As The Saying Goes, Growth Is Found Beyond Your Comfort Zone

The same is true when it comes to wealth growth and protection. More often than not, you can find the best propositions and outcomes to wealth building outside of the place you live in. Bobby Casey knows where. As the Managing Director of Global Wealth Protection, he has been helping many entrepreneurs minimize taxes, protect assets, and open their doors to a digital nomad lifestyle.

In this episode, Bobby shares how to find the best places to live in the world for wealth growth and protection. What country is best for asset protection? Which one has the best tax plans? Who handled the COVID situation best? Where should you live to increase your quality of life? Bobby answers these questions and more in this discussion.

Listen To The Podcast Here:

How To Find The Best Places To Live In The World For Wealth Growth And Protection With Bobby Casey

On the show, we have Bobby Casey. He is the Managing Director of Global Wealth Protection. He has helped many entrepreneurs to minimize taxes, protect assets and most importantly, open the doors to a digital nomad lifestyle.

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You are not going to want to miss this show with Bobby Casey of Global Wealth Protection. Bobby is going to talk about the best country in the world to live for asset protection, taxes, what country handled the COVID situation the best and where you want to live if you’re looking to increase your after-tax income and your quality of life.

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Bobby, welcome to the show.

Chris, thanks for having me.

I’m surprised I got you in one place in North Carolina. We’re in the same state because you’ve been all over the world even during the pandemic, which I’d love to have you share more with the audience that. Before we do, tell our audience a little bit more about yourself as well as your company, Global Wealth Protection and what you do.

I’m a lifelong entrepreneur. I’ve never had a professional job. The last job I had, I was nineteen years old. I’ve always had my own businesses. I’ve started various businesses over the years. What got me in the field I’m in now is growing up as the son and grandson of an entrepreneur. My grandpa and my uncle had a chain of restaurants before I was born. My dad had a construction company in real estate development all through my whole life until he sold the business many years ago. Growing up in that entrepreneurial household was never a thing for me to go get that corporate job. It was never even a mindset that I had that that’s what needs to happen. I’m fortunate, I didn’t have that. I think about people that go that path, go through the education and get to corporate and all that stuff. I think about those people making $100,000, $150,000 or $200,000 a year in their 30s. They’re like, “I’m going to walk away from this.” That must be exceptionally difficult for somebody in that position.

When you do that, in my case, it was eighteen years of being a professional in the medical device industry, I got to the number, the financial piece and the passive income that I needed to get to. My CPL looked at me. He’s like, “What are you waiting for? You don’t need to do this anymore.” It had become such a part of me. I had such anxiety to walk away. I took a trip down the Grand Canyon a few years ago and my biggest source of anxiety wasn’t, “You might die in the river in the Canyon in the middle of nowhere.” It was, “What are you going to do if you can’t check your email.” It’s crazy what it does to your brain. 

I have the email too. That must be an incredibly difficult thing to walk away from that career. I never had that because I never went on that path so I don’t understand what that feels. I was talking to my youngest son about this. I’ve never had a steady paycheck ever my whole life. It’s a completely different way of thinking about things. For me, growing up as an entrepreneur, our normal dinner-time conversations when I’m twelve years old are about tax planning, company structure, tax minimization and optimization topics. It’s super exciting when you’re twelve.

Going through my entrepreneurial career, I had a few different businesses. In my late 20s, I got to the point where I thought, “I need to do something different.” From a financial standpoint, I need to do a bit more tax planning and asset protection planning. I had a decent size company. I was doing upper seven figures, close to eight figures. I had some bunch of real estate. I owned a restaurant at one point in my late 20s. I ended up hiring somebody like me back then to do what I do for people now with asset protection, planning and strategic planning for their business, taxes and stuff. That’s what got me started on that path. The guy that I met is still a mentor of mine to this day. We still talk every couple of months. Sometimes, we collaborate on a client project or something. At that point in my life, all my friends were entrepreneurs. I didn’t have friends that had normal corporate jobs. Everyone I knew and hung out with had their own business. That’s how my network evolved.

I started doing some consulting at that point for helping them optimize their own situation. That was many years ago. It grew progressively from there. I ended up selling a few different businesses. I sold the business in 2007 or 2008. I thought, “What do I want to do?” I love dealing with entrepreneurs. I love the freedom of location and the clients that I’m working with. I’ve got a bit of money. I don’t need to grind for a paycheck every week. That’s when I officially started doing what I’m doing now. This is what I’ve been doing officially since about 2008. My tagline is Tax and Residency Planning for Location Independent Entrepreneurs. We help people internationalize their business, their wealth and their life. It’s always tax planning. A lot of it is optimizing company structure and multi-jurisdictional planning.

I had a Turkish guy living in Canada with a business partner who’s a Turkish guy living in Singapore. They’re software developers developing video games and we’d discussed how and where to structure their business to optimize it for tax planning and asset protection. That’s a very normal conversation type of thing I have every day. Those things get complicated. I’ve got a German client with a huge eCommerce business selling primarily in the American markets and he lives in Thailand. Those things get complicated. That’s basically what I do now.

The pandemic has been interesting. My wife and I have a short-term rental Airbnb that we run. We’ve had some people here. They come through and like, “We can work from wherever. We’re going to live here for 1 or 2 weeks and explore the Asheville area. We’ve seen the rise of the digital nomad over 2020. It seems the pandemic has opened people’s eyes. If somebody is reading and doesn’t know what a digital nomad is, can you share more about that? It seems like you’re one of the original digital nomads.

I’ve been independent my whole life even when I had an office years ago. Technically, I have two offices now. I’ve got one in Arizona and one in the Caribbean. I don’t think I’ve been to the one in the Caribbean for a couple of years. The one in Arizona I’ve been to once this 2021. I don’t go to the office. Before, I used to have an office with twenty employees physically. The joke was when I showed up, the receptionist would say, “Hi, how may I help you?” I had an office at home. At one point, when he retired, he became my CFO. My dad would call me, “Are you going to work?” I’m like, “Dad, I’m at home working.” “You can’t work when you’re at home. You work here at the office at 7:30.” That was always the thing with him. A bit old school that you’ve got to be in the suit and tie at your desk by 8:00 AM.

The nomad thing I started many years ago when Skype was created. I remember my first trip to Russia back in 2005, 2006. I came home and my cellphone bill was $2,000. I only had a few phone calls. It was $10 a minute or something. Skype started and it dramatically opened up the work for small business people. If you’re a big company, it’s not a big deal. You make a 30-minute phone call to Europe or Asia. If you’re a freelancer and you’ve got a client, let’s say you do video editing freelancing for marketing stuff for people and you’ve got clients in Asia. What are you going to do? Are you going to have your phone calls at $10 a minute? No. Skype was the catalyst that opened up the world for global, free or cheap communication. I also think Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was a big catalyst for a lot of people.

Rich Dad Poor Dad and The 4-Hour Workweek are books I read and I was like, “It puts that imprint in your brain.” Being in sales, it’s a very entrepreneurial endeavor. I didn’t want to be tied down to where I wanted to live. It’s amazing. I remember my first Skype call with my son. I was in Colorado at a cycling event. I was like, “This is amazing. He’s a year old and I’m looking at him on the camera.”

That type of stuff that opened up the world for small business people, freelancers, small entrepreneurs or solopreneurs, they have clients all over the world. It also opened it up like The 4-Hour Workweek. He talked a lot about, “Do your job remotely and go live your best life in Bali.” That was very difficult prior to Skype. A lot of things have opened up since then. Now, you’ve got digital nomad. It’s a pretty broad term. It can be anywhere from what we call the Coconut Cowboys, the young guys that make $700 a month and decide they want to go live in a cheap home and party all the time. They can do that stuff in cheap places in Thailand, Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia. That still falls under the digital nomad category. You’ve got freelancers, solopreneurs, people running big businesses that have built remote teams and people that have remote jobs now. General Motors announced all their office workers are fully remote. They sent 30,000 people home. You’ve got some of the huge stalwarts of industry sending all their office people home. Clearly remote work trend.

What’s interesting is Tim Cook said, “You got to come back in the office three days a week.” The Apple employees revolted against him. They said, “You can’t make us do this.” It’s going to be interesting. One of the other interesting things I’ve seen here is a business where you can go live on a cruise ship. Tell us more about that.

There was a guy down in Panama who parked the ship. He got a ship. He bought a ship or was working on buying a ship and they were parking it in the port in Panama City. It was not going to move. It was going to be parked and people could buy their cabins or multiple cabins. I’ve talked to that guy. He got shut down because he couldn’t find an insurance company that would insure the project because they didn’t know what to do with it. It’s like housing. They knew how to insure the house but they didn’t know how to insure the boat that doesn’t move. There is a world cruise like people live on cruise ships. They do twelve-month cruises. You buy your cabin or you can rent it also and you can get on and off wherever the ship docks at a port. You could get off the boat in Barcelona and decide, “I’m going to stay in Barcelona for a month.” Let’s say the next port is somewhere in Asia. You get on a plane and fly to that port and you get back on the boat again.

As our kids get a little bit older and they’ll be graduating, I’m starting to talk to my wife about some of these different concepts. It’s interesting to think about what’s possible.

I did a cruise called Nomad Cruise. It’s a cruise for digital nomads. It was a two-week cruise that went from Barcelona, Spain to Recife in Brazil. It was a one-way cruise for about two weeks. That was a pretty cool event. Johannes is the guy who runs that thing. I did a keynote presentation on the cruise for the Tax And Residency Planning. It was a great event and super fun. They killed it shortly after that but Johannes said they’re relaunching it. January and February of 2022, they’re going to do another one. That’d be fun if you’re interested. It’s a cool event with cool people. Digital nomads are definitely a growing trend that technology has made available to us. We wrote an article in 2020 on our blog. I got so much hate for this but I loved it. I said, “COVID was the best thing to happen for humanity.” What happened during COVID from a worker’s perspective, a lot of people got sent home. If you were able to work remotely, they did it.

What happened is it exposed people to the idea that, “Why am I commuting an hour to work every day? Why am I even doing that?” “I commute two hours every day. This wasted time sitting in the car. Why would I not work from home, take a long lunch break with my kids, go to the gym and exercise or cut my work time down a little bit and have a side hustle where I make some extra money?” A lot of people realized that an eight-hour workday only has about four hours of work in it.

We have 3 to 4 hours of concentrated mental energy every day anyway. My wife and I get up at 5:00. We work for a couple of hours, get the kids to go and do their thing and a little bit more workout. We’re as productive as we want to be. Certainly, this is any goal, one study here but it certainly works in our case. I agree. People have seen the light. It’s like, “What am I doing? Why am I living in the Northeast?” I have a coaching client, he lives in New York and he’s taking a promotion with a different company. It’s 100% virtual so he can work wherever he wants. He’s talking about moving to the Carolinas. He’s like, “Why would I live in a high tax state with this crappy weather when I can live in a low tax state with great weather? I live at the beach.”

Take it a step further and go live on the beach in Mexico where the cost of living is 1/3 of what it is in North Carolina with a very high-quality life. Depend on your tax situation and how you earn your income but you can make at least $150,000 tax-free living in Mexico. I was thinking about American because you mentioned the guy from New York. If you’re an American citizen, you live abroad and you meet the requirements of the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, you get about $110,000 tax-free income plus about $40,000 in housing. It’s about $150,000 and you can earn tax-free. There are other things you can do if you make more but it’s simple to do the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion and earn about $150,000 tax-free. For your coaching client, I would skip all the way past North Carolina and go to Mexico.

Most of our audience is in America. We have some in Canada. A couple of internationals that pop up. What are some of your favorite countries around the world to check out right now?

It’s tough because you got so many countries with COVID restrictions that make it complicated.

Push those aside a little bit.

In the Western hemisphere, the Americas, if you go South of the US, the only two countries I would consider living in outside of the Caribbean are Mexico and Brazil because their behavior during this COVID situation and most of those countries has been atrocious. Panama, for example. You can only go outside month-to-month. You can only go outside for 2 hours a day, 2 days a week. Four hours a week, you can physically be outside of your home.

I’m going to stay inside where COVID transmission rates are sky-high, basically exclusively indoors. That’s insane.

Don’t worry. The US is not immune from stupidity too. In 2020, they closed the national parks. My wife and I did an RV trip in 2020 for a few weeks in the States. Ironically, almost all of your States had their State parks open but federally, the national parks were closed because COVID only appears on the federal-owned property, not state property. What’s better than seeing inside and breathing COVID air than going outside and going hiking in a national park?

There are so many idiotic things that occurred. Our kids went back to school but not on Wednesdays. I guess that’s the only day COVID got transmitted.

COVID on Wednesdays is bad. COVID is bad after 11:00 PM because a lot of places have that 11:00 PM curfew now.

We could spend a whole show panning the responses to COVID especially in retrospect. To your point, COVID shed light on countries, businesses and weaknesses. You look at schools now. I was reading an article, school attendance in the counties down 1,500 students and the county is now concerned about getting federal funds for schooling. My first thought was where did those students go? My belief is that a lot of them went to private schools that stayed open and took two different approaches to this situation. It’s interesting to see the way these behaviors have occurred. Mexico, Brazil and South America.