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.