In April, my client opened our call from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
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.
Takeaway: Research produces information. A strategic process produces decisions.
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.
Takeaway: Map your life first, then make the programs compete for a place in it.
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.
Takeaway: A trip only produces a decision when you arrive with a shortlist and a checklist.
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.”
Takeaway: Give every country in your setup one job, and don’t let any of them own you.
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
If this sounds like something you would like to do, you can book a call below the video.
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
PS: Applications close on July 16, and then I will be focusing on the people who decided to act. Spots are limited because this is 1:1 work.
I'm looking at retiring early spring 2027 and selling my home, and using that equity (interest + SS) initially to travel and then possibly settle down, or at least have a home base. I know i'm not ready to do things right this minute because this is my busy time of year at home, but is there an ideal time before I pull the trigger to start the conversation.
I can appreciate all the research and knowledge that you bring to such complex decisions, but what I’m always left wondering is the Why behind what these people are doing… For example, there are places within the USA with similar weather, etc. to San Miguel, so why would a U.S. citizen take on so much extra “work” rather than the easier lift of searching for the lifestyle, improved tax situation, etc. within their own country? They can still travel the world to their heart’s content. I’d love to see this kind of background given, at least briefly, for the stories you present.