Vance | Everyone Needs a Plan B

Vance: But I’ve been using the pseudonym online for a couple years it definitely gets weird with the the online to offline thing. I haven’t quite figured out the best balance, but it would be weird to use my pseudonym in real life, I think. You know what I mean? So I don’t know. But do you want me to call you Vance? Yeah, please.

Timothy Allen: Okay. I haven’t gone full. It’s always weird. I find that whole thing about people changing their names. I had a girlfriend once. We can even talk about her. Okay, we can start with that. We’ve started now. No, I was going to say I had a girlfriend when I was younger. and I won’t say who she is because just in case she’s listening I doubt she is but and she completely changed her name and I found mid relationship no no no I we we broke up but she still stayed in contact with my mother we were a good couple and you know she knew my family really well and it was you know it was it was a shame we broke up in a way but we did because we just did it wasn’t it was kind of amicable but um when I saw her again a few years later she changed her name completely and I still find it weird. For many, many years I found it weird to look at someone and call them by a different name. You know, it just, I think that my brain works like that. So why have you got a pseudonym then? Because this was a, it was and is a side hustle,

Vance: My Latin Life and I had a regular full-time job as a software developer and, you know, working normal jobs and just didn’t want to have that conflict.

Timothy Allen: And on Twitter, lots of people have his pseudonym. Even there’s a guy who’s going to be presenting later today. Cremieux is like his Twitter name. He isn’t, I don’t know, if you meet him in real life, is he going to be like, hey, I’m Paul or something? Or is he going to say, hey, I’m Cremieux? I don’t know. We’ve got to make a cool black coffee online and everyone does call him coffee. But I do find things like that a bit weird. You have to get, especially in our world, Well, in the Bitcoin world, there’s so many pseudonyms. By the way, be careful you don’t tap this table. It’s hollow. It’s annoying. Leads to some echoey. Oh, you can hear it massively. Okay, hands under the table. Well, no, you express yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I keep having to tell everyone it’s annoying. You know, the worst kind of table. I should have brought, obviously, mics on stalks. But once again, can’t fit that in the luggage. So what? You rebranded yourself. Why don’t you give us, actually, give us a bit of a life history, a real quick one.

Vance: Oh, man. So we’re recording now. Yes, we’re recording now. Okay, where to start?

Timothy Allen: Well, I grew up in Canada, in Toronto.

Vance: My mom’s American as well, so I’m Canadian-American. And I already experienced a little bit of that geo-arbitrage going from Canada to the U.S. visiting family. And, you know, you kind of notice things, right? You’re like, oh, alcohol is half the price in the U.S. What if I buy it in the U.S. and bring it back to Canada? So I already kind of got a little bit of that geo-arbitrage, which you probably see a lot of in Europe and is no big thing. But, you know, in North America, there’s not as much. But anyway, so I was always interested in business, technology, startups, that kind of thing. Studied business in school. Taught myself how to code. Did a code boot camp. started working as a software developer um read the book uh the four-hour work week and um you know some other books that had a big impact on me and always knew I kind of wanted to do the digital nomad thing and work and travel at the same time and you know travel while still being able to make money and uh yeah basically became a digital nomad in 2018 and uh been been uh pretty nomadic since

Timothy Allen: By the way, booze cruises or booze runs, as we used to call them in the UK, were massive because we could go over to France. It’s like a one and a half hour ferry ride. So when I was a kid, like if you wanted to have a party, for example, you would drive a truck over to France and you would fill it up with alcohol and then you would drive it back. and you saved money on the fact even that you were driving a bloody van and the petrol and the cost of the ticket and stuff. So, no, no, I fully understand that kind of stuff. The other thing, oh, yeah, 4-Hour Workweek. It’s funny. It’s influenced a lot of people, 4-Hour Workweek. I know a number of people. I missed it. I never read it. No, no, I didn’t. I never saw that. There’s been books because, you know, I don’t know, I’m probably quite a bit older than you, how old are you um or roughly I’m in my early 30s okay right I’m in my early 50s so 20 years is a long time when you think about it to be you know so 20 years before you were sort of discovering that I was discovering something completely different but it was purely analog the idea of a four-hour work week didn’t exist you could basically I went traveling and I did I traveled all around the world especially southeast asia but we didn’t really have any concept of being able to make a living while you’re out there unless you taught english that was the main thing worked in a bar or something well yeah but not even that I mean the there was the tourist infrastructure didn’t really exist if you see what I mean you might you used to bump into people every now and then who basically were working at a hostel and making less than minimum wage for the privilege of just hanging out at the hostel but I did something called a tefl course which is teaching english as a foreign language yeah yeah that was the go-to for everyone totally And I did do it. I did it in Indonesia and made quite good money. I think I can still remember it was like 10,000 rupee an hour. Back then, this is in the 90s, like, was amazing. But it wasn’t a big part of what we were thinking about. people went traveling and you kind of tried to last as long as you could with the money you had my original trip by the way I went around southeast asia for a year and three quarters and I took 900 pounds with me that’s what I left the uk with 900 quid back in the day when a street food was like 10 10 cents or something it’s funny how everything’s evened up now there’s no such

Vance: Thing as that anymore really is there well I mean I guess it’s still a rite of passage right take a few thousand bucks and go backpack for six months kind of thing. But I had read the The 4-Hour Workweek and I was like, okay, there’s actually this new emerging way of doing it enabled by technology where instead of just, you know, blowing a bunch of money and coming back with a hangover and, you know, being broke, you could just learn a little bit of skills first, learn some web design, whatever. And then you can make money while you’re, while you travel. So that you don’t have to, So you kind of come home in a better position or at least a less, you know, you don’t come home with zero type of thing.

Timothy Allen: But was the plan to come home with a four-hour work week?

Vance: Ooh, that’s a deep question. That is a deep question. Well, I kind of knew it was going to be a multi-year thing when I set off because I did things kind of like the, you know, I had to check all the boxes, graduate from university and, you know, kind of make the family happy, I guess. And so, yeah, I knew when I got my software development skills and I was like, okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to work online. So this was back in like 2017, 2018, when Skype like still wasn’t that good. Like, you know, like doing video calls still wasn’t that good. Now these days in 2025 2026 like you can do online sales jobs You don’t even have to have technical skills but kind of 10 years ago at least the way I was looking at the cards on the table I figured I need to have technical skills I need to be able to code or edit videos or do something technical because you couldn’t really just be a sales guy back then. So that’s what I did and put in the time, did a code boot camp and so forth. And yeah, I guess when I set off, I kind of knew it was going to be for a while. But I always pop in. Like, you know, I pop in back home and, you know, go home for Christmas and that kind of thing all the time.

Timothy Allen: What part of the world were you heading to? All Latin America and Europe. I’ve still never been to Asia. Really? Yeah. It’s funny, isn’t it? People, I know people whose favorite places are very different to mine. Africa, a lot of people love Africa. I love Southeast Asia. You know, a lot of people love LatAm. And when you look at it, it’s often the first place they go to in a big way. You know what I mean? It’s the one you fall in love with, the one you have all your seminal experiences in before you get a little bit jaded, I suppose. But mine was Southeast Asia and I did, gosh, how many years out there? A lot in the end, three to four, you know, years solid. Back in the day when there was no contact with home, apart from letters, post-restaurant, we used to send actual letters, you know. It seems crazy these days. No email at that particular moment, really. Email was just starting and people weren’t really using it in that sense. You know, it’s a funny old way that people travel now. I find it a bit too easy booking things in advance, having things ready for you when you arrive. It’s great when you’re old like me, but when you’re young, I thought half the fun was just turning up and not knowing what you were going to do. Totally. If you’re a The 4-Hour Workweek guy, you probably need a bit of structure, don’t you?

Vance: Yeah, you know, the The 4-Hour Workweek, part of it too, was he was big on language learning. So the author, Tim Ferriss, he’s a American guy. And for us, languages are like this thing for Europeans and those different. But for us, you know, he talks about in the book, how he went down to Argentina, he learned tango, he learned Spanish, he went to Japan, he learned Japanese. And so I knew like part of it, I’ve just always been interested in self-improvement in general, in all aspects, kind of like all the pillars of self-improvement, you know, financial independence, learning languages, you know, physical conditioning and so forth and so on. And so I knew I wanted to learn languages. So I was kind of picking my destination strategically to work on a language. And I, you know, you look at Asia and it’s really like Chinese and then all the other ones are kind of irrelevant. I thought I was going to eventually double down on Chinese and learn that, but I haven’t got there yet. But I’ve learned French and Spanish and Portuguese to a pretty decent level. And that’s kind of how I focus my travels is I’m not in Czech Republic or whatever because I’m not interested in the language. Maybe if in Prague they spoke Spanish or whatever, I’d be spending more time there. So part of it actually is I’m choosing my destinations based on, you know, the languages that they speak in these places.

Timothy Allen: So what’s the story after The 4-Hour Workweek then? You know, I take it you got out of coding early. I mean, it’d be a bad time to be in coding as a DigiNomad now, right?

Vance: Yes and no. I mean, it’s actually pretty exciting with the cloud code and AI and all that stuff. So I have been coding most of the way along here. Like I’ll still pick up a contract if, you know, the, if it’s a juicy enough price, but yeah, you know, I had a lot of influences early on. Like I was interested, basically like the decision tree was you go into finance or are you going to tech, right? That was kind of, at least in the big cities, like in Toronto, Boston, London, that kind of thing. That’s kind of the, the general idea. It’s like, are you going to do the finance track or the tech track, or I guess maybe like the law track. But law seemed like a lot of studying. And so it was kind of finance or tech. And, you know, I was exploring both of these. And, you know, there is a way to cut it down the middle with like fintech and venture capital and, you know, tech banking and this kind of thing, which I did a bit of. But you look at the tech and, you know, they would have this is like when WeWork came out. and they would have a keg at the WeWork office and like at 5 p.m. they would open the keg and it’d be good times. And you didn’t have to wear a suit and you could basically wear whatever you wanted and everything was more chill. And so you look at tech, you’re like, okay, we got kegs and you don’t have to wear a suit. And you actually have more asymmetric upside because if you can get equity in a startup, you can potentially make millions and millions of dollars where if you look at finance, You know, it’s obviously much more stodgy and old school and longer hours. You have to work like 100 hours a week and you actually get no equity and there’s not much upside. But you can get to a high, you know, million dollar salary if you get to managing director or VP like 10 years down the line. So those were kind of like it was like that was kind of my range of options, I felt. And I guess I picked more of the tech side because I also knew that would allow me to have that location freedom as well.

Timothy Allen: So when did you so yeah carry on with the with the timeline I’m always interested because my timeline was pretty I don’t know I’m always like thinking like I’ve got kids now and in the current world we live in there so that my oldest is like 13 so in in about five or six years they’re going to be emerging into this world and there’s no way I’m going to advise them to do further education not even when we used to say yeah if you want to be a doctor if you want to be a what it may be but even that now I’m starting to think nah get out there and and be an entrepreneur in some shape or form you know and so I’m always interested in the sort of entrepreneur story because that didn’t really exist for me it existed in the sense that you could be an entrepreneur but not in the way that you could marry it up with world travel now if you were an entrepreneur and a traveler you were obviously doing something pretty crazy you were probably starting you know there was no option to there were no sort of like nomad specific jobs like coding like whatever really and entrepreneurial ideas abroad I can’t really think you would have to start a company in that country where you were really back in the analog days so I’m always interested in how I can advise my my my kids and trying to get a sense of where I would help them to to focus their their attention when it comes to that point where they basically need to start becoming independent from us you know so I’m always interested in the origin story of people that end up living interesting

Vance: Lives now you know so so carry on please yeah um I don’t know if this is sequential but you know I was always interested in biography and reading people’s life stories. I used to just crush Wikipedia and just read hours a day of Wikipedia reading about, you know, the richest, like I would look up who are the hundred richest people in the world, and then I would read all of their biographies and just see like what they did to get there, that kind of thing. I would read about kings, how they become the king, all this type of stuff. And, you know, I always just found myself attracted more to people who had a more interesting story. If you look at the list of like maybe the 100 richest people, some of them had very boring lives and then some of them had interesting lives like a Richard Branson type, right? And so it’s like, do you want to be a Richard Branson type to get there? Or do you want to be the banker that’s like, I’m from New York, I went to New York University and then New York Law School and then I worked for the Bank of New York Mellon. It’s kind of boring, right? So I kind of was attracted to more of the Richard Branson types the people that were like a little bit eclectic, but they had a good balance where they were still, you know, disciplined, but having fun with it too.

Timothy Allen: Go on. I’m still interested. Let’s hear it. I want to hear your, I want to hear the timeline. You know, how do you, because you obviously don’t just code now.

Vance: Yeah. Well, I think now is like a really interesting time to code because, you know you can basically build whatever you want Like even a couple of years ago So you needed to hire a dev team in the Ukraine for 25k at bare minimum to like get something off the ground But now you can basically do it all yourself. So as long as you have an idea, you can kind of do you can kind of code it all. And it’s still good to have technical skills, like you still need to have a little bit of an understanding of technology of the coding languages, how to use a code editor like VS Code or something, how to deploy something to the cloud, deploy it to the internet. So, you know, you can’t be 100% non-technical, but all these things can be learned and whatever you don’t know, then you just ask the AI kind of how to do it. So I think having technical skills still is very important. I think as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to do a little bit of every aspect of the company. There was this guy, Robert Herjavec on the Shark Tank, he was on the Canadian version of Shark Tank. I know they have a Dragon’s Den in the UK. I really, I always used to love that show, Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank. And part of the idea is you want to be able to do like every role in the company so that nobody can get too much leverage over you. And so that you kind of know what questions to ask. So it’s like, you should be able to know a little bit of accounting. You should know a little bit of sales. You should know a little bit of the technical behind the scenes of the product that you’re, that you’re doing. So you should be able to, you know, kind of jump in everywhere, you know, be a little bit of a micromanager. So I don’t know, I always, I always studied, you know, interesting entrepreneurs and people, maybe you’ve heard of Jim Rogers, who is a really interesting guy, this banker that quit his job in his 30s and got a couple world records for driving around the world first on a car and then on a motorcycle, or maybe it’s vice versa. I always thought that was an interesting guy and And things like that. Like I’ve always just enjoyed biographies, reading about what other people have done.

Timothy Allen: What’s, so what, but you stayed around LatAm, Latin America. Is that the focus? How long you been there in total then?

Vance: I guess it kind of set off in 2018. The first place I went, I thought I was going to go to Miami. Me and a buddy were like, okay, let’s split Airbnb in Miami, 2018. south beach something like that you know and it was pretty expensive we were looking at it like oh it was kind of expensive and then uh my buddy was like have you heard of Playa del Carmen in mexico and I was like okay yeah I have heard of this because there was um this old podcast you might have heard of called uh the tropical mba yeah you never heard of tropical mba oh man in the in the world of digital nomads this is like one of the early ones um there was uh there was Travel Like a Boss with Johnny FD, which I used to listen to a lot. There was this one, the Tropical MBA that I used to listen to. It was like these two American drop shipping guys. They were pretty influential back in the day. And one of the co-hosts of the podcast went to Playa del Carmen and talked about it. So it was already kind of in my mind. And, you know, we looked at the Airbnb and it was way cheaper than Miami. So we said, all right, let’s do it. We wound up in Playa del Carmen. You know, we show up first day to get the keys from the Airbnb host. And the guy’s like, oh, like you guys are like, you guys seem cool. Like I have a WhatsApp group with other, you know, cool international people, digital nomads. How about I add you to the group? And then so and then, you know, we get added to the group. This is the first hour on the ground. And then they go, hey, we’re meeting up at the bar tonight. And then, you know, we’d go shower and then we’d go to the bar and then we’d meet people from all over the world. It’s like, hey, I’m from the Netherlands. I’m from this and that. And we’re like, okay, we’re already in the game here back in 2018. And back like kind of pre-COVID, Playa del Carmen was a little bit different. There was kind of only one nomad crew. It got, it exploded post-pandemic when it was like the only country that was open. But back in 2018, it was like one crew and it felt like a college town kind of because there’s only like one or two main streets in the town and anyone who’s been to playa like has this experience like if you spend some time there that you just start seeing people you know after a while like if you leave your house in playa you just start going like hey what’s good man hey what do you have to do tonight and and it just kind of you know goes from there and you’re like oh this is amazing because when you come from you know a boring corporate environment in toronto boston london’t that kind of thing and you end up in this sort of college town type of tropical on the beach party every night you walk out of your house and there’s like other cool people you’re like okay like this is uh this is

Timothy Allen: Going well you know yeah I funnily enough during the pandemic I took my family out of the uk and we went to mexico because there were no restrictions there and the first place we went was Playa del Carmen that’s in that’s um what’s the big airport there um cancun cancun yeah we flew from we flew into cancun and I knew cancun I knew I’d heard a car plowder coming we knew we weren’t gonna stop there long we were looking for somewhere to settle down but I figured it would be a good first week and it was because I got an airbnb really easily and we spent the first week there but it’s pretty full-on there’s like I remember down that main drag there’s people kind of like with snakes and tigers and stuff in there you know it’s like it’s one of those kind of places not not not the kind of place where people go missing you know foreigners go missing quite a lot I would imagine for for various reasons overdosing or just getting shot by the local drug dealer and stuff um but um but yeah I I I know what you mean what about so what’s the um what what tell me about the risk of the sort of south the central american landscape that you’ve kind of like you’ve been hanging out with. I take it when you went to Playa del Carmen and you, you had, you were taking your business with you, your clients with you, or did, you know? Yeah, I was just coding back then.

Vance: So I was just coding. I hadn’t even started My Latin Life at this point. I really had no exposure to Latinos because in Canada, there really weren’t that many when I was growing up. So something kind of new to me and, you know, it’s like the, the vibrant, the colors, the reggaeton, the reggaeton music was all new to me. I’m like, this is crazy. You know, the way like a nightclub works in Latin America is very different than the way a nightclub works back home and like all these things. And so it was just like, you know, it’s just all these things that was just amazing. And you know, long story short, how it how it came to My Latin Life in the business is with My Latin Life didn’t even start till like early 2023. So it’s been about three years now. So even for the first, you know, four or five years that I was a digital nomad, I wasn’t, you know, immediately trying to turn it into a business or, or that kind of thing. I was just doing my thing as a software developer, making decent money and traveling around to, you know, places I thought would be cool to hang out for a month and so forth. And yeah, so it’s always kind of been a side hustle to even run this business. But it’s, it’s, it’s actually been a couple of years now that I probably should be going full time on it, because it’s been going well for basically since I started, it’s been going well. And so it’s kind of hard to leave the comfort zone of like, you know, your good salary, you’re making your, you know, 10k a month, whatever, and kind of jump into

Timothy Allen: Entrepreneurship but that’s that’s kind of where I’m at but I mean what what are the major like in income revenue streams then from My Latin Life like like what you know people how do people most people make money in those kind of situations you know yeah well most people I don’t know maybe

Vance: They sell ebooks and courses and things like that we haven’t done too much of that honestly what we’ve really become or when I say we it’s basically me is um is an immigration agency and so as far as I know, I’m the only immigration agency in the world that does every single country in Latin America. So we do Mexico, we do Panama, Argentina, Paraguay, every country in Latin America, we can get you the residency visa for that for that country. And there’s a lot of ancillary services that spring out of that, you know, offshore bank accounts, LLC formations, trusts and foundations and asset protection, business structuring, things like that. But I guess the core business really is the residency visas

Timothy Allen: When you asked me earlier whether I had a second passport and I said no you seemed absolutely disgusted with me Is that am I doing I doing the wrong thing when I told you the reason why disgusted no I we call this breaking your balls no I you know what I mean though I I gave you my reason the reason I haven’t got any second passports is because it would be multiply the part the cost by five and I as far as I know I don’t know a second passport that I can get for you know is it less than 100 grand or something like that maybe I don’t really know yeah so we do a lot of we talk about this stuff a lot um I have

Vance: I have three passports I have canada the u.s and italy I got italy by descent um I also help my parents get irish citizenship by descent so there’s kind of like five or six ways to to get a second passport it’s by descent or ancestry by marriage by investment by naturalization living somewhere. And I guess by merit or by exception, I think those are the five, maybe one escapes me. So what we typically tell people is like, it’s extremely important to have more than one passport. I’m pretty into this idea of sovereignty and, you know, not being dependent on any one jurisdiction. And so I think everyone really should make having multiple citizenships a priority in in the way that they sort of designed their life. And so you just kind of got to go down the list and think, okay, well, let’s see if we can do by descent. A lot of people in the UK can do Ireland or different countries by descent. So you look, okay, can we do by descent? Yes or no? Let’s start there. How far back can you go on descent then? Well, it really depends. With Ireland, it’s to grandparents, maybe great-great-grandparents in certain situations. Really? It’s sort of country-specific. Um, but basically just go down the list and say, okay, can I do descent? Uh, let’s, that’s usually the easiest, most cost-effective way. Can I do by marriage? Um, can we do by naturalization, by moving somewhere and living there for, you know, two to five years? Um, and it, you know, and if all those things fail, then you would do maybe citizenship by investment and pay on the low end. It could be a 95 K for São Tomé and Príncipe for the whole family. or you know mid mid-range would be like the Caribbean ones like St Kitts and Nevis is about 280-300k for a family of five and so you know Turkey would be like 400k so you know if you like once you hit a certain net worth level like you know which might be let’s just say 20-30 million dollars or something and it only represents a small percentage of your portfolio it kind of becomes a no-brainer I’m not quite at 20 to 30 million net worth yet I would

Timothy Allen: Have thought more the podcast is but I’m so why haven’t you got a central american passport then a latin american passport well I have a lot of residencies I have a lot of permanent residencies I have permanent residency in mexico in panama paraguay and a couple others um so I have the residencies and the ideas in time they would they would lead to citizenship oh I see so you’re you’re on the on the path to yeah talk talk to me about some residency programs then in in LatAm and I know I hear a lot about you know people think of it as the place at the moment it’s it’s emerging it’s got a great standard of living it’s got a lot of places on the back end of socialism coming into the free market and, you know, and often offering you actually pretty good terms for getting residency quite quickly. Is that right?

Vance: Yeah, residency in Latin America is extremely accessible. Honestly, like pretty much every country in Latin America is open to getting residency, open to migration. I would say the most popular ones we do at My Latin Life are Mexico and Paraguay. So those are definitely the most popular.

Timothy Allen: Why Paraguay? Mexico probably because it’s so accessible, right? And everyone knows it. And it’s not a scary endeavor. I think most people, when they think of Latin America, would probably start with Mexico because it’s the one everyone knows about. Wouldn’t they? If you’re a little bit tentative about moving. But Paraguay, I know a lot of people love the idea of, but I’ve never been there myself.

Vance: Yeah, I think it depends on your goals. A lot of people in the UK, in Europe, in Canada, Australia, they want to leave their high-tax system. They’re fed up with the UK. Maybe they’re making money online and it just doesn’t make sense if you can just physically move and go from paying 40%, 50% tax to paying zero. And so in that case, you’d probably want to get a residency that has a favorable tax system of which Paraguay has been popular for a couple of years for that reason. So typically we say for Europeans, the best first one is Paraguay. But for Americans, the best first one is Mexico. Because Americans have citizenship-based taxation, you probably know this. And so Paraguay doesn’t do too much for them. So we usually say do Mexico. But for the Europeans and Canadians and so forth, we usually say do a territorial tax country, do a country that doesn’t tax foreign income. Paraguay is kind of the easiest. but there’s actually a number of countries that could fit the bill for that. Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, where we are now, etc.

Timothy Allen: What about, so if you’re an American, I thought you just paid tax to the US government, whatever. Are you saying that some countries have a more favorable relationship with the US?

Vance: No, no, I’m saying, I’m saying the being an American is a very different situation than everybody else in terms of, you know, their situation because they can’t escape US taxes. But what happens with Americans that want to say retire in Italy, or they want to retire, like they Americans have this romantic idea of retiring in Europe, right, going to Italy, France, Spain, but it becomes absolute tax hell because you become a tax resident in Europe, and you got to pay those taxes, which are very high. And then you have to pay US taxes. And then you have to look at the tax treaties, and you get these foreign tax credits. And it’s just an absolute mess. Whereas if an American moved to, say, a territorial tax country or somewhere in Latin America that doesn’t tax them, they only have to worry about the U.S. And so it’s generally better for Americans to, if they want to leave the U.S., like Europe is, it’s painful. And you only, you pay federal tax and that’s it if you live in, say you move to Mexico, that’s all you’re paying, the federal tax rate. Technically, the state tax can follow you as well if you don’t do things right.

Timothy Allen: But if you’re not living in the state, or do you have to leave a previous address?

Vance: Well, you have to have an address, right? So you have your U.S. bank accounts, you have to have an address, right? So what we actually coach clients to do is something we call the Texas two-step, which is like, say your last state that you were living in was California or Massachusetts or like a high tax state in the US, we say before you leave the US, go switch your state to Texas or Florida or one of the zero tax states, go get a driver’s license down there so that California or the high tax state doesn’t come after you when you go abroad.

Timothy Allen: It’s crazy that you get taxed wherever you live in the world. Even on, what does it, how does it work? Not you, you’ve got an American passport. but you don’t have to how does that work if you’ve got a number of passports and one of them is American does that mean you have to whatever happens you have to pay your tax yeah I got a

Vance: File every year uh the U.S. is the only one chasing me like Canada I’m out of the system Italy I’ve never been in the system um so it’s really just the U.S. that I have to worry about and so you know the the idea of renunciation comes up quite frequently but I don’t know I’m

Timothy Allen: I like being an American. Yeah, no, I agree. I love America. But that is just an arcane thought. So if you are working in Mexico as an American and you’re earning, say you were running, something silly, like you were running a hairdresser’s in Mexico, cutting people’s hair and getting paid, would the U.S. government take a cut of that income? Or does it only account for income you would have earned in the U.S.?

Vance: No, it’s your worldwide income as a U.S. citizen.

Timothy Allen: It’s crazy. How did they get away with I mean, how does that even, how do you even justify that? Well, because they can enforce it.

Vance: Yeah, but I mean, morally, like, how does it, how, how does it justifiable that you can live in another country for many, many years and still be paying the man back home in some country you left years ago? Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a couple of people on the podcast that are kind of fighting against this or, you know, lobbying to change the rules. There’s a couple of organizations. There’s one called like Accidental Americans. there’s one you know they have different names it’s like americans abroad I forget the exact names they’re gonna kill me for not giving them a shout out but there are people trying to lobby to to change it I think Trump even promised he would change it but we haven’t seen too much movement on that um but yeah that’s it just is what it is yeah but that’s a tall order just

Timothy Allen: Having that or renouncing your citizenship you know it’s crazy I suppose the reason they get away with it it’s because they can because everyone wants to live in america everyone wants to be american well not everyone but a lot of people do see america as the sort of pinnacle of of places to live it’s ironic that you where do you live out of interest don’t dox yourself but but

Vance: I’m still pretty nomadic but mexico paraguay portugal um those are like the three three big

Timothy Allen: Ones what and why why those in particular um well my uh my significant other is mexican so

Vance: Spent a lot of time there and what about what about portugal and you know paraguay yeah well paraguay obviously a lot of business interests a lot of community um I was just there um and uh it’s a fun place to visit especially because there’s a huge community now of digital nomads and stuff there’s so there’s just people I can go you know go to dinner with get a steak and all

Timothy Allen: That like literally every night of the week where give it I’ve never been to paraguay give me give me the the landscape like capital city hot spots that kind of stuff you know um it’s pretty much

Vance: All concentrated in the capital and in Asunción um it’s a pretty big city it’s like four and a half million people something like that um really good bars good restaurants it’s it’s actually a fun

Timothy Allen: Place to spend time. And isn’t it true you can get residency in a couple of days to begin with? You can start the process. You just kind of turn up there and file for it. Yeah. To submit, we only

Vance: Need you on the ground for like two business days. And then it takes two to three months to get the approval. And for a family, how much would that cost? For a family of five? Is it roughly $2,000 a person. And what does it mean for you going forward once you’receive it? Say the, I don’t know, COVID 2.0 hits and you’re like, God, I don’t want to be in my country. Can you just go and spend as long as you want in Paraguay? Yeah, once you’re a resident, yeah, of course. Right. So it’s not like you have to spend a certain amount of days there or something? There’s what’s called a minimum physical presence requirement that pretty much all countries have. And it’s kind of an interesting topic because digital nomads and really everybody, they’re kind of looking like the golden goose, I guess, is like the country with the lowest physical presence requirements possible to maintain the residency so that you can have like a plan B residency or paper residency. And Paraguay works quite well for that. A lot of Latin American countries do, where in Paraguay, once you hit permanent resident, you start as a temporary resident for the first two years and then it renews to permanent residency and once you’re permanent it’s one day every three years really I mean presumably that will change will it that seems very liberal it’s relatively common in the region you know uruguay is one day every three years panama is one day every two years honduras where we are is one day a year um until you know I think until you get PR, it might change. But yeah, a lot of the countries in Latin America, there’s quite a few that are like one day a year, one day every two, one day every three years. And that’s one of the things that makes Latin America really unique as a region is these like Plan B residencies, these territorial tax systems. There’s a little bit of it in Asia,

Timothy Allen: I hear a lot about Panama. I think we were discussing it earlier. I hear a lot about it, but you don’t tend to hear a lot about it out in the sort of world of people, even though it’s a really enticing option, I think. I mean, I know a number of people who would say it’s the best option in Central America for a number of reasons. What do you think about that?

Vance: I personally love Panama. I think it’s a cool place. I think the one thing you might find interesting as a European and for the European audience is it’s still on a lot of the blacklists by EU countries. And so if you leave your European country and go to Panama, your European country might keep taxing you as if you never left. Because a lot of these countries have rules where it’s like, if you go to sort of a designated tax haven, which could be Panama, it could be, you know, Cayman Islands, or, you know, they have this, every country has a slightly different list. But they say, if you go to a tax haven, we’re still going to tax you for the next three years or whatever it is. Every country is a little bit different. But that’s one of the reasons it’s slightly less popular with Europeans is that if you go directly there, they might keep taxing you because of these blacklist rules. But if you go to like a second country first, you can sort of get around it.

Timothy Allen: Even briefly? Like, could you go to, I don’t know, Costa Rica for two weeks and then go to Panama?

Vance: Well, you’d have to get legal residency, right? So you’d have to, like, become a legal resident somewhere else and then say, hey, UK, I actually moved to Costa Rica. And then they think you’re in Costa Rica. And then after you’re in Costa Rica, then you can move to Panama.

Timothy Allen: I’ve always thought that if I ever left the UK, the last thing I would do would tell them what I was doing. You know, I suppose that’s irresponsible, is it? In case you want to come back.

Vance: The thing is, is that you can’t really leave your country’s tax system unless you have legal residency somewhere else. So you can’t leave to just be like a stateless person or a residency-less person. Yeah, you need to have legal residency somewhere else. For the most part, I think the UK actually might be slightly an exception in this regard. but for the most part for most countries you need to get legal residency somewhere else and ideally get tax residency somewhere else in order to be able to leave your your prior

Timothy Allen: Country’s tax system I’ve not ever done it myself and hence I don’t know what I’m talking about but I always assumed that if I was outside of the uk for more than a certain amount of time in the year it was none of their business unless I owned property in the uk I think that that does if you own a property in the uk I think that signals that you are domicile in the country it’s but but other than that I always thought that you could just go and and just I don’t know tell him none of their business or whatever there’s a lot of rules it’s actually very explicit in the case

Vance: Of the uk there’s something called uh substantial ties and yes if you have a house if you have if your kids stay in the uk things like that um you know there’s all these rules but it’s actually pretty explicit in terms of what you need to do to leave the system and what triggers could accidentally put you back in the system. Like if you stay more than 45 days in some cases, that could put you back in the system. Yeah, I mean, I would love to get out of the UK tax system,

Timothy Allen: But I unfortunately, I don’t imagine until my children have grown up and left, I can’t see ever leaving actually and you probably look at me and think you’re being a bit close-minded about that because no no I I would but because I I always thought that I would do something like that if I realized there was a better option which I do actually think there is a better option right now you know when you look around the world there are so many great places that you could be and especially when you live in the world we live in, you see the opportunities and you often see the opportunities way before anyone else does I mean I heard about some projects here this this week and I like wow I really want to go and see that I really want to see what going on down there that sounds amazing you know and as a result I I would love to take my family and position them there because I think they would thank me later I mean sure standard of living is great as well in these places but also I think positioning your family your kids for the next 10 years is a good idea like in positioning them in a country like england you’re probably I’m kind of saying to them unless that we have a massive u-turn in the uk and and by that I mean a u-turn even in the consciousness of people because you can’t imagine how negative everyone is in in my country right now when if you my local pub you know everyone’s having a bit of a chinwag and a laugh but actually it just complains it’s complaints all the time oh this that and the other you know and then you come to a place like this have you heard anyone complain about anything here like here literally maybe they complained because they couldn’t find the wi-fI code or something but on the whole people are thinking forward thinking they’re thinking about what can be done totally not what they can’t do and then optimism yeah it’s a massive deal it’s a huge deal and you know I don’t think people understand what it’s like in the UK it’s a it’s a kind of fog that just sits there and and affects people in a sort of unconscious way and and but it really in my case for example it changes my attitude towards a lot of things for example I wouldn’t start a new business in the UK I wouldn’t I wouldn’t think about doing it You know, I wouldn’t have an idea. And my first thought would be, where am I going to do this? Because it’s not where I am right now, 100%, you know. And I would never think about starting a kind of on-the-ground business in the UK. It would be, you know, like something that had to exist there. No, that’s crazy. I heard vape shops and kebab shops are doing pretty well. Turkish hairdressers and stuff, yeah, sure. But, you know, I mean, there you go. the ones that are making money are the ones that aren’t paying tax there you go like that’s what they’re all fronts for you know it was a wonder why you can only spend cash in those places but I mean that’s a that’s a sorry a really sorry state of affairs and it annoys me that it’s my own country because I know that that idea is pervasive I know a lot of people that think exactly the same way now on mass for a whole country to think like that even a certain percentage of them especially the entrepreneurs that’s terrible I don’t see a great future there that’s what I mean you know and I don’t trust the political system to fix it I know we’ve got all these great new things happening but I I kind of watched that happen in the states when when when Trump was voted in I saw I saw a a kind of um a wave of expectation that things would change under Trump for example and they did change but they changed all I think they just changed tracks they were still heading in the same direction I think uh you know it’s hard to say because I don’t live there

Vance: This it’s always greener on the other side right I do have a buddy in uh in mexico he’s living in mexico city uh he popped out three or four kids started I think they were all born in mexico or at least the first two or three and I just spoke to him this week and he said I moved back to the uk countryside really yeah he said the the countryside was calling me and uh he’s he’s back at it and do I mean if you can have the horses and all that that’s the dream right that’s that’s

Timothy Allen: A pretty good pretty good setup it yes it is but um how can I put it it’s it’s a struggle to um to to generate income basically I mean like we’ve we’ve we’ve always traditionally done okay I’d say my family we you know we’ve been good at what we do both me and my wife as a result we’ve got a house that’s paid off we’ve got you know we’ve done all right we haven’t squandered our money we but in the last since COVID we have cut back on a lot of things including things like holidays you know those kind of erroneous things that you would always have spare money to do I wouldn’t think twice about taking the kids away for a week during the school holidays half term we call it you know go away for a week abroad somewhere we don’t do that anymore or we would do something slightly different we would go locally on holiday and that’s all because of the the financial climate in the uk which is cost of the things you need on a day-to-day basis pretty much doubling since um since the covid and and um wages not really and I also have you know I’ve kind of shifted my attention to this podcast as well from a from a more much more profitable business um which was my choice I know but I know the same story with with many of my contemporaries who who are basically seeing a doubling of prices and nowhere near a rise of wages consistent with that and for example things like since the so our house is heated by oil heating oil right and three weeks ago when when you know the u.s started bombing iran the price of heating oil tripled and it’s at triple the price now so it went from 55 p a liter to to 104 one pound 44 a liter it is now if you want to buy that same oil no it doesn’t sound not too bad but we use um we use 5 000 liters a year we’ve got a hungry house so basically over 5 000 pounds yeah year on on heating much more than that now it was three grand say it’s now uh more like eight or nine now that that that is an extra five thousand pounds and now when you when I the way I look at that I go okay imagine if I went and asked for a five thousand pound raise and I was an employee of someone say I was earning 40 grand a year I don’t know I think that’s the average in the uk Now I’m asking for 45. That’s quite a big raise. But this is just the price of something that I don’t even get a better service. I’m getting the same oil from the same tanker into the same thing. And it’s that much more. I know. You’ve got to get some electric going or something. Well, no, but electric’s even worse. We pay in the UK. We’ve got, I think, the second highest rate in the – one of the second highest rates in the world or something. I think the highest rate in the world might be, it’s crazy what we pay for those kind of things.

Vance: My thoughts on this are you want to be in sort of a year-round destination, like it could be Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Europe, where they don’t have AC, they don’t have heating. So their monthly bill is nothing. It’s 30 bucks for electricity, and that’s it. Or in Latin America, we have the coffee region, which is where you’re at a little bit of elevation, and it’s just sort of like 17 and 19 degrees like all year round. And that’s where you want to be because then you have no AC, you have no heating, and you’re not dependent on the grid. You’re not dependent on the extortion stuff. I get it. I’m from Canada. Everybody’s complaining about the cost of heating your home in the winter because you have to or you’re going to die, and you’re like dependent on the government, and they keep raising the thing, and you’re paying $1,000 a month just to heat your house. And it’s like, what are we doing here type of thing.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but in that case, take my example again, you know, in one day or in a week, we had an extra bill of a four or five thousand pound a year, right? That’s where the holiday disappears. So that’s where that little short break, that week holiday that costs you five grand, that’s where that gets taken away, because it now has to go into oil. And since COVID, that has happened multiple times on different things. and for example the price of groceries has doubled it’s doubled in price I know that because I I I’m the I’m the guy that does the shopping I I you know I like you know on the saturday I go but well we live on a farm so I buy things in bulk I’m a I’m sort of like a a wannabe prepper I love I love nice I love buying things like that and so when I so I do that I do the weekly shopping one of the few times I get out of the house often is to go out and do that So I know how much it used to cost and it now costs more than double what it did pre And, you know, once again, you add those up, you know, you’re spending, say you were spending a thousand a month on food. Now you’re spending 2,000 a month. You multiply that by 12. That’s 10 to 12,000 and another, right. So where are you going to find that extra 10 from? The only answer is make more money, right? You can’t save your way to solving that. You just got to make more money.

Vance: Right, exactly. And I agree with that. And now you look at the climate, look at the economic climate in the country. Exactly. It’s getting worse. It’s tough in Europe, man. It’s tough in Europe. The salaries are low. So you got to be an entrepreneur. But being an entrepreneur is difficult because the regulation, all that is insane. So it’s just really not looking good for Europe in a lot of ways. and Latin America or just the Americas in general is much more dynamic in that sense where salaries are a lot higher. People are moving from Portugal to Brazil for higher salaries. People are moving from Spain to Mexico for higher salaries. Imagine that. People in Spain are making 1,200 euros a month. They go to Mexico City and now they’re making at least three, four grand a month. How is that though? How can that work? Because it’s the Americas. It’s a more dynamic economy.

Timothy Allen: And uh so it’s kind of like a reverse uh reverse migration reverse brain drain I guess I have I some of the guys I’ve spoken to the guys that run you know those kind of relocation companies in south america like yourself and that’s a common thing the repatriation thing is is big now and he one in particular fran he’s a guy francisco yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah he he was always saying that a lot of his clients their dream is to move to europe and they go there and a lot of them go oh my god it’s not very good is it let’s go back you know which is crazy when you think about it and

Vance: You know how the tables have turned well this is geo-arbitrage right it’s like you want to you want to make money in in one location and and spend it in another this is flag theory right so make your money in the u.s in Dubai in singapore in you know switzerland and and then spend it in sort of lifestyle destinations or places with a lower cost of living so there’s a lot of europeans have been doing this forever I know lots of dudes in spain portugal that you know they’re making a dutch salary or a finnish salary or a swiss salary and then they they spend time down south

Timothy Allen: So the only the only problem with that idea and I like it as an idea is when you add a family into the mix and I know you can travel with your family and I know you can move your family around and do all this kind of stuff. But my experience of having a big family now is that the kids appreciate a solid 10 year period, at least, you know, when they get to a certain age, that kind of like maybe eight to 18, you know, that just give them a, give them a like, I mean, when they’re really young, they’re just with you anyway. Right. So they don’t really notice. That’s where I’m at. I have, I have one or two, by the way. Right. Okay. So traveling with them, I mean, Obviously, it’s hard to travel with small babies, but I don’t think it’s actually probably as good for the kids as not as staying in one place, because really they just want to be near their parents. But when you get to that slightly older age, I now really understand that giving them a really good structure to their lives, you know, is amazing. My kids are really happy, really settled. That’s why I say I could never leave. the next time I fully leave the uk will be when the last one has left the nest or or or when they’re all at least in their sort of more than 18 and I’ve I’ve kind of accepted that there’s a cost of living in the uk and it’s my children’s happiness in a way you know that’s a cost worth bearing even though I know if we sold everything in the uk liquidated everything moved it say to Argentina, my children could have private education, horses, we could live on a ranch, you know, a better version of all the things that we have already, but it would be in Argentina. But they wouldn’t have their friends.

Vance: Well, if the UK is cool, I guess the only, you just gotta, if the UK is not good for making money anymore, then you just gotta make money in Prospera, in, you know, in wherever the money is, right? There’s a lot of money out there. Like there’s an abundance of money. We can’t, we got to make sure to stay away from having a scarcity mindset, right? We need to have an abundance mindset. And if the capital flows have shifted away from the UK to somewhere else, cool. We just make the money somewhere else. Kids in the UK, it’s all good. So I don’t like judge anybody for staying in the UK. I think it’s amazing actually. Like, you know, I have British heritage. You know, I like, you guys are the salt of the earth. So much respect. And yeah, we just, I don’t know. We just got to adapt, right?

Timothy Allen: Yeah, I find it, I just find it a bit sad that the, because I grew up, I grew up in the UK and I loved growing up in the UK. And now I see a much more strained version of that. And it’s sad because I loved my life and I still would now. And I think my kids have no idea of the kind of struggles or the internal struggle that we go through. It doesn’t really matter. They just sing the great life. The money falls from the sky. Yeah, and just everything. But we do live in a great situation. We are living the kind of very traditional British lifestyle. We live in the countryside. You know, it’s very safe. We don’t lock our doors. Everyone knows everyone. They’ve grown up in something that I really wanted them to grow up in. But if you look at mum and dad under the hood, there’s all kinds of stuff going on in us, you know, wishing that we could do this and that and we can’t and then struggling to do that. And I agree, go elsewhere to make a living. But I also want to be there around for my children. And I don’t have an online, I mean, I do now, I suppose I have an online business.

Vance: I guess you got to interview more people to give you some tips, but it’s doable.

Timothy Allen: It is doable. And I am doing that, actually. It is doable. But as you know, you have a podcast. It’s not something you think of as your primary income stream, right? Definitely not. How many episodes have you done so far? We must be on 180. Nice. And I mean, since I’ve been here, like I’ve already done, you’re the ninth one I’ve already done. I mean, I did three just before I left the UK and then I instantly left and I’ve done six here. And I will do 20 or 30 just here alone, I think. Wow. And I think I might start doing some midweekers, dropping some midweek episodes. because I’ve got so much content. It’s good to have a backlog or like a scheduled. Well, that’s what I do. I mean, that’s how I run it. I run it by going off and getting content and then planning out. And you’re good for like two, three months. Yes. But that downside to that is you sometimes have podcasts which would go out of date. I’ve had a couple that went out of date. And, you know, so I like it when we’re not talking about current things. So you just put those ones first. and then the more, what’s it called, green ones, you put them later. Sometimes. I tend to go with my gut feeling on when to put one out. Evergreen. But, yeah, I have lost a couple to just, I can’t put this out now because we’re talking about.

Vance: No, I like your strategy with the in-person and just like cranking out like 10, 15 in-person at the same time. So I do all mine on Zoom basically and all remote. So you’ve taken the next level.

Timothy Allen: But you’re inspiring me, by the way. No, but the thing about online is, well, this in-person thing is a brand that I believe in. And I’ve done one, funnily enough, I’ve done one online. It was with Niklas Anzinger, actually, because it was a very specific episode that was a kind of response to someone else. And so I had to do it because he was here in Prospera and I was in the UK. So I did that one. And it’s not my thing at all. And it would change the whole vibe of what and I found myself shouting you know like it just so this is such an amazing way to converse with someone Plus and this is the thing a lot of people don’t tell you if you run a podcast like this um and you want to meet people this is the way to do it the way like after we’ve had this con brother blazer well after we’ve had this conversation you’ll be someone I can approach at any time anywhere and and I wouldn’t necessarily say that was true if we’d have met online necessarily right you see what I mean and and um we discovered that the first couple of years running this podcast because it was for the foundation the Free Cities Foundation but it we’realized remember me and peter realizing after the first few trips we’d done it was like blimey this is a a really good networking tool because you can phone anyone up or you can send a message to random people and say um you know I mean you might ask them can I have a meeting with you and they’ll say no but if you say you know can you come on my podcast it’s like, yeah, well, and then you sit down for a two hour meeting with them and get to know them. And, you know, it’s a funny, it’s a, it’s a really great tool for, for, for, for reaching out to

Vance: People. You know, I agree. It’s, it’s been incredible for just now I can show up in any Latin American country and, you know, there’s people that want to take me out for a steak dinner and all that. And a lot of people here at Próspera, I’ve interviewed before I’ve interviewed Niklas, I’ve interviewed a lot of the other guys. And it’s, it’s kind of funny to interview them online first and then meet them in person a year or two later and be like, yeah, remember

Timothy Allen: How many episodes have you done then? Over 300. Wow. Yeah. But it’s just a little sideline thing you do. It’s a marketing tool for your business, I take it as well.

Vance: Yeah, it’s a marketing tool. It’s just one of those things. There’s not too many good sort of digital nomad type podcasts. There’s only really a handful, surprisingly few, surprisingly few, I would say, podcasts that, and that’s part of why I started is there just weren’t that many. There was like this one, there’s the The Maverick Show, there’s Tropical MBA, there’s a few, but there’s really not that many.

Timothy Allen: Which seems crazy. Which seems crazy. Why is that? Because digital nomads literally are looking for ways to make money online. Maybe it’s because it’s very difficult to make money on a podcast, which it is. I know that.

Vance: Yeah, people don’t stick with it.

Timothy Allen: Yeah. It’s amazing when you look at the stats. If you get past five episodes, apparently, the likelihood of you going on more is massive. It’s really interesting. And it’s funny because the only reason I’ve ended up sticking with it is because I started off doing it for someone else. if it had been like I have not missed an episode in nearly four years pumping them out they go out at 6 15 every friday morning and if it had been me left to my own devices doing the timothy allen podcast or whatever I almost certainly would have one christmas or one new year’s I’d have gone oh my god I’m just going to take the week off you know but when you’re kind of when you feel that that that responsibility to to an outside force I I bang them out and it’s been great because it’s completely changed my life you know I came from a very unstructured life I mean I really was working probably two to three months of the year I was making a lot of money but I was hardly working at all because I was uh you know I was leveraging a long career that and just doing small amounts of work that were well paid rather than you know and but it was completely unstructured you know a lot of the time I would get up and say oh what am I going to do today you know now I have much more of a structure and in the beginning I’d say it was relatively tricky to to sort of like reincorporate that back into my life because I hadn’t worked for anyone for a long time but now I do it it’s amazing I remember first few times I had to write some things you know like write a write an introduction to a podcast it was a real strain now I can just like sit down and knock it I mean obviously chat gpt probably knocks most of it out now but even before chat gpt it it started working the muscles of the brain again to start thinking about being creative and doing things and blah blah blah you know I think the one place I think I need better I need to do better is in um well I don’t know I don’t know maybe maybe not I I would like to monetize the podcast even more than it already is but I feel like I’m in a situation where there’s a limit to how much you can monetize a very sort of specific podcast like this because you’re reaching a certain amount of people if you’ve got a million listeners you can pretty much advertise anything as long as it’s kind of on brand but you can advertise pretty much anything if you’re at you know like the level we’re at we need very specific sponsors who are into connected with the industry we’re in and a lot of the people in this industry are startups they’re not actually trying to advertise

Vance: Things that you know do you know what I mean yeah I think you know um how would I put it monetizing it directly is difficult because then they want to look at the number of downloads and And, you know, but when you think of it more of as like a moat and like a part of an ecosystem and the online to offline and how you have events and you have Free Cities Prague and then there’s going to be Free Cities Próspera later this year. It actually makes your whole business and the whole Free Cities brand more defensible because it’s not just events. It’s events and a podcast and probably a bunch of other stuff. So it actually like it makes the whole business and brand and everything more defensible. And it’s just like a, you know, a loop or, you know, like a self-reinforcing thing. So I think it’s a great kind of piece of the puzzle.

Timothy Allen: It is. But I have, like I was telling you earlier, I’ve recently started dealing with the podcast as a separate entity. So that’s the, maybe I didn’t tell you. It’s something that I’m trying to turn into a separate business, basically. for a number of reasons. But one is because I feel like, you know, I can put, you know what it’s like when you’re working for someone, you watch the amount of hours you do. When you’re working for yourself, you’ll work seven days a week and you don’t care because you’re working towards something. And I realized the only way to scale this podcast is to do that because I’m sort of kind of subsidizing it with my own money in a sense by not paying myself much, if you see what I mean, because the revenue is not there. but as the revenue increases um it it becomes a viable thing and the the the what the amount the podcast increases is very highly correlated with the industry as well because we are in we are in a very sort of specific ecosystem here and I’ve tried I’ve tried a few things like I branched out and talked to you know like a sort of wider guests that aren’t necessarily Free Cities they’re more like freedom and very highly followed people millions of followers you get a pump the week they’re on straight back down to the mean the next you know you can see the mean rise in listeners and it’s that and whenever there’s a pump it tends to try and trend back down to that line so So, you know, I’m kind of, I feel like that the strategy might be to go free city specific, actually, and really ride the wave of that.

Vance: I don’t know what you think about that. Yeah, like having a big guest actually doesn’t move the needle as much as you think it is. So it’s other things that move the needle. Even guesting on other people’s podcasts moves the needle because then you’re capturing people who already listen to podcasts. and then they listen to your podcast, right? So you’ve got to come on mine, and then you can capture my audience, and then my audience will listen to your podcast. So that’s a good way to do it.

Timothy Allen: But you use your podcast in the same way that the Free Cities Foundation used this, which was a tool to promote what’s going on and just to promote the brand and to get it out there. So I understand that if I run a company, I would have a podcast and it would be part of the strategy. What’s the toughest thing to do, I now realize, is to just do a podcast as a business. And I don’t know what the stats are, but it must be a very small number of the super profitable ones. I mean, like very small number. I think there’s then a band of people like us who, I could live off the income of the podcast, but not well enough. You know, it wouldn’t be, it’s not good enough. And then there’s everyone else who basically either stop doing it before five episodes or just do it for fun every so often, you know.

Vance: Yeah, you have to sell something, right? Because if it’s not you, you have advertisers and they’re selling something, right? At the end of the day, someone has to sort of sell something. So most of it, it’s just like YouTube, right? It’s like you don’t, on YouTube, you don’t live off the YouTube AdSense revenue. That’s just like the beer money. You make the money on the back end selling courses or T-shirts or event tickets or whatever it is, right? So, you know, classic funnel stuff, I guess.

Timothy Allen: Yeah. I don’t know. I think I must be old. I’m old school. You know, I don’t even like the advertiser model. I don’t like the idea of advertising. I think the dream is to just have conversations, isn’t it? I know it’s an unrealistic dream because you need a revenue stream. You need, and as it goes, the only, there’s two ways to get revenue. One is from your listeners and one is from advertisers, I’d imagine. I can’t think of another one. And getting it from your listeners is tricky in this day and age because who pays for a podcast? I do actually have subscribers. Yeah. Community. Community. Yeah. but that’s that’s something that’s I found much harder as well I’m not sure I’m good at the community thing because I don’t don’t post much I don’t do much on social media I feel it’s very much a methodical part of the job you know some people are all over social media like if you said run run this community telegram channel they’d be in it all the time commenting and they love all that I that doesn’t suit my personality type so um you’re only left with a couple of ways to monetize and it’s obviously um you know finding the right sponsors I suppose but um but yeah dude

Vance: You never asked me about my hat I’m on video I got the Bukele oh yeah is that your own merch then is it it’s not my merch is that Bukele’s merch I I bought this for four bucks on the street in el salvador last week oh really and I thought it was funny because it’s a well I don’t know if you

Timothy Allen: See it but it’s actually like kind of badly done which makes it funnier I’ve got a version of that do you’remember do you’remember did you ever see that Michael Saylor meme um which is where he they’re playing sort of classical music and he’s so take your money and buy all the bitcoin and and remortgage your house and buy more bitcoin and but you know and it gets faster and faster and faster right that was a very famous meme in the bitcoin space about three years ago and they someone had doctored the video so it kind of had his face looked quite crazy and someone made that into a hat right and it was one of the funniest things ever you know they they sent it off to the thing and said create this picture as a hat and it was terrible but it became a very sought after hat because it was so bad and all that and bitcoin has loved it because it was so bad and it became a thing I’ve got a similar version it’s a bit like that it’s like a terrible looking version or something but um but what were you doing in el salvador then if you don’t mind asking

Vance: Uh checking it out I was just there for a week um you know obviously we’re we’re right next door el salvador honduras uh someone to go check it out and dude it’s very interesting it’s well worth

Timothy Allen: A visit I’ve been a few times actually have you yeah yeah I took my family there like like in recent years yes yeah yeah we went there during first of all I took my whole family there during the state of emergency my wife didn’t like that we lived during the pandemic because when they opened up we went straight there it was just after the bitcoin um law was passed and um we it was amazing my wife did a complete turnaround she started off not wanting to go there by the end of it it’s like the best place we went that whole really that whole year well we we got out we got We got an Airbnb near El Zonte, next beach down. And it was just great for a family. We had a great Airbnb with a big garden and coconut trees and avocado trees backed onto the beach. Sick. And it was old school. I mean, I’m not sure it’s the same now. I think certainly prices around that part of El Salvador have gone up massively because of all the Bitcoiners. But it was great. And it was like old school. it’s what I remember beaches used to be you walk onto the beach and there’s literally thatched huts selling margaritas selling mojitos you know and good food really good food like fresh caught fish on a plate with loads of other stuff and reasonably priced and yeah we lived I think it was two months we spent in that house spending Bitcoin You know it was just amazing But then I been back a few times I did a presentation at Adopting Bitcoin a couple of years We went there when we started this podcast as well. We went there. We started the podcast here about three and a half years ago. We went to El Salvador. It’s a really easy route to get there. You can fly direct, can’t you, from Roatán. But come on. So what’s your view on there?

Vance: I’m extremely excited. Yeah? Yeah. Go on. Why? Well, I think safety is number one. Huge. I think the economic opportunity, it’s USD. I think the government’s encouraging business. They want you to start businesses. They’re making it easy. Tax breaks. I think it’s basically like it checks every single box, essentially.

Timothy Allen: It’s crazy. So you went in like 2022? ah pass no no more like 2021 when was that’s crazy when was the bitcoin I think yeah okay so around there I’ve got the a copy of the newspaper that’s crazy because that’s early that’s early that was like it still wasn’t fully safe but it was like basically there well we when we like basically I booked I booked the tickets you know and then told my wife yeah um we were in mexico and I just said look I’ve got to I’m a bitcoiner they’re passing it’s the first country in the world to make it legal tender we’ve got to go there gotta do it and then after I booked it we heard about the state of emergency but you know I had friends there and I just said look help me out here is it safe and they’re like yeah man it’s completely safe and actually uh you know because we lived there for a long time and we got very friendly with a lot of local people who were in our same we lived in a little street cobbled street and stuff you know and um they all said look even at the darkest moments of of el salvador there were certain places and they were tourist towns which kind of got left alone they didn’t have shootings and murders that the gangs didn’t seem to operate there right and and etc etc sure it wasn’t the kind of place you would walk out on the streets of the capital and stuff like that but but we didn’t see any of that and it was I mean I talk about you know we were talking earlier about positive vibes and people were feeling positive wow optimism in el salvador is off the scale I mean it’s palpable you could really feel it you know like yeah it’s it I think it’s really important to be surrounded by builders

Vance: And optimistic people um I have this idea I’ve been ruminating on you you okay if I hit you with it sure yeah I think if you look at any moment in history you want to be where the scientific innovation is, right? So if you look at, say, like, you know, 2000 years ago, you probably want to be in Egypt 1000 years ago, maybe you want to be in, I don’t know, Baghdad, or somewhere like this, maybe 1500s, you want to be in Venice, you know, back Greece, whenever they were innovating. So it’s like at any point in time, you know, maybe France in the 1920s, with the whatever there, There was like that hip moment, right? Silicon Valley in the 2000s, maybe New York in the 80s. What are some other like cool like moments in time, right? And usually there’s, it could be like a hundred year super cycle or it could be like a 10 year, you know, minI trend. But at any point, but you always want to be kind of where the scientific innovation is, like where the scientific advancement is. is El Salvador where the scientific innovation is? I mean, a little bit in a, you know, you can make that argument, right, with the Bitcoin legal tender and innovating on safety and a couple of these things. And so, I don’t know, that’s just one thing I think about. It’s like you kind of want to, there’s like people who want to be in the epicenter and there’s people who want to be like maybe as far away from it as possible or just sort of in the middle. I don’t know, but I think it’s one of, like El Salvador, is one of those places right now. And then maybe there’s a couple with the AI stuff, you know, San Francisco’s still doing good. And there’s a couple AI innovation centers. But I think El Salvador hits a good balance of this where it is like a moment in time. It’s a scientific innovation center, while also hitting some good balances in terms of like safety and, you know, a good traditional place to raise kids and fun and builders and the governments at your back. And I don’t know, it’s just something I’m ruminating on.

Timothy Allen: I agree. I think it would be a great place to be. However I going to have to push back as well because look at Dubai now right I mean it not easy to know exactly what going on Yeah that one over Right They had a moment in time though Right But I mean is it over or not I don’t really know. I think it’s kind of over. We could debate whether it’s over or not. But what is true is that one month ago, or say two months ago, Dubai was the place to be. Two months later, it’s the complete opposite. And it happened like that. And in a way, El Salvador, that could be Bukele getting assassinated. It could be all kinds of things, couldn’t it? And, you know, this is the time we live in, I think. You know, it’s like I’m really disappointed about Dubai. I think that’s really unlucky of them. It’s a shame, yeah. Providing, I mean, you get conflicting reports coming out of Dubai. And I think if it was me personally, I don’t think I’d be fleeing Dubai. Personally, I really don’t. judging by what I can see in the news about what’s actually happening there. But a lot of people are. And that is the beauty of a place like Dubai is you can leave with your capital. And in a way, that’s why it’s so competitive. You know, it’s why it’s done so well. It’s because it is trying to keep people there. But I think it’s unlucky for them that that’s happened, you know.

Vance: Well, there’s, I guess, as I was saying, there’s like a convergence of their super cycles. And then there’s like these smaller minI cycles, right? And the Americas is a super cycle. The Americas is going to keep growing next hundred years. Basically, no questions asked. South America is going to keep growing. No questions asked. Right. I think the Middle East doesn’t have it kind of had that super cycle for maybe like 50 years with population growth, had a high fertility rate. They have the oil boom and this Dubai thing and all that. But I think that super cycle is over. It’s just too hotly contested of a region. I think that that’s kind of over in terms of a super cycle. So the super cycle right now is in the Americas. You know, it was London’t in the 1800s. It was Spain in the 1600s. It was Portugal in the 1500s. It was the Netherlands before that. and right now it’s the americas and kind of the epicenter of of the the the america’s super cycle I think is it’s the u.s and it’s el salvador and Argentina and Brazil no and Panama no not Brazil

Timothy Allen: Really no Brazil’s not gonna really do you think I I’ve got I’ve just been speaking to a lady this morning about a project down in Florianópolis which I’m definitely going to go and see it sounds It’s beautiful and amazing.

Vance: Yeah, beautiful and amazing. Yeah, well, as the presentation yesterday, every country in Latin America is going right. They’re going capitalist. And the prediction as of right now is that Lula will probably win again and it’ll just keep being socialist and floundering. There’s a famous phrase that Brazil is the world’s next greatest country and always will be.

Timothy Allen: Once again, though, things can change like that. Venezuela, bang. Cuba, my Cuban friends are saying it’s about to happen. I don’t know what you think about that. Yeah, Cuba’s going to flip. Yeah. Yeah, it’s going to be exciting. Well, imagine the difference there. I mean, you know, overnight, talk about Dubai. Within a two-week period, Cuba, I mean, it won’t sort of regenerate, rejuvenate instantly, but the option two will. And you imagine, I know so many, this is the interesting thing around Central America is the diaspora, the people that live abroad can’t wait to come home to their countries if it looks good. You know, and Cuba is exactly the same. I know so many Cubans who are like, just let me in there to do good. Because I’ve been living in the States for 20 years, you know, and I’ve done well, and I know how to make money. And that place is rife for me to sort of like come back and run a business there, you know. It’s a huge island. Have you ever seen where they do the size of? and if you if you uh put Cuba on like a map of europe it goes from portugal to russia basically it’s it’s a huge island jesus I didn’t know that yeah I assumed it was quite small actually no it’s huge wow yeah they got a lot going on you know they got cigars coffee some of the best beaches proximity to the u.s just like rebuilding a place shops bars supermarkets you know fumidors like cigar, you know, you know, like there’s, when you, when you bring a country like that back from the brink of socialism, everything needs being made. So you can, you can run any business. You can go in there. If you’re a former refugee from Cuba who’s living in America and you’re a doctor or you or you a PR person or you a it doesn’t matter what you do You can just come home and do it in a place that an emerging market where so many people want to I mean you seen that in and this is a much better version than Cuba would be, but El Salvador, it’s the classic. Everyone coming back. El Salvadorians going, holy shit, my country is awesome. I met a lot. I met a lot of dudes from Texas, California, whatever, Salvadorian Americans coming back, spending time. One Salvadorian American dude gave me a ride at the airport. So, yeah, it’s a thing.

Vance: I mean, that’s why I think my niche is very cool with My Latin Life and Latin America is I can just bounce around talking about all the different jurisdictions. You know, there are people that you’really kind of like hang their hat on one country and they made their whole business one country. But I knew that that was a little bit, you know, maybe not the right way to go. So I’m just covering all Latin America. And there’s just so much excitement all the time. Things are flipping. Things are changing. different jurisdictions and arbitrage opportunities. I really think the Americas is kind of the place to be. And, you know, when coming back to kind of your question, and maybe it’s like one of the overarching themes of this podcast episode is like, where do we want to be? Where do we want to spend time, invest our energy, our resources? And it’s kind of, you know, Europe or the Americas, really, in terms of, you know, lifestyle and all that. Europe, man, I don’t, dude, I think Europe is effed unfortunately I wish it were not the case I’m 100 european ancestry you know there’s nothing I would like better than for europe to be awesome and rich and we could all live on the med and it would be awesome and all that stuff and eat olives and drink wine and but it’s it is not looking good this next 100 years europe is gonna be weird 50 years from now 100 years from now, it’s like disappearing, man. It’s really weird. And so just the America is the super cycle. It’s really where to be. We can debate if it’s Argentina or El Salvador or whatever, maybe, you know, different strokes, depending on what people are into. But somewhere in the Americas,

Timothy Allen: I think, is where you want to be. I think, well, apart from the fact we’ll probably leave it there, I think I kind of tend to agree with you. Yeah, you know, I hate having a thought but not being able to act on it. That’s the only problem. I agree. Like I, it’s funny, I got off the plane here in Honduras and I smelt that sort of tropical air. And I was like, oh my God, it’s been a long time since I’ve been even in a place like this, you know. And God, it’s so hard speaking to people in a conference like this and realizing how many different things there are going on. And I love that stage in a movement where everyone’s excited about that thing. And they’re, you know, yeah, we need some… What we’re lacking in Europe, certainly in the UK, is optimism, basically. Optimism, I would say, is at an all-time low. So hopefully we’ll bounce back. I mean, that’s what happens at all-time lows, isn’t it? maybe it goes down another 90% who knows but but yeah anyway Vance Vance how do I say it Vance Vance that’s the English English pronunciation thanks for coming in to my studio which isn’t mine it’s Próspera’s but anyway and yeah good luck with everything I’ll put all the links to all your stuff in the show notes you’ve got a great podcast as well if anyone’s interested in

Vance: Latin things. Maybe do you want to plug it yourself? Yeah, let me do a quick plug. Well, we’re on Twitter at MyLatinLife. We’re on YouTube as well. We have our podcast, the MyLatinLife podcast, which you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you’re listening to this amazing podcast, MyLatinLife.com as well. If you’re interested in a residency visa, offshore bank account, all these things, Latin America, there’s many ways to get in touch with us and we’d love to help you out and uh thank you so much for having me on the show as well of course

Timothy Allen: No problem mate and um yeah you’ve got a panel later have you oh yeah I already did it yeah what

Vance: Was it on um LatAm communities nomad communities I did it with Gonçalo Hall joey langenbrunner zach from nomad what is it nomad co-living and daniel from Noma Collective so shout out to those

Timothy Allen: Guys nice all right long live the digital nomad life good luck and thanks for coming in thank you

Notes

This transcript was reconstructed from the raw timestamped video episode text. The opening music was removed. The transcript above starts at the beginning of the conversation, around 0:00:53 in the video-timing transcript, and ends at the close of the conversation.

Speaker names were added and formatted in bold. The source transcript did not include reliable speaker diarisation, so speaker turns were inferred from the flow of the conversation, context, questions, interruptions and repeated references. Short interjections and overlapping speech were lightly consolidated where doing so improved readability.

Timestamps, filler words, repeated false starts and obvious transcription artefacts were removed or lightly normalised. The conversational tone, meaning, jokes, scepticism and main order of the exchange were preserved.

Proper nouns and likely ASR errors were corrected where possible. The main corrections/normalisations include: Vance; My Latin Life; Próspera; Free Cities Foundation; The 4-Hour Workweek; Tim Ferriss; Playa del Carmen; Tropical MBA; Travel Like a Boss; Dragon’s Den; Shark Tank; Robert Herjavec; Jim Rogers; Mexico; Panama; Argentina; Paraguay; Asunción; Portugal; São Tomé and Príncipe; St Kitts and Nevis; Turkey; Canada; the United States; Italy; Ireland; Texas; Florida; California; Massachusetts; El Salvador; Bukele; Michael Saylor; Bitcoin; El Zonte; Roatán; Niklas Anzinger; Gonçalo Hall; Joey Langenbrunner; Noma Collective; Daniel Thompson; Cuba; Venezuela; Dubai; Brazil; Florianópolis; and the My Latin Life Podcast.

A few names/phrases remain context-dependent and should be checked against the audio before publication: “Cremieux”; “Black Coffee”; the exact form of “Zach from Nomad co-living”; the name of the panel Vance had already done; and any figures quoted in the residency and passport discussion, especially citizenship-by-investment pricing and tax/residency thresholds.

No independent fact-check has been applied to claims made by either speaker beyond checking spellings and likely identities of proper nouns. Tax, residency, citizenship, immigration, economic and political claims should be treated as speaker claims, not editorial assertions. Anyone acting on those topics should take professional advice in the relevant jurisdiction.