People ask me all the time about moving money from one country to another and when I use the term “offshore banking” they often have a quizzical look on their faces and ask me: “is it legal to have an offshore bank account?” That about sums-up the way most people think about banking offshore, especially because of the way mainstream media has portrayed the topic but also movies often depict the lawyer with the brief case, on a tropical island, meeting-up with the beautiful co-conspirator, after having pulled of some big rip-off back in the states. So it probably surprises my friends in Brazil and Canada even more when I suggest that United States offers some of the best offshore banking services that they’ll be able to find anywhere – now they’re really confused….
Offshore relates to banking in any country outside of where you are domiciled (definition of domicile: a person’s fixed, permanent, and principal home for legal purposes). Therefore, your bank account doesn’t need to be in Cayman or Switzerland to be offshore and in many cases you can get excellent bank services from almost any country in the world. I recommend U.S. banking for anyone not permanently living there because the rates are relatively low but more importantly it’s really easy to get a Paypal account with a U.S. bank account. However, in today’s world privacy and asset protection play a more important part of an overall banking strategy and let’s face it, the U.S. is just not big on privacy, as a matter of fact, when you open a new business account in America you’ll soon-after be barraged with solicitations from local businesses and services, which means that the bank sold your information before the ink was even dry. Now that’s not as much of a problem, more of an annoyance but the fact is that most people just don’t want anyone, including a snooping government, to know how much money they have in the bank – that’s where I come in and the reason people ask me about banking, as I’ve been setting-up offshore accounts since 1994.
My first education into offshore banking was way back in 1984 in Australia, where I learned by necessity how to open accounts and transfer money in foreign countries, to access while traveling in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong, back then there wasn’t an ATM machine on every corner either, so it took some strategy. Now let’s fast-forward, I can set people up with what we refer to as; cloud banking – aptly named because your money doesn’t reside in just one bank and your private information (notarized Passport color copy, bank reference letter, and copy of a utility bill) are kept with a trust company from New Zealand, housed in a storage facility in a third country, and once you’re a depositing customer you can log-in to access your account from any Internet computer and granted the ability to order MasterCard branded, or Visa branded credit and/or debit cards, open new foreign bank accounts and easily move money between your master-account and any of your sub-accounts, or fund debit cards, pay for credit cards, make wire-transfers online and even choose to issue yourself anonymous bank cards that work with a PIN at any Cirrus Maestro ATM machine or anywhere MasterCard is accepted – all this with 100% confidentiality and completely legal by the laws of any country on earth.
The other service that we can now provide introductions to is offshore investing, in global financial markets of Forex, stocks, bonds, etf’s or precious metals from the control of an International Business Company (IBC), this is often referred to as Trustee Trading, since the account management is done via an offshore trust – it’s much easier than it sounds, but the bottom line is that this online investing service enables a person, or company, to invest offshore with complete privacy and security, in any major market of the world, just like using eTrade or any other online trading site, all you need is a user ID and password.
There are 4 types of people who seek the offshore services we offer:
- Independently wealthy individuals
- Expats earning money outside of their home country
- Active Investors who prefer trading from an International Business Company
- Corporate Structures that work in the International marketplace
If you are one of the above types of people and seek private, secure banking and investing, then contact me.
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