They wave me on with a smile and a slight warning.

Why? Because they’re nice? No. Even though they may be….they don’t have jurisdiction !!

Let’s get serious now. I left my old country of domicile (It felt like a prison escape!) seeking business and ways to support myself along the way as I was not wealthy nor even close to retirement and had no certain income.   I knew a business structure was important and so was properly structuring the banking.

Now was my chance to implement the ‘5 flag philosophy’ I learned from W.G. Hill. The 5 Flag Philosophy works like this to be completely effective in the ‘PT’ world.

Flag #1: You carry a passport from your native land. This is your citizenship and where you are typically taxed.
Flag #2: Your domicile is your residence, where you ‘officially live’ most of the time which is in country #2
Flag #3: You establish a business in country #3. Mine was ‘cyberspace’ with legal resident agent in another Latin country. This is your business base.
Flag #4: Your banking and asset management is located in country #4. This is where your assets are held and managed by proxy.
Flag #5: Is your playground where you like to spend a lot of, or at least ‘some’ your time to really get the most out of life.

Why go to this trouble? Well, you are reading ‘Escape from America’ so I’ll presume you are well versed on the ‘why’ already. Let’s just run through a quick example.

I’ve already shown you how to have some fun with the ‘municipality revenue enhancement specialists’ called ‘traffic cops’.

Now let’s take it to the next level. Maybe your neighbor is jealous of your new lifestyle and he makes some outlandish and unfounded allegations to the local tax collectors seeking to collect the reward that they offer to snitches.

They start looking at you. Here’s the scenario. They find out you have committed the crime of deciding to live in a tropical paradise where they can’t keep you under their thumb so easily and now they are attack hounds sniffing for evidence.

They encounter problem #1. In the place of your residence, you have no business activity. Nothing to track there.

If they do link you to a business of some sort, first of all, if it’s structured properly you can invite them to coffee and lay it all out, shrug your shoulders and say: “So what?” Problem #2: Now they have to locate banking records which requires a court order in a foreign land.

They would have to a) discover and b) get a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction in Flag country #2. Problem is, you are not a stockholder of that company and the court will not look kindly on violating privacy issues to the detriment of ‘it’s citizens to a foreign government whose ‘subject citizen’ is not even a sole signatory or major player in the company. The trail probably reaches a dead end there if by some miracle it had gotten that far.

If they were to find a miracle to get the order, the business which is domiciled in Flag country #2 has no banking in that country. The predators will have to find and secure another court order from Flag country #3. And if they get that far, they only find a pass through account with nothing in it. The pot of gold they are looking for is in Flag country #4!!

Now the question comes into play: “How bad do they really want you?” All this from a tip from a jealous neighbor?

Highly doubtful. You see how the layering effect helps you protect yourself from predators of all kinds. And it’s really quite simple. It’s not difficult at all once you have the concepts down. It can be implemented in no time by people of average means.

Being in business, I’ve made the mistake of getting involved with the wrong people on more than one occasion.   In the international circles you get a good dose of the ‘wanted’ and the ‘unwanted’ from wherever they came from.

My counterparts have attempted fraud, collusion, theft, embezzlement, you name it. My wife and I don’t put up with it. At one time we had more than 4 serious lawsuits/criminal charges all at once against various crooks for doing some serious ‘bad’ business trying to take advantage of us. We went after them and their crooked attorneys. By the time we are through we may have 3 attorneys in jail, 2 suspended from practicing law, and one more paying damages to the tune that he wished he’d never tried to screw us! And those are just the attorneys, not the clients they worked for! People have died for less.

As I write this right now, my wife has just chased down one culprit after a day long stake out using disguises and three different cars and has them in police custody right now. I’m dead serious. Some crooks don’t take favorably to honest hardworking people catching on and trying to mess up their plans. Being a ‘fraud buster’ can be potentially hazardous to your financial or physical health.

We have achieved a business profile in the community and as a result of some limited success we have had attempts at extortion on more than one occasion. We have to be very careful to protect ourselves from predators and detractors of all kinds. So do you!

The lesson here is simple, if you are out ‘living life’ no matter how ‘good’ and ‘honest’ you are, that doesn’t mean that all the people you run into will be, nor will they respect that. You can be a target. You need to be very careful, wise and prudent in how you structure your business and financial affairs. One of the books on my ‘wish list’ to write is a compilation of all the horror stories I have accumulated from well intentioned people who lost everything, or close to it, by just being naïve and good hearted with the wrong people.

I would love to go on, but this is an article not a book. My wife and I have created an educational membership organization to help people structure their business and finances and we occasionally do conferences on the subject whereby we spend about one third of the time on business and the other two thirds having fun in our beautiful new homeland of Costa Rica. After all, that’s what it’s all about….enjoying life!!

If you’d like to learn more, we’d love to hear from you! Look us up next time you are in the neighborhood!

Pura Vida!

The following are the previous articles that Rex wrote for the magazine:

• ‘No Fear’ Real Estate Investing - Real Estate In Costa Rica
• American Escapee Uses Computer To Make A Living In Paradise ~ Living In Costa Rica