Comments by "Marvin Fine" (@torontovoice1) on "Nomad Capitalist"
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Another great video as usual. It's somewhat hard to parse all of the different options. And the more options you have, the more complex it becomes. I think it really depends on where a person's at in their life, how much money they have and what's important to them. If you go to a country where English is not the majority language, it really sucks. It's not like you can't learn a second language, most people can. I've learned five already, I'm probably not done yet. But it's a chore to try to speak another language. Especially if you're in a situation where you've got a medical problem or there's an emergency and your vocabulary is so limited but you're unable to articulate exactly what you need to have done. Of course these are the extreme situations, there are many others that are less extreme and just as vexing. I think the thing that's sort of in the back of my mind is what's happening internationally with the minimum 15% tax that countries are trying to impose on the others you know when you think back, tax was supposed to be temporary when it was originally enacted. It's far from temporary now. You notice that the US just enacted a 1% tax on share BuyBacks. You know that just opens the door then they can add a 2% 5% 10% I mean once the tax is in it's easy to modify the rate. I think it's going to be more difficult going forward to live in countries that are tax Havens. And I think you alluded to that as well when you compared paying tax in Malta because it was a whitelisted country. However I'm not sure if it is whitelisted, or at least the banks. I think they're still gray listed. And I spoke to people about moving to Malta, and they did mention a lot of difficulties with the banking there. I think the kyc is just over the top. Setting up structures I think invoke some anxiety to at least myself not knowing if the structures are going to hold, or if the rules are going to change. I think you're much better off to go somewhere where it's a straightforward deal, and you know exactly what's up front and you're able to comply with all the rules and regulations without any expectation of change which could always happen. I think your talk illustrates exactly how difficult choosing a location to move to can be. I guess you could start with a simple truth table. The first question is do you want major English speaking or not? Once you have made that determination, then the list gets whittled down pretty good. Then I think next I would look at healthcare. And I remember you did a talk on healthcare which I found overly simplistic. I think the topic was how much is healthcare actually worth? So you took the total population of the country and the total amount that was spent on healthcare and divided the two together to get a number on what a country spends on healthcare. Could be around 3 to 5,000 for example. And that makes a lot of sense. But you know what if you get a heart attack at 2:00 in the morning, you're dealing with the local healthcare of that country and I think if you're in a third world country with third world doctors and third world equipment, your outcomes might not be the same as say the Mayo clinic or the Cleveland clinic. Of course if it's not an emergency you can jump on a plane and go anywhere. And I guess at the end of the day it might not save you anyway, but it certainly gives you a piece of mind. The other thing that you didn't talk a lot about was the weather and the relative number of things to do in a country. For example you talked about the Bahamas. I inquired about the Bahamas. It's really hot like unbearable in the summer, and the cost of electricity is around 40 cents a kilowatt hour. It cost you more air conditioned your place than with the rent or the cost of carrying would be. And healthcare well, not much there, you'll need to jump on a plane and go to Florida. And what are you going to do there? So I think those are other criterias. You know it's not simple, and having someone who is experienced not only in legal aspects and the financial an accounting aspects, but also the lifestyle is also important. I mean what's the good of all the money in the world if you can't enjoy it? That's something you haven't addressed. As usual, great video. Thank you for creating the content
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When I first saw the topic of your video, I was very interested to watch it. The first two parts of the video such as finding the property, I think it's very much the need to be able to understand the local market. I don't know how are you going to find someone who understands your needs. And I think the biggest concern is all these agents that you're going to hire are biased. They're not representing you, they are representing themselves. They want to make commission. In order for them to do that, they have to find something that appears compatible to yourself. So it's always an issue to try to really find someone who is perhaps fee-based, such as a property appraiser who is not getting paid based on a purchase but rather consulting on the basis of trying to understand your needs and finding the right property for you. Even then, especially in emerging markets, you never know what corruption may exist. Obviously the longer you spend in the country, and the more you travel the country, the more you will learn. I have a skill at looking at areas by doing things that are perhaps strange to some people. People normally buy groceries in the area where they live. I like going to grocery stores and walking around. I can look at the faces of the people in the store, and moreover, I like to look at what they're buying so I look in their basket of groceries. You can really get a good indication of the socioeconomic sector of the population by what they buy. I agree with you that buying anything in a trust really will not give you any asset protection. In fact there have been new laws and acted in many countries where you have to disclose the person of ultimate ownership. So all the structures in the world won't help you cuz at the end of the day, you have to disclose who the beneficial owner is. I think corporations do offer some additional protection from the perspective of estate taxes if they exist in a particular jurisdiction. Obviously corporations don't die, so by creating a will and providing a succession details in the will, it enables the successors to deal with the property. The other thing of course is that you probably don't have to probate anything in the local jurisdiction, because the corporation just continues. The asset protection discussion was actually quite interesting. You may or may not know that there was a guy named Kevin Trudeau who had some issues with the Federal trade commission. He was running infomercials and to make a long story short, the Federal trade commission going to judgment against him for 37 million dollars. He was driving a Bentley, living in a mansion, and was spending $100,000 on his credit card a month. He was called to examination in aid by the attorneys for the Federal trade commission. He said that his car was corporate transportation, the house was corporate housing, and he said he was broke. The judge didn't believe him, and gave him 10 years in jail. There's a lot of YouTube's on him as well. I think asset protection is more or less dead. If you have to disclose the assets, the judge tells you sell the property and transfer the money or go to jail. I think maintaining the properties though in my view is probably the biggest challenge. I remember speaking to a realtor in Panama. And she was very honest and she told me point blank, you cannot own a property in Panama and leave it unattended. It will just mold and rot. That's probably because of the humidity. So I asked her what people do? She told me that they hire a maid or I guess you would call it a house sitter. I think you're right about the idea of buying condominiums where there is a management company in the building that has a key to your property that can go in if there is fires floods etc. Also having a building with security is really important I think. I agree with you that an apartment is what you need, and if it's in a gated community even better! Having a trusted property manager is also important. I read a story in Cyprus mail we're a property manager who rented out a bunch of apartments that were essentially holiday apartments to asylum seekers. They completely trashed the places! The property manager was arrested and was thrown in jail, but I don't know what remedies the property owners had? I would probably think about looking into insurance about ensuring whether or not this type of risk can be covered. Over and above that, I think it's necessary to have a property manager in each of these places like you said, and have someone coming in and clean. I remember leaving my main property for only a couple of months. When I came back it was a disaster! I cleaned for almost 3 days. Whenever you live in a country that is hot or humid, you're all you're going to have problems. In Florida I know they run the air conditioners all summer. Cost of electricity has gone up to notches unknown in Europe. Some places are around 45 cents a kilowatt hour. Running AC could run up a big Bill. Obviously if you have staff that are visiting these properties or using them, that could be a big plus. I also do agree with you that putting them on Airbnb could be more hassle than it's worth. I inquired in a few high tax European countries about doing that. I think I said that I wanted to buy a property put it on Airbnb and use it the times that I would be in the country. The lawyer told me you better have all your paperwork in order. When they find out you're living in a tax efficient jurisdiction even with a double taxation treaty with the country, they'll be checking the days test for sure! Let us not forget what happened to Shakira in Spain. She thought she could be clever, it backfired on her. Anyway it was an excellent video, and I learned a bit, but there are still quite a few things that can go wrong. Many of the comments that you made would enable someone to circumvent a lot of issues. Well done!
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I completely disagree with the learned professor. You'll find that the productivity is based on people. Wrong! And even more going into the future, productivity will be based on machines. In fact Elon musk said, that at some point in time there will be no use for most workers. He was referring to truck drivers, and automated Driving systems for example. But the list goes on and on with process control equipment and shop floor automation. You won't need thousands of people to make cars anymore. Instead they'll be using robots, and engineers driving and managing these machines not people sitting on the end of an assembly line with an impact wrench, bolting in lug nuts into cars and the other mundane repetitive work. In fact, having a lot of people can be a liability. These people need to eat! And although you hear all kinds of people talking about pollution, the greatest polluters in the world are people. We eat, we digest food, we breathe oxygen, and the list goes on and on. If you want to add animals in there for meat consumption, the pollution goes up. Have you ever seen what a fish farm looks like? After a few years it's so polluted that they have to move it and it takes years to recover. I must respectfully disagree.
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Well the rules were not exactly explained, this is more like fear mongering. But Australia is not the only country that has these type of snapback procedures or whatever you want to call them. I currently live in Israel, and Israel has a four-year period whereby if you leave the country and you don't establish either a residence permit or another passport, they may not release you from your tax obligations. And what's more interesting is that if you leave and then come back within 4 years, they will roll that back as if you never left. All of these rules came about as a result of a famous Israeli model bar rafaeli who was living for some time in the US with Leonardo DiCaprio. She only had an Israeli passport, she was born in Israel, and she was on a tourist visa in the United States. She lost the case in Israel, and I don't want to bore you with the 42-page judgment that I read, but the judge said basically, if you're not a tax resident of Israel, where are you paying your taxes? So I think increasingly you're going to see governments try to continue taxing their citizens until such time as they're able to satisfy the government that they have actually left for real. They have a special form that you have to fill out it's called 627 for those of you who want to look at it, and it basically asks a number of questions such as do you have an apartment in Israel do you have a bank account in Israel do you have another passport or another residence permit where are you going, etc. So I think you're going to see a lot of countries look at these kinds of scenarios from people who really don't leave the country or set up Roots somewhere else such as digital nomads for example. Even though they do pay tax in that country based on their digital nomad Visa, they don't really consider them a resident but rather a temporary resident. So unless you're able to upgrade that to a permanent resident, your home country might not consider that you left. I think these are the way things are going to go in the future. The oecd in particular and the United States pushing them is pissed off with people running around the world and not paying any tax. Shopping for low tax jurisdictions is one thing but they are going to soon insist that in order to leave you're going to have to go to a country that has a tax treaty with the country you're leaving. So when you look at these zero tax countries especially the British overseas territories for example, they are going to annihilate you for taxes. But also at the same time Canada still has a tax treaty with Barbados, enabling Canadians to set up corporations in Barbados and even repatriate the income back to Canada. The only thing you have to establish is the control effective control in that country. But I think going forward you're going to see much more things happening and I think if you look at the number of these tax strategies that may work today you may want to consider them to be temporary because governments need money, and poverty rates are exploding everywhere, and governments are losing their tax base so they're going to do everything they can to try to expand their tax base and or hold on to their taxe base as much as they can. As far as the camel's nose being out of the tent, I have seen one or two camels in this country have a theme park in the South near elat, but aside from that, that is the extent of that camels that I have seen here.
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I think you're going to see a lot of countries adopt this form of taxation. It's not enough to leave the country, you need to establish ties in another country generally that the country you're leaving from has a tax treaty with. So if you're going to go to Dubai or Panama Costa Rica and other territorial tax regimes that don't have tax treaties with many of the first world countries that have high taxes, unless you totally sever all your ties, I mean really literally everything, you're going to have a problem. I recall speaking to one guy who left Canada as I did and moved to a country that does not have a treaty with Canada. He told all his Banks all over the world that his tax residence was Canada. Just so happened that he was approached by one of his Banks and they asked him, why did you tell your bank you were a tax resident of Canada? He said because I moved to a third world country, and I'm a high net worth individual, and if I told my bank where I was living, they would likely share that information with my current tax residence, in which case my life would be in danger. Can you imagine a clerk and a third world country finding out that the poor unsuspecting guy living in their country has 50 million dollars in the bank. What do you think she's going to do? She's going to tell all her friends, because she had nothing else to talk about. I can just see it this gringo has 50 million. Eventually, this will end up getting to her boyfriend and who knows who else. He is now the right pickings for extortion. And in the third world countries, if you don't pay the bribe, they'll find drugs in your apartment, and off to jail. Now it's your word against the cops. Now you've done a deeper hole for yourself which is going to be harder to get out of. More people to pay off. That's why the first thing that I do when I consider where to go is I look at the corruption perception index. There's 180 some countries on there, anything that's more than 60, is concerning. When you're getting up to 80, even bigger problem. So on the top of the list it's probably Finland and Denmark the least corrupt. And on the bottom you might have Sudan, North Korea, and Nigeria. You can no longer live on an airplane or a boat
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I agree with you that Switzerland scores very high on all of the charts. Quality of life, healthcare, and general overall living. But there's a few drawbacks that I see. I'm not too concerned about the language, because I speak French having grown up in Quebec, and I also speak Yiddish, so I understand most of the German. The Swiss German accent might be a bit challenging, but I would probably be able to understand some eventually. The problem I have with Switzerland is the taxes. All of the cantons have wealth tax which can be extremely high especially if you are a uhnw individual. You can also pay a flat tax forfait, but I think the minimum is around $150,000 Swiss francs. When you factor in the cost of living, it's easily going to cost you $300,000 Swiss francs a year to live, not to mention that you have to buy private insurance to add to the cost. I have the option to go there because I have a Schengen passport, but I really don't see the value. The other thing that concerned me was that the people are very cold. Also, growing up in Canada but I hated most was the cold weather. Switzerland is not exactly tropical! Am I missing something? Please let me know. I put everything on the spreadsheet and it doesn't look enticing! I know our good friend Andrew Henderson tells us that there's 31 good countries to go to. I have looked at every country in the world. I started off with the global corruption index and I wanted to at least be in one of the countries in the top 25%. South America is way down the list. So if you're okay with going to a country like Mexico where everywhere you go you have to bribe a police officer or they'll find cocaine in your car, does not seem like you would live a peaceful life. There's a big difference between being a regular Joe, and being a well-known person. If you're just an average Joe and you have a pension of two $3,000 a month or whatever and you go to South America, I agree no one's going to bother you very much. They don't want to bother you because they don't want the press. They want others to come. So they'll pretty much leave you alone. I agree with that. There are isolated cases where people have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they're not the norm, and it can happen anywhere. But these corrupt officials are always on the take. So if they see someone coming in, especially if the person has done something which could be characterized as Gray, you're putty in their hands! Now this is never going to happen in Switzerland I agree with that, nor will it happen in any of the Scandinavian countries or in Germany. But there's a correlation between all of these different aspects. Now Andrew talks about American cities, and many of them are downright dangerous. You're talking about places like Buffalo New York, Chicago, etc. Yeah, you need security to walk around in these places and you got to be sheltered especially if you look like you have more than two nickels to rub together. I don't think the government is corrupt though, and they're not going to go after you even if you're a billionaire, as long as you follow the rules. Of course the more money you have, the more they'll put you under a microscope to see what they can get. But you don't hear about Warren Buffett or Bill Gates being prosecuted or sued? Finally, you want to go to a place where you're going to feel comfortable and have reasonable social circles. It's not easy to find the right country despite the fact that we are invited to choose from the buffet!
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I just went to a lengthy seminar with major accounting firm on investing in China. It was probably a little more succinct however that they did talk a lot about headwinds. The Chinese communist government or should I say investing in the Chinese economy it's not quite the same thing as investing in Canada. This is a dictatorship, and a brutal one at that. So while things are going hunky-dory, and it's in their best interest to keep you going, they'll probably leave you alone. But you can't step on anyone's toes, I'm not referring to breaking the law, but rather do anything that is counterproductive to the Communist Chinese parties ideals. The courts are completely corrupt such as patent law, and it's just a matter of time until governments around the world are going to take a very dim view of what's going on. They have been running with their belt and road initiative and encumbering third world into all kinds of debt for infrastructure projects, and this will not last. At some point in time, the masses will rebel. The only reason why that this hasn't happened, is because everything is controlled like the media, the internet etc. So people really don't have the ability to congregate and assemble.
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You know I think you're missing the point. I get your points. You're a seven or eight figure entrepreneur, you have an online business where you're doing investments, or have other businesses that are online or you're receiving funds online or you have an international business. Absolutely you don't want to be an American and pay American tax. I get that! But when I look at your if viewers on your site, and you look at the percentage of people that have these portable occupations, they are very minut percentage of the population. So the video about why you should move to the US. It's really a home run for someone coming from an emerging market because they could get a job and make substantially more than they could ever make in their home country. Moreover, if they're entrepreneurial, they can go into business and probably double the income that they could have made. They could become a trans person for example, a truck driver, and a multitude of other vocations and start to make a six-figure income in a small business. They would also pay a lot less tax. I'm not an American, but I know statistically that there are many places in America that are not safe, to say the least. That's especially true in blue States, not that I'm trying to make any political points. But that is the main reason why people move to these countries, to get a better job. Most people work at a job. Those of us that have been in business realize the word job is an acronym for just over broke. And that is probably true if you have a basic job and try to make ends meet in Canada the United States probably Australia New Zealand and the UK. But I wonder for how long this theory of living in third world countries and working in these portable occupations are going to last. You may remember historically that taxation was supposed to be a temporary thing. Governments can no longer run without getting tax money. We all know about what happened with the minimum tax which only affects large corporations. But that's the way these things start, they often don't end like that. They will continue to bring down the threshold including more and more people. There's many people in the US they don't pay any tax at all by simply taking assets like real estate and reinvesting the money from income into more real estate, and taking debt. Your good friend who you did a podcast with, whose wife said that he could pass his Japanese! That's what he tells people all the time I don't pay any tax I use debt. That works well in a market that's going up. Look what happened to the Donald. He got wiped out a few times when the prices crashed and the he was sitting with lots of liabilities. All these things are a two-way street. Anyway nice video, a pleasure to watch as always.
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@aipacsucks well I won't argue with that one, I don't know if it's dementia a coma but he certainly in decline. How he got elected, God only knows. But I know it was the ballot harvesting, and getting lots of votes from many people that may not have been vetted or there signature is not verified. It doesn't even make sense! This guy never even did any campaigning, I never took questions from the media and yet he's the most popular person in America! It's completely illogical. Only one problem, nobody's been able to prove it, and in a court you need proof. Conjecture and the balance of probability is not enough to overturn an election. But I'm sure everybody's in a good mood because they're printing money like there's no tomorrow, and the GDP keeps going up because the border is open and illegals are flooding through which is bolstering the economy. What are you going to do with all these people when they start getting sick, old, bringing drugs through the border, and all of the other untoward activities that come with open borders or he is not a good situation
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First of all, I enjoyed the video very much. It was not only entertaining but as a fluent Yiddish speaker, I want to thank you for your attempts to revive the language. You know I have been grappling with his very idea for the last couple of years. You make a lot of very valid points, but at the same time oh, there are many omissions. On a positive note, the idea appeals to me as well. I don't know if I would want as many as you have, but I was thinking of three maybe. In hot countries I am told that you have to leave the A/C on all the time. What if it breaks? There are many power failures in emerging markets! I guess you would need a property manager in each place not only checking on the property bi weekly, but have access to trades people whom you can trust X2 (the property manager & the person he hires) not only to do a good job, but to charge you fairly and not do work that is unnecessary. Next, what do you do about insurance / break ins? The word gets around that you are a westerner and the property is largely uninhabited. Have you ever had break ins? I spoke with my insurance company here in Israel and they told me that when you leave the property, the water & power must be switched off. Even going away for a few months, I came back to find a sticky coating on all of the plastic parts on electronics etc. So I guess you need to put everything away in sealed bags! I was looking at Panama for example (not anymore) but just as an example. The realtor told me that if the property is not "lived in", it will be trashed from the humid environment. So you would need to hire a live in person to maintain it. Its not that expensive, but might still cost you $800,.00 a month perhaps. There was a story I read in the Cyprus mail where a property manager rented out people vacation homes to refugees that trashed the place. Sure the guy went to jail, but I don't know if that is an insurable risk? I suspect not. Thanks again for the video. I'm going to do some extensive research on the topic. I'll read the rest of your comments and may comment further if I have the "koiah" to do so!
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Unfortunately, this is not a USA problem but a world problem. When you look at the entire world every country is competing for people and capital. If you want to immigrate to a country they ask you a lot of questions. But what is the underlying denominator of all of these questions? What can you bring to our country? Are you bringing in money, capital, expertise? We have enough people to wash dishes already! So if you have a university education, you have an existing business, you want to buy a Golden passport golden Visa, these are all things that create benefit to a country. Even freelancers. What do they do they come to the country and they bring in for an income. The first country to do this I think was if I'm not mistaken Costa Rica or Panama or maybe both. And they called it the pensioner's Visa. These people just came in with pensions or money or income or dividends whatever, didn't work, and spent money in the local economy. What a benefit. So when you go full circle and you ask yourself well what if all of the intelligent people wealthy people left and all the s*** remained? But that's exactly what's happening. That's why third world countries are losing their best and brightest to first world countries that are offering people a better quality of life. But many of those first world countries as the speaker has alluded to are becoming complacent, and invoking confiscatory taxes, rules, and other impediments to a person's enjoyment of life. So what do they do, they leave! And I think that's what he was talking about.
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I must admit I was someone confused by this video. Although you didn't name names of banks in particular countries, that's very understandable. But the whole concept from the beginning didn't make a lot of sense. So let me just elaborate. Your theme is talking about six and seven figure entrepreneurs, that is your target market you say. Some of the comments that you make just don't make sense. Let's say for example you talk about opening up an account in Tbilisi Georgia. Well if you opened up an account there, and you had other accounts in Switzerland or other places, and they found out about it, they would immediately freeze all your accounts. Sure it's easy to open up an account there, I couldn't agree with you more. But what are you going to do with the money that's in the account? Where can you send it? Who would take it? I suspect nobody. Because the whole world has become more and more difficult to bank. And then you talk about countries like Ecuador. Ecuador is a serial defaulter on their international bonds. They are currently still in default in their 2030 Bond. Sure you can open up an account there, but how you going to get the money out? Then you go out and talk about Swiss banks. And you mentioned opening up an accounts with small balances. Typically Swiss banks are looking for balances of over 5 million USD. They're not going to open up a bank account for you for $100, that's for sure. And the onboarding process is quite extensive. And then you talk about Canadian Banks. I am a Canadian non-resident, and I can tell you that all of the Canadian Banks closed all the accounts of non-residents several years ago, particularly the trading accounts. They sent a very clear letter saying you have 30 days to move your money. You will not be able to do any more transactions after 30 days other than sell securities and or transfer money to other Banks. Banks are very independent these days. Because of the US compliance rules, many banks have been stung with huge fines. I'm sure you recall it all started with UBS, and then it went all over the world. And the US has that power to find Banks and tell them exactly what to do. When the United States says jump, they ask how high! And if you want to talk about getting merchant accounts for Visa Mastercard, there not only difficult but almost impossible to get especially if the product or service is something that is not local. And they also have very strict rules on cash on cash in other words using a Visa card to fund the bank account, that's cash on cash. Plus, if the business has any baggage to it, let me say that in a nice way, they probably wouldn't touch you with a 10 ft pole. I agree with you if you go out to a country and get a residence permit or have citizenship in the country, and particularly by a property and want to use an account to fund the expenses, that's usually not too much of a problem. And of course people use prepaid debit cards like wise and revolute for low-cost forex conversion, as well as facilitating payments. But trying to receive money from third parties unless you open up a business account with them which is very scrutinized, they will immediately close your account. And there are hundreds of posts that I've seen about people that have had their accounts Frozen for one reason or another and literally weeks or months have gone by and they can't unfreeze it. Of course there's two sides to every story, and you only hear the posters side, I don't think that these companies arbitrarily close people's accounts or freeze them if there isn't some bona fide reason. But in short, it's getting more and more difficult to open up accounts where you do not have a Nexus with the country.
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He did. Serbia, Columbia, Mexico Kuala Lumpur etc. Those are the places he thinks are good value, especially where you can get a hamburger, no no I mean a cheeseburger at 2:00 in the morning. Well, last year 14,000 people, high net worth move to Australia. 10,000 move to America, and 4,000 move to Canada. They must have been conned by the fake media! I guess it's a matter of perception and what you're used to. But he did make a very very good point, and that's this. There's a big difference if you're 40 years old as opposed to being 60 70 or 80 years old. I think that's when it comes to healthcare. I know I made some inquiries about Cyprus and I spoke to some private insurance providers and they told me that if you get really sick, they may not have the facility to treat you in Cyprus in which case they'll send you to either tel Aviv or Germany for treatment. And yet when you look at the lists, the Cyprus appears to have excellent healthcare. And when you look at the top 100 hospital lists, I think the Mayo clinic is number one and many of the first few places are in the US come within the next thing in Toronto Canada. That's true hospitals aren't good in Canada, providing you willing to wait your turn which may be 6 months unless it's life threatening, then you'll get it immediately and it will be free. But I think a lot of these things have to do with where you are in life. And I think Andrew nailed it right on the head. If you're earning a salary, especially a nominal one, and you need the social programs that the state is providing in case you need a half a million dollar operation, the 10 or $20,000 that you pay in tax pals in comparison to what it would cost you to get the same operation done in the United States for example. But if you're well insured, and you have access to good hospitals all over the world, then why pay all that tax? It's not really a good deal. Even safety can be bought. How many people live in gated communities.
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There is no doubt that many cities in America are very dangerous, especially blue States. Poverty is the number one driver of crime. There's no denying that! So generally speaking the poorer a person is, of the greater propensity they might have to commit a crime. It may only be petty theft and or non-violent crime, but it's still a crime nonetheless. Mexico is a very unique economy where you do have a lot of people in the country that are extremely wealthy, and you have vast hordes of people that are very poor. The majority of people living in the small villages and so on, are probably harmless and honest. But when you look at the major cities such as Mexico City, the crime is extensive and rampant. And it's not only crime, but it's also corruption. I've never been stopped by a police officer in North America and asked for a bribe. When I was in Mexico and I took a small taxi we were only allowed to have three people in the taxi cuz that's all the room there was in it. And there was four of us. So the driver said look, I'll take you all, but if we can stopped by the cops, you'll have to pay a 100 peso bribe. They didn't use the word bribe, they called it a bite. I said okay fair enough I agree. So sure enough we're driving along and we get stopped by the cops. So I reached into my wallet and gave the driver a hundred pesos to give to the police officer as the agreed bribe for that type of offense. Then he comes back 5 minutes later it says look, the policeman wants a tip on the bribe! So I give him another 20 pesos as a tip. I wasn't too bothered by this event, but if I was living in a country like that I'd be very concerned. What's the stop the police or other corrupt government officials from shaking you down. The vast majority of people that go to Mexico probably have very few problems unless they go out and look for adventure. You'll have to use your own imagination on that word! But statistics in Mexico are very misleading, because the vast majority of crime is not reported, and even worse, many of the criminal offenses especially Hit and run are not solved or even investigated for that matter.
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