the cows come home.”

Eighteen years of reading produced no decision, because every answer created two new questions. Visas led to taxes, taxes led to banking, and banking led right back to “which country?”

Meanwhile, her two original plans were falling apart on their own:

• South Africa was the plan until the government started debating whether foreigners should own property at all. Too much uncertainty to build a retirement on.

• New Zealand looked good until we checked the visas. The retirement route doesn’t open until age 66, requires a huge investment, and even then you get a 2-year visitor visa, not residency.

Panama almost seduced her on paper.

When she heard how simple the Friendly Nations Visa is, her reaction was:

“I’ll be going there, like, tomorrow.”

Then she checked the climate. Hot and humid, all year. Off the shortlist for a base.

Research tells you what a country offers.

Whether you can live with it is a different question, and Google (and AI) has no answer for that one.

So we changed the process and started with her instead of a country.

We ran 46 residency and citizenship programs against her wants and needs, her lifestyle priorities, and her dealbreakers.

A handful of countries survived.

Mexico was one of them.

But we didn’t stop there, because a shortlist only answers “where could I go”.

The bigger questions come after:

• Where does your money sit?

• Where do you become a tax resident?

• How does each residency work in detail?

• What job does each residency do for you?

That strategy is what she was missing for 18 years, and no visa guide will hand it to you.

From overwhelm to clarity

Nobody who comes to me lacks information.

What’s missing is a way to decide.

The Blueprint runs through four calls: Foundation, Clarity, Decisions, Roadmap.

Here’s a look inside.

First, Foundation.

No countries allowed yet.

We mapped her life instead: income sources, family ties, health, fears, dealbreakers, and what a “normal Tuesday” abroad should look like.

She left with homework that forced her priorities onto paper for the first time in 18 years.

Second, Clarity.

I built granular briefs on 46 residency and citizenship programs and we cut them against everything the Foundation surfaced.

This is the call the shortlist came from.

Not “which country is best,” but “which countries fit this exact life.”

Between those calls, she gained clarity on what really worked for her, and what did not:

“Working with you gave me the opportunity to not only think about what I was doing in a fundamentally different way, but then to be able to talk to you about the different issues, come back, have another think about it, and then really create a strategy that was going to work for me.”

That loop (ask, think, come back, decide) is what no amount of research will give you.

Healthcare is the best example.

It had worried her for years, and it stalls more retire-abroad plans than any visa ever will. Inside the program she got the actual numbers for her situation, on her timeline, from people in my network who do this daily.

Her reaction:

“I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do the healthcare piece, but now it seems to be a no-brainer, and I’ve got my healthcare.”

The same happened with taxes, banking, and the famous “what if I pick wrong” question.

The Blueprint is an extensive back and forth that finds the right residency and banking setup for your situation.

Part of that setup is a bank account in a neutral country, opened in your name during the program. The same 4th account I keep writing about.

In her words:

“A lot of programs are like, oh, here are these 10 things, read them and pick what you want. But that’s not what you’re doing, and that’s the differentiator.”

Then, with a shortlist in hand, she got on a plane.

The trip that confirmed it

In March, she flew to Belize for a dive trip.

Mexico was on her shortlist by then.

So instead of flying home, she changed her return ticket and went to look.

A friend connected her with people in San Miguel de Allende, a highland town about four hours north of Mexico City.

She got on a bus.

“From the second I got here, it was just amazing.”

She was running her list against the place:

• Climate: warm days, cool nights, dry air. Pass.

• Safe for a woman on her own: she walked everywhere, alone, including at night. Pass.

• Community: “People are so friendly here. Everybody says hello. They light up when you say hello back in Spanish.” Pass.

• Cost: her new friends had just helped someone rent a three-bedroom for $615 a month. Pass.

Two weeks in, she opened our Decisions call from her hotel room in San Miguel.

We locked Mexico as her base on that call.

She had traveled her whole life.

All those trips decided nothing, because she never knew what she was testing.

What she built

Four calls, one trip, and a 41-page roadmap later, here is her setup.

Mexico = The Base.

Permanent residency, applied for directly at the consulate.

Her finances let her bypass the temporary residency stage, so she goes straight to a card with no renewals and no minimum-stay workarounds.

She’ll rent in the center of San Miguel and buy nothing before 2027.

Italy = The Passport.

Citizenship by descent through her Italian grandfather.

The paperwork is in motion, and when it’s all done, she holds an EU passport with visa-free living rights across 27 countries.

No plans to become an Italian tax resident, same playbook I’ve written about before.

Thailand = The Long Game.

A 10-year Privilege Visa, application planned for her Asia trip this fall.

It buys her a decade of access to her base in Asia, at today’s price, with no (huge) investment or property purchase required.

One residency, one citizenship, one long-term visa.

Her words:

“Got one in the Americas, and I’ll have one in Europe, and I’ll have one in Asia, which really opens the world. I’ve wanted to be a global citizen forever.”

Notice what she didn’t do.

• She didn’t buy property anywhere.

• She didn’t lock herself into one country’s tax system.

• She didn’t wait for any single application to finish before starting the next one.

Her money is getting the same treatment and will be spread beyond one country and one system.

She’s even exploring moving part of her portfolio to Switzerland.

(But that’s a story for another day.)

At the beginning, in her words, it was a dream.

“Now it’s a concrete plan. I got my Blueprint. I started taking action, because with a plan, it was very easy to take action.”

Hear it from her

Now you’ve read my version of the story.

Here is hers.

What this means for you

Her setup is built for her life.

And everyone’s situation looks different.

But the mistakes she avoided are the same ones I see every week.

She stopped treating research as progress. Eighteen years of reading moved her nowhere. A few weeks of structured decisions moved her to three countries.

She started with her life, and let countries compete for it.

If you’ve been planning for years and still don’t have a plan, you’re in the majority.

On a call with 25 of my readers last month, 18 told me some version of:

“I’ve been planning this for years and I’m still not there.”

She was one of them.

Her words:

“I’ve got a lot of business experience. I had a very big career, and even I was unable to do this by myself.”

If you want to build your own version of what Cheri built, applications for the next Blueprint round are open now.

They close on July 16.

👉 Watch how it works

And whether you join my program or not, do one thing this week:

Write down your dealbreakers.

The things that eliminate a country instantly.

This is the first step out of the research trap, and it costs you nothing but a concentrated hour with pen and paper.

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

— Ben

And she decided against it.

Instead, she moved dollars into a Panamanian bank and took the slower, pricier route into the exact same country.

The more popular visa would have cost her a fraction of that, handed her permanent residency in a few months, and thrown in discount cards for the rest of her life.

So why did she do it?

Because the visa did not fit her strategy.

And the strategy is everything.

Why you're moving matters just as much as where you go or how you get in.

If you remember one thing today, make it this:

The visa comes last, once you know what you’re solving for.

Do it the other way around, and you can end up with the perfect visa for the wrong life.

I’ve spent six years collecting residencies (five active ones at last count) and I talk to people making a move abroad multiple times per week.

Today, we’re going to look at two distinct paths into the same country, which one makes sense when, and which strategy they are linked to.

What we will cover:

• The two visas that get you into Panama, and what each one truly costs

• Why $200,000 parked in a Panamanian bank can be a good idea

• How to tell which path is yours before you spend a dollar

Let’s get into it.

Path 1: The Pensionado

The Pensionado is the visa that put Panama on every retirement list, and it has earned the name.

The requirement is a lifetime pension of at least $1,000 a month and US Social Security counts toward it (so does a government, military, or corporate pension).

Buy a property worth $100,000 or more and the requirement drops to $750. Each dependent who comes with you adds $250 a month.

The upside is generous.

Approval gives you permanent residency from day one.

To keep it, you visit Panama once every two years, with no minimum days and no annual filings. Then there’s the discount program: 50% off hotels, 25% off restaurants and utilities, 20% off doctor visits, 15% off hospital bills, for life.

For a retiree living there full time, this sounds like a good deal (and it is).

What if you have no pension, or not enough Social Security?

There’s a workaround.

You can buy a lifetime annuity that pays out the $1,000 a month, and that qualifies you too.

One mention on “work” (since people always ask).

The Pensionado won’t let you take a salaried Panamanian job.

But it does nothing to stop you working remotely for clients back home or living off investments, and since foreign income isn’t taxed in Panama under its territorial system, you can use that for your benefit as well.

For most people, that’s the only work question that matters.

Takeaway: With $1,000 a month in lifetime income, the Pensionado is the cheapest and simplest way into Panama.

Path 2: The Friendly Nations Visa

The Friendly Nations Visa is Panama’s fast track for citizens of more than 50 countries it counts as “friendly” (hence the name).

The US, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe are among them.

What it requires instead of a pension, is an economic tie to Panama. Either $200,000 in real estate, or $200,000 parked in a Panamanian bank for three years.

Initially this looks like a harder sell, especially compared to the Pensionado.

Residency comes in two stages:

1. A provisional permit for two years

2. Permanent once you reapply and prove you still qualify.

Start to finish, plan on about three years to permanent.

None of the Pensionado discounts apply (and $200,000 is a lot more than a pension letter).

So why would anyone take this route?

Because that $200,000 doesn’t disappear (the way it does e.g. in Portugal, if you go the donation route that requires €250,000).

The bank route puts it into a three-year certificate of deposit that stays yours and comes back when the term ends.

The deposit qualifies you for residency and pays you interest while it does.

One important detail:

The money has to sit in a bank with a General License. Use a bank without one and the application is not going to be successful (a good lawyer knows this).

Takeaway: The Friendly Nations Visa costs more upfront, but the $200,000 stays yours and earns interest while it buys you in.

The Two Panama Paths

So why did she choose the harder visa with a pension in hand?

Her strategy decided it, long before she compared a single requirement.

Every move abroad is based on a strategy (or better “should be”).

I work from eight of them with clients.

Two lead to a territorial tax base, a country that only taxes what you earn inside its borders and leaves your foreign income alone.

But the same country can play two completely different roles.

For one person, Panama is home.

For another, it might just be a second residency you hold (and occasionally use).

My client had a pension, which made the Pensionado the obvious choice, but she took the $200,000 route anyway.

The reason starts with a single question:

Read more

One that sits outside the country you’re from and outside the country you move to.

It became the most-read piece I’ve published so far.

A lot of you came back with the same question.

“Okay, I get why. Now how does it actually work and how do I use it?”

The first article was the “why”.

This one is the “how”.

I’m going to show you what I actually do with mine.

How the account gets opened, 5 things people use it for, and where it fits with the three accounts you (might) already have.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The four accounts, and the one job each of them does

• Five things people actually use the fourth account for

• How the account gets opened when most banks turn Americans away

Let’s start with the structure.

One job each

Most people moving abroad use one or two accounts and hope for the best.

The setup that actually holds up has (at least) four.

Each one does a single job.

Here’s the structure.

US home base

Where your income arrives.

Social Security, pensions, brokerage withdrawals, the occasional tax refund. Keep one open even after you leave. The key is choosing a bank that won’t close you out the moment it sees a foreign address.

The usual go-to here is Schwab.

Fintech bridge

Wise or Revolut.

Send dollars in, convert at the real exchange rate, and send the money onward for a fee under 1%, instead of the 3 to 4% a bank buries in the spread.

Fast and cheap, but a tool, not a vault.

Local spending account

The account that allows you into how your new country actually pays for things.

Thailand uses PromptPay, Portugal uses MB Way, Spain uses Bizum. Rent, groceries, the QR code on the restaurant counter.

Essential for living there, but I would never store wealth in there.

The “Untouchable Account”

The one that sits outside the country you’re from and outside the country you moved to.

It holds and grows the money you’re not spending this month, in a place that has no reason to freeze it, close it, or ask why you’re moving your own money around.

No account anywhere is truly untouchable (and anyone who tells you otherwise, has no idea what they’re talking about).

But this one is far harder to reach than what you have today.

The first three are infrastructure.

They keep your income landing and your daily life running, and I covered them in detail in the original three-account article.

The fourth is the one that keeps you sane.

Why somewhere neutral

The whole point is the location.

The Untouchable Account sits in a country where you don’t live and where you’re not from. For example Panama, the Caribbean, Singapore, Switzerland.

A place that has no claim on you.

Say you’ve moved to Spain.

A bank in Panama doesn’t answer to Spanish regulators. It can’t freeze your money because your Spanish residency card expired, or because Spain changed a reporting rule overnight.

Spain’s problems stay in Spain.

A US court can’t reach in either.

A bank with no US branch sits outside US jurisdiction. To touch the money, someone would have to go through that country’s own courts (and no court abroad gives a US order “automatic effect”).

Nothing here is “secret”.

This is not a “secret account”.

This is not about hiding money.

The bank reports it, and so do you.

What you get is geographic diversification and control.

The money sits under more than one set of rules, so no single government can corner all of it at once.

Knowing about an account and controlling the bank that holds it are two different things.

Five things people use it for

Let’s get a little more practical.

Here is what the account does once the money is in.

1. Park and grow

The simplest use. Move a lump sum in and grow it.

It earns interest on your US dollars, instead of the near-nothing a US checking account pays.

2. Quarterly top-ups for spending

Instead of wiring money to your local account every few weeks, you send one lump sum a quarter.

Less admin, fewer fees, no scrambling when the local balance runs low.

3. The Wise replacement

If you have never been comfortable holding real money in a fintech, this is where it goes instead.

Not all accounts can hold multiple currencies, but the ones I use do.

The difference is that this account has a banking license (a fintech does not).

4. The backup account

A funded account that has no reason to ever close on you.

If a US bank freezes yours over a foreign login or a foreign address, you are not locked out of your own money.

5. The local hedge

If your new country tightens transfers or freezes accounts, your reserve is somewhere else entirely.

How the account actually gets opened

Most international banks will not open an account for an American.

FATCA reporting makes US clients expensive to serve, so plenty of banks simply say no. The ones that say yes often want an in-person visit, a six-figure minimum, or a relationship you do not have yet.

So the account that protects you best is also the hardest one to get.

What a good account looks like

A multi-currency transaction account in your own name that can hold dollars, euros, francs, whatever you want. It comes with an international debit card, and nobody else has access.

That is the goal.

Your money, your name, your control, in a neutral country.

Expect the KYC to be tougher, not lighter

The compliance check at a serious offshore bank is more rigorous than what you are used to in the US, not less.

Opening a US checking account takes a driver’s license and five minutes. A good offshore bank wants proof of where the money came from, tax records, sometimes a reference.

There will be more questions, not fewer.

That is a good sign.

A bank that does real due diligence is a bank that takes its license seriously (the ones that ask you nothing are the ones to worry about).

To sum it up

Four accounts, each with one job.

Three things to take with you:

• A local account is for spending. Wealth belongs somewhere with no claim on you for any reason.

• The protection is the location. A bank with no tie to your home or host country is far harder to freeze or close than what you hold now.

• This is reported, legal (and boring). Geographic diversification is the headline here, not secrecy.

One thing you can do this week:

How I help

I work through a Swiss banking partner that manages around $7 billion and holds close relationships with more than 50 banks across the globe.

They do not take walk-in clients. Access comes through working with me.

The account is opened remotely, KYC and compliance handled for you, structured to stay fully US-compliant.

• Visa launches

• Rule and fee changes

• Travel access changes

• Citizenship & investment news

Here is what changed in the last four weeks.

Nauru’s $90,000 Passport Deal Closes June 30

Nauru cut the price of its citizenship program to $90,000 in February, down from $115,000.

The window closes in a few days (June 30).

What and where is Nauru?

Nauru is the third-smallest country in the world (about 8 square miles) with around 12,000 people, located northeast of Australia and just below the equator.

How does their Citizen-By-Investment program work?

The official name is the “Nauru Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program”.

After you make a one-time contribution, the approval will come in about three months. The discount applies to any application filed before June 30 (even if you pay later).

Now the most important question.

Is spending $90,000 in this passport a good deal?

It might look like a deal until you look at the passport.

Nauru ranks around 60th on the major passport indexes, middle of the pack, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 90 destinations.

None of them are the ones most Americans want.

No visa-free entry to the United States, Canada, or the Schengen Area. The UK cut Nauru's visa-free access in December 2025, pointing straight at this citizenship program as the reason.

I wrote earlier about someone who paid $130,000 for the 88th-ranked passport from Vanuatu.

If I had to decide between the two, Vanuatu clearly wins.

What this means for you:

Skip it.

A $90,000 passport you can’t travel on is a waste of money.

Fast and cheap citizenship makes sense in narrow cases, and only if you've exhausted more suitable options (via descent and/or naturalization).

Ireland Drops Visa-Free Access For Three Passports

On June 11, Ireland announced that citizens of St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Nicaragua now need a visa to enter.

The rule took effect June 15.

It covers ordinary, diplomatic, and service passports, plus airport transit.

Two of those three, St. Kitts and Saint Lucia, run active citizenship-by-investment programs.

Visa-free travel is one of the main things they sell.

Migration Minister Colm Brophy said the move brings Ireland “in line” with the UK and the rest of Europe.

Britain had already done the same, tying its decision to a rise in asylum claims and the security risk it sees in Caribbean CBI passports.

I covered this same pattern in January, when Norway began deporting Caribbean passport holders at the border without changing a single written rule.

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Remember:

An investment passport is only as good as the countries still honoring it.

And the list is getting shorter, at least for some of those programs.

What this means for you:

Read more

For a decade, the Golden Visa was the standard answer for an American with savings and a plan to leave. After buying property, you got residency, with a passport a few years down the line.

Those days are (mostly) over.

Spain is gone, Malta’s citizenship route was struck down by an EU court, and the programs still standing cost two to three times what they did in 2021.

If you are planning a move in the next few years, the residency advice you read in 2023 is already out of date.

But this is not all bad news.

The residency routes that actually suit a retiree are still wide open, and most of them never required a large upfront investment.

This is what this article is about. Actionable advice, instead of telling you things are “bad” or scaring you about the world ending.

So today we are going to look at what changed, and what still works.

• Which Golden Visa deals are already dead, and which ones just got expensive

• Why Portugal’s Golden Visa stopped being worth the money

• The income-based routes that do the same job without a €500k price tag

I will start with the deals that are already gone.

What closed, and what just got expensive

Two of Europe’s most popular programs no longer exist.

Spain ended their program on April 3, 2025 and stopped taking new applications. Current holders keep their status while everyone applying after that date missed it.

Malta offered full citizenship, a full EU passport, for a contribution of around €750,000. In April 2025 the European Court of Justice ruled the scheme illegal, and Malta has to wind it down.

A residence permit is a national matter, but citizenship in one EU country is citizenship of the whole union, with all 27 member states.

The court said that is not something a member state can sell.

The programs still running mostly got more expensive. For years, Greece was Europe’s cheapest entry point, with a €250,000 property purchase for a five-year residence permit. That ended on September 1, 2024.

Greece now has three price tiers.

The high-demand zones cost €800,000, which covers Athens and the islands people actually want, like Mykonos and Santorini. Everywhere else is at €400,000, and the old €250,000 tier only applies for narrow restoration projects.

In 2025, the first full year under the new prices, Greece took 6,978 new Golden Visa applications. That is down about a quarter from 9,391 in 2024.

Part of the “Greek drop” is not just the price though.

Greece also banned short-term rentals on Golden Visa properties, so buyers can no longer put them on Airbnb, which eliminated the investment case for a lot of applicants.

The major programs and where they stand today:

• Spain: €500,000 property route, closed entirely in April 2025

• Greece: €250,000 flat, now €800,000 in the high-demand areas

• Italy: Flat tax for new residents climbed from €100,000 a year to €300,000 (as of January 2026)

• Hungary: relaunched in 2024, then dropped its €500,000 property option within a year

• Malta: citizenship near €750,000, ruled illegal and ending

Takeaway: Since 2024, major programs are either closed or two to three times more expensive. A good residency deal is still out there, but only for a window, so timing is crucial.

Portugal’s Golden Visa is open but barely moving

Portugal is still one of the best places in Europe to retire.

The D7 visa, the income-based route most retirees use, works exactly as it did before.

Everything that follows is about one thing only:

The Portugal Golden Visa.

The Golden Visa sold a clear promise. Once you put in the money, and a few years later you had residency and a clear path to an EU passport. The property route that drew most buyers closed in 2023, so what is left is mainly the fund route, €500,000 into a qualifying investment fund.

For that kind of money, the promise was always speed.

Five years to an EU passport, and you barely had to set foot in the country.

That promise broke in two places.

First, the wait.

Portugal’s immigration agency, AIMA, is still clearing a backlog of more than 400,000 immigration files. The legal limit to process one is 90 days, but real waits now run to two years or more for a first residence card. The government has promised to clear the backlog in 2026 (it made the same promise in 2025).

Second, the timeline.

In May 2026 Portugal signed a law extending the wait for citizenship from five years to ten. For a new applicant, that ten-year timeline only starts once the first residence card is issued.

The backlog pushes the starting line two years out before the count even begins.

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7 months ago · 294 likes · 95 comments · Benjamin Hies

For a buyer who plans to retire in Portugal, the passport timeline is a problem.

A 63-year-old who buys in today is realistically looking at an EU passport somewhere past 75, once the backlog and the ten-year clock both run their course.

Takeaway: Portugal’s Golden Visa is technically open, but the fast passport it was built to sell is gone, and €500,000 now buys a decade-long wait for an EU passport.

Most retirees never needed a Golden Visa

None of this should change your plan.

The Golden Visa is an investment product. It answers one question:

How to turn a large sum of money into legal status, with as little disruption to your life as possible.

A retiree planning a real move wants the legal right to live in the country they have chosen. That right is residency, and most countries grant it on the strength of steady income. Once you show a pension or passive income above a set threshold, and you get permission to live there.

Portugal’s D7 works this way, and so do retirement visas across Latin America and Southeast Asia.

This is why residency comes first and the passport later.

Residency is the part you actually use. It is the right to wake up in your chosen country, year after year, for as long as you like. A passport is a separate and slower project, and for a retiree it is usually optional. Golden Visa marketing always leads with the passport.

Why?

Because selling a Golden Visa makes more money than advising on a “simple” residency path.

I hold residency in five countries, and only one of them came from a Golden Visa. The income-based routes were always there, usually cheaper and far less marketed.

However, if you only remember one sentence from this article for far, make it this:

The right time to arrange residency is while you still have options open.

The good routes are still wide open

Set the golden visas aside, and the list of options is still long.

Europe still has income-based residence visas.

Spain has its non-lucrative visa and Italy has its elective residence visa, both built for people living on savings or a pension.

Latin America is wide open.

Panama’s Friendly Nations Visa still takes Americans, and Uruguay grants permanent residency to anyone who can show about $1,500 a month in steady income.

Southeast Asia runs its own long-stay routes, including Thailand’s Elite Visa and the ten-year LTR. There are more working routes than any one person could use, and a single Golden Visa closure in Europe barely makes a dent.

And you do not have to choose just one.

The strongest setups use more than one country.

• Get residency where you want to live, and route your banking through a jurisdiction better suited to your finances.

• A second residency, somewhere else again, sits in reserve, so no single rule change can strand you.

In practice it can look ordinary.

Retirement in Portugal on the D7 and keep your banking in a country chosen for how well it handles cross-border money (e.g. Switzerland). A LATAM or Asian residency sits in the background, unused, until the day you might want it.

All of this rewards moving sooner.

Why sooner?

Because the rules change constantly.

Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Hungary all rewrote their Golden Visa rules within two years. The income-based routes are not gone, but their thresholds and tax perks get revised constantly.

A route that looks generous today may not look that way in a year.

Takeaway: Good residency routes are everywhere, and the smart move is to lock one in while it is still a good deal.

Conclusion

That’s it.

• The “cheap”, and fast Golden Visa deals are mostly gone. Two of the biggest programs are finished, and the survivors cost two to three times more.

• A plan built on income and residency never needed a Golden Visa, even if you don’t read this in the marketing brochure

• The routes that work are open and generous right now. The rules move every year, so move early.

One thing you can do this week:

Write down the monthly income you can prove on paper, pension plus any passive income.

That single number decides which of these routes are open to you.

If you have questions about your specific situation, drop them in the comments.

I read them all.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

PS

(Some people might call collecting residencies my “weird little habit”)

In more than one instance, taxes worked differently than I expected.

The pattern was always the same.

The visa process was clear. Immigration told me exactly what to submit, how long it takes, what it costs.

But nobody mentioned the tax side.

No consulate or immigration lawyer ever said:

“By the way, here’s when this country starts taxing your worldwide income.”

So I had to figure that out on my own.

After doing it several times, I started writing the rules down. What triggers tax residency, how different countries treat income, which reporting requirements people miss, and the mistakes I’ve made and watched clients make.

That’s what this article is based on.

A “cheat sheet” I built for people planning a move abroad.

And no, not that kind of cheating.

The goal is to keep you fully compliant, in the US and wherever you land.

I’ll walk through one key concept at the beginning, which is important to understand, and add some helpful resources afterwards.

The full document is available to download at the end.

Residency vs. Tax Residency

If you only remember on thing from this article, make it this:

• A visa is permission to enter a country.

• A residency permit is permission to stay.

• Tax residency is the obligation to pay taxes.

These are separate systems, run by separate authorities, using separate sets of rules.

Mixing them up is one of the most common (and expensive) mistakes people make when moving abroad.

In most countries, the tax office looks at two things:

1. How many days were spent in the country during a calendar year, and

2. What ties exist there (a home, a spouse, a bank account, a registered business).

Cross the threshold, and the country claims taxation rights. Most countries set that threshold at 183 days of physical presence.

When two countries both claim tax residency, bilateral treaties use a tiebreaker:

1. Permanent home

2. Center of vital interests

3. Habitual abode

4. Nationality

5. Mutual agreement between the two governments (if none of the above resolve it)

Obviously, it doesn’t always work exactly like that, and what I wrote above is simplified.

But it gives you a mental model to work with once you start digging into the specifics.

I’ve covered each of these topics in detail in separate articles:

Last but not least, make sure to check out those videos explaining how residency works abroad, how to move your money abroad as well as the bank account in the “neutral zone”.

The Cheat Sheet

After years of explaining tax residency to clients and making my own mistakes along the way, I put everything into a single document. One reference sheet that covers the nine topics I wish someone had handed me before my first move abroad.

The full cheat sheet is available to download below.

Read more

The night before, it had over $250,000 in it.

The bank had frozen everything overnight.

Why?

Because the final page of a rental contract we uploaded weeks earlier was missing.

One missing page, and a bank decided that was enough. It took weeks to get access back (the full story is here).

That’s how fast access can vanish when you bank across borders.

I’ve made plenty more mistakes since I left Germany in 2020. Six of the more expensive ones are here.

The pattern behind all of them is the same.

Banking abroad has rules that don’t apply at home, and most people find out about those rules the hard way.

I talk to people who are about to leave their home country every week (find out more here).

Most are about to make the same banking mistakes without knowing it.

Which is why I put some common ones in this article, so you can know about them (and avoid doing them yourself).

We’ll cover:

• Seven banking mistakes that you should know about (and avoid)

• Where each one shows up (US bank, new country, and the fintech in between)

• The account setup that fixes most of them at once (and only takes a few weeks)

Let’s start.

Mistake #1: Keeping all your money in one country

Most Americans move abroad with every dollar still sitting in one place.

All of it in the same banks and brokerage they’ve used for decades, in the country they’re about to leave.

It feels safe because the setup is familiar.

But when one country holds all your money, one government and one banking system stand between you and everything you’ve saved.

If that system freezes accounts or changes the rules overnight, you find out with no warning. Ask anyone who banked in Cyprus in 2013 (the country seized 47.5% of deposits over €100,000 to keep its banks alive).

Spreading your money across more than one country is simple risk management.

You stop handing a single system the power to cut you off.

Takeaway: One country holding all your money is a bad idea.

Mistake #2: Assuming all US banks work fine from abroad

The plan most people have is “no plan”.

Keep the same US accounts and carry on as if nothing changed.

Then the letter arrives.

In 2025, US banks and brokerages closed an estimated 340,000 expat accounts. Wells Fargo stopped opening brokerage accounts for people living outside the US back in 2021, and Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, Fidelity, and USAA have all restricted or closed accounts for Americans with a foreign address. At many banks, a single login from a foreign IP triggers a review.

The same thing happened to me while I was living in Cyprus.

My German broker decided overnight to stop serving clients across most of the EU.

I had 30 days to close every position and move the money out.

Thirty days.

Some of my stocks were down, but it didn’t matter.

The policy changed, and I was simply an inconvenience to get rid of.

The fix is boring (but it works).

Keep a US account, but choose one that accepts foreign residents. Charles Schwab and Interactive Brokers are the two names that come up most in expat circles. Tell them you’re moving, ask in writing (!) whether you can stay on as a non-resident.

Takeaway: Confirm your US bank will keep you as a non-resident before you move, not after the closure letter arrives.

Mistake #3: Treating your local account as a place to store wealth

You need a local account.

It lets you access payment systems where you live, paying rent and tapping the QR code at the corner restaurant.

Always get a local account.

But a spending account and a place to store wealth are two different things.

Your new country has its own ways of making your financial life harder.

• Argentina froze every bank account in December 2001 and capped cash withdrawals at 250 pesos a week, the “corralito.” Dollar accounts stayed locked unless you agreed to convert them to pesos.

• Greece capped ATM withdrawals at €60 a day in 2015 and kept the banks shut for three weeks while it blocked money from leaving the country.

Those are just two examples. There are plenty more, across Europe and beyond.

My two Thai accounts handle rent and everyday spending, and the balances stay small on purpose (my savings live nowhere near them).

Takeaway: Use your local bank for groceries but keep your wealth somewhere else.

Mistake #4: Treating bank selection as a one-time transaction

At home, opening a bank account is “an errand”.

Fill in a form, get a card, and never speak to the bank again.

That works fine in the US, where the system runs on sheer scale. Bank branches are everywhere and a standard process for everything.

Nobody at the bank needs to know who you are for your money to move.

Cross a border and the relationship becomes the actual product. When a wire gets held for review, or a compliance officer wants to know where $80,000 came from, you are “a stranger” emailing a general inbox in a different time zone.

I learned what that costs.

When that company account got frozen over a missing contract page, the mistake was ours.

What made it brutal was having no one between us and the bank.

No guide, no one who could deal with the institution on our behalf. So it took weeks (instead of an afternoon).

Banking has been drifting toward ongoing advisor relationships and away from one-off transactions for years.

But cross-border, the relationship that matters goes through whoever placed you at the bank.

They handled the compliance, they know your file, and they talk to the bank so you don’t have to. For someone running money across two or three countries, that is worth more than a tenth of a percent on a savings rate.

So when you set up money abroad, treat it as an ongoing relationship.

Work with someone who keeps it running long after the account is open.

Takeaway: Set up the account and the relationship behind it.

Mistake #5: Holding everything in one currency

Currency risk is one that you might be aware of already.

There are two versions of the mistake:

1. Holding everything in dollars when your rent and groceries are priced in euros or another currency, so a weak dollar affects your savings.

2. Converting your whole nest egg into the local currency the month you arrive, then watching that currency slide.

I paid for this one directly.

In 2023 I needed 60,000 euros converted to baht to buy a condo in Thailand.

The baht was sitting at 35 to the euro (normally around 37 to 38). I needed the money that month, so I converted at 35 and moved on. That timing cost me about 180,000 baht, close to 5,000 euros, on a single transfer.

The fix is to stop being forced into bad timing. Hold more than one currency so you are never trapped converting everything at the worst moment.

Move money in lump sums when the rate is in your favor.

A multi-currency account lets you park dollars, convert to euros or baht when the rate is good, and earn interest on whichever one you hold.

Takeaway: There is no way to control exchange rates, but you can avoid being forced to convert everything at the worst possible time.

Mistake #6: Expecting it to work like opening an account at Chase

In the US, opening an account takes 20 minutes and an ID. Walk in, sign, done.

People assume the rest of the world works the same way (it does not).

International banks ask for things American banks (almost) never do.

They want proof of where your money came from, a bank reference, sometimes a local tax number or an in-person visit you have to fly in for.

Many set minimums in the tens or hundreds of thousands. And thanks to FATCA, plenty of foreign banks reject American clients outright rather than deal with the US paperwork.

The “source of funds” question alone stops people cold, because most have never had to prove, on paper, where their savings came from.

Offshore banking gets called secretive, but the truth is actually the opposite. The compliance is stricter than anything you deal with at home.

None of this means you did something wrong.

Banks default to caution with a foreign client they don’t know, so the burden of proof lands on you. Show up unprepared and you wait months (or get rejected and start over somewhere else).

The fix is, as you might have guessed, preparation.

Have your documentation ready before you apply. Proof of source of funds, certified ID, the lot.

This is also where working through someone who handles the KYC for you earns its keep, because they know what each bank wants and assemble it before the bank has to ask.

Takeaway: Abroad, the account goes to whoever shows up with the paperwork already done.

Mistake #7: Wiring money every time you need cash

Plenty of people run their life abroad one wire at a time.

Need money this month?

Send a wire.

Need more in three weeks?

Send another.

Each one costs you.

A traditional bank charges $25 to $50 per international wire. Do that every few weeks and you bleed thousands a year, all of it invisible because no single transfer feels big.

The steady drip of small transfers can also draw the kind of compliance attention you don’t want.

The fix is to move money in set amounts on a schedule.

One larger transfer each quarter to your local spending account instead of a dozen small ones, and a fintech bridge converts at favorable rates.

Takeaway: Set up how your money moves abroad once, and you stop paying for it every few weeks.

The account that removes the most risk

Almost all of these come back to one thing.

Money sitting inside your home country and your new one, and nowhere else.

What’s missing is one account that sits outside both countries.

Adding one won’t erase the whole list.

You still have to tell your US bank you’re moving, prepare your documents, and time your conversions. But no single step removes more risk at once.

I call it the “fourth account”, sitting on top of the three most people already have:

• US home base

• Fintech bridge

• Local spending account.

What that one account covers:

• Money stops sitting under a single government (mistakes 1 and 3)

• Holds several currencies so you can convert on good days (mistake 5)

• Works as the funded backup if a US bank drops you (mistake 2)

• Lets you run your spending off one quarterly transfer instead of a dozen wires (mistake 7).

• Set it up through the right people and the compliance and the relationship come with it (mistakes 4 and 6).

Most international banks won’t open these accounts for Americans. FATCA makes US clients expensive to serve, so they pass.

That’s the part I help with.

I work through a Swiss-based family office that manages around $7 billion and holds relationships with more than 50 banks across Panama, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean.

I put the whole setup into a guide.

Download it here for free.

The Untouchable Account Guide

Conclusion

That’s it.

Seven mistakes, and almost all of them come back to where your money sits.

One thing that you can do today:

List every account you hold, which country it sits in, and how fast you can access your money if something happens.

The answer tells you whether you need to make a change.

Appreciate having you here,

— Ben

• Visa launches

• Rule and fee changes

• Travel access changes

• Citizenship & investment news

Here is what changed in the last four weeks.

Thailand Cuts Visa-Free Stays To 30 Days

Thailand is taking back half your stay.

In the third week of May, the Cabinet approved cutting visa-free entries from 60 days to 30 for 54 nationalities, including Americans. Three nationalities drop to 15 days. The Foreign Ministry proposed the cut on May 13, citing misuse of extended visa-free stays.

The change is not in force yet.

It takes effect 15 days after publication in the Royal Gazette. As of early June, that has not happened, so the 60-day rule still applies.

If you are in Thailand right now, your current stamp stays valid. Entries made before the effective date keep their full 60 days.

What this means for you:

If you spend winters in Thailand on back-to-back visa-free entries, that setup is ending. A 30-day stamp plus a single 30-day extension at immigration gets you 60 days at most, with a trip to the immigration office in between.

The cleaner answer is a proper long-stay visa.

The Thailand Elite Visa starts at 650,000 baht (about $19,000) for five years of residence, with no income proof and no quarterly renewals. I hold one myself and live in Bangkok, it is one of the easiest and most hassle-free residencies to obtain.

Visa-free entry was always a “visitor tool”.

If Thailand is part of your residency rotation plan, get something that does not reset every 30 days.

Schengen Countries Started Pausing Their Own Biometric Border Checks

I saw this coming a mile away, and am not surprised at all.

On May 2, the European Commission authorized Schengen states to temporarily suspend fingerprint and facial capture at borders during peak surges.

States can pause biometric checks for up to 90 days after full rollout, with a possible 60-day extension, reverting to old-fashioned passport stamps when queues build up.

Three countries have already used it:

• Italy reverts to passport stamps nationwide whenever queues exceed 45 minutes, in force through September 30.

• Spain paused biometric capture at Madrid-Barajas and Barcelona-El Prat.

• Portugal notified Brussels in late May that it will suspend biometric registration at its airports during peak periods.

To be clear about what this is:

A pause on collecting biometrics at busy moments, not a rollback. The EES database stays active, with 61 million border crossings already logged, and the Commission publicly defended the system while granting the flexibility. Once you register, your record applies.

What this means for you:

If you fly into Europe this summer, your experience now depends on which airport you pick and how bad the queue is when you land. You might get fingerprinted, or you might get a stamp like it’s 2024.

Plan for the slow version. Arrive early, especially for your first entry, when the system captures your full biometric profile.

If you hold a Schengen residence permit or long-stay visa, nothing changed. You stay exempt from EES registration but share the same checkpoints, so the queue relief in Italy, Spain, and Portugal helps you too.

Italy’s Top Court Just Made Citizenship By Descent Easier To Claim

If you have an Italian parent or grandparent, May brought good news.

As you might know, Italy grants citizenship by descent. An Italian parent or grandparent makes you eligible to claim it.

Read more

A US home base, a fintech bridge, and a local spending account.

At the end of that article, I wrote:

“This is the simplest version of the system. But there’s more you can do.”

This is the “more.”

I talk to people every week who are 6 to 24 months from leaving the US.

They chose where to go (or work with me to make that decision), started the visa paperwork, maybe even sold the house. But when I ask where their savings will sit once they leave, the answer is almost always the same:

“In the same accounts I have now.”

That worked 10 years ago.

In 2025, US banks closed an estimated 340,000 expat accounts. Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, Fidelity, USAA. All of them restricted or shut down accounts for Americans with foreign addresses.

And the country you're moving to?

The banking system has its own rules, own regulations, and own reasons to make accessing your money complicated.

Your money is stuck between two systems that both have reasons to make your life harder.

Today I’m making the case for a fourth account, one that sits outside both countries.

We’ll cover:

• Why your home country and your new country are both bad places to store wealth

• What a “neutral zone” account actually is (and why it’s legal, boring, and useful)

• How to add this fourth layer to the three-account setup you already have

Let’s start.

The US will cut you off

Account closures aren’t random.

In 2010, the US passed FATCA (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). It requires every bank in the world to report American account holders to the IRS. The compliance costs are high, and for most US banks, keeping expat customers on the books costs more than dropping them.

So they drop you.

Wells Fargo stopped opening brokerage accounts for anyone living outside the US in 2021. By 2025, the closures had spread across the entire industry. Some banks send a letter, others just freeze your account. A foreign IP address logging into your online banking is enough to trigger a review at most major institutions.

I talked to a client last week whose banker told her, and I quote:

“I won’t lift a finger to help you with that.”

She was trying to wire her own money to her new country. Pure insanity.

The safety net is shrinking too.

The FDIC is the reason you don’t think (or are not as worried) about your bank failing. For anyone who doesn’t know what the FDIC is, it’s the agency that insures your deposits up to $250,000 per account. If your bank goes under, the FDIC pays you back. That guarantee has kept American banking stable since 1933.

But the agency itself is getting gutted.

The FDIC’s 2026 budget was cut by $487 million, a 16.4% reduction from the prior year. Staffing dropped from 6,723 to 5,386. That includes 21% fewer compliance examiners watching the banks that hold your money. And Project 2025 called for merging the FDIC into other agencies entirely.

As of March 2026, the FDIC still exists. But it’s smaller, slower, and less staffed than at any point in recent memory.

Then there’s what happens if a bank actually fails.

Before 2008, it was simple. The government bailed the bank out with taxpayer money. After Lehman Brothers collapsed, Congress authorized $700 billion through TARP to rescue the financial system. The final cost to taxpayers was $31 billion (!) after repayments.

Congress decided that couldn't happen again. So in 2010, Dodd-Frank introduced a new mechanism:

The “bail-in”.

Instead of taxpayers funding the rescue, the bank uses its own money first.

That sounds reasonable until you realize who counts as "the bank's own resources."

Under the bail-in framework, depositors are classified as unsecured creditors. Anything above the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit can be converted to equity to keep the bank alive.

Where does this leave you?

• In a bailout, you pay as a taxpayer.

• In a bail-in, you pay as a depositor.

Either way, you pay. If you’re waiting for the punchline, there isn’t one.

Has it happened in the US?

Not yet.

But the legal framework is in place. And if you’re over 50 with a retirement nest egg above $250K sitting in one US bank, you’re exposed in a way that didn’t exist before 2010.

Takeaway: The US banking system is built for people who stay. If you leave, you're on your own.

The new country has their own problems

A local account is something you need once you relocate.

It connects you to the payment system where you live. Rent, groceries, utilities, QR payments at the restaurant down the street.

But a local spending account and a place to store your wealth are two very different things.

Your new country has its own ways of making your financial life difficult:

• Spain’s rules changed in January 2026. All banks now report every account to the tax office, regardless of balance. Any transfer above €10,000, inbound or outbound, must be declared in advance. Banks use algorithms to flag patterns that look like you’re splitting transfers to stay under the limit.

• Portugal has seen a steady rise in account closures and transfer difficulties for foreign residents between 2023 and 2025. Non-resident accounts come with restrictions: limited online banking, no credit access, fewer features than what locals get.

And then there’s what happens when things go wrong.

In 2013, Cyprus seized 47.5% of deposits above €100,000 at its largest bank to keep the financial system alive. Depositors at the second-largest bank lost everything above the €100,000 guarantee.

Two years later, Greece imposed capital controls that capped ATM withdrawals and blocked transfers out of the country. Banks closed for weeks.

Mind you, these are EU member states.

Countries with the euro, shared banking frameworks, modern financial systems. Not some local bank in a lesser known country.

So what do you do with local accounts?

I have two local accounts in Thailand. I use them every day. But I would never put six figures in either of them. A local account is for living your life. Wealth belongs somewhere else.

Takeaway: Use your local bank for groceries. Keep your wealth somewhere else.

Fintechs are tools, not banks

On a call last week, a client’s husband asked me a fair question:

“I already have a Wise account. What’s different about what you’re describing?”

(What I was describing is in the next section.)

I use Wise every month.

I’ve used it across six countries over five years. It converts currency at the real exchange rate, charges low fees, and moves money in hours instead of days.

But Wise is not a bank.

It doesn’t have a banking license.

The money in Wise is safeguarded, meaning it's held separately from Wise's own funds. If you opt into their interest feature on USD, you get FDIC pass-through insurance up to $250,000. Without that opt-in, there's no deposit insurance. The money is “ring-fenced”, but not insured.

Wise is good at what they do:

Moving money across borders cheaply and quickly.

But I would never park $50,000+ in a fintech account.

The problem is that people confuse a tool for transferring money with a place to store wealth. But retirement savings need a home with a banking license, deposit insurance, and a jurisdiction that has no reason to restrict your access.

Takeaway: Wise is a tool, not a vault. Know the difference.

The 4th bank account

At the end of the 3 accounts article, I promised more sophistication.

Separate accounts for investments. Physical asset storage in different jurisdictions. Keeping your main reserves in secure places like Switzerland or Singapore.

This is what I was talking about.

The fourth account sits in a country where you don’t live and where you’re not from.

A jurisdiction that has no connection to you other than holding your money. Call it your “own personal Switzerland” (whether the account is actually in Switzerland or not).

Why does location matter?

Because a bank in Panama or the Caribbean or Singapore is not subject to Spanish domestic banking regulations. It can’t be frozen because your residency card expired or because Spain changed a reporting threshold.

And while the bank reports your account to the IRS under FATCA (every foreign bank in the world has to), a US court cannot directly order a foreign bank to freeze your funds if the bank has no US presence. Reaching the account requires international legal cooperation through treaties, not a domestic administrative action.

Both countries know the money is there. You report it yourself on your FBAR and Form 8938. But knowing about an account and controlling the institution that holds it are two different things.

I have accounts in several countries.

Some in Europe, some in Asia, one in the Middle East, one in Central America and one in the US. The European accounts are infrastructure I’ve kept since before I left. The Asian accounts handle daily spending and part of the investment side. The Middle East and US accounts are for business. Central America is where my wealth sits and grows.

It also pays better than you'd think.

Most of these accounts are multi-currency. The one I use holds 10 currencies. You can park money in US dollars, convert to Euros or Swiss francs when rates are favorable, and earn interest on whichever currency you hold.

The account earns interest on USD deposits, and comes with debit and credit cards that work internationally.

And the capital backing is often stronger than in the US. Large US banks hold CET1 capital ratios around 13% on average. Banks in the Eastern Caribbean maintained capital adequacy ratios around 19% as of early 2025, with some individual banks running well above that.

In plain terms, for every dollar of risk these banks take on, they hold more equity backing it than a typical US bank does.

Here's what the full setup looks like:

1. US home base for income (Social Security, pensions, brokerage withdrawals)

2. Fintech bridge for converting and moving currency cheaply

3. Local spending account for daily life in your new country

4. “Neutral zone” account for storing and growing your wealth outside both jurisdictions

Is this legal? Completely.

Of course, you need to report the account annually to the US Treasury via FBAR if your foreign accounts exceed $10,000 total, and also report it to the IRS via Form 8938 if foreign assets exceed $200,000 (for Americans living abroad, double that amount if you file jointly). And depending on where you move, you may need to declare it to your residence country as well.

The reason why US-based financial advisors are not recommending it is because they lose when you move money offshore.

Their revenue comes from layers of fees that are buried so deep in the fine print most clients never see the real number. The median all-in cost for a managed portfolio in the US is 1.5% to 1.85% annually, and that's before you count the bid-ask spreads on every trade, which never appear on any statement.

Most of these fees are deducted before you ever see your returns, reducing what you earn without a single line item or invoice. When you move assets to an international bank outside their ecosystem, those fees disappear from their income statement.

So they don't bring it up.

The stories I've heard from clients about what they were paying their US advisor, without knowing it, would make your head spin.

Takeaway: Your wealth belongs in a jurisdiction that has no reason to touch it.

What comes next

Stop assuming that one country’s banking system will always work in your favor.

The Americans I work with who sleep best at night are the ones who spread their financial life across jurisdictions, not because they’re hiding anything, but because they understand that concentration is risk.

Open the account in your home country. Open the account in your new country. Use the fintechs for what they’re good at. And then open the fourth account in a country where you have no ties, no tax residency, and no reason for anyone to look twice.

That’s the neutral zone.

Your own personal Switzerland.

If you have questions about your specific situation, drop them in the comments.

I read them all.

— Ben

PS

If you want help opening an international account in a trusted jurisdiction where your wealth is actually secured, watch this video. I walk you through how I set up my own multi-country banking structure and how my clients are doing the same. And if you want your own 4th account in a neutral zone, you can book a call with me here, and we get the process started right away.

The advertised numbers are easy to read:

• Portugal’s D7 at €920/month

• Spain’s NLV at €2,400/month

• Panama’s Pensionado at $1,000/month

Those figures are on every listicle, and they’re usually where decisions start.

The income threshold is one of eight criteria that decide whether a retirement visa actually works for you.

This article walks through all eight.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to compare 3 visa options side by side in one afternoon

• The 8 criteria that decide whether a retirement visa fits your life

• The 12 questions that separate a visa that looks good on paper from one that fits your needs

Let’s start with the one that looks simplest.

1. Income And Savings: Can You Actually Qualify?

Every retirement visa has a minimum income or savings threshold.

That number is the easy part to find.

The rules “around the number” are often more nuanced.

Three things the headline rarely tells you upfront:

• Whether the figure is per applicant or per couple

• Which income types count (Social Security, pension, investment, rental)

• Whether the money has to sit “seasoned” in a specific account before you apply

Thailand’s retirement visa is one example.

Headline: 800,000 baht in savings.

The footnote: those baht must sit in a Thai bank in your name for 2 months before you apply, stay there 3 months after the visa is issued, and never drop below 400,000 baht for the rest of the year.

I’ve had clients discover that rule halfway through their planning, with flights booked.

Takeaway: The headline number is never the “real” number. Check the specific requirements for the specific income source.

2. Path To Permanent Residency And Citizenship: What’s The Long Game?

A retirement visa lets you in.

That’s not the same as letting you stay.

Three things to check before you commit:

• Whether the visa itself counts toward permanent residency, or whether you’d need to switch to a different permit

• How many years of continuous presence are required, and how “continuous” is defined

• What language or cultural test sits between you and citizenship

Retirement visas fall into two “camps”.

Some are renewable residence permits that never work towards anything permanent. You live in the country as long as you keep qualifying, but the years don’t count.

Thailand’s retirement visa is one example: renewable annually, holdable for 30 years, and it never turns into permanent residency or citizenship. Malaysia’s MM2H works similarly.

Lose the income qualification at renewal and you’re out.

Others are designed to accumulate. Every year of continuous presence counts toward permanent residency, and eventually citizenship.

Portugal’s D7 is one example: 5 years of presence gets you permanent residency, with citizenship on the table after that subject to an A2 Portuguese language test. Spain’s NLV runs on a similar 5/10 schedule.

“Continuous” is doing work in those sentences. Leave for too long in any given year and the clock resets.

Both systems have their place. But knowing which visa leads to which outcome is important.

Takeaway: Residency first, passport later (always). But verify how your visa works towards more permanent paths, such as permanent residency or citizenship.

3. Tax Implications For Americans: The IRS Never Lets Go

Americans pay US tax on worldwide income, no matter where they live. Knowing your destination country’s way of dealing with this fact is important.

Three things to verify before you commit:

• The country’s tax residency trigger (183 days, “center of life,” or something stricter)

• Whether a US tax treaty exists and how it treats your specific income types (pension, Social Security, 401k, rental)

• Whether the country’s “favorable” regime is grandfathered, under review, or already closed to new applicants

Portugal is the cautionary tale. I wrote extensively about the once favorable timeline in a recent article here.

The formula that I use:

Tax system + income type + treaty provisions = your actual situation.

The longer tax breakdown is in my recent article How Taxes Work When You Retire Abroad and in my video walkthrough here.

Takeaway: A visa that looks tax-friendly today may not look that way in two years. Check the current rules and how stable they’ve been.

4. Healthcare Access: Can You Actually Use The System?

A residency visa and public healthcare enrollment are (usually) two separate tracks.

Three things to confirm before you rely on the system:

• Whether the visa itself grants public system access, or only legal residency

• Whether private insurance is mandatory to qualify, and what it costs at your actual age

• Whether the care you need (chronic conditions, prescriptions, English-speaking specialists) is accessible where you’d be living

Spain’s NLV is the good example. You can’t submit the application without proof of private health insurance with no copayments, issued by a Spanish-authorized insurer. Portugal’s D7 grants eventual SNS access, but the wait time requires most D7 holders onto private plans, at least at the beginning.

Most retirees I work with use a combined approach. I wrote up the three strategies expats actually use if you want the details.

Takeaway: “Good public system” and “you personally can use it” are two different questions. Answer both.

Read more

Which residencies are “easier” to obtain than others?

Some programs have short timelines but bury you in paperwork, consulate appointments, and notarized translations.

Others ask for almost nothing, but processing drags on for a year.

The five in this article get both right: low requirements and reasonable timelines.

Here’s what you’ll find for each:

• Country, timeline, and requirements

• What you get (and what to watch out for)

• How to apply and what the process looks like

Let’s get started.

#1 Panama (Pensionado Visa)

Panama’s Pensionado launched in the 1980s. It has run for almost 40 years without changing its core structure.

Social Security qualifies, so do military pensions, SSDI, and federal or state government pensions. If you buy property worth $100,000 or more in Panama, the threshold drops to $750 per month.

Timeline:

• 3-6 months

Requirements:

• Proof of pension income of at least $1,000/month (or $750/month with $100K+ property purchase)

• $250/month additional per dependent

• Valid passport

• Health certificate from a Panamanian physician

• Police record from your country of residence (past 5 years)

Benefits:

• 25% off airline tickets

• 25% off restaurants

• 50% off entertainment

• 20% off private medical consultations

• 15% off hospital bills

• 10% off prescription medications

• 25% off electricity

• No tax on foreign-sourced income

• Dependents (spouse, children under 25) included

How to apply:

• Through a Panamanian immigration lawyer

• Or directly at the Servicio Nacional de Migración

One thing to know:

• You need to visit Panama at least once every two years. Absences beyond 24 months can result in cancellation of your visa and a fine.

Takeaway:

• $1,000/month in pension income gets you permanent residency in a program that has run (more or less) unchanged since 1987.

#2 Paraguay (Temporary Residency)

Paraguay removed its $5,000 bank deposit requirement in 2022. A declaration of your profession or financial means is required, but you don’t need to prove funds.

Timeline:

• 2-4 months for approval (in-person steps take 2-5 days in Asunción)

Requirements:

• Valid passport

• Apostilled criminal background check (past 3 years)

• Apostilled birth certificate

• Apostilled marital status certificate

• Passport-sized photographs

• Government fee: ~$350 USD

• Total cost with lawyer, translations, and apostilles: $1,500-$3,000.

Benefits:

• 2-year temporary residency, renewable

• Permanent residency after 24 months

• Territorial tax (no tax on foreign-sourced income)

• No minimum stay requirement

• Citizenship eligible after 3 years of permanent residency

How to apply:

• In person at the Dirección General de Migraciones in Asunción

• Or through a local immigration lawyer

One thing to know:

• You need to go to Asunción in person. The process can't be done remotely or at a consulate abroad.

Takeaway:

• No income requirement, no investment, under $1,000 in fees. Cheapest entry point on this list.

Continue

#3 Uruguay (Rentista Visa)

Uruguay lets you apply for permanent residency directly. Once you filed, you get a temporary cedula (ID card) within about 10 days, and wait 6-8 months for the permanent approval to come through.

Timeline:

• Temporary cedula within ~10 days

• Permanent residency approval in 6-8 months

Requirements:

• No legally fixed minimum income; assessed case by case, but $1,500 is the standard benchmark.

• Valid passport

• Birth certificate (apostilled)

• Police clearance from your home country and any country you’ve lived in the past 5 years

• Medical certificate (done in Uruguay)

• Proof of local address (rental contract or property)

Benefits:

• Permanent residency granted directly (no temporary residency phase)

• Tax Holiday: 11 years of exemption on foreign-source capital income (year of acquisition + 10 calendar years), but only if you spend 183 days/year in Uruguay or invest ~$2 million in local real estate

• Citizenship eligible after 3-5 years (depending on status)

How to apply:

• Enter as a tourist and apply in person at the Dirección Nacional de Migración in Montevideo

• Or work with a local immigration lawyer

One thing to know:

• You cannot be absent from Uruguay for more than 3 consecutive years, and spending at least 30 days per year in-country is recommended to maintain your status. If you want the tax holiday: 183 days per year.

Takeaway:

• Permanent residency on your first application for ~$1,500/month in passive income. The tax holiday is a bonus, but only if you actually live there most of the year.

#4 Portugal (D7 Visa)

Portugal’s D7 requires €920 per month in passive income (roughly $1,085). For a couple, €1,380. Pensions, dividends, rental income, and investment returns all count.

Timeline:

• Consulate processing: 30-60 days (however, getting a consulate appointment in the first place will take longer)

• AIMA residence permit appointment in Portugal: months-long backlog (400,000+ pending applications as of 2026)

Requirements:

• Proof of passive income of at least €920/month (single) or €1,380/month (couple), plus 30% per child

• Valid passport (6+ months validity)

• Criminal background check

• Proof of accommodation in Portugal (12-month rental or property)

• Private health insurance

• Must spend at least 183 days per year in Portugal

Benefits:

• 2-year temporary residency, renewable

• Permanent residency after 5 years

• Schengen area access (travel across 29 European countries)

• Path to citizenship after 10 years (up from 5, pending presidential signature as of April 2026)

• Dual citizenship allowed

• Right to work included (rare for passive income / retirement visas)

How to apply:

• Schedule an appointment at the Portuguese consulate in your country of residence

• Submit documents and attend in person

One thing to know:

• You need a Portuguese NIF (tax number) before you can do almost anything (sign a lease, open a bank account, buy a phone plan etc). Get one remotely through a fiscal representative before you arrive, or in person at a local tax office.

Takeaway:

• One of the easiest ways into the Schengen area on passive income alone. Just budget extra time for Portuguese bureaucracy.

#5 Thailand (Elite Visa)

Thailand’s Elite Visa (officially the “Privilege Visa”) is a membership program. Pay a one-time fee, get a 5 to 20-year visa. No income proof, no age requirement, no minimum stay.

Timeline:

• 1-3 months (background check takes 4-6 weeks)

Requirements:

• One-time membership fee starting at 650,000 THB (~$19,000)

• Valid passport

• Clean criminal record

• No overstays or visa issues in Thailand

Benefits:

• 5 to 20-year visa depending on tier

• No minimum stay requirement

• VIP airport fast-track and immigration processing

• 1-year stay per entry (re-enter to reset)

• 90-day reporting handled for you

• No income, investment, or employment proof needed

• Option to open local accounts with multiple banks

How to apply:

• Apply online at the Thailand Privilege Card website

• Or through a licensed agent for easier processing (no extra fee)

One thing to know:

• Thailand Privilege has raised membership fees multiple times since the program launched in 2003. The entry-level price today is higher than it was two years ago, and there’s no reason to expect it will stay where it is. If you’re considering this, waiting usually costs more.

Takeaway:

• Pay once, stay for years. No other program on this list is this hands-off.

Conclusion

That’s it.

Five residencies across three continents:

• Panama’s Pensionado has been running since 1987 on the same terms. $1,000/month in pension income gets you permanent residency.

• Paraguay and Uruguay cost the least to enter, but you need to show up in person to apply.

• Portugal has one of the lowest income bars in Europe at €920/month, but it can take a little while until you have your residence permit.

• Thailand’s Elite Visa is the most expensive and the most hands-off. No paperwork, no renewals, no minimum stay.

Don’t forget: Residency programs change. Prices go up. Tax breaks disappear. Banking gets more restrictive every month you wait.

The best time to get residency is when you don’t need it.

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If you have questions about your specific situation, drop them in the comments.

I read them all.

Appreciate you being here,

— Ben

PS

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

I help you figure out which program fits you best, based on a process that I successfully use with all my clients. You won’t wonder about missing out on a great program, what to do with your money or confusing tax questions anymore, and know exactly what works for you (and what doesn’t).

The brand new residency-by-investment program has three tracks, each one including direct permanent residency from day one.

The tracks are:

• Invest $200K in securities.

• Invest $200K in real estate.

• Invest $150K in tourism projects.

Total residency applications already went from 28,000 in 2024 to 47,000 in 2025, with 80,000 projected for 2026.

For Americans looking south of Mexico, this is the biggest residency-by-investment launch in Latin America this year.

I spent a few hours pulling it apart.

What the announcement doesn’t say and what you need to understand before making a decision.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What the Investor Pass actually buys you, and what it doesn’t

• Why the territorial tax structure matters more than the residency

• Which of the three tracks makes sense, and which one I would avoid

Let’s start.

What the Investor Pass actually buys you

In short:

A Paraguayan permanent residency card, granted directly.

(Without the two-year temporary stage like the older programs required under Law 6984/22).

For those of you who are familiar with Paraguay, you might know that there is one other route that avoids that two-year wait.

The SUACE Business Plan, in place since 2022, granted direct permanent residency for $70,000 invested in a Paraguayan company, plus a business plan and five local hires.

The Investor Pass removes the business and hiring obligations entirely.

Once you allocate capital under one of the three tracks you receive permanent residency.

The trade-off is a higher capital threshold: $150K-200K instead of $70K.

So as of April 2026, you have three paths to Paraguayan permanent residency:

1. The standard route (slow but cheap, no investment, two-year temporary stage, then permanent).

2. The SUACE Business Plan ($70K plus running a real business with five employees).

3. The Investor Pass (fast, passive, $150K-200K, no operating obligations).

The benefits of the Investor Pass:

• Permanent residency from day one

• An 8% dividend tax instead of the standard 15%

• Citizenship eligible after three years of permanent residency

• One entry to Paraguay every three years keeps your status active

That citizenship benefit has a condition I will cover in a later section.

What the Investor Pass does not do automatically: make you a tax resident of Paraguay. The pass gives you a “cédula”, which is the prerequisite for opening a bank account and registering for a RUC (tax ID) through SET, the tax authority.

The RUC is what makes you a taxpayer.

Without it, Paraguay is your home for immigration purposes but not for tax purposes.

The tax residency certificate (the document you would actually show another government to prove where you pay tax) is a separate application on top of all that.

Takeaway: The Investor Pass shortens the residency process from two steps to one. Tax benefits are not (automatically) linked to obtaining the PR.

Why the territorial tax structure matters more than the residency

Paraguay has a territorial tax system. Foreign income is taxed at 0%.

For an American retiree drawing a 401(k), Social Security, or dividends from a US brokerage, Paraguay doesn’t touch any of it.

There is no wealth tax and no inheritance tax and local income gets taxed at a flat 10%.

If you’ve been looking at Europe, you know how rare clean tax setups are becoming.

• Spain taxes pension income at rates up to 47%.

• Portugal’s NHR closed to new applicants in 2024 and its replacement excludes pensioners.

• Italy’s flat-tax regime for new residents now costs €300,000 per year.

Paraguay has no cap, no expiration, and no exclusion for pension income.

I know what you’re thinking.

“That sounds great Ben, but it’s Paraguay. I want to spend my retirement in Portugal.”

Fair.

But you don’t have to live in Paraguay to benefit from the tax system.

There are ways to structure your global setup so that you hold a territorial tax residency in a country like Paraguay or Panama, while spending months per year in Italy, Spain, or Portugal without triggering tax residency there.

In a safe structure, you keep the US obligations, add nothing on top, and live where you actually want to live. It takes careful structuring. The 183-day rule, center-of-life tests, and treaty provisions all need to line up. That’s what I work through with clients in the Retire Abroad Blueprint.

One reminder:

Territorial taxation abroad does not replace your US obligations. You are still American. Paraguay eliminates the second tax layer that a country like Spain would add on top. If you haven’t read my full breakdown of how US taxes work when you retire abroad, start there.

Takeaway: Paraguay’s territorial tax system is a great option, and you don’t have to live there full-time to use it.

Which of the three tracks makes sense, and which one I would avoid

Not all $150-200K options carry the same risk. Here is how I view the three present options.

Read more