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Comment by bradleyjoyce | Hacker News Reader

When I read stories like this I often wonder, would I do things any differently if/when I have that much money?

Would you?

No, you wouldn't. The thing is that all that top wealth is managed by a group of accountants and lawyers. Highly professional accountants and lawyers. (My friend is an accountant here in Silicon Valley who manages wealth for billionaires in a large accounting firm. He describes me some ways how they manage wealth.) So these people's role role, their only role, is wealth preservation, meaning tax minimization and avoidance. They know all the laws, rules and regulations, and they have fiduciary duty to manage the wealth efficiently and conservatively. Hence they will go to tax heavens and offshore, if needed.

Then I guess the question becomes, you appear in an article in Bloomberg about how you are using this loophole. Now what do you do?

So, every time a story like this comes up, it makes me wonder... Does anyone offer services like this for non-millionaires and non-billionaires?

Probably not, because it's not worth their time.

If you're not in the highest marginal rate bracket, or most of your income is not investment income, it's generally not worth the expense of paying for these services.

Fees for these services generally start at $10,000, and only go up from there.

Out of curiosity, is any of this process of moving money around amenable to automation? Can the "rules" be systematized in software?

Yes, but the process of creating and more importantly updating that software would involve so much human input that you wouldn't end up with much of a net gain in terms of time or costs saved.

US federal tax laws change every year, and are so interconnected that quite frequently small changes in one tax law can have massive impacts on entirely different areas of law. And that doesn't even take into account state and local taxes, or the taxes of the foreign jurisdictions you'd be dealing with, or the impacts that tax treaties could have, or even the impact that non-tax laws may have on financial transactions.

Felix Salmon has an article discussing a couple of such services.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/12/10/how-online-...

Sure, but the cost will probably consume your entire savings.

These guys do:

http://patrioticmillionaires.org

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