Thanks Patrick for a Great Article on investing properly offshore.
I agree we need to collectively brainstorm. There are a number of us with a similar end objective of living offshore and in Europe(EU) in particular but are at different stages of readiness in terms of physically going, what assets we have and where they are located
(offshore vs SA) and at what stage of accumulation we are at with these assets.
My background circumstances and part of the reason for wanting to invest offshore, besides making good financial sense for all the reasons you have given, was we also love to travel and we want to be able to fund on average up to 3 months of Travel / Living expenses overseas in a common currency used for travel i.e. US Dollars/ Euros.
I have dual citizenship with Portugal (obtaining a Portuguese passport was as you alluded to a whole story on its own. All I can say is persevere. I am glad I did. It’s been a life game changer for us!). Independently of Portuguese citizenship, we chose Portugal as the country we want to use as a base to live in and travel from but not to work and maybe not as a permanent resident/ tax resident.
With this long term view I set about researching where best to invest from a domicile perspective with regard to inheritance law/ estate perspective, dividend tax, Capital Gains tax , double taxation treaties, Bank Accounts, Brokerage companies , etc etc and surprise surprise a couple of months ago I settled on opening a basic brokerage account with Degiro IE.(Ireland) , not Degiro Portugal and have started buying one ETF, VWRL Vanguard FTSE AW on the Euronext Amsterdam Stock exchange . ….I could have saved myself a lot of time if your article had come out earlier 😊 but seriously there were a number of factors that influenced my decision.
I have being trying to put together a longer term plan on how best to prepare ourselves and set ourselves up to be ready for a future relocation overseas, the EU and Portugal in particular. I have been trying to better understand a host of things from tax emigration and exit tax to financial emigration, definition of a tax resident etc, etc . It is a minefield .As they say in the classics the devil is definitely in the detail.
Each one of these are almost a sub topic on their own but thought that we could maybe house it under a more general Tread – something like Preparation for an Offshore Relocation.
There is already a number of Trail Blazers. Orca’s generous sharing of his actual Real Life Experiences with relocating to Portugal and now the UK has been absolutely invaluable. As he mentioned in his post, this all happened despite him doing all the research upfront.
Yozzi and Rond also seem to be in the midst as well Nothing like the real thing!
