I'm looking for insights into what complications are likely to come up if I'm trying to flee at the same time as a large number of others. For example, that might make it a very bad time to try to sell your home.
Don't get me wrong: It's not because the situation isn't serious. However you're in "the bay area", as opposed to some backwater white-supremacy proto-ethnostate. You already have neighbors and state legislators that are opposed to whatever is coming down the dumbest-timeline pipe, make your stand with them.
Not only will locally organizing give better results, it'll cost you a lot less in time, energy, and money than trying to emigrate in a panic.
Also if the US collapses into several states, you no longer have a passport. There is a precedent for this (Soviet Union) where "russians" found themselves essentially stateless. So unless you have a second nationality, your best bet is to stay where you are to ensure the new nationality stick to you (hopefully).
If you have a second passport, residence and home, you probably wouldn't be asking this question anyway. Preparing such an infrastructure is out of reach for most people, unfortunately.
Or upon reflection are you fleeing because your general anxiety is high (totally get it) and the flight or fight response is all consuming ? Because there is no way to flee that.
LMAO!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
* Political speech starts getting monitored and targeted for detention/arrest
* Immigration into other countries gets backlogged
* Other countries stop letting Americans in entirely as a sanction
* Border controls become a lot more restrictive
Is any of this actually going to happen in the next few years? Who the fuck knows. But the likelihood just increased substantially.
If you have not yet found a country that suits you, make time to travel now to explore some options based on your criteria, residency, and work visa constraints (digital nomad visa vs non lucrative passive income, for example).
Depending on your means, there are many countries you can purchase outright for under $200k. Mortgages can usually be had with 40% down. Renting is almost always an option.
Line up housing (rent or own), income, and residency. Have a plan what you’ll sell, ship or store, travel plans to move, etc. Execute plan when your risk appetite is exceeded.
Canada: https://www.jobbank.gc.ca/findajob/foreign-candidates
Estonia: https://workinestonia.com/
Germany: https://make-it-in-germany.com/
Denmark: https://workindenmark.dk/
Finland: https://workinfinland.com/
UK: https://findajob.dwp.gov.uk/
Sweden: https://arbetsformedlingen.se/
New Zealand: https://www.live-work.immigration.govt.nz/work-in-new-zealan...
I have made a few preparations since then.
I always keep a few thousand euros in cash at home, enough to keep me going with a frozen bank account. Even when all goes well, ATM limits can be restrictive. In a worse situation, money can be hard to access.
I keep a bit of money with my family abroad. Enough to soften the landing even if I arrive with just the clothes on my back.
I have citizenship on another continent. I refused to become a EU citizen until I was guaranteed dual citizenship.
I keep a lot more liquid assets than most. I would prefer to keep more of it out of Europe but that is not so easy.
My pension is not tied to any country. This was an important feature for me.
I can work from anywhere. I can leave early while most people would wait until things get really bad.
That being said, I try not to worry too much. These things are set up precisely so I don't have to. They're a sort of insurance policy.
I am supportive of my friend and sympathetic to their concerns, yet even if things got much worse my inclination would be to stay and engage with friends and family who have ideas that I strongly disagree with.
The problem is that I’m both too rich and too poor to do it. If I had nothing, no problem. If I were rich, I could afford the attorneys and other professionals needed to live abroad without getting jammed up.
Some people pull off the nomad lifestyle. That’s cool, but it really depends on stability here in the United States. You could be living your best life in Bali, but living at the whim of policy in Washington.
If things did get locked down. Don’t count on being allowed to leave. Or of other countries accepting US citizens.
If large numbers of people want to move, expect requirements to get steeper as people in the receiving country begin to worry about the consequences of a large influx of foreigners. Expect the required personal qualifications to get stiffer, expect the fees to get steeper, and expect the delays for bureaucratic approvals to get longer due to the increased workload.
In many countries you would not have to move immediately, so a good plan might be to get approval now rather than when things get tough.
Expect misinformation and changing requirements and procedures. Expect false steps and mistakes. You'l want to get as much information as early as practical so you can make realistic plans. Even then patience and flexibility are required.
In summary, do it now because if you don't, it may not be practical later.
Curious question.
Places like Japan or UK might be tougher on immigration. And they're probably in a "nowhere to go but down" kind of situation with high debt, low economic growth, declining population.
Well, I didn't flee the United States exactly, but I did move to Finland in what some would consider a hasty move.
It turned out to be a great decision in every regard except, of course, financially. I've probably left something on the order of $500,000 of pretax income on the table and counting at over $100,000 a year, as I moved right after completing a top university undergrad in mathematics and electrical engineering. Salaries in tech really are much lower in most other countries, even the relatively well off ones like Finland, so you need to ask yourself whether you're genuinely willing to leave so much money on the table first.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, due to US tax law, you will essentially never be able to invest in e.g. an index fund again. You should walk into this assuming your Roth IRA, 401k, etc. will all be essentially frozen at their current values, and that the country you move to will not grant them any special privileges. Nor will the US grant any special privileges to any requirement or investment accounts held in the other country. Sufficiently sophisticated investors may be able to get around this, but frankly if you're that good at this stuff you should probably become a corporate lawyer or something.
You may incur serious issues if you, for example, attempt to mortgage a new home in your new home. If you're fine living with one checking account and one full time job for life, forgoing any interest in entrepreneurship whatsoever, and I repeat at much lower wages than what you currently earn, you can probably avoid the dozens to hundreds of hours of research this will all entail. Or, you can throw money at the problem and eventually smart well-remunerated individuals will figure it all out for you. But walk into this with open eyes as to what it actually means in the worst case scenario.
If that's all okay with you, the good news is that most issues can be dealt with eventually if you leave with enough money and live frugally enough to get all the paperwork out of the way. I would strongly advise you to pick a handful of countries you're interested and research the passport and visa process, and to try to get that sorted out well before you actually make the move. This is not what I did, and ultimately I'm happy with my decision, but I was in very unusual personal circumstances and had to move decisively at the time or risk losing something very dear to me.
TL;DR: Have a lot of money. Expect to lose all of it slowly over the years and never make it back. Plan the visa/passport thoroughly. Never let it escape your conscious until everything is totally squared away. Expect the process to take up 5 to 10 years of your adult life before that happens.
I would assume that only applies to the special tax-advantaged things listed, does it also apply to a generic brokerage account?
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/US_tax_pitfalls_for_a_US_per...