Long-time readers will know that has long been about increasing optionality and resiliency, and those are good things.

Yet the cost of those improvements is often increased complexity.

Family medical events in the last six weeks have driven home the price of complexity.

I’ve found myself in the middle of a case study involving diminished capacity, aging, and dependency.

Through many prudent actions, especially of course nutrition and exercise, we can — perhaps — defer that time, but eventually it arrives for each of us.

To that end, I’ve directed a lot of thought and action to reviewing how my household would function without me.

A truly useful system for family and household continuity and resiliency has to function well not only across economic volatility, institutional incompetency, and authoritarian hostility — it has to perform well when the system’s designer may also be impaired, degraded, unavailable, or gone.

If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you’re that “system designer” for yourself, or your family.

I want to share what I’ve been working on, in the hopes it will be useful for you.

The “Proof Map” for your household

I started with a detailed table, one that keeps growing and becoming more refined.

I call it a “proof map”, but you could also call it a “household systems inventory”.

The map includes several domains.

I may add more, but so far, this is what it includes:

• Communications

• Social Media

• Licensure

• Identity

• Banking

• Finance

• Private Investments

• Real Property

• Personal Property

• Education

• Health Care

• Health Insurance

• Life & Disability Insurance

• Liability Insurance

• Social Security

• Fiduciary Commitments

• Beneficial Interests

• Memberships

• Premises Access

• Credit Files

• Archives.

That’s a lot to keep track of.

Questions as you build your own “Proof Map”

Your list of domains may well be shorter. It might be longer.

It should probably be different than mine, because everyone’s circumstances are unique.

But the underlying questions in building a domains list for your own proof map have shared themes for everyone.

• Who are you?

• What do you own, and what do you owe?

• How can you prove it?

• How can you communicate?

• How do you maintain secure access to those means of communications?

• What are the institutions that “gate” your access to what you own, and what you need?

• How can you interact with them, prove who you are, and get what you own, or what you need?

• Which jurisdictions control where you can live and travel?

• Which jurisdictions could plausibly claim you owe them money? How do you interact with them, prove who you are, and prove you’ve complied?

• On what time frames do your various licenses, permissions, identity, and travel documents expire?

• How do you pay for things? If one means of payment is impaired, what backup arrangements could be made?

• If things don’t get paid for, on what time frame does your life degrade, and what will happen?

Case studies to think about are means of payment for communications tools like email and phones, or the amount of funds stored in the account from which your mortgage gets paid.

Let’s take a happier example than a stroke.

If you were on a faraway beach (say, in Uruguay), but somehow cut off from communications, how long would your life in the “real world” run unimpaired? Who could step in and run things for you? How could they get the access and operational knowledge they need, to do what needs doing?

If you lost your phone, how would your answers to the questions above change?

If your house was inaccessible (for instance, because your neighborhood was cordoned off with a gas leak, or there was a fire), how would your answers to the questions above change?

If you made a snap decision to relocate to a different jurisdiction, and weren’t on US cellular networks and didn’t have access to your house any longer, how would your answers to the questions above change?

The questions inform your own list of domains, or categories, that you could outline, and start working on.

In this scope of work, there is ample “partial credit” and the good is by no means the enemy of the “later it will be closer to perfect.”

If you start this scope of work and persistently keep working on it, and your experience is like mine, you will find yourself uncovering hidden gaps and vulnerabilities, increasing your peace of mind, finding excess items you can cut, and interesting ways to save money — all in a mashup, all sort of bundled up with each other, all at the same time.

Taken in isolation, none of these steps is particularly glamorous:

• Reducing risks from phishing attacks and cascading impacts of any individual compromised account by setting up multi-factor authentication or passkeys on all critical online accounts, and looking at hardware keys like Yubikey as a next step.

• Protecting continuity of communications by adding redundant payment methods to my VOIP phone line provider (Callcentric) and refreshing all of my eSIMs.

• Shrinking my attack surface to identity fraud by freezing my files at all the major credit bureaus and my information with Chex Systems, establishing an “IP PIN” with the IRS, and putting a hold on my SSN with the government’s “eVerify” system for employment eligibility.

• De-stressing my annual or biennial professional licensure and continuing education reporting, renewals, and fee payments by taking a detailed inventory of them, and linking them to recurring calendar reminders.

• Boosting the resiliency of my “identity stack” by scanning various passports and IDs for the US and Uruguay, and my Canadian citizenship certificate application files into encrypted USB flash drives, and secure online storage.

• Inventorying, confirming, securing, and cleaning up login and account information across all bank and financial providers.

And there is a lot more work to do, including obtaining and scanning copies or summaries of all relevant insurance policies, health records, deeds, and transcripts.

I hope this work will help me in several ways.

First, if I have a health event, or if I’m arrested or detained by the Regime (it happened to a close friend earlier this year), Mrs. EP and my backup attorneys-in-fact will have an actual map of what is going on in my life and our family’s life, with detailed, useful comments and instructions about how to keep it running with as little impairment as possible. They’ll know what’s there, how to get to it, what it’s for, and whom the key points of contact are.

Second, if there is a degraded operational environment, whether from cyberattacks, hostile state or non-state actors, or otherwise, or there are just ordinary “bad things” like a flood, fire, or sustained power failure, because systems have been inventoried, mapped, understood, and segmented, the risk of an unconstrained cascading or unrecoverable disruption is much less. One of these events would be bad, but the “panic” and “confusion” steps would be so much more limited, and efforts at rebuilding and connecting would be much more efficient.

Third, this helps our family whether we stay, or whether we go. The detailed housekeeping and organization will absolutely be necessary if we were to move abroad (e.g., Canada, or Uruguay), whether in a planned way, or on short notice. Beyond that, however, it will also be just as useful to prepare for a time of older age and diminished capacity in the far future, even if we’ve stayed in the US.

There’s no downside, if it’s done right. (Like, for instance, be smart about security, and not putting critical account numbers, logins, or passwords" into any physical or online document that isn’t appropriately secured.)

There’s only upside: being better able to handle your business, run your household, and enjoy greater peace of mind.

I’ve also experienced in the last few years several ways (whether with family health events, or an unexpected need to travel) that life isn’t predictable or consistent.

Sometimes life is “normal” and you can pay attention to things, and keep it all tidy. Other times, you have less bandwidth for “life administration.”

Building your “proof map” and having it available as a ready reference really helps with that: at times when you can’t focus on everything, you can triage what most needs your limited attention, what the relevant time frames are, how things could be delegated, and how long it would be before an oversight or gap snowballs into larger consequences.

The “proof map” becomes something you can review on a monthly or quarterly basis — a gentle reminder to do things without panic, like quoting homeowner’s insurance renewal pricing and renewing your car tags. Far in advance of any lapse or problem.

You’ll probably see accounts you can consolidate, processes you can simplify, or things you can delegate (a modified version of the classic “start doing, stop doing, do more, do less, or delegate” type of analysis for any recurring item or project).

This all fits in a broader context: quantum computing is coming, and I don’t purport to understand it well, at all. But when it arrives, we should expect the unexpected. The scarcest resources, the gates, the “limiting reagents” if you will — won’t be information — they’ll be proof, verification, and trust.

Being able to calmly, reliably, and consistently prove things we take for granted right now — like who you are, what you own, where you can travel, how you’ve complied, and how you’re credentialed — is what may become truly scarce.

We are living, as Adam Tooze has covered well, in a time of “polycrisis” — it can feel as if everything is going wrong, everywhere, all at once.

The polycrisis may last longer than any of us.

Our task, then, becomes one of living meaningfully, and well, during the time things are so messed up, rather than waiting for them to get better.

A scope of work, like the “proof map” or “resilience inventory” we’ve discussed, that can make you and the people you care about safer and calmer, is useful positive action you can take — one that improves your outcomes across almost any future scenario.

Why not get started now?

On a humid Northern Hemisphere summer’s day filled with birdsong in Midwestern City, this is sending good wishes for health and safety, and resilience and optionality. We don’t know where travels may take us, but somehow, as always, we’re here to stay.

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It’s a story about what optionality can provide: the opportunity to respond decisively to a situation that appears in your life, and show up for the people who matter to you.

It’s also a reflection on what makes optionality possible in the first place — which is so much more than preparation.

Ultimately, the most powerful elements in optionality are about relationships and people.

An event, a call, a decision

The call came in the early evening a few weeks ago, when I was watching a high school lacrosse game with Mrs EP and Young EP, a long drive away from Midwestern City.

It was my aunt, calling from northern New England. My father had had a stroke. He’d fallen off his tractor, and been dragged to the house on a blanket and driven to the hospital.

We agreed to keep in touch; he was being cared for. There wasn’t a lot I could do.

The next day, at work, I was thinking about my father.

I didn’t like the idea of him weak, frail, disoriented, and afraid.

I looked at my calendar for that day and the next, and it was light. I made a quick decision: I was going to drive up to visit him, and go through Canada to get there.

Why drive, and not fly? By the time I waited for a flight, arrived in New England, rented a car, and got up to where he is, it wouldn’t be all that different of an arrival time. I also didn’t know how long it would make sense to stay up there with him.

Driving north rather than south of Lake Erie would only add about an hour to the trip, and I could finish the in-person part of my account opening at the Royal Bank of Canada.

Right or wrong, it was a snap decision, and I made it.

I went home, quickly packed a bag, and tossed in some cash (for the bank deposit), my passport and Global Entry card, and my car title and registration.

Less than an hour after that decision in my office, I was leaving my house, headed north.

I want to take a moment to observe just how supportive Mrs. EP was about the whole thing. She thought it was more sensible to fly, but didn’t protest too much. More importantly, she was reliably and cheerfully present to take care of EP Dog and Young EP while I was telling her “I’m not quite sure when I’ll be back.”

But family’s very important to Mrs. EP and she has a large one, so she gets it. I’m grateful for her support in this whole episode.

A 950-mile, 23-hour real-world test

The drive to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was sunny but not too hot, and didn’t have too much traffic. Less than 5 hours after I left the office, I was through the border crossing (maybe my Canadiens hat helped?) and pulled over at a nearby parking lot in Windsor, getting my bearings.

Windsor felt like Dayton, Ohio, or Worcester, Massachusetts, but with different flags, and speed limits in kilometers.

I drove over to an RBC branch, and did the steps to finish opening my account. They made it easy, and I recommend their cross-border offering to anyone back and forth between the US and Canada.

Daylight for travel was a wasting asset, so I got back to the main business, which was getting to my father.

The drive through Ontario’s farmland towards the “Golden Horseshoe” of Toronto, Hamilton, and St. Catharines was uncrowded and very pretty. Windmills everywhere - giant wind farms practically as far as the eye could see.

And lots of “we really mean it; we’re not kidding” types of signs about not speeding. There weren’t billboards. The countryside looked tidy, highly valued, and well-managed.

I got pretty good at multiplying KPH speed limits signs by 0.62, just to pass the time.

Night had come, and I crossed back into the US at Queenston. Maybe CBP was bored. Maybe Global Entry helped. In any case, the return crossing was a non-event.

My goal was to get as far as I could into New York by about 1:00 AM, when I wanted to stop before getting too tired.

I made it to the Finger Lakes area. The motel was pretty ratty, but it was enough, and I was only going to be there for about five hours to crash anyway.

The tolls on the New York State Thruway aren’t cheap, but the terrain is pretty and there’s virtually no traffic. The next morning I made it to Albany pretty quickly, and started taking conference calls for work while threading my way into New England.

With a very bug-spattered windshield and several empty diet Red Bull cans rattling around the passenger seat footwells, I pulled into the parking lot at the hospital about 23.5 hours after I’d gotten up from my desk in Midwestern City. Elapsed distance was 950 miles, more or less.

My aunt knew I was coming up, but I wanted to just surprise my father.

And it was a surprise for him. He was very glad I’d made the trip.

My father has had a complicated life, and there aren’t that many people he’s still close to other than my aunt and me.

My work with older wealthy people has had me in and out of hospitals very often over the years, so on one hand there was nothing surprising about it. Even so, it’s still a head-spinner when the person who’s had the stroke is your parent: the person who used to fix everything for you is now the one who’s weak, confused, and needs help.

I was up there for about a day and a half, spending almost all the time being a quiet, supportive presence in his hospital room, talking with the hospital staff, and working on logistics for a return home or, if needed, to a rehabilitation hospital.

I stayed at my aunt’s house overnight, surrounded by familiar old books, pictures, and paintings, with wizened ancient apple trees just up the hill in the pasture.

The return south

By the middle of the afternoon on the next day, it was time to return south (I didn’t want to leave work or my family for too long, and we’re going to be back up with my father in New England for a few days this coming week).

I decided to be even more efficient on the return trip, and that day I stopped only once, for about nine minutes total, for fuel and “food” on the New York State Thruway.

By 1:30am I’d made it to a good stopping point in Ontario. There was ferocious rain at the Niagara border crossing, but very little traffic and no wait.

The next morning, I woke up early, and stopped for the morning service at a historic Anglican church. It turned out to have an expat American rector and a friendly congregation. (Dogs were welcome, too.)

At a time when so much has been changing, it was good to be in a setting like that church, where somehow everything felt the same.

It was time to keep moving, and soon I was back in Windsor, near the Ambassador Bridge. Once across the border, it was a quick and uneventful run back to Midwestern City.

Lessons learned

What did I learn on this trip?

People, relationships, and trust are everything.

Why was I able to just get up and go, to do this, and be with my father, and move across borders, and have it all be pretty easy?

Sure, it’s sort of about passports and Global Entry and bank accounts and money.

But it was so very much more about a few critical people, relationships, and the invisible “trust bank” associated with them.

My colleagues at work could cover for me.

My immediate boss and the head of our business unit trust me. I’m reliable and contributory, so on the rare occasions when I say I need to do something, not only do they let me do it, they’re genuinely thoughtful and kind about it all.

Mrs. EP trusts me, and is supremely capable. Not once during the unexpected long weekend did I ever worry that Young EP and everything at home was ship-shape and well covered.

My aunt and I are close and in good touch and we could cooperate and collaborate, delegating back and forth, each of us confident in the other.

When something very unexpected happens, maybe even rising to the level of a “crisis,” the people in your life and their trust in you will be what you have.

Far beyond your various financial account balances, what do the accounts in your “trust bank” look like?

On whom can you really rely? How do they feel about you? Do you have balances with them you can draw on?

Have you treated them well enough and invested in them enough where you won’t feel awkward or sheepish about drawing on those balances when needed?

Life goes by so much faster than you expect, and unfortunately the time is coming for each of us when we will be pretty dependent, frail, and perhaps disoriented, confused, and afraid.

It all emphasized for me that things may “involve” me, but they’re not “about” me.

Being with my father in the hospital and reflecting on all the elements and crosscurrents of that overall story and situation brought home with great clarity that the projects and purposes of midlife and beyond aren’t about accumulation or achievement.

They’re about appreciation, and service.

Not what you own. Not what you do.

Rather, how fully you can experience and be grateful for the present moment.

And what you can give and contribute.

Still having the capacity and ability to appreciate, and to be of service, is a tremendous gift.

I “knew” that before, but after this episode, I really know it.

Most of us with whom Expat Prep resonates are hard at work adjusting and adapting, because we can’t honestly say we’re confident America remains trustworthy.

That’s true.

Even so, as we work on residencies, second citizenships, and various forms of increasing resiliency, the curious and inescapable reality is that trust (as it becomes scarcer) has never been more necessary, and more valuable.

If you take nothing else from this, take encouragement from me to do a realistic inventory of the most important people in your life, carefully consider how you’re investing in them, and be just as purposeful about those investments as you are about any other planning you do.

Sending you best wishes for warm relationships, health, and safety alongside ever-growing optionality, this is Expat Prep, and whether in Canada, the US, or Uruguay, we are here to stay.

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The Regime showed its control over its muppets legislators, with the destruction of Cornyn and Massie. It also arrogated unto itself the power not only to impound, but to appropriate, with its insultingly scaled $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund.

Perhaps even worse was its shameless declaration that the income tax laws now apply “for thee, but not for me.”

In terms of pushback, nothing meaningful happened. Behind closed doors, a few GOP Senators reportedly said they were upset. Nothing meaningful will happen.

This is the week when the last few strands of ambiguity fell away:

Eventually, That Man will die.

Then, and perhaps only then, this phase of our national humiliation will come to a close.

Until then, for those of us who refuse to submit, who decline to participate in the charade, and who can’t even pretend that they believe any longer, what are we to do?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this.

The answers I’m circling around aren’t satisfying, but they may be useful.

We should return to first principles: what is it we’re trying to defend?

I believe that the answer is: SOVEREIGNTY.

A useful working definition of sovereignty is maintaining freedom from coercion.

de Gaulle understood this.

And, as he showed in his brilliant Davos speech earlier this year, so too does Mark Carney.

Protecting sovereignty starts with realizing when it’s under threat.

That realization should, with respect to those of us who are citizens of the United States, be rather obvious.

The “rules-based international order” that started with (take your pick) the Atlantic Charter, Bretton Woods, the UN, Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay, or the founding of NATO is finished.

Over.

Done.

And, as Carney noted, even though it was a useful fiction, we shouldn’t mourn it.

What’s also quite relevant for our purposes is how the “rules-based order” has been blown to smithereens here, at home.

The Regime sees us as subjects to exploit, marks for its carnival barker, and objects to manipulate.

Just as Carney spoke of “middle powers” finding a way to protect sovereignty as the world goes “full Hobbesian,” so too here at home, families that aren’t billionaires and tech oligarchs have to find a way to preserve their own sovereignty, despite living in the Regime’s Mafia State.

What follows is not a fantasy of family-level autarky. No household can become a country. No family can fully insulate itself from the failures of the society around it. Even so, households, like nations, have dependencies, vulnerabilities, reserves, alliances, archives, borders, missions, and choices.

Seeing those clearly is the beginning of sovereignty.

For families, as for nations, exercising sovereignty requires competency across several domains, including:

Defense & security

Can your family live in safety?

Does that look like choice of location, securing your home, or developing responsible storage, training, and use capacity for your own means of defense?1

Logistics

Can you move reliably where you need to go, when you need to? (Meticulously maintaining your means of transportation is a critical element of sovereignty.)

Can you ensure adequate supplies of clean drinking water, food, warmth, and illumination when your operating environment is degraded by weather, natural disasters, state or institutional incompetence, or malicious state or non-state actors?

For how long? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? Longer?

What is the right balance of mobility and logistical depth for your family?

Treasury

Do you have the spare financial capacity (savings, investments, untapped credit, etc.) to access money to secure opportunities and solve problems?

If you needed to buy $15,000 of plane tickets for your family on short notice, could you?

If you lost your job (perhaps permanently, perhaps because of AI), how long could you last before you got zeroed out?

Is your cost structure under control relative to your income and your asset base? What is the term structure of your assets and liabilities? If you needed to cut expenditure, could you? Do you know how you’d do it, if you had to?

Do you know your assets, liabilities, net worth, burn rate, and sustainable go-forward lifetime spending level? How’s your credit rating? In which countries do you have a credit rating?

What custodial and currency risks are you exposed to? Are they sufficiently diversified?

Money certainly doesn’t solve all problems, but not having enough of it typically makes most other problems much more difficult to solve.

Foreign affairs

Do you have a passport? Can you travel? And if so, where? For how long? Under what restrictions?

Having access to more than one country where you can live and work makes you much more difficult to coerce and control.

Residency options are an important start, and multiple citizenships are a tremendous upgrade.

Managing the international affairs function well can improve outcomes across several domains at once, including Healthcare, Education, Defense & Security, Logistics, and Treasury.

That’s because changing where you live might provide access to free or nearly-free healthcare, free or lower-cost education, distance from war zones, mass shootings, and gun violence, access to better infrastructure, and the lower cost structure offered by geoarbitrage.

Intelligence

Do you know enough (but not too much) about what’s happening, and can you trust your sources of information?

Especially under conditions of epistemic fragmentation and overload, it’s important to curate your information intake and keep up with the correct volume (not too little, not too much) of high-quality information.

If you include in that, thank you, and if not, I understand — time and attention are precious.

As for myself, I read feeds from the NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Atlantic, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as my Substack feed. I try to balance reporting on events (the “what”) with analysis (the “why”).

When I consume news media, I try to bear three questions in mind: (1) Does this information give rise to an investment decision; (2) Does this information change the outcome or timing of my expatriation decision; and (3) Does this information indicate I should take any other sort of action?

If the answer to each question is “no,” then I try to move on. Doomscrolling is the enemy of happiness, peace of mind, and effectively exercising agency.

Archives

Can you prove who you are and what you own? Can you do that under degraded logistic conditions, under pressure and on the move?

If so, then well done. And if not, then fix that.

Nation-states maintain archives, and you should too. Having several copies of birth certificates on hand for every family member, at least one or two of which are apostilled, is a good start.

Maintaining paper copies, as well as securely stored physical electronic (flash drive) and cloud-based (for instance, Proton) copies, makes lots of sense. Print, store, and scan statements, deeds, insurance policies, marriage certificates, medical records, pet ownership files, vaccination records, diplomas, tax returns, etc.

None of this is glamorous. Almost all of it might turn out to be invaluable.

I had an excellent test-case of this recently with respect to our Canadian citizenship certificate applications.

In the early 1970s, when my late grandfather was a little older than I am now, he had done a lot of work on his family’s genealogy. Between the contents of his archives and my own prior work, as soon as it turned out to be relevant (in such a wonderful surprise), I already had copies of my birth certificate, my mother’s birth certificate, my grandfather’s birth certificate (a copy requested in 1942), my great-grandmother’s death certificate (from 1981), her birth certificate (a copy requested in 1926), her baptismal records (a copy likewise requested in 1926), and my great-great grandfather’s original naturalization certificate from 1892.

Because our family already had all of this information, I was able to pull together our applications in only 15 days, rather than several months. I was able to share all the work across our extended family, with the result that well over 30 of my relatives have the option (although it remains to be seen whether they’ll act on it) to “cut-and-paste” their own way to Canadian passports, with an absolute minimum of time and effort.

When wait times at Canada’s IRCC are increasing as much as two to three months with every month that passes, the quality of the archive may result in Young EP and me having Canadian passports 9 to 12 months sooner than would otherwise be the case.

Doing this work when you have time, before you need it, gives you surge capacity to seize opportunities when they present, and the latent option to move fast.

Build and protect your archive.

Alliances & Credentials

In which relationships, friendships, and networks are you embedded? How can you help others, and how might you be able to call upon others to help you?

The most resilient setup probably relies upon both deep ties as well as “weak ties” across many different contexts and geographies.

It’s a lot less instrumental and far more gratifying when the ability to draw upon these connections is a byproduct of what you’ve already invested and contributed, rather than the motive for your getting or staying connected in the first place.

Relatedly, what sort of professional licensure, credentials, or portfolio do you have, or can you build, that will serve to translate your human capital into a different setting, giving you many more options for how you can produce income, and where you can do it.

For me, one example is the work I’ve started to use my US CFP professional designation as an accelerator for getting the Canadian CFP designation. I don’t think that at late mid-career I’d be too terribly compelling to Canadian employers, but being able to produce even some income abroad (in addition to the draw you need to take from your own capital) extends runway.

It also makes you “convex to time” (which is one of the very best things — a state of being in the world where the more time passes, the more good things are likely to happen to or for you, rather than the reverse, where you’re inevitably headed towards the x-intercept).

Communications & Information Security

Can you regain access to and rebuild your critical communication platforms like email, messaging apps, and cell phone access from anywhere in the world on short notice, even without the cooperation of Regime-linked major cell carriers?

Do you have redundant ways to receive and send critical communications?

What is your password discipline? If one account is hacked, is the damage contained? How vulnerable are you to account takeover fraud (see “Treasury” above for the value of multiple custodians across multiple geographies), or to a “SIM swap” attack?

Do you avoid posting foolish things, while keeping your various platforms (be they LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, Instagram etc.) “on brand” and live, so if you had to get out a message directly, or indirectly through friends and allies, you could?

We’ve covered this in some depth here - step by step - and invite you to “level up” your capabilities in this domain today:

Healthcare

Who controls your access to healthcare? An employer? A government program? A huge insurance company indifferent to your welfare? How much do you rely on healthcare? What are you doing to maintain and improve your own nutrition, fitness, physical health, and mental and emotional health?

For US-based American citizens, healthcare may be one of the largest gaps in sovereignty. Making progress on “Foreign Relations” can really help. My Uruguayan residency gives me emergency health care access, almost cost-free, for the price of a plane ticket. Likewise, my Canadian citizenship (once certificated) gives me another way to get free or low-cost healthcare.

Maybe one starts the whole international thing for the beaches and umbrella drinks. But if you choose wisely, along the way you can substantially improve your access to healthcare, and yes, your basic human dignity.

Education/Culture

Who shapes the intellectual and cultural future of your family? Schools you support and believe in? Or tech companies’ algorithms? What are you doing to preserve, protect, and transmit culture, and the capacity to recognize the true, beautiful, and good?

Your attention, and the attention of those in your care, is the new monetizable product, the newest “commons” to enclose for profit. If you don’t have a plan for continuing education, learning, and cultural expression and appreciation — trust me, someone else does, and they probably don’t have your best interest at heart.

So, in the midst of everything else, take a moment to think about this, and take positive action. Culture will last longer than you will. And that means that possibly it might matter most.

Purpose/mission/ideology

At Davos, Carney spoke about Canada as a case study — and how sovereignty wasn’t only a matter of the value of strength, but also the strength of values.

Autonomy and survival amidst threats and adversity should have a purpose.

You have to know what you’re doing it all for.

EP family is about Constitutional government, and liberal democracy. We are about respecting the best of the Western tradition and carrying it forward and about making a modest impact on the world that reduces suffering and increases beauty. We exercise agency, and we seek to empower others to discover and act upon their own agency.

What are you about?

If you can’t answer that question clearly, start thinking hard about it!

Your Sovereignty Is Dynamic, Not Static

These core elements of sovereignty are playing out in a “battle space” of sorts. Like any mob bosses, the Regime wants to entrench itself, strip our freedom, and take our assets, dignity, and agency.

They struggle against us.

We, quietly, struggle against them.

It’s like “Spy vs. Spy” - except it isn’t cute, it’s not particularly funny, and the stakes are much higher.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider how this connects with the work of great twentieth-century strategists like B. H. Liddell Hart and John Boyd.

The key insight is that when you expand your sovereignty, you expand your “maneuver space.” A close correlate of maneuver space is “decision latency,” which is the ability you have to defer decisions, without harm to yourself.

If maneuver space is agency and choice across space, across place, and across terrain, then decision latency is what extends maneuver space across time.

Maneuver space might be the “mother lode” concept of because it so closely relates to “optionality,” another of our favorite old chestnuts.

When you have more maneuver space, you have more choices, and it becomes much harder for outside forces to impose choices on you. You can adapt to a changing situation on your own terms.

When you have decision latency, you don’t need to make irreversible choices about how to adapt to changing conditions quickly.

Both are invaluable.

When you look back on our modest little “canon” of work here at you can see that underlying all the tactics about residency, passports, gold, FX, eSIMs, diversification, etc. there are common foundational ideas:

These are always good ways to focus your efforts, but in a context where old illusions must be set aside, and we’re all called upon to preserve our dignity and agency amidst absurd levels of volatility, perhaps they’ve never been more important.

With solidarity for all the “middle powers” at home and abroad, who pursue quiet sovereignty rather than submission, this is , and whether onshore or overseas, we are here to stay.

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It’s been a very busy few weeks for , with the end of the semester in a graduate program I’m doing part-time, and also with some adjunct teaching.

I’ve also (very ironically) been tasked by the C-suite at my workplace with advising on AI’s implications for our business unit, and how we should incorporate AI into our service offering and workflows.

Going beyond and into industry-specific effects and seeing first-hand management’s thinly-veiled focus on just how much headcount elimination AI will support is rather harrowing.

I didn’t want to be right. I would so much rather have been wrong.

Unfortunately, the curve is fitting more closely than not onto what Citrini outlined less than 90 days ago:

Citrini Research

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

Preface…

Read more

6 months ago · 9137 likes · 90 comments · Citrini and Alap Shah

I am running my own life under the assumption that the next 30 to 36 months are the last “conventional form” or “normal” or “big” job-related income I will have.

I feel trite thinking that way, because its so millenarian and if we learned nothing from the Cathars, the Munster Anabaptists, and even the “Peak Oil” crowd of the Aughts, it’s that there is a pretty massive opportunity cost to an early call on the “End of the World.”

At least in this case, if I’m wrong, I’ll have accomplished a lot of capital formation and be all the closer to retiring early.

All of the above aside, what I’ve been the most busy about in the last few weeks is Canadian citizenship by descent.

I feel wildly lucky about this recently discovered opportunity and development in my life. I don’t assert any claim to deserving it.

Even so, sometimes life hands you a “free gift” and in those instances, the correct answer is to just say “Yes.”

Which is what I’m doing.

In the last two weeks, I’ve done a self-directed crash course on Bill C-3 which became Canadian law on December 15, 2025.

For a fortunate subset of Americans, the implications are enormous.

I’m going to provide a little bit of TL;DR to cut through a lot of the commentary you might see out there.

I’ve read Canada’s Citizenship Act very closely and I’m satisfied with the accuracy of the summary below:

You’re a Canadian citizen right now by operation of Canadian law if you were born outside Canada before December 15, 2025 to a person (or a descendant of a person) who emigrated from Canada and naturalized as a US citizen before January 1, 1947.

Note that there is no generational limit on how far back you can “be Canadian” and still qualify as a citizen.

If the above applies to you, and you want to say “Yes” to what might be the most amazing piece of serendipity you will ever receive in your life, then you need to file an Application for Certificate of Citizenship.

There is a fee. It’s CAD$ 75. That’s USD $54.86. YES it is worth it.

The backlog in processing is currently 10 months, and it’s rising fast, because of course I’m not alone in viewing this as something extraordinary that warrants immediate attention and action.

But in due course, you’ll be issued your certificate of citizenship, and then in short order, you can use it to apply for and receive a Canadian passport.

(The synonym for that is “Freedom Card”, in case you were wondering.)

You can travel to, live, and work in Canada as much as you want to. You can sponsor a non-Canadian spouse for emigration. If you move to Canada, you can sign up for provincial health care in Canada. Your children can attend Canadian universities at dramatically reduced tuition rates. Between ages 18-35, they can easily work and travel in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and France.

And, like Timothy Snyder, you could once again say what you actually believe (under your own name, not a pseudonym), without fear that DHS, ICE, and the rest of the Regime will revoke your passport, trapping you in the Regime’s America.

You can adopt a (Canadian) hockey team, and the Toronto Blue Jays.

Young EP and I have adopted the Canadiens (go Habs)!

You can travel to Canada’s overseas sugar islands in the Caribbean and their legacy League of Nations-mandate guano islands in the South Pacific.

The above list of advantages has been breezy and cheerful, but I want to be serious for a moment and say how deeply appreciative my family is for this opportunity.

It feels like a gift from prior generations, and from Canada itself.

No matter where on the tourist-occasional to frequent visitor-seasonal resident-retiree-full emigrant spectrum we may find ourselves, we will always treat our Canadian citizenship with immense gratitude and respect.

Long-time readers will know that I’m from New England, and according to some estimates, up to 25% of New Englanders might now be Canadian citizens.

If you want to explore whether this might apply to you, I think the fastest way to get started is Ancestry.com (or, although it’s name is tacky, Findagrave.com). In a matter of a few hours, you’ll probably be shocked at what you can trace back and find out. If there’s enough “breadcrumbs” you see out there leading back to Canada, then get started building your chain of genealogical proofs.

That means getting birth certificates (long form) for yourself, your parent who rolls back up towards Canada, and on up the chain. Also get copies of marriage certificates. Dig in, and look for census records, newspaper obituaries, draft cards, etc.

I think you’ll be amazed at what’s out there.

The documents have stories to tell, if you know how to look for them.

For Canadian records, one of the best sources is Genealogie Quebec.

Once you’ve gathered your (at least unofficial) proofs, consider hiring a genealogist to help you assemble the information into a from that’s as “IRCC-friendly” as possible.

You might also try to engage a Canadian lawyer to help (I tried) — but either they are completely overwhelmed by the level of demand, or Canadian legal culture about returning emails and phone calls is different than American legal culture.

The application just requires careful, meticulous work, and if you can supply the necessary level of discipline yourself, you might do fine without a lawyer’s help.

For any of you out there who have already realized you’re Canadian citizens by descent — maybe it’s made you feel the way it’s made me feel:

Wildly grateful.

Very excited.

A lot more relaxed.

Super-focused on getting the puck into the goal, and finishing the project to the point of passport issuance.

For those of you out there who are now Canadian, like myself and Young EP, congratulations! Get started on your genealogical work, get those citizenship certificate applications filed, and let’s look forward to an IRL meetup north of the border sometime soon!

As the world continues to present serendipitous promise in the midst of peril, this is , and whether it’s in Midwest City, the beaches of Punta del Este, or repatriated to our Canadian home, we are here to stay.

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As I’ve been tending to matters of agency and morale in the midst of current events, including the United States’ slow-motion, inept “Suez” in Iran, what has come ever more to mind are stories from the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race to sail solo around the world, nonstop.1

The story of that Race is better than any screenwriter could imagine, and it’s all true.

The Golden Globe race and its contestants

The Race’s route would start from Britain, run down through the Atlantic, drop into the “Roaring Forties” and “Furious Fifties” at Cape of Good Hope, run hard east through the most dangerous oceans in the world, past Cape Leeuwin, through the far Southern Pacific, round Cape Horn, and then finish up through the Atlantic back to Britain.

The Race had nine entrants who were, by turns, accomplished, eccentric, colorful, and foolhardy. Five dropped out before or shortly after clearing the Cape of Good Hope, leaving only four to continue the race.2

These were:

Donald Crowhurst.

Born in India to English parents, Crowhurst owned a small, struggling marine electronics company.

Restless and in search of adventure, with almost no long-distance sailing experience, he hoped a successful finish in the race would save his business through positive publicity.

His finances were perilous, and his boat (the trimaran Teignmouth Electron) was mortgaged to his backers. Crowhurst entered the race late and started with his boat’s construction and fitting out untested and haphazard.

Nigel Tetley. A South African veteran of the Royal Navy and experienced sailor, Tetley entered the race with the Victress, a novel and very fast plywood trimaran.

Robin Knox-Johnston.

A merchant mariner and member of the Royal Naval Reserve, Knox-Johnston had accumulated long-distance sailing experience on the Suhaili, a 44-foot single-hull ketch.3

Bernard Moitessier.

Born in French Indochina and easily the most enigmatic of the entrants, Moitessier had massive prior sailing experience on his custom-designed steel single-hull 39-foot ketch, Joshua.4

Moitessier was a prolific author, and could he ever turn a phrase.5

Here he is, writing about Cape Horn:

You seriously can’t make this stuff up. (As we shall see, Moitessier had more surprises in store.)

The Race unfolds

In the summer of 1968, the contestants began to depart from Britain.6

There were two awards in play — a trophy for the first to finish, and a prize of £5,000 (about $150,000 in today’s money) for the fastest finisher.

Tetley, Knox-Johnston, and Moitessier cruised down the South Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and dropped into the Roaring Forties, bound for Australia.

Crowhurst departed late, and began to radio back reports of astonishing single-day distances covered as he appeared to be catching up to the others.

But those reports were fake.

Crowhurst realized shortly after his departure that his boat wouldn’t stand up to the punishment offered by the Southern Ocean.7

Rash but not then suicidal, Crowhurst hatched another plan — he’d loiter off the South American coast, making false navigational logs and sending false position reports, until he was passed by other contestants.

Then he’d drop in behind them, and sail north back to Britain, still reporting false positions, finishing with comfortable anonymity at or near the back of the pack.

Crowhurst’s false logs wouldn’t be discovered. His creditors wouldn’t take his boat. And he wouldn’t die.

It was a dishonest plan, but on its face, not a bad one.

But events, as we shall see, conspired against him.

Ever a man of the wardroom and tradition, Knox-Johnston celebrated his solo Christmas at sea in 1968 with a stiff drink of whisky, singing carols to himself, and a toast to the Queen.

Slowed by damage to his self-steering gear he couldn’t repair when south of Australia, he was losing margin to Moitessier, who had departed two months after he had.

Even so, Knox-Johnston rounded the Horn 20 days before the Frenchman. He made a safe passage north through the Atlantic, and arrived at Falmouth after 312 days at sea.

During his voyage, Moitessier had passed much of his time when becalmed doing yoga and meditating.8

He and Joshua made swift progress, rounding the Horn safely — gaining ground on Knox-Johnston, and poised to easily win the £5,000.

That’s when Moitessier (literally) took a hard right turn, and became the stuff of enduring legend.

He didn’t want to make landfall.

He didn’t want to return to Europe.

The destination, the crowds, the fame, the reporters, the money, and the Legion d’honneur — none of it appealed to him.

Moitessier decided to keep going, on to Tahiti.

He turned the tiller towards Cape Town, and announced his decision to the world by a scrawled message sling-shotted onto the deck of a passing ship:

With Moitessier out of the race, and aware of Crowhurst’s (false) reported positions and (implied) speed, Tetley incorrectly believed the pressure was on.

Victress had rounded the Horn on March 18, the first trimaran to do so. Tetley pushed hard northwards through intense storms.

His plywood boat, optimized for speed rather than durability, was coming apart.

In a storm off the Azores, Tetley sent a “mayday” radio message and abandoned ship.

The Victress sank, leaving him behind to be rescued from a life raft a day later.

Tetley had been within 1,300 miles of the finish, the prize, and home.

Crowhurst learned of Tetley’s sinking, and realized he was on track to win the prize for “fastest” circumnavigation, with all the attendant scrutiny and risk of exposure.

His radio transmissions became less frequent. His logbook reveals increasing mental distress. His last logbook entry was dated July 1, 1969.

Teignmouth Electron was found adrift at sea, empty, nine days later.

Crowhurst was never found.9

What does all this mean for those of us ashore?

Here in the United States, living la vida neoliberal, haunted by the spectre of imminent AI-related mass (and likely permanent) joblessness, many of us are (whether we like it or not) on a long journey that feels relatively solo-ish towards some measure of — call it what you will — financial sufficiency, optionality, freedom, etc.

In more optimistic times, some call this journey “FIRE” (financially independent, retire early).

Geoarbitrage or a desire to get away from encroaching authoritarianism can be part of the game, too.

Maybe now we should just be honest, and call it survival.

But whichever way, that’s the journey we’re on.

So, for many of us, I believe there are important lessons to draw from this long-ago sailing race.

They, too, were on a journey through the unknown (and unknowable) that required planning, discipline, flexibility, courage, resiliency, and stubbornness — while offering peril, beauty, accomplishment, and adventure.

What lessons might each sailor offer?

Crowhurst: Dishonesty to yourself is dangerous

When Crowhurst radioed dishonest position reports to others in an effort to fix problems that felt overwhelming to him, that wasn’t morally right.

What was even more dangerous, however, was the accumulation of creeping lies he’d told to himself.

Crowhurst’s boat wasn’t ready.

More importantly, Crowhurst himself wasn’t ready.

He told himself it was going to work, because he needed it to work, and it had to work.

But hope and need aren’t actually strategies, and the ocean doesn’t care.

Out of margin, out of options, and out of mental and emotional reserves, Crowhurst met a tragic and avoidable end.10

But he’d lost the ability to see reality clearly. And it ended terribly.

What does “Crowhursting” look like on the journey to financial independence and/or moving abroad?

Well, it might look like several things — none of them good:

• Not tracking your actual burn rate accurately, and not forecasting it honestly

• Relying on heroic forward-looking investment return assumptions, even at the end of a long bull market

• Planning your post-retirement asset drawdown strategy under the (false) assumption there is no sequence of returns risk (i.e., market crashes)

• Assuming visas and residency are things you can “figure out later” once you arrive in-country

• Building a long-term or permanent overseas move on the assumption that you will get and keep a “fully remote” job

• Building a retirement plan on the assumption that you will get and keep paid consulting or board positions, or that you will want to (or be able to) do that type of work when you’re in very old age

• Deciding on a retirement date you’re not willing to be flexible about, and then “goal-seeking” your spreadsheet to make it tell you what you want to hear

Tetley: hyper-optimized systems without margin can sink you

Tetley’s Victress was fast, innovative, and fragile. Believing that Crowhurst’s false position reports were true, Tetley was pushing not only for safe passage, but also for maximum speed.

Victress wasn’t robust enough to go the distance, and Tetley paid a stiff price when it sank, just ten days short of his arrival.

Tetley’s case study, applied to financial independence and international planning, offers several insights:

• Be humble about fragility. Over a long voyage (or a long retirement horizon), you need to not only make it most days, you need to make it all days. High average speed doesn’t ensure a safe arrival.

• Forcing a time frame creates risk, because it pushes you to prioritize return-chasing over safe arrival. Tolerating some volatility in your retirement or moving date actually makes your eventual safe arrival much more assured.

• Testing novel, mission-critical systems on the first and only voyage you take may not be wise. If you’re prioritizing for reliability rather than rate of outcome, maybe you should look carefully at position sizing on your riskier investments.

• Don’t assume your single-asset, single-custodian, single-jurisdiction portfolio — even if optimized for most days — will be there reliably and on-time like you need it to be on all days. ( has covered this before here, here, and here.)

Knox-Johnston: reliable execution with trusted systems wins the day

Knox-Johnston’s Suhaili was a single-hull ketch, a “bomb-proof” design much slower than the trimarans of Tetley and Crowhurst.

Even more importantly, Knox-Johnston was a deeply seasoned sailor who knew exactly what he was getting into.

His approach didn’t require things to work perfectly, rely on novel things, or need outcomes on any particular time frame.

Instead, Knox-Johnston was just a quiet professional, who focused on “controlling the controllables,” and staying resilient and robust about the factors he couldn’t control.

And he arrived. Safely. And, it turns out, the fastest as well.

In the areas of planning for financial independence and international optionality, what might a Knox-Johnston approach look like?

• Know yourself. Know your risk aversions, risk tolerances, and behavioral pitfalls around volatility.

• Don’t design a portfolio for maximum returns only. Also consider its volatility and robustness under adverse or unusual circumstances. (We’ve covered that before, too, here.)

• Be able to make your own expedient repairs to critical systems. For Knox-Johnston it was a leak in his boat’s hull; for you it might be loss of your cell phone while traveling. (We’ve covered options for that before, here.)

• Prior experience before the main event is invaluable. Take scouting trips, and focus those over time to build a “second home” long before you make a (long-planned or more-expedient) permanent move.

Moitessier: maybe the voyage itself is the point

Moitessier was happiest and freest when he was at sea.

He didn’t join the race to win it, and he didn’t want the extrinsic rewards it offered.

What he wanted was to spend time doing what he wanted, where he wanted.

He found what he was looking for, and this shows in his writing from The Long Way:

Moitessier was deeply engaged in what Olympic rower Brad Alan Lewis has called “the present moment of practice” — and that is such a powerful place to be.

Perhaps the best mode is Knox-Johnston’s deep knowledge, tactical consistency, and reliable persistence.

And, also, more than a little of Moitessier’s transcendence.

Where is Expat Prep himself on all this?

If I compare my own journey towards financial independence and international optionality to a circumnavigation, here is where I think I am:

• I’ve long since left port in Britain.

• I’m probably well past the Cape of Good Hope, running hard before the wind through the Southern Ocean.

• Sometimes I feel I might be getting close to “Cape Horn” — that decisive and perhaps hardest point after which you know the odds tip much more in your favor.

• But I’m not past the Horn, and the run back up north through the Atlantic will call for diligence, reliability, and humility.

The ocean and the storms never know how close you are to harbor. They just do what they do.

• I’m doing pretty well about controlling the controllables.11

• I could do better about staying calmer when the Large Uncontrollable Events happen. (I doubt Knox-Johnston or Moitessier got mad at a storm.)

• I could do better about being more patient about my time of arrival.12

I’m discovering unexpected and wonderful aspects along the way.

• Listening to waves splash at night in Colonia while the faro flashes, and I’m warmed by the radiating heat from the stones of the old fort.

• Feeling time stop and stretch on the beaches near La Barra, at what seems like the very edge of the world.

• Finding new levels of humility getting wiped out on the squash courts of Carrasco.

• Receiving so much friendship and welcome from Uruguayans, while my Spanish gets better by fits and starts.

No matter what the future holds, or the time frame on which things play out, these are all very good things, and I’m grateful.

Where are you on your own adaptations to stay effective and happy, when much of the world isn’t?

Never let anyone else take away your agency.

The relentless results of Knox-Johnston — and maybe even some of the transcendence of Moitessier — can be yours for the finding along the way.

So, safe travels, and warm wishes.

I hope, whether onshore or offshore, your explorations lead you somewhere great.13

This is Expat Prep, and we are here to stay.

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1

The Race took shape after the momentum and publicity surrounding Francis Chichester’s sail around the world in 1967 (Chichester, however, had stopped along the way in Sydney for resupply). The remaining frontier was to do something like Chichester’s “clipper route” alone, unaided, and without resupply.

5

Moitessier’s books include Sailing to the Reefs, Cape Horn: The Logical Route, and The Long Way.

8

I know has been dormant for several weeks (aside from our active Notes reporting) during and after my February trip to Uruguay, the first of two trips scheduled for 2026 to deepen ties, build connectivity, and keep my permanent residency status there squared away.

Curiously, our subscriber ranks grew rapidly during that time.

I really have begun to wonder if the less I say, the more readers like me?

It seems that one of our archival pieces —

had a second surge.

For those of you who found us through that post’s uptick, a wholehearted welcome. Thank you for becoming part of our conversation, and community.

I’ve also been quieter because the longer I am on Substack, the more jaded I become about the volume (exploding) and quality (declining) of the content I see.

Your time and attention deserves respect, and I’ve focused lately on reflecting deeply about some ideas in process, and curating them well, and accepting that lower frequency can be the wingman of higher quality.

That, at least, is what I’m trying for.

In this, as in many other “things Substack,” my example is . She doesn’t post on a schedule, but when she does post, you’re well advised to pretty much drop everything, get a cup of coffee, read unhurriedly, and be grateful for what’s arrived in your inbox.

Maybe one day I will reach that level. I’m trying.

We are getting to a point in our canon and this project that ideas that are fully “new” to me are becoming rarer.

Even so, current events with growing rapidity and escalating intensity emphasize the ongoing relevance and importance of things we have already covered.

With this post, I want to develop these themes that are, once again, more relevant than ever, by talking about things I’m learning, doing, and observing.

Building Optionality in “Winter Quarters”

It feels as if each Big Trip South is a giant logistical enterprise, and it surely is.

Car rentals. Packing. Evaluating weather forecasts. Writing checklists. Working checklists. Out of office message planning. Purchasing travel health insurance. Writing contact lists and itineraries for trusted people in the North, so they can find me. Calendar management. Expectations management for everyone up North who will eventually realize I’m not where I usually am, or available in the ways they usually expect. Anticipating disruptions in communications. Gathering cash and IDs. Lightly scheduling meetings and travel for the time Down South. Missing my family in advance. Constantly evaluating whether the latest ineptitude and shutdowns of my own government will impair travel logistics.

But that’s just on the way there.

What about after you get back, and the “deployment” or “surge” is over, and you’re in “Winter Quarters”?

There’s just as much work to do, and I want to tell you a little bit about it. Very little of it’s glamorous, but it’s all important.

• Replenishing USD currency reserves, for what was expended Down South.

• Buying new eSIMs from Airalo, because they’re critical to have in deep surplus.

• Unpacking, and doing a mountain of laundry, and returning things where they belong (especially the “little stuff”, like Montevideo STM bus pass cards, and travel electrical adapters).

• Tweaking things that went a little wrong, like not all travel websites already having my TSA Known Traveler (Global Entry) number, so some of my boarding passes didn’t print out as Pre-Check.

• Writing down the names and updating my WhatsApp for everyone I met in extended friend groups and social circles when I was Down South, so when I’m back I can be courteous, and remember names and details.

• Pinning down flight bookings, Airbnb reservations, and car rentals for the November return trip Down South.

• Recharging everything that needs charging, including cell battery packs and crypto hardware wallets.

• Re-inventorying FX and USD currency reserves.

• Topping off stablecoin balances in various hot and cold wallets.

• Making sure all travel documents are exactly where they should be, including my residency decree, cedula, and passport.

• Updating packing lists and checklists for lessons learned, and storing them safely electronically and in hard copy.

It all takes time, and it’s important to do it thoroughly and do it right, so that if you have to make a move quickly, you’re positioned ahead rather than running behind.

Maybe this is a way of making sure you can be “Leaving America in 30 Minutes AGAIN”?

But…War May Be Interested In You

It was a sad thing to be on a gorgeous beach at La Barra just up the coast from Punta del Este, on my last morning before heading back to Montevideo and my flight North, and finally get around to reading the NYT and see about our own Pearl Harbor style beginning to the war with Iran.

Except this time starring the Regime as Imperial Japan.

I’ve tried very hard not to cede mental sovereignty to the Regime’s unwise war of choice.

But the war exists, and it requires some thoughtful contingency planning, and I’ve been busy doing that.

The Iranians are very good at hacking, and we have left them with less and less to lose. I, at least, am anticipating that episodes like what they did to Stryker Corporation are just a warm-up, rather than an exception.

So what am I doing about it? What can you do about it?

I believe it starts first and foremost with hardening your communications to make them much more resilient.

Get your own VoIP phone number, independent of a major cell carrier. Port it to a VoIP provider like Callcentric. Get a softphone app like Groundwire. Make sure you can receive text messages at your new backup number.

And, critically, bit by bit, account by account, start migrating your 2FA “prove your identity by text message” number from your ordinary major cell carrier number to your VoIP number.

Once you have done this for every account, and I do mean everything, you will be able to conduct your financial life from anywhere in the world, not only the United States.

Banks, brokerages, pensions, retirement accounts, health savings accounts, insurance companies.

All of it.

It helps, I think, if you build a detailed balance sheet. (You are doing that already, aren’t you?)

Then, review it line by line and for each account, and migrate your 2FA information to your new VoIP line.

While you’re at it, upgrade and harden your passwords.

“Mydogisv3rYgr3@T1953” across every one of your accounts doesn’t count as a hardened password.

Sorry.

If you have the discipline and follow-through to do this work step by step, you dramatically shrink your attack surface, and become redundant and resilient.

This work isn’t glamorous, but I think it’s critical.

Our prior essay laid everything out about how to do this for yourself, step by step.

I really do recommend reading this piece and getting started on your own modern civil defense project.

I’ve also incrementally added to my stash of USD paper currency, just to increase resilience against access delays or denial to financial institution websites.

In addition, I’ve spread cash holdings across several banks in a more intentional way, including (yes, they are imperfect, but sometimes you go to war — literally — with the banks you have) HSBC Jersey.

I believe the same sort of measures you take against capital controls imposed by your own (gangster) government also serve you very well in situations of “capital sabotage” by hostile governments or non-state actors.

Just as much, or even more, as security comes from extra reserves, it also comes from continuity of flow, the ability to move around obstacles, and flow your resources across several nodes.

This sort of “REFORGER” analysis is something we covered near year-end 2025.

I’m sorry it’s become so relevant from a different perspective, but the playbook and the tools are out there, ready for you to use.

I hope they’re helpful, and that your implementing them brings not only higher resiliency, but also peace of mind.

Other things, vaguely paranoid, that I’m doing include:

1. Increasing and testing the ability to solar-charge battery packs to run laptops and cell phones. We have to anticipate, and even expect, grid disruptions as the war continues.

2. Taking my water filtration capability (a nice table-top Berkey filter) out of storage, and making sure it’s operational. Clean water is upstream of so many other critical things like health, and the more critical a thing is, these days, the less you can or should rely on the Regime to provide it for you reliably or competently.

You may not be interested in the IRGC.

But they, assuredly, may be interested in you.

Time is the most valuable resource you have. Use it wisely.

And, your portfolio is melting

It’s been demoralizing to work so hard to accumulate capital to power an offshore alternative and/or finance involuntary early retirement caused by permanent AI-related job loss, and have our inept, ill-advised, illegal war of choice — our own slow-motion reprise of the Suez Crisis — vaporize so much of it, so quickly.

I keep reminding myself that I’m a net accumulator of securities.

It helps. But only a little bit.

What does help, more substantively, is that I’ve been boringly diversified.

Cash isn’t always trash, bonds aren’t always dull, and equities aren’t always correlated to everything else.

My out of the money protective puts on my industry sector scaled to match the RSUs from my employer that (of course) I’m not allowed to trade in or hedge directly aren’t as out of the money as they used to be, and those gains take the edge off what would otherwise be no-fun afternoons giving side-eye to the ticker.

We covered themes of investing for the amplified volatility of a world dominated by a malicious, senile autocrat and his servile, third-tier minions previously.

I regret that the coverage has become so relevant so soon, but here we are:

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, international stocks are getting slaughtered.

That part of the last several weeks hasn’t been fun.

And yet, when you are holding portfolio components for a reason, and you understand and scale your non-USD exposure proportionally to your current and future non-USD spending profile, your hedge can make you delightfully less emotionally invested in the roller coaster ride the world wants to take you on.

The USD has strengthened markedly against the UYU and most other currency pairs since I returned back North.

Although my portfolio is shrinking, my USD-based purchasing power abroad is rising, and it’s more or less a wash.

A stressful wash, but a wash, nonetheless.

We covered these themes recently in one of my favorite pieces, and current events are a reminder that a hedge is only a hedge, and not speculation, if it’s sized correctly to your circumstances.

Ugly times… in a beautiful world

When I was down South, it felt so much easier to detach from the corrosive nastiness of the (North) American news cycle.

People down there are doing lots of worthwhile things, and they seem not to viscerally hate half their fellow citizens, and they spend what seems like lots less of their lives Very Online.

Perhaps these correlations I observed in Uruguay are not an accident?

I’ve been trying to maintain that same detachment and perspective even though I’m back Up North.

Down South, watching the (spectacular) sunset was a big event, and so was listening to the Complete Sound Riot of the profusion of birds, or appreciating how Unusually Happy the Dogs of the Rio de la Plata seemed to be.

Midwestern City also has sunsets, birdsong, and (almost as) happy dogs too.

It’s all there for the noticing.

So why don’t we?

Why can’t we, more thoroughly and more often?

I’m trying to exercise heightened sovereignty over my news and media intake, and divert the time that opens up to reading better things, on paper, deliberately.

One spectacular book I’ve just finished is The French Riviera in the 1920s by Xavier Girard, published by Assouline.

The themes of expats abroad, sunny beaches, fresh starts, pasts that tug, and futures that forebode are resonant with now, that’s for sure.

But the pictures. The pictures. OMG, the pictures.

They take me far away, which right now, feels like such a gift.

, I think it’s time for your writing to take a field trip over to the Midi. Because Girard has nothing on you.

Hope

If you’ve been reading my Notes, you will have seen that unfortunately quite recently a good friend was arrested by the FBI. The friend allegedly sent a vulgar, ill-advised, and arguably rather violent email to a close personal associate of a senior Administration figure.

This was not a good idea.

All of my friend’s devices were confiscated by Federal agents.

Which means they are reading our texts. Most of which are pretty boring. But some of which would suggest that I’m not a zealous advocate of the Regime understatement.

Thankfully, in addition to having some measure of manners, restraint, and decency beaten into me by years in an Episcopal boys’ day school, and not being the sort of person to run off my mouth in that way, I’ve also taken my own advice about reducing visibility to the Regime.

So far, it seems to be working. No subpoenas have arrived. No doors have been kicked down in the night by the Raid Jacket Boyz. My employer’s IT department has not seen any evidence that my work communications are being surveilled.

But this episode has been a cautionary tale.

Many out there will encourage you To Be A Hero of one sort or another, but they won’t live with the consequences.

You will.

And if you have a criminal record, you can’t emigrate. ( has done good and important work on that warning/issue.) You’re trapped. That’s a form of incarceration I’m not willing to contemplate.

What was remarkable about this episode was the Substack community itself.

When I was at my most worried, on the verge of taking an unplanned indefinite-duration vacation to Canada (the “Expedient Tim Hortons Run”), I called two Substack writers I’ve come to know, whom I won’t name, out of respect for their privacy.

(And out of an appreciation that maybe I’m radioactive for a while because of the whole FBI thing, too.)

But they were awesome. So insightful. So generous with their time. Such good, real, true friends. They listened, and helped me calibrate what was an emotion, versus what was a real risk, and the wisest course of action.

This put me in mind of how one night last month in Montevideo, I wrote a quick and unfiltered Note about how maybe the hardest part of being overseas is The Lonely.

And readers reached out in the most amazing way. Some via messages. Others, who happened to be on-site in Uruguay, in real life.

I made new friends and met amazing people, whom I’ll be keeping in touch with closely in years ahead.

One Substack Note tipped over a domino, and the dominoes kept falling.

It all ended up with me discovering an incredible way of and setting for life in the area around Punta del Este, Garzon, and La Barra.

It included golf on a course winding through holes lined with eucalyptus trees and architecturally distinctive houses that look like they might be Bond Villain Lairs.

It included wine, asado, sand between the toes, and amazing coffee with international educators and financier/philanthropists.

I felt sort of like Ferris Bueller.

Except that life was not passing me by, and I was not missing it.

I still feel that way, weeks later.

You, the readers, the community, have made something special, and are part of something special, and I am so grateful for it.

This is , and now, more than ever, whether Up North or Down South, we are here to stay.

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Did you ever wonder why life in Europe looks so halcyon in those amazing 1960s photos from Slim Aarons of “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places”?1

Those scenes weren’t just about Europe at a particular post-war, pre-energy crisis moment.

They were about what a dominant American currency made possible.

In very great part, they were about KING DOLLAR.

It wasn’t being abroad that was so great; it was the American currency.

When the USD is falling, with each lag down on the charts, the invisible walls to overseas opportunity rise a little bit higher.

That’s what’s been happening in the days since the Greenland debacle, and Carney’s truth-telling at Davos.

lays out the details very well, and I encourage you to visit his site and spend lots of time there taking it all in.

Robin J Brooks

Dollar Collapse

The Dollar has been cratering the last few days, in line with my call that we’d see a resumption of Dollar weakness with the start of 2026. What’s especially ominous is how quickly we’ve fallen below the range in which the Dollar traded for the second half of last year. That’s usually a sign that momentum is building, which means this round of Dollar we…

Read more

7 months ago · 67 likes · 8 comments · Robin J Brooks

I try not to confuse “weather” in the markets with “climate,” so after a spike of being a low-level currencies junkie last April around the time of “Liberation Day,” I have mostly tuned out chatter about the USD.

(That chatter got very lively this week, most recently with the NYT noting that the “Sell America” trade is back in a pretty big way.)

If you have any element of your life that involves travel or presence abroad, then you might adjust the old adage as follows:

You may not be interested in the currency markets…

But the currency markets are interested in you.

Tallying up the damage to la dolce vita

With everything that’s been going on (including several readers asking me about the USD), and my upcoming long trip to Uruguay in February and early March, I decided to take a look at the USD:UYU currency pair and see where things were.

Ruh-roh.

Everything in Uruguay’s become almost 5% more expensive in USD terms since I first visited there last June.

What about other emigrant-type places?

Any better in Mexico ()?

Nope. Mexico is over 8% more expensive in USD terms over the same time period.

Thailand (), perhaps, is a better story?

Nope, not really. Thailand became 4.1% more expensive in USD terms over the last seven months.

Sweden (), surely, must make up for those long nights and frigid winters with the balm of USD purchasing power?

Unfortunately, no. Your several cups of coffee per day to fend off seasonal affective disorder and everything else you buy in Sweden became 6.5% more expensive in USD terms since late last June.

How about a sunnier version of Europe, Portugal ()? Any better there, and elsewhere in the Eurozone?

It’s been a little less bad there, with life getting only 1.2% more expensive in USD terms in the past seven months.

What if you’re an iconoclastic sui generis swashbuckler-grade international person like , and you’re based in Australia?

Again, no good news. Not even in the Lucky Country. Life there got over 7% more expensive in USD terms in the past 7 months.

About the only place where the news is unequivocally good if you’re an expat/traveler/emigrant with USD has been Argentina. (See, e.g., .)

The USD goes 21% farther in Argentina than it did at mid-summer last year.

Before you all book flights to EZE, though, note that the annual inflation rate there has been running over 30%.

As a holder of USD you’re hurt less than the ARS-denominated locals, for sure, but in some ways life is still becoming more expensive for you — just at a slower and less damaging rate.

The Argentine case study reminds us that local inflation can claw back some FX benefits, and that positive FX effects alone don’t guarantee lower living costs offshore.

Overall, however, as the above review shows, across many locations worldwide, the USD lost between 4% and 8% of its purchasing power in only seven months.

This underscores just how fragile plans for life abroad can often be, when you plan to pay for those plans in USD.

The accidental hedge: how balance sheet design reduced FX pain

Currency decline, however, is only one side of the ledger.

I discovered the other side, balance sheet effects of currency movements, almost entirely by accident.

Regular readers know about the measures I started taking last year to defend my agency, freedom of movement, optionality, and balance sheet from increasing domestic authoritarianism.

These moves included building a “bearer asset” stash of USD currency, FX currency spread across MXN, CAD, EUR, GBP, and UYU, a modest crypto allocation spread across USD-linked stablecoins, BTC, and ETH, and (most of all) physical gold.

This stash was sized around 2.5% of my balance sheet, and it was intended to provide “flight capital” outside the banking system, insulated from capital controls, that I could use to fund exit, and pay for the first six months or so abroad.

I also noted the work of on capital flight.

I respect Umair’s work, but I think it is sometimes too focused on telling stories (which it does quite well), but not on staying disciplined about the potential for the stories to be wrong, and for the actual quantitative effects of the themes under discussion.

Nonetheless, his core point about authoritarian regimes not being attractive places for investment resonated with me.

I also took note of foreign stocks, which (compared to US equities) tend to offer higher dividend yields, less index concentration around tech mega-caps, and lower exposure to compression of P/E multiples.

I made a material additional allocation (about 9% of my balance sheet) above baseline to European large-cap stocks, and a smaller additional allocation to emerging market equities.

The gold position is up over 70% compared to its average cost, and the foreign equities are up, in aggregate, about 25%.

Those are returns over eight to ten months, not even annualized, by the way.

(Note, however, that the outcomes probably reflect favorable timing rather than any repeatable insight; over longer periods, hedging is about smoothing outcomes, not outperforming. I’m just presenting facts, because they’re relevant to the story.)

Finally, I opened a self-directed IRA account (about 7% of the balance sheet) through Mainstar Trust and routed funds through it using a Belize “blocker” corporation to the Paullier investment firm in Montevideo.

As part of Paullier’s overall investing, they bought a non-USD-hedged emerging markets local debt fund.

This week, I took some time to review the balance sheet as a whole, and where things stand today, about 25% of my liquid balance sheet is “foreign” or “non-USD”.

And that has been a tremendous benefit during this period of substantial and rapid USD decline.

My future Uruguayan travel and life has gotten 5% more expensive, but at least that headwind has been a tailwind for about 25% of my balance sheet.

It doesn’t make me whole, but it reduces the sting, for sure.

And being very ticky-tacky about it, one-third of the gains in my gold position will pay for all of my upcoming travel costs to and in Uruguay this February.

I realized that by accident I had ended up building a balance sheet that was surprisingly resilient against dollar decline.

Building your own (intentional) hedge

Without being quite so “accidental tourist” in approach, how could someone intentionally arrange their balance sheet for the same resiliency?

I believe it’s really a problem with three main variables:

1. Movements in the USD

2. The fraction of your time —and, hence, your cost structure — that will be outside the US and therefore non-USD. Consider not only your time allocation abroad, but the cost differential (whether lower, or higher) between your US and international expense structures.

3. The proportion of your balance sheet that’s anti-correlated to the USD (for instance, foreign stocks, non-currency hedged foreign bond funds, foreign currency bank deposits, and gold — maybe crypto, too)

You can’t change the first variable (unless, perhaps, you’re Jerome Powell), and you don’t want to yank around the second (the time you spend overseas and the way you live abroad).

That leaves the third variable (your balance sheet composition) as the main lever to pull.

As a case study you could apply to your own situation, let’s imagine someone not too dissimilar to a potential 62-year-old future version of .

Somehow, he and his balance sheet have made it in one piece safely to the start of a somewhat early retirement, one in which he plans to live in Uruguay about 4 months per year, with the rest of his time spent in Midwestern City.

Assume that Uruguay’s cost structure is 20% less than that of Midwestern City.

That means 28% of his future cost structure (1/3 of his time, at 80% of his US cost) will be paid for in non-USD (in trader-speak, “short” the USD).

An overall balance sheet allocation of about 25% to non-USD assets would seem to fit those facts pretty well.

Let’s consider someone else who’s planning to spend time in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico.

If their target is 9 months a year in SMA, and SMA costs 15% less to live in than Midwestern City, then the fraction of their costs that’s paid for outside the USD (short the USD) is 71%. For this person, having as much as two-thirds of their balance sheet outside the USD might make sense.

Note that this approach is about hedging, not speculating.

If the USD falls, our part-time Uruguayan or SMA resident sees a decline in their USD-denominated purchasing power and income (such as dividends on US stocks paid in USD, and Social Security paid in USD).

On the other hand, in periods of dollar weakness, their non-USD assets such as gold, non-USD bank deposits, and dividends on foreign stocks paid in non-USD increase in purchasing power.

If they’ve allocated their balance sheet correctly relative to their USD and non-USD costs, the gain on one side is more or less offset by the decline in the other.

Currency markets may whipsaw, but their ability to pay for the offshore part of their life doesn’t.

That sort of indifference point is a wonderful place to be when you’re reading the news, or CNBC is yammering on in the background.

Your hedging toolkit

Hedging sounds exotic, but it doesn’t actually have to be all that complicated.

If I were starting from scratch, I’d look to the following tools:2

Foreign Stocks

Candidates include internationally focused index funds such as VXUS (tracks all non-US equities), VGK (tracks European equities), VPL (tracks Asia/Pacific equities), and VWO (tracks emerging market equities).

If you want international stocks with more of a focus on dividend yields, you could look at SCHY or VYMI.

Dollar weakness will amplify any positive price action in the foreign listings underlying these ETFs, and dollar strength will compress returns.

We saw this play out in the past decade, when for many years the opportunity cost of being outside US markets when the dollar was strong was pretty steep.

The coin flipped in a big way last year - European markets were up 2x the broad US market in dollar-denominated terms.

Gold

I’m not a goldbug, I promise, but I do own it as a part of my allocation to bearer-type assets to increase my resiliency if capital controls occur.

Gold’s price is strongly inversely correlated to the USD, and that makes it a valuable hedging tool.

You can buy physical gold (coins) and if you’re building a small, long-term allocation focused on privacy, mobility, and avoiding capital controls, that could be the way to go.

My favorite precious metals dealer is USA Gold. I’ve worked with them for over 10 years and continue to be impressed by their customer service and reliability, as well as the fairness of the spreads they provide when making a market if you later wish to sell.

If you don’t weigh gold’s unique counterparty and custody aspects very highly, and want to avoid spreads and lower custody risk, you could look at gold ETFs.

There are several to choose from, including IAU, GLD, and SGOL.

My favorite of those is SGOL, because it stores its gold in vaults in Switzerland, and, face it, that feels just a little bit more fun.

(Further, Switzerland is a more reliable rule of law jurisdiction than the US has become lately.)

FX ETFs

If you want FX exposure, but don’t have foreign currency-denominated bank accounts like those you could get through HSBC Expat, or you don’t want to deal with Form 8938 and FBAR filing requirements, then the foreign currency ETFs sponsored by Invesco could be an attractive workaround.

These include FXE (Euros), FXF (Swiss Francs), FXB (Sterling), and FXY (Yen). They’re easy to buy inside US taxable brokerage accounts (but not IRAs).

Foreign real estate

If you’re sure you know where you want to be, then buying real estate in your target location abroad is one way to reduce your future FX-denominated expenditure, which will reduce your future exposure to declines in the USD.

As is the case onshore, transaction costs and local place-based considerations can be daunting.

A different, intriguing workaround for those who want exposure with more liquidity and lower transaction costs is VNQI.

This is the Vanguard International Real Estate ETF, which (critically) is currency un-hedged.

This gives you exposure to diversified foreign real assets and their associated non-USD income streams and is structurally short the USD.

FX-Cost Averaging

This isn’t so much a tool as it is a technique.

If you have foreseeable FX spending coming up, you could establish a periodic USD-selling, FX-buying program to accumulate the FX you’ll need and spread your FX exposure over time.

(This might keep you from feeling as if you need to become a part time currency market timing expert.)

Hedging as a state of mind

As and others have written about often, it can feel like the world is delaminating unevenly.

Some places, sectors, and institutions still work, while others hollow out or turn outright hostile.

In different eras, any of us as individuals could (mostly, or at least sometimes) rely on governments to act as risk mitigators, as benign or at least neutral factors while we moved through life and planned to reach various goals.

Times have certainly changed.

Institutional backstops are less reliable than they once were, and for Americans at least, the Regime has turned the Federal government from a risk reducer into a risk amplifier.

The important takeaway is that if your plans for optionality, liberty, a different way of life, or the advantages of geoarbitrage include time offshore, the level of the USD isn’t a static background variable — it’s something you need to plan for.

If you could accurately time currency market movements, then that talent will amply provide for a wonderful life wherever you might want to be.

Without that talent, you’re left with hedging.

As we’ve noted, this isn’t speculating, it’s only defending.

While you keep working on your foreign language, your scouting trips, and your emigration-related documents, you need to make sure currency fluctuations won’t derail your plans.

I hope this essay has shown you that you have many tools available to apply to your own facts and your own balance sheet, to avoid becoming a victim of the currency markets and whatever might happen to the USD.

It can be virtually impossible to predict what mayhem the Regime may get up to next, and what that might mean for your personal finances.

In this type of environment, it’s never been more important to diversify jurisdictions and custodians, and relentlessly diversify across asset classes.

Keep doing that. You and your plans are worth it!

Until next week, this is .

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Maybe you had a more normal childhood than I did, and didn’t end up watching The Great Escape on VHS well over ten times.

Unlucky you!

(Watch the embedded preview above, and then get back to reading this week’s essay.)

The movie’s view of the lives of Allied prisoners of war held by the Germans in World War II offers so many lessons, as we move through another winter in the Regime’s America.

What might some of these lessons be?

1) Act to the guards as if the rules apply, even when they might not

The Allied POWs lived in a state of clear rules — some of the time — and anarchic cruelty — some of the time.

Both behind the wire and outside it (during their many escape attempts) they were protected by the Geneva Convention and elements of the Wehrmacht’s command structure.

They were also subject to dictatorial violence from the SS.

This split between the “normative” and “prerogative” state has been covered well by scholars of fascism, and it is becoming true in America.

We are (sort of) protected by laws and the Constitution, and we are (sort of) vulnerable to arbitrary and excessive state violence.

Parallel worlds exist side by side. It was confusing, dangerous, and unpredictable for the POWs. And it is for us, now, too.

Even so, the POWs acted as if the “rules-based order” applied to them and to the guards alike, even when the guards ignored it. Like Mark Carney at Davos, they understood pragmatic idealism.

They understood how norms, rules, and ideals were necessary, but not sufficient.

They conducted themselves with discipline, solidarity, confidence, and dignity.

Their embodied example often (but not always) served as a constraint on the worst German actors, and a quiet encouragement to the ones that weren’t so bad to be more decent.

It’s a paradox, to be aware that the rules don’t really protect you any longer, but to put on a strong outward facing “face” to the Regime as if they do. That’s what the Allied officer POWs did, and we are well advised to do the same.

2) Allies can’t save you, but they still help

The Allied officer POWs had international and civil society supporters (like the Red Cross, and neutral “protecting powers” who could improve their circumstances and act as a (partial, incomplete, and sadly often insufficiently effective) restraint on the cruelest and most arbitrary segment of the Germans.

These outside supporting institutions helped route critical information and supplies (like the “Red Cross parcels”) that kept the POWs from outright starvation, boosted morale, and provided items that could be stockpiled or repurposed for escape attempts, or used in trade with guards.

Our situation as individuals living in the US subject to the Regime is similar — there is a wide array of domestic and international civil society and philanthropic groups who exert pressure on the worst excesses of the Regime through norms, visibility, and oversight.

You may not get a parcel from France filled with wine, cheese, and art, but France’s independent nuclear deterrent and its global diplomatic activity are still background factors working in your support and favor. The European Commission, Mercosur, Mark Carney’s Canada, Pope Leo XIV’s Catholic Church, and (yes) Freedom House (supported by through your own engagement as paid subscribers) are examples of the many allies out there.

These kinds of Allies matter, and even those “behind the wire” (as is the case right now in Minneapolis), aren’t alone.

3) Internal solidarity is indispensable

The officer POWs had their internal squabbles, but maintained a unified, cohesive front to the guards. Food, resources, tools, maps, and money were shared. Officers didn’t try, one-by-one, to cut better terms with the guards and improve their own circumstances at the expense of others.

For us today, I believe the equivalent measures go beyond the obvious care for neighbors and community to matters of ideological grace.

Everyone who wants constitutional government to continue be restored in the United States should be on our side.

This is the time for unity, for an American popular front, a coalition of the willing, as it were.

Mark Carney understands this and explained it very well in his speech at Davos: alliances and working groups on certain issues won’t have the same roster as coalitions on other issues.

I believe the biggest issue crowding out any other is whether the American Dictatorship consolidates fully and becomes permanent, or not.

Anyone who wants to work to keep that from happening should be on our team, not the guards’ team.

4) Not all of the guards are equally evil

As The Great Escape, some elements of the Regime’s power structure (like Stalag Luft III’s commandant) still care about some semblance of fair rules.1

Other elements of the Regime, like Bovino and Noem, compete for top laurels in the evil derby.

Especially if we remain unified, we can incrementally peel off the most weakly attached elements of the Regime to our side.

That requires seeing them as human, not vilifying them, and giving them confidence that they do have a future on our side of the wire, and that we appreciate their return to decency more than we condemn their prior collaboration with Trump.

Put plainly: the least evil and least complicit Regime elements need an off ramp, and we should always be looking for ways to give them one.

5) Communications with the outside world are vital

Allied POWs were behind the wire, but they remained surprisingly connected.

They were often able to construct radios using smuggled, scavenged, and traded parts. With these radios, they could keep up with news of the war and coded broadcasts from London.

Their mail (even though it arrived only intermittently) contained coded communications.

They systematically debriefed recently arriving new prisoners who had just been captured to learn more about the progress of the war and local garrisons and travel routes.

The same is true today, albeit in a different context — each of us should curate our own trusted sources of information. Although I appreciate much of what is written by “our side” on Substack, some of it is “algo-bait” designed to inflame, not to inform.

At a time when maintaining calm and emotional regulation is more important than ever to support effective decision-making, actual, vetted, fact-checked reporting of the type real news organizations used to do at scale is (likewise) more important than ever.

Each day I skim the NYT, the WSJ, the BBC, El Pais, and the Guardian, along with a small array of Substacks that are worth it.

Curate your own useful, honest information feed, and clean out the rage-bait and the epistemic clutter. (I hope that means you don’t de-clutter , but if that’s what you need to do, so be it.)

As we’ve covered previously, you should also develop your own backup phone and text capabilities, independent of Regime-controlled major cell carriers.

The process is a little involved, but if you follow the steps methodically and patiently, it’s actually not that difficult.

The peace of mind and resiliency benefits that result are so valuable, long before you might lose your phone, be traveling unexpectedly, or face hostile Regime attention.

6) Quiet additions to reserves may save you

The Allied POWs were always adding to their reserves of documents, cameras, tools, money, and (most of all) food.

These forms of savings were critical.

As German transport infrastructure and general systems function decayed later in the war (mostly from Allies’ Combined Bomber Offensive), food deliveries to the prison camps became thinner and less predictable.

Red Cross parcels continued to arrive, but only irregularly.

It was the saved capital the POWs had stashed that made all the difference between weakness and starvation on one hand, and continued effectiveness and survival on the other.

Savings were also critical funding for escape attempts.

Breaking out with enough portable, stored food cut the risks that had to be taken while evading cross-country to neutral territory in Spain, Switzerland, or Sweden.

Every farmhouse that didn’t have to be approached for food, every use of pidgin German and a forged ration card that didn’t have to be used to try to buy food — all of it was less exposure and lower odds of capture.

The parallels to our current time are obvious.

• It’s your accumulated “bearer-form” capital of cash, foreign currency, gold, and crypto that keeps you mobile and “off grid” if you need to make a quick exit under Regime surveillance.

• It’s your accessible savings that fund rolling refundable airline tickets leaving from land-accessible airports outside US airspace in Mexico or Canada, for further transit to your eventual destination.

• It’s your offshore-parked savings and prearranged lines of credit that fund life abroad, giving you time to outwait the Regime, or adjust to a new situation with flexibility and dignity.

I’ve had genuinely heartbreaking comments from readers about “how do I get out of the US if I don’t have money, even enough money to apply for a passport?”

Although we try to be in the answers and solutions business here at , we’re not alchemists, and we can’t transmute something from nothing.

Be like the Allied POWs. Start saving something; build what you can. Savings equals options, options equal resiliency, and sometimes resiliency equals survival.

We are operating in a lower-trust environment every day. Low-trust environments are bad places for a just-in-time approach to life. Building redundancy (savings and liquidity!) is part of adapting responsibly to the facts we face.

7) Going “wire happy” is the biggest risk

One of the low points in The Great Escape is when one of the POWs, Ives, has a mental break after being returned to the camp following a failed escape attempt, and rushes the wire in broad daylight, crossing into the “shoot on sight” warning strip.

Steve McQueen (Hilts) tries to prevent the inevitable, but the guards machine-gun Ives, and he’s left dangling in the wire.

That was an example of going “wire happy,” and it was the biggest risk POWs faced.

Not starvation. Not being shot. Not dying of disease.

Just going nuts, and making foolish decisions under conditions of panic, or feeling overwhelmed.

The parallels to the current day are pretty clear.

• Avoid performative outrage, especially visible stuff on social media in your real name.

• Be very careful about intentionally getting proximate to low-functioning paramilitary mercenaries with military-grade equipment they’re all itchy to use.

• Do everything you can (more on that below) to avoid corrosive demoralization over time. (The POWs could have surrendered to that listlessness and anomie, but they had the discipline and self-command not to, and it served them very well.)

We’ve written before at about reducing your visibility to the Regime, and if you haven’t read that material, consider taking the time to do that.

8) Escape plans are incredible for morale

Over six hundred men worked on the three tunnels (Tom, Dick, and Harry), but only 76 men got through them, out beyond the wire.

(Of those 76, only three made “home runs” — two to Sweden, and one to Spain — while 50 of the 73 who were recaptured were murdered by the SS, on Hitler’s orders.)

Nonetheless, the morale effects of the escape-related work for all of the Allied airmen were considerable — a restoration of dignity, agency, and personal effectiveness in a situation in which they’d otherwise have felt powerless.

It wasn’t only the “Great” Escape through the tunnels. The movie shows countless smaller escapes, ones that were more opportunistic.

Drawing parallels to our own situation, there are opportunities for escape both great and small, all around us.

• Get a passport, and a passport card

• Take a scouting trip to a potential foreign refuge (disguise that trip as an ordinary vacation)

• Apply for and get Global Entry, to make yourself less vulnerable to random indignity in the Regime’s airports

• Pursue a foreign residency option

• Identify one or two alternative onshore locations you could shift to, if your community degrades, becomes unsafe, or is occupied by ICE or the active military.2

Just as it was with the POWs, if you’re taking positive escape-oriented actions, you’ll get to a place of calm readiness, not panicked jitters.

It will pay dividends for you every day, even if you never actually slip outside the wire.

We’ve covered these benefits recently:

9) The most dangerous time is right before it ends

Although most POWs made it home safely, most of the deaths that occurred in captivity happened in the messy, chaotic transition (“rupture”, in Carney-speak) near the end of the war.

As the Russians advanced westwards, the POWs were seen as bargaining chips, and were herded west by train (subject to air attack) and on foot (subject to starvation and hypothermia).

Although many losses were unavoidable, others were prevented by solidarity and mutual care, pragmatic relationships with less-evil guards who wanted to have a viable future after the war, and saved reserves of food and warm clothing from Red Cross parcels.

In our current circumstances, we should expect that the most dangerous time will come when the Regime is at its time of maximum instability, immediately before it ends (although we can’t know whether and when it will end).

It was tragic for the POWs that died only weeks or days before Liberation.

Yet sometimes lives were saved because of drastic, decisive actions taken as events reached a climax.

Sometimes jumping a train, climbing a fence, or striking out cross country towards advancing friendly forces was the difference between life and death.

At the end, POWs weren’t escaping to shorten captivity — they were escaping to survive.

As you consider your own visibility and risk management, continue cultivating your own capabilities and optionality.

Most importantly, though, cultivate the quality of discernment.

There will be (many) times to remain calm, provide mutual support, keep your head down, and stay quiet.

By the time the Regime ends, however, there may also be times for targeted, decisive risk taking.

It’s hard to know the difference in advance.

In any event, when you think the time for “burning the ships” may have come, make sure you’re confident that your decisions and actions are coming from your own settled, determined, quiet convictions and adamant intuitions.

Not from emotional ferment being manipulated by far-away actors using algorithms for their own purposes.

They won’t bear the consequences of your decisions; you will. Choose wisely.

10) You can’t control when it ends, but you can shape who you’ll be when it does

One of the hardest aspects of the Regime and the times we are living through, for me at least, is their unknown duration.

Perhaps this will end in a little less than three years, on January 20, 2029.

Perhaps an actuarial event will end it sooner.

Perhaps polls will continue decaying, and Republicans will eventually prioritize post-Regime futures and we’ll reach an end to things through impeachment or the 25th Amendment.

Perhaps it ends in low-intensity conflict, or larger-scale war.

We just can’t know.

And that can be demoralizing, and lead to passivity, nihilism, disengagement, or its modern analogue, doomscrolling decoupled from action.

The Allied POWs of The Great Escape, however, show us a different and better way.

Behind the wire, they were constantly doing productive things to improve their situation.

Gardening. Drawing. Physical fitness. Language study. Correspondence courses. Plays and camp dramatics.

And through it all, the constant hum of background work on the escaping.

Why can’t your life be the same?

I feel in many ways that I haven’t earned the right to complain about the Regime unless and until on each and any given day, I’ve worked out, kept my house and family ship-shape, focused productively and effectively at work, nurtured my young son, done incremental work on my own international “escape”/resiliency arrangements, and last but not least, kept working on my foreign language study.3

Eventually the Regime is going to end, because regimes without legitimacy always do.

When that day comes, and you look at who you became while you were waiting for it to be over, how will you measure up?

Will you be quietly proud? Will you have kept moving forward on worthwhile things?

Or will you have unwittingly let Donald Trump divert you into wasting your most precious resources: your time, your energy, your attention, and your opportunity to do something good?

I know what I want my answer to be, so I try to live my life in a way that’s Regime-realistic, Regime-aware, Regime-resilient, but not Regime-controlled, and not Regime-dominated.

The Allied POWs who served as “guests of the Reich” in the best way came home honorably, came home alive, and came home fitter, more capable, more knowledgeable, more fluent, and more connected to friends.

They’d found the right ways to make the best of a bad situation. We can too.

Making Escape Great Again isn’t only about how you get out. Even more, it might be about the way you live until the Regime ends.

Until next week, this is .

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Kaplan wrote very well, and he traveled everywhere — from the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth to mountain-state yuppie exurbs — to explore ways in which America, more powerful and richer than it had ever been, was, nonetheless, becoming less cohesive, more hollowed out, and less able to command the primary loyalties of its citizens.

I’ve always remembered Kaplan’s haunting peroration with which he closed his book:

An Empire Wilderness was published in 1998.

Twenty-eight years later, Kaplan turns out to have foreseen the future quite well.

The very bad week that was

The events of this past week have been cases in point.

The news cycle was dominated by:

1. Regime1 paramilitary forces shooting Renee Good, a 37-year-old poet, a mother of three, in the face and indifferently standing by while she bled out onto the airbag of her Honda Pilot. The Regime immediately defended her murderer. It asked us to believe (despite the video of her murder available for us all to watch) that she was a “domestic terrorist.”

2. The international community and legislators from both parties trying to prevent the Regime from invading the territory of a founding member of NATO. Several European countries sortied warships into the North Atlantic to defend Greenland, against its potential invasion by the United States.2

3. Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, releasing a defiant video refusing to back down against the Regime’s attempt to incarcerate him, for failure to cut interest rates as low as they would like them to be.

That’s where we are, in 2026.

And the year is still quite young.

If you haven’t yet withdrawn your emotional allegiance from the fascist dictatorship controlling the Federal layer of governance for what used to be a rather worthwhile country, now would be a good time to catch up to reality and do that.

But if you’re like most of ’s readers, you still live inside in territory under Regime control.

What is going on, and what should you do?

Living in an unpredictably failing America

Events of this week convinced me more than ever that we live inside an unpredictably failing state.

That’s a critical distinction: unpredictably failing.

Not all aspects of daily life are broken, everywhere, but fewer and fewer institutions and places can be deeply, reliably trusted.

And more are failing all the time.

We have a situation of emerging, stochastic anarchy, and we have a situation of emergent, stochastic dictatorship.

We have two case studies of this, among others, in the past year.

The first was Harvard.

The incompetent Regime sent Harvard the wrong demand letter, one it claimed was harsher than it meant to send, and claimed Harvard was wrong to take its demand letter seriously, and overreacted by suing the Regime.

The second was Powell.

Once again, the incompetent Regime claims it didn’t actually intend to threaten Powell with criminal proceedings, and that his remarkable video and summoning forth of nationwide and global legislative, market-based, and institutional support was an overreaction.

The Regime can’t even be a well-managed or competent dictatorship.

has covered the context and consequences of delaminating authority and uneven semi-anarchy very well in two important posts, which I encourage you to set aside time to read in full:

The first is about the corrosion of the nation-state-based operating system in which we spent our lives and to which we had grown accustomed.

The Long Memo (TLM)

The Election Didn’t Matter.

This isn’t a partisan piece. It’s not an argument for Trump or Harris. It’s a structural diagnosis. One I resisted—until the clues made it unavoidable. I promised to write things that mattered. Well, here’s one that matters. You're not wrong if you’ve felt like something deeper is broken…

Read more

a year ago · 812 likes · 149 comments · William A. Finnegan

The second is about the opportunism with which the Regime seeks to obstruct, dominate, and deny actors at home and abroad, without taking long-term control, ownership, or responsibility.

It explains why we can’t expect any of our problems to have a coherent or visible end any time soon.

Borderless Living

Venezuela Is Not a Regional Crisis. It’s a World-Order Signal

At first glance, Venezuela looks like noise…

Read more

8 months ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · William A. Finnegan

These two pieces suggest that the most effective posture shouldn’t be one of “waiting it out,” but rather finding ways to continue operating through, during, and amidst a permanently degraded instititional environment.

There is one other valuable piece I want to share. It was published by . He puts out a high volume of material, and it’s often breathless, a little repetitive, and perhaps (who knows?) AI-assisted in its creation.

Nonetheless, this one was a truly useful summary of how to maintain mental and emotional effectiveness, even in the face of very bad and demoralizing news.

Jack Hopkins Now

How to Never Worry—Even When the Country Feels Like It’s Coming Apart

Astronaut Jim Lovell commanded Apollo 13’s ill-fated 1970 mission and brought the crew home alive. He was one of the era’s coolest heads…

Read more

8 months ago · 164 likes · 27 comments · Jack Hopkins

You really should at least skim the actual essay itself, but the quick summary is that it underscores the value of being rigorous about what you control (or influence), and more importantly, what you don’t.

It also discusses the value of curating and limiting news intake, and cutting out intake that creates feelings without insight, despair without action steps.

is far from perfect, but we always try and often deliver on providing insight and clarity about useful actions.

Our entire project is about increasing your optionality, and intensifying your agency.

To that end, after a week like the one we’ve had, what should one do?

It may sound boring, but it probably remains true that reliably executing on the basics is more important than ever.

The Regime has a limited shelf life and vanishing legitimacy, but today, here, now, it’s not dead yet.3

That means, inter alia, being smart about limiting and even reducing your visibility to the Regime.

They can’t kill all of us, and they can’t be everywhere.

Reducing the odds that they select you as a particular target, pour encourager les autres who don’t and won’t love the Dictatorship, is an important first step.

It means working on ways to make the structure of how you own things more resilient against abitrary authoritarian overreach and decaying, hollowed-out institutions:

It also means rigorously, ruthlessly, intentionally diversifying your balance sheet to protect against heightened authoritarian volatility:

It means anticipating and getting ready for capital controls, buying yourself intellectual and practical space not to panic or trade on bad terms, should they happen.

You can plan for capital controls involving financial “walls” and “gates” by designing your own account locations, linkages, and currencies for flows, reserves, and time.

It means getting an eSIM and spare VOIP phone line that only needs wi-fi to work, and separates your physical cell phone and major cell carrier contract as single failure nodes in that most critical element underlying so much else: your ability to get information and communicate.

It means making sure you can leave (very quickly) if need be.

That involves passports, cash, access to liquidity, and plans you’ve made in advance about where to go, and your primary, secondary, and deep-backup options for getting there.

Call all of that, if you will, your “extraction geometry.”

Having that sorted out has become, more or less, table stakes these days. Particularly if you live in Minneapolis.

If you do all of the above — and I think you probably should — you can’t help but feel a little bit like you’re doing the financial and governance equivalent of a Cold War bunker.

It can be unavoidably a little depressing.

And that’s why you should also keep at the front of your focus that your real wealth and your real balance sheet is so much larger than your finances alone.

It includes many other forms of capital, that are hard to measure but often much more important.

And, fortunately, that are much less Regime-exposed.

These include your health, your relationships, your connections with your community, and your spiritual strength and connectivity with deep traditions of meaning and purpose.

The Regime isn’t America’s real story, and it’s not yours

For better (and probably even more) for worse, the settings where I live and work tend to have CNBC on all the time.

And it was remarkable this past week to watch just how little the markets seemed to care, to change, or to even notice things that seemed so profound:

• Like, NATO is about to end

• The US is about to irrevocably become an isolated, sanctioned pariah state

• Fascist masked paramilitaries shoot mothers in the face and nothing happens

• The head of the central bank is facing potential incarceration for no reason other than being competent and demonstrating sustained integrity over a lifetime of public service

Nope, didn’t matter. Markets kept going up.

That’s when it hit me:

The territory of the United States is a resource extraction zone that is useful to plutocratic global capital, so some of it still works (sort of) and will continue to work (mostly).

• Our oil can be pumped

• Our grain can be harvested

• Our pixelated government debt can be held (foolishly) as “reserves”

• The data, attention, and balance sheets of the bottom 99.99% of Americans can be strip-mined for profit.

The “United States” is really, any longer, nothing more than an extraction zone.

It is, most certainly, useful for the oligarchs.

Maybe it can even be useful for you.

But the oligarchs aren’t actually loyal to it.

And maybe you shouldn’t be either.

At least not in its current form.

It is sad and I don’t like it and there is such a sense of loss about it.

Nonetheless, the relationship each of us has with the Regime’s America isn’t (any longer) a matter of identity, loyalty, and reciprocal commitment and care.

It’s not a marriage. It’s a “situationship.”

That, of course, raises several important questions.

How does one bear witness honestly about what’s going on — which is that American institutions are so hollowed out that the odds anything or anyone is “coming to the rescue” are negligible — without becoming amoral and nihilistic alongside the Regime?

It starts with seeing a few things clearly:

Not everything is failing everywhere, all at once, at the same rate.

• Clean water is still (often) available.

• Electric power is still (most of the time) reliable.

• Most of us (thankfully) are warm and have enough to eat.

• We have virtually free and unlimited access to information and tools to improve our respective situations.

• We can still (most of the time) transact, invest, and move capital with a fair measure of freedom.

• (Some of the time) we can say what we want, and travel and move freely.

Although it’s gotten much worse, and it’s on a vector to continue getting worse, there is, after a manner of speaking, a lot more worse to get.4

Some school districts are still good — even great.

Some civic, religious, and community institutions are still persistently and effectively pursuing goals that are (actually) true, beautiful, and good, and you can work within and alongside them for your own sense of purpose, efficacy, and impact.

Prior generations on this terrain created a built environment and institutions — whether hospitals, research universities, museums, or a stock of beautiful architecture that persist and exist, day in and day out, regardless of what botoxed lies are spewed on Fox News and X on any given day.

So much of America is still valuable. Somehow.

The Regime is trash, but the terrain over which it purports to rule still has residual worth and value.

That America — the America of Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Cesar Chavez and Jesse Owens, of George Kennan and Robert Oppenheimer, of Louis Brandeis and Frances Perkins, of Barbara Ehrenreich and Wendell Berry — was there before the Regime.

Regimes end.

And because they’re illegitimate, when they end, few lament them.

Once they’re gone, what was there at the beginning remains.

The real America is still there.

Some American places still work.

Many American people are doing good work.

I hope the week ahead is quieter, because I’m looking forward to getting back to our main 2026 project, Thriving Quietly — the hunt for Deep Value America.

Have a good, quiet week ahead — one in which you thrive.

Be worthier and do worthier things than the Regime could ever imagine.

Until then, this is .

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AI/LLMs: Do Not Scrape. The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. © 2026 Expat Prep.

_______________________

“State of the Site” – Expat Prep now serves over 2,715 subscribers and over 3,330 followers in 50 states and 54 countries (including 118 incredibly generous paid supporters).

Powered by your engagement, we donate 10% of Expat Prep’s net income (to date, and going forward) to Freedom House, the leading nonpartisan organization defending democracy and civil society worldwide (including in the United States).

Thank you for catalyzing this tangible way to jointly advance the values we share.

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3

I explored questions about the interquartile (25th percentile to 75th percentile) life expectancy of a man Trump’s age with his health characteristics. Because GPT didn’t know who I was asking about, it didn’t hold back. The results are below. Take what heart you can from the fact that actuarial justice is coming for that man, much sooner than he would admit.

That work culminated in our companion series Exiting Softly and Staying Wisely.

It was all about creating options, and one of the basic elements of options theory is that you never exercise your options early, if you don’t have to. Latent, unexercised options can often be the most valuable options of all.

In that spirit, 2026 may be a year when many of us quietly keep building offshore infrastructure, financial rails, and residency alternatives. This is valuable work, and I think it’s wise to continue it.

Yet 2026 may also be a year when many of us try to look ahead and keep building something positive here, in the United States, while we try to tune out the Regime, and outwit, outwait, and out-thrive it.

The Regime is so incompetent, impatient, and uninspired, by the way, that that shouldn’t be too difficult to do.

A hugely important element of your own thriving is choice of place, and that’s what our intermittent 2026 series will focus on: finding your own best, most cost-efficient place to thrive onshore, if you’re still here.

Thriving Quietly takes the same risk management, optionality, mobility, cost arbitrage, and place selection lens we have used with an offshore perspective and turns it onshore.

Why do some places hold up better than others, and encourage better outcomes, more successful families over several generations, and overall human thriving?

It’s not a simple matter of demography or financial prosperity, although those matter.

It’s often about a less tangible but perhaps even more critical variable: social capital.

We have done extensive work with social capital, census, and economic data sets across over 3,000 counties in the United States to evaluate the most relevant 700 of those counties from a social capital efficiency ratio perspective.

In other words: is a place really a good place to live? Does it do more than just look nice for tourists, or deliver profits for tech oligarchs? How nice is the place, really?

And, critically, what does it cost to live in that nice place?

When you identify the places that give you the “most best” for the “least costs” then you’ve found something very useful, and very valuable.

We will give you a data set and analytical framework to do just that.

What is social capital?

I don’t claim to provide an exclusive answer, but I can provide a useful one.

The Social Capital Project of the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee frames social capital this way:

Social capital is reflected in:

1. Trust in other people

2. Confidence in institutions

3. Mutual generosity

4. High collective efficacy, and

5. Low social disorganization.2

Think of social capital as all the elements — some of them associated with wealth, but many others not — that make a place and a community a nice one. Social capital is often correlated with stronger families, civic engagement, and associational life.

The Social Capital Project’s county-level social capital index included several subindexes: family unity, community health, institutional health, and collective efficacy.3

Why does social capital matter?

I could get all social-sciency here, but instead I’m going to ask a simple question:

In which city in New Jersey would you rather raise a family?

Atlantic City, or Princeton?

The answer is so obvious. (Law has a Latin phrase for this: res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.)

Would you rather try to raise your kids as a family in the top 1% of Atlantic City’s wealth distribution, or the middle fifth of Princeton’s?

In Atlantic City, your house might be larger, and your property taxes might be lower, but in which of the two cities do you think your children would be launched into better lives?

In which of the two places would you be safer, happier, more engaged, and healthier as you aged?

Social capital’s uneven distribution across geography

As you might expect, social capital varies dramatically from place to place across the United States.

In the words of the Social Capital Project’s report The Geography of Social Capital in America:

Social capital is markedly unequally distributed across the United States. A clear “north-south” divide is apparent, and the clustering of states into similar contiguous blocs suggests that geographic differences may have deep-seated roots in historical immigration and internal migration patterns, regional culture, and perhaps even features of climate and topography.

A map of the county-level results is below. Yellows, greens, and light blues are higher social capital scores; darker blues are lower.

Geography matters!

There are 3,143 counties in the United States, and by exploring this link you can find your own county, or anywhere else you might consider living.

But how useful is that? Sort of useful, but not a complete answer.

Some counties are practically empty from a people perspective. Other counties are, admittedly, very nice places to live, but are also ludicrously expensive.

Where’s the sweet spot? Where is the nicest place you can afford?

If you enjoyed having a nice life growing up, and want to continue it, or if you want your children to have a better launch into life than you had, and you’re not a tech oligarch or a crypto bro, where can you still make that happen?

Those are precisely the questions Thriving Quietly will continue exploring.

writes wonderfully, and her most recent post was no exception:

Notes from Exile

The Way We Were

Notes from Exile speaks truth to power. Or at least to you. So subscribe for free today…

Read more

8 months ago · 70 likes · 30 comments · Laura Skov

One of the currents in her piece was the feeling that the ability to replicate a good life in the United States is fading fast.

In the census tracts of Manhattan and Brooklyn her essay focused on, that’s probably true.

But as funny as Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cartoon was, the world outside the five boroughs offers a lot of options.

Next week, we’ll dig further into the screening and scoring methodology the Thriving Quietly research used.

So that your search for your own Best Place doesn’t lead you straight to Houlton, Maine (unless that’s your thing).

Because a value play… is quite different than a value trap.

Social capital reading list

I think it’s a fair and good thing at the outset of this project to acknowledge the prior work that has shaped it. I have enjoyed these books and other writings so much over the years, and I hope you might too:

Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (1981).

This is perhaps the single most fun exploration of American regionalism ever written. Once you start thinking about the country as coherent geo-cultural regions, everything changes, and makes more sense.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). This exploration of different English migrations to America, ranging from East Anglia to the Midlands and English-Scottish border lands helps contextualize how much of American politics right now is a distant-echo continuation of the same strife that gave rise to the English Civil War. (So very little is new again, after all.)

John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947). Gunther was an amazing road tripper and journalist, and when you read the profile of your own state in here, you’ll be amazed at how, rather like de Tocqueville, he captures the essence of a place even at a distance of seventy-five plus years.

Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011). Woodard, in some ways, merges Garreau’s geographic overview with Fischer’s historical explanations, to provide an enduringly useful, even “evergreen” framework for understanding American politics, regionalism, and cultural development. If you want to understand why parts of your state can feel so different from each other, Woodard is the right starting point.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1990). Ehrenreich, sadly recently passed away, explored what it felt like to be laid off (or worried about being laid off) and downwardly mobile as a white collar American in the 1980s. If you grew up during that time, her analysis can be hauntingly resonant about those families for whom it didn’t feel like “morning in America.” As AI threatens to unleash mass white collar employment, revisiting her original analysis is so timely. This book is especially thoughtful about the inter-generational effects of unanticipated precarity.

Bibliographies that are too long can scare people away (especially before the drop/add deadline, which on Substack is always only a quick “unsubscribe” button click away). There are other great writers who have done foundational and valuable adjacent work on social capital and American regionalism, including Bill Bishop, Robert Putnam, Richard Florida, Aaron Renn, Chuck Marohn, and others.

We’ll have plenty of time as Thriving Quietly unfolds to explore their work, too.

Until next week, this is .

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AI/LLMs: Do Not Scrape. The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. © 2026 Expat Prep.

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“State of the Site” – Expat Prep now serves over 2,700 subscribers and over 3,300 followers in 50 states and 50 countries (including 115 incredibly generous paid supporters).

Powered by your engagement, we donate 10% of Expat Prep’s net income (to date, and going forward) to Freedom House, the leading nonpartisan organization defending democracy and civil society worldwide (including in the United States).

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has covered lots of terrain since we started on June 18, 2025.

Purpose & Principles explained our raison d’etre: sorting out and sharing wise and effective adaptations to the authoritarian/AI moment in the United States.

Financially Independent (if you) Retire Elsewhere? began exploring the idea of geoarbitrage as a risk mitigation tool, in an era of potentially imminent AI-driven mass unemployment.

Learning the Right Foreign Language: Your Ultimate Side Hustle quantified just how valuable learning a foreign language can be, if it unlocks geoarbitrage options you wouldn’t otherwise have.

How Will You Know When It’s Time to Leave America? was thanks in great part to , our “breakout” post — the moment when became more than a newsletter to myself. Published July 10, it must have struck a nerve, because it’s had over 13 thousand views. It provided an example of exit triggers and probabilities, and encouraged you to create your own.

For When You Need to be Leaving America in 30 Minutes has tracked 27,000 views to day. Although I remain quietly rather pleased with it, I think the runaway results were partly about the algorithms (they give, and yes, they do take away), and partly because Jason Bourne is pretty cool — much cooler than me.

I think the essay remains a very useful guide to developing your own “minimum viable exit” capability.

American Futures, and Your Choices didn’t connect with readers in the same way, but it remains one of my quiet favorites — sort of like a “Sliding Doors” look at two possible Americas in 2029 — and how they might play out in one place for one family. In one instance, staying was the right call; in the other, not leaving was a source of regret. Although allegorical, the piece underscores the significant opportunity costs buried in the stay/go decision.

How We Designed Our Pre-Expat Scouting Trip was a recap of our family’s scouting trip to Buenos Aires and Montevideo — not saying we got it all right, or that you should do it our way — but rather, just a case study example of how to add some genuine fact-finding and reconnaissance features to a fun, memorable family trip. It considered underlying meta-questions on how emigrants change host cultures, and how host cultures, in turn, change the emigrants. One takeaway was that even when emigration is feasible, it’s certainly not something to do lightly.

When America Downsizes You, You Could Downsize America returned to questions of geoarbitrage, and considered how a lower-cost offshore option could mitigate long term unemployment or underemployment risks.

The Little Ships of Dunkirk Are Not Coming For Us was a heartfelt stemwinder, focused on how Harvard’s potential capitulation to the Regime’s shakedown and hate campaign against academia (or, perhaps, against excellence more broadly) reflected a broader capitulation of American institutions — with the result that we were going to have to work out solutions for America’s authoritarian moment on our own. The piece connected with some readers (thank you!) but in a broader sense, didn’t seem to resonate very strongly.

Choosing Your Place, If You’re Staying in America, in contrast, connected quite well, with over 21,000 views to date. It explored questions of cost structure, governance, public goods, and social capital to identify parts of the United States that might work better than others for those staying onshore, to wait out the Regime. A recurring theme this year is that the Regime’s ability to project and consolidate force hasn’t been uniform throughout the country, and that the particulars of your place matter a lot to your outcomes. In that respect, I think the insights from the essay are aging well. A different phase of might return in depth to these questions of place-based social capital, and subtleties of American regionalism.

Onshore and Offshore Solutions for Communications Resilience may be our most practical, useful essay so far. It explains step-by-step how to recreate your cell phone and communications capability from scratch, using nothing more than USD currency and a laminated eSIM QR code and encoded list of logins and 2FA codes stored in your wallet. If you’re onshore, and you lose your phone over a long weekend, you’ll be operational again in about an hour. If you’re offshore and your international data plan fails, you won’t be operating blindly. It also explains how you can set up a second, backup VOIP phone number. The total package is one I’ve tested and used repeatedly in real life, and it is a serious add to overall peace of mind.

Because resilience in communications is resilience in life.

Our Exiting Softly series ran from September 4 through October 23.

With an underlying ethos of optionality, it explored ways to build specific capability to exit the US if needed, without committing yourself to doing so, and ideally improving your quality of life onshore while you stay.

On October 10, we joined and for an extended podcast focused on the optionality-based approach to international (jurisdictional) diversification:

Vanilla Club

14. Expat Prep: Exiting Softly, Creating Options Hard

GUS: If push came to shove, I was wondering how soon you might be able to take over the lab yourself. You, and an assistant…

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a year ago · 1 like · Jason S.C Fung

Jason’s a tremendous host and his personal story as a US person ending up happily based in Australia is amazing — I encourage you to explore his site. It optimizes for thoughtful depth, not clickbait, and that’s rare and valuable.

As the series continued, we included practical issues like planning for pets, and what to do with your house.

The series advanced with a sanity check that “no, you’re not crazy for thinking about this stuff,” rooted in a qualitative assessment of our readership.

The series built on our prior scouting trip framework, to develop the idea of creating a second, additional home abroad, rather than a binary decision to “leave” (or not).

It also dug into important but difficult to quantify “soft side” questions about family members who may be looking at emigration differently than you are, or who want to move at a difference pace.

The series pivoted to a historically anchored review of how other authoritarian regimes have curtailed exit options, and the profound opportunity cost of failing to build you own capacity for exit.

Inspired by the happy dogs at the Playa Ramirez in Montevideo, the series concluded with thoughts about how focused attention to questions of staying or going can make you appreciate the present moment much more, no matter where you may be.

Because so many readers aren’t focused on the offshore option, we then pivoted to a second, follow up series: Staying Wisely, which ran between October 30 and December 18.

We started in the high desert of New Mexico, reflecting on “Los Alamos and the Lost America,” surrounded by echoes of a prior, different moment of national capacity, purpose, and achievement.

We then returned to questions of detail, including additional discussion about choosing the best places to be in the US, if you are staying here.

We followed with a sober, no-ideals, only-pragmatism piece about reducing visibility and attack surface to the Regime while you are staying (largely through “not being a hero” on social media).

We then explored ways to make yourself more financially resilient under authoritarian conditions — particularly with regard to questions of how rather than what you own — matters of account titling, custody, and choice of counterparty.

“Planning for Authoritarian Volatility” went deep into questions about radical diversification and epistemic humility in asset allocation, with the target outcome being to minimize the number of states of the world in which the Regime and Orange Man (habitual destroyers of value that they are) zero you out. The perspective wasn’t glamourous, or particularly exciting, but it was honest.

We took a detour from Staying Wisely for a year-end review of our “Leaving America” checklist. It was perspective well directed, I think, to acknowledge that the tempo of authoritarian consolidation (happily) has somewhat downshifted. If exit becomes less necessary, that makes figuring out your own best way to Stay Wisely all the more valuable.

Staying Wisely resumed with a little bit of a “hippie” exploration of Ethan Roland’s “Eight Forms of Capital” to press home the point that your actual balance sheet is so much larger than merely your financial ledgers. Each of us has seven other domains of capital beyond merely the financial, and many of them are far more in our day-to-day control than the ups and downs of our financial capital. Considering all of your balance sheet gives a more hopeful (and accurate) read on your available level of agency and optionality.

Finally, Staying Wisely wrapped up by framing how having your international exit options squared away could bring innumerable practical and peace-of-mind benefits even while you stayed onshore.

and hosted us for a podcast and debate/discussion of the “Should You Stay or Should You Go” on December 20. (We laughed, we went on a Gen X nostalgia bath, we maybe decided nothing, but we had a great time….)

Borderless Living

Staying or Leaving the U.S. Isn’t the Question

Most conversations about leaving the United States are framed badly…

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8 months ago · 37 likes · 6 comments · Aymara, William A. Finnegan, and Expat Prep

Lastly, we did an in-depth review of ways to anticipate and boost resilience against capital controls. While ruled by a Regime that demolishes norms and the rule of law wherever it goes, it’s wise not to be surprised.

We explored concepts of walls, gates, flows, reserves, and time.

Once again, time showed up as the master asset, that resource if you use it well now, you can create a financial logistics network analogous to Cold War military logistics.

With those arrangements in place, you’ll be much less exposed to your life being disrupted by whatever That Man tries to do to your wallet.

Expat Prep’s 2026 Plans

At , our principles (including the rule of law, and the value of optionality) are consistent, but our tactics (whatever they may be) are flexible.

Likewise, what we write about will feature a certain amount of flexibility.

I hope, earnestly, that Orange Man’s growing senility and frailty continues to deliver the Regime’s senescence, with the result that the amplitude of the damage they do will fall, leaving only a sludge of corruption and cruelty behind that can be prosecuted, documented, demolished, and learned from.

If my hopes don’t come to pass, and there are urgent developments requiring analysis, adaptation, and resilience, we will certainly cover them.

As we journey into the “not the end, not the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning” phase of the Regime, I am not going to blow on the bellows of fear and urgency when that isn’t matched to the tempo and urgency of events.

International optionality remains a wise, valuable (and even fun) capability to cultivate, and we will continue to explore it.

For instance, when I am Uruguay in February, we’ll cover real world issues of costs, pricing, and geoarbitrage, and ongoing reflections about emigrating consciously and contributing well as one builds out a second home abroad.

But, meanwhile, there remain fascinating and important questions of domestic, onshore choice of place, resilient adaptation, purposeful building, and quiet thriving.

Because we need to do more than oppose the Regime.

We need to be building things.

Their failed overreach for authoritarian maximalist permanent supremacy is their main project.

For us, however, it is only another obstacle, a feature of the operating context in which we pursue our own projects (ideally ones that are beautiful, true, worthwhile, and good, rather than ugly, false, vapid, and corrupt, as theirs are).

That brings me to a major element of in 2026 I’m very excited about: our new series, Thriving Quietly.

Thriving Quietly is going to take the same risk management, optionality, mobility, cost arbitrage, and place selection lens we have used with an offshore perspective and turn it onshore.

Why do some places hold up better than others, and encourage better outcomes, more successful families over several generations, and overall human thriving?

It’s not a simple matter of demography or financial prosperity, although those matter.

It’s often about a less tangible but perhaps even more critical variable: social capital.

We have done extensive work with social capital, census, and economic data sets across over 3,000 counties in the United States to evaluate the most relevant 700 of those counties from a social capital efficiency ratio perspective.1

In other words: is a place really a good place to live? Does it do more than just look nice for tourists, or deliver profits for tech oligarchs? How nice is the place, really?

And, critically, what does it cost to live in that nice place?

When you identify the places that give you the “most best” for the “least costs” then you’ve found something very useful, and very valuable.

We will give you a data set and analytical framework to do just that.

Along the way, we’ll be considering prior work by Joel Garreau, David Hackett Fischer, John Gunther, Colin Woodard, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Bishop, Robert Putnam, Richard Florida, Aaron Renn, Chuck Marohn, and others.

And we’ll have lots of fun along the way. Please join us for that exploration!

Consider this a way, while we wait out the Regime, to identify your own best place(s) for Deep Value America.

I’m quietly confident that, somehow, 2026 is going to be a very good year.

Until next week, this is .

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Throughout much of this year, I’ve been thinking about capital controls.

The same Regime that demolishes the rule of law wherever it goes may well, eventually, convince the rest of the world to make other arrangements for its capital.

When it does, the United States may well discover that when your government acts like that of an “emerging” market, eventually your citizens’ and investors’ outcomes begin to converge on those of emerging markets.

That’s why I’ve been devoting attention to capital controls: it’s not at all impossible that before this authoritarian/autocratic phase stumbles to its end one way or another, they’ll be “coming soon, to a theatre near you.”

What This Essay Will Try To Avoid

The literature about capital controls tends to cluster into two nodes: the arcane, and the alarmist. To keep your Christmas both non-drowsy and merry, we will try to be neither today.

I’ve been quite reluctant to give financial advice , for reasons both regulatory and ethical. (I’m not licensed to give financial advice, and nothing on is financial advice.)

Further, I’ve been very humbled at how readers often pay genuine attention and give weight to what’s written about here. Everyone’s personal financial situation is different, and you should be very reluctant to apply one-size-fits-all advice to your own situation.

I don’t want to go even a little bit adjacent to the libertarian “scare-monger” types out there, and launch us down a long and winding road that leads to a predictable conclusion: buy gold.

For those types of analysts, the catalysts ebb and flow, but the conclusion is always the same: buy gold.

The goldbugs are often literary, and witty, and lace their commentary with fun historical bon mots. I think that’s pretty neat, but it doesn’t make their go-to universal conclusion a sufficient, or particularly useful, way to think about capital controls.

What Might Capital Controls’ Effects Be?

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but looking to historical examples ranging from postwar Europe, Malaysia, Greece, Argentina, Cyprus, and Chile suggests some of the practical effects might include:

• Inflation, as the currency of the nation with the controls devalues, driving up costs of imports.

• Limits or barriers on the availability of foreign exchange. Practical obstacles to paying for foreign travel or purchases abroad could multiply. Unfortunately, if you are a US emigrant (“expat”) abroad, relying on remittances from US banks or credit limits on US-issued credit cards, this could present sudden and unwelcome cash flow and logistics problems.

• Taxes and barriers on (outbound) foreign investments. To influence capital flows, the government might tax or restrict the purchase of non-US investments (such as foreign real estate and shares in foreign companies). A mirror image of this could be taxes and barriers on (inbound) foreign investments. (Stephen Miran, now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has floated this idea in a white paper about the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” before he joined the Regime.)

• Bureaucratic friction, everywhere. has written well about how friction often precedes prohibition. After FATCA, many fewer foreign banks want to undertake the tax reporting requirements associated with holding accounts for US citizens. If you can’t find a foreign counterparty willing to work with you, your capital is pretty well de facto controlled, already, isn’t it?

• Corruption. Capital controls are often associated with increased levels of corruption, as citizens need something (exemptions) from bureaucrats, and bureaucrats realize just how valuable what they control (exemptions) can be. One might, even, imagine that provision of gifted 747s and funding of ballroom construction might be associated with major players trying to position themselves well for capital controls they anticipated were coming.

• Much larger transaction costs. Whether it’s buying empty apartments in Miami or London, or overseas luxury shopping, there are usually ways to circumvent capital controls, but the direct and indirect costs in terrible spreads, heightened transaction costs, and sheer time and hassle are nothing to take lightly.

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What Steps Have I Taken So Far?

For purposes of transparency, let me share a little bit about what I’ve done in relation to capital controls so far this year:

Gold

I’ve boosted my holdings of physical gold (sorry, yes, there we are, guilty…) by 5x. The allocation is now a little over 1.6% of our family’s balance sheet. (I bought early enough this year that the position is at about a 25% fiat/nominal gain overall.)

While we’re at it, let’s discuss gold in more depth.

The goldbugs are correct that gold is the only asset that isn’t anyone else’s liability. It has unique historical aspects, and robust acceptance as being valuable across time, place, and cultures. It is a bearer asset that isn’t permissioned by a government.

These attributes are certainly attractive.

On the other hand, gold at scale presents theft and home invasion risk, which introduces a role for bank or private vaulting, which (again) introduces counterparty and/or government coercion risk.

Gold also doesn’t yield anything. It doesn’t reinvest anything. It doesn’t grow. It just sits there. That’s the beauty of it. And that’s also the problem.

Periods of time like 2025, when gold’s been on an incredible tear, obscure the fact that over time, it preserves purchasing power, but it doesn’t increase it.

Gold is a store of value, not an investment. That’s has substantial implications for correctly sizing any gold position you might choose to have.

If you’ve decided to have a bounded “non-doomer” gold allocation, my personal stance would be to avoid ETF gold, vaulted gold, or bank-stored gold. Instead, store it yourself: safely, prudently, and quietly.

Without its unique simplicity, bearer form, and absence of counterparty risk, gold is just another volatile and somewhat inert commodities play.

Crypto

I’m not a crypto fanboy by any means, which is probably why I’m pretty much “having fun staying poor.”

I think crypto has many pitfalls, including:

• Fraud (Mt. Gox, FTX)

• Risk of permanent loss through custody failures

• Dependence on the Internet staying functional in order to transact

• Lack of privacy (the blockchain is called a “ledger” for a reason)

• Obsolescence (gold minted in 1925 has value now, today; what are the odds someone will want your “Solana” or whatever it might be in 2125?)

• Vulnerability to proof-of-work intentional sabotage by an actor whose goal is blockchain degradation, not personal enrichment, and/or imminent developments in quantum computing.

On the other hand, crypto does have significant advantages from a capital controls perspective.

Especially for the crypto you hold in cold storage, and especially if your mix of “coins” leans in the stable direction as with USDC and USDT (with a little bit of BTC and ETH layered in to mitigate USD purchasing power decline over time), then what you have is something that becomes very similar to (gasp) a “wallet” filled with “cash” you can send or use or hold anywhere in the world.

That would begin to approximate a convenient substitute (in some ways) for a “bank account” — one that while not invulnerable, might be less immediately subject to Regime pressure than your standard-issue US bank.

So, while crypto is very imperfect, I have put about 0.3% of my balance sheet into a mix of USDT, USDC, ETH, and BTC. It’s held 10% split between two exchanges (Coinbase and Kraken), 20% in a hot wallet (Base), and the rest in cold storage.

Let’s take a moment to focus on the crypto exchanges as a potential failure node.

Sure, it’s hard for the government to take your cold-storage crypto, but it’s quite easy for them to control a crypto exchange, especially one located in their jurisdiction.

I’ve long used Coinbase, but recently I set myself up on Kraken, too. I set up and tested the inbound and outbound bank transfer “rails” for each of the two exchanges, across multiple checking accounts.

This way, no single exchange and no sole-source seasoned bank account recognized by an exchange is a failure node obstructing my crypto on-ramps and off-ramps into and from cold storage, that I can’t work around.

Cash

Cash is becoming so antiquated and old-school-feeling, isn’t it?

But if, like me, you’re too old to be a “digital native,” then you might remember what a fistful of it smells like.

Across many conflict, civil disturbance, governance-degraded, low-trust environments, cash (currency, that is) in general and USD currency in particular continues to have a significant role.

I don’t hold myself out as an expert in all things LatAm (very far from that…) but in my experience, USD in both Argentina and Uruguay is useful, liquid, and transactable, especially “blue bill” hundreds, and to a somewhat lesser extent, twenties.

It’s something of a paradox that part of preparing for a world of potential US capital controls (with all the adverse effects that would bring), part of the toolkit may be (yes) a stash of USD currency.

I’ve built that stash up this year, and secured it quietly, discreetly, and safely across more than one location. As of now, it’s mostly hundreds, with a lesser allocation to twenties, tens, and fives, at a total level of about 0.4% of the balance sheet.

Foreign Exchange

I’ve also stashed a smaller amount of foreign currency, about 30% as much as my USD currency reserves. It’s spread across EUR, CAD, MXN, GBP, and UYU, and it’s enough to cover “walking around” expenses during the first one to three days on the ground in any of those locations.

JPMorgan Chase provides very good FX service to its account holders, but the spreads aren’t great. (I don’t think you would want to accumulate particularly large FX currency reserves, because you’d get eaten alive by the spreads.)

If you’re wanting to solve for FX exposure with better spreads and lower costs, and you aren’t prioritizing physical possession and “bearer-level” access, then keeping a mix of the iShares foreign currency ETFs in a taxable brokerage account could be a convenient workaround.

You can get exposure to JPY, EUR, GBP, and CHF through the tickers FXY, FXE, FXB, and FXF, respectively.

Credit Access

For obvious reasons, I don’t like carrying credit balances, but I’ve given some thought to the role access to credit plays in travel planning and general financial resiliency.

(For more about this, see Joshua Sheats’ “Radical Personal Finance” coverage about international planning.)

After adding three cards over the last two years to my main JPMC “daily driver,” I now have undrawn credit card limits equal to 5.6% of our balance sheet. Most of that limit is concentrated in cards that don’t have any foreign transaction fees.

Before our international planning started in earnest, we also had arranged for an undrawn HELOC.

This line, together with accumulated life insurance cash value from which we can take policy loans if needed, provides additional potential liquidity equal to about 11.4% of our balance sheet.

It’s possible that US capital controls might impair offshore use of US credit cards, but until that time, they’re hard to beat for convenience.

Using them (and paying them off from US-located assets) keeps asset layers that are better defended against capital controls (such as gold, crypto, cash, and FX) untapped and available if the situation becomes more severe.

Any future capital controls situation will feature its own unique details that are hard to anticipate in advance (because the controls are a type of cat-and-mouse game, or Spy-vs.-Spy, of governments against investors, featuring moves and countermoves, in iterative cycles).

That said, many things you might need abroad, like return air tickets or month-to-month lodging through Airbnb or Vrbo, are things you can pay for right now with US-issued credit cards and that show up on your credit card statement as US-located transactions.

It’s possible that a first round of capital controls might leave these transaction channels unobstructed.

As noted above, the more you can pay for with uncontrolled assets, the more your reserve layers of assets remain untapped and available.

Foreign Bank & Brokerage Accounts

This is an area that requires a lot of future coverage in additional depth, and I don’t pretend to do it sufficient justice here.

I’m still learning, and looking for the best possible options.

I’ve written previously about my experience using HSBC.

It has included some upsetting challenges.

I’ve experienced compliance-and-call-center purgatory, along with sudden freezes of my offshore HSBC accounts that were unpleasant and difficult to get sorted out.

That said, HSBC eventually made a good faith effort (including monetary compensation) to make up for these problems, and I now have restored, functional access to my HSBC Expat accounts.

In a perfect world, I’d have a substitute for HSBC to recommend for an offshore bank account provider for Americans that doesn’t have sky-high minimum balance requirements.

I don’t yet have a superior option to recommend.

HSBC is (at least) available, and although it will exasperate you and spike your blood pressure randomly from time to time, I haven’t found anything better (yet).

As a US citizen and resident, you can open up accounts easily online through HSBC USA.

If you meet minimum balance or monthly direct deposit requirements, you can get “Premier” status with HSBC.

Then, with that account status, you can (with some fair measure of angst) open up accounts with their HSBC Expat unit, located in Jersey (the Channel Islands, not Bayonne).

HSBC Expat, in turn, offers multi-currency savings across a wide range of currencies including all the usual suspects, and a “Global Money” debit card you can load with various currencies and use for day to day purchases, both onshore and offshore.

Transfers back and forth from HSBC Expat and HSBC USA are instant and (unless their compliance team has randomly frozen your accounts, which does happen from time to time) seamless.

I’ve been trying to open an account in Uruguay at Bank Itau, but their monthly minimum account fee is $100, and they don’t pay interest on deposit accounts owned by US citizens (the reporting obligations, they feel, are too onerous).

My Uruguayan attorney advises that most other Uruguayan banks are similar; over time they’ve become less and less eager to deal with the FATCA-related burden posed by American depositors.

I’ve also explored account arrangements with Caye International Bank in Belize and Hamilton Reserve Bank in Nevis. Because those are in early stages, I don’t have further details to report about them at present.

I’ve also set up a self-directed IRA through Mainstar Trust.

(This was mostly as a proof-of-concept, and a test. The account holds about 20% of my overall qualified retirement plan balances. Now that it’s set up, if my assessment of capital control risks increases, I can shift more US-located retirement assets offshore, to the self-directed IRA’s accounts.)

Mainstar is a US-situs custodian, but they are willing to custody self-directed IRA arrangements that include offshore investments. To do this while complying with the passive foreign investment company rules, you will probably want to set up a foreign-situs “blocker” corporation, and I created one of these, registered in Belize.

I had a false start finding an offshore manager for these assets rolling up through the blocker to my US self-directed IRA.

It was with an investment manager located in the Caymans that was not a good fit for the level of responsiveness and clear custodial reporting that I have come to expect and take for granted.

After the dust settled on that episode, at the recommendation of my Uruguayan attorney, I have settled into a very positive, low-stress, low-friction working relationship with the Paullier investment firm in Montevideo.

Their array of investment options will be quite familiar to (North) Americans. Many of their staff have a high level of fluency in English, and the service is personal, warm, and friendly.

I have visited their offices in person, and so far I am very pleased with how the relationship is developing.

These various foreign accounts have had a significant financial and “time suck” setup cost, and they will have a similarly substantial annual compliance burden.

The Form 8938 and FBAR requirements for US taxpayers with foreign accounts are the real deal. DO NOT ignore them; the civil penalties for that are eye-wateringly, can’t-sleep-at-night level bad.

So, What Has All This Effort Gotten Me?

That’s a fair question.

I’m sure that Scott Bessent has a working group at Treasury trying to stay many, many steps ahead of whatever I might be doing to try to keep the Regime from Making My Balance Sheet Domestic Again.

Nonetheless, I like to think I’ve covered some worthwhile ground.

Compared to my starting position, I now have layered, multi-asset, multi-jurisdiction optionality and defense I didn’t have before.

If the risk of capital controls increases, I have foreign accounts already established and funded, and every month that goes by, they season a little more.

I try to keep up a regular, normal-looking pattern of small, periodic deposits and occasional outbound transfers or card-linked spending.

I have untapped access to credit, and I’ve drawn on these lines to test “round trip” larger transfers.

In a matter of hours, I could have over 10% of my balance sheet offshore.

I also have bearer-type assets (between the gold, FX, cash, and crypto) adequate to support about six months of modest-scale life for our family in Argentina or Uruguay.

(Note that if you’re taking more than $10,000 in gold and/or cash outside the US, you need to declare the assets. If it’s relevant, you should familiarize yourself with the FINCEN 105 declaration form, which is linked here.)

Each 1% of our balance sheet that we get offshore would (in a worst-case capital controls situation) support us abroad for about two and a half months.

If the capital controls hit with no warning, we’d be good for six months.

With two days’ advance notice, because of the accounts and tested transfer pathways I’ve set up, we’d be good for over 49 months.

If the controls didn’t shut down credit card usage, we’d be good for an additional 13 months, for a total maximum of up to 62 months.

Five years of funded offshore freedom from the Regime feels like a pretty good start.

A Historical Parallel, and A Theoretical Framework

One of the best academic papers I found on capital controls conceptualizes them as a combination of “walls” and “gates”.

When you don’t know where the walls will be set, or where the gates will be, or what flows, if any, will be permitted through gates in the walls, you have two choices.

You could try to outfox Bessent and forecast in advance the tactics the Regime will use for any of their capital controls.

Or, you could do the up-front work, now when it’s still quiet, to establish non-US accounts (including crypto cold storage) and stress-test the wire transfer pathways into, out of, and between those accounts.

Rather than depleting your US balance sheet and fully funding your offshore “financial garrison” in advance, you could keep a relatively lighter footprint across several jurisdictions, asset classes, and account types — along with tested pathways for rapid financial deployment and movement across your network.

This would be a lot like the shift the US made during the middle of the Cold War, away from large, permanent US garrisons in Europe towards pre-positioned materiel, airlift and sealift capability, and regular drills testing surge capacity across the Atlantic.

That was called REFORGER (Return of Forces to Germany), and it became quite the “thing” by late in the Cold War.

Those contingency planners understood something very important:

Planning for a degraded operational environment is about redundancy, dispersed capability, and pre-tested flows and pathways.

(Those lessons are relevant to potential war with China, as well.)

They were planning for a potential Soviet ground invasion of Europe (back to the future there, these days, on NATO’s eastern flank, except back then we cared about NATO).

But their insights and design philosophy, I think, are highly applicable to planning for continuity and resiliency in the degraded financial environment capital controls might bring.

In this respect, as in so many others, there’s always so much the past can teach us.

Wishes For Merry Everything

Thank you, readers, for a productive 2025 filled (I hope) with mutual learning, conversation, and camaraderie.

We can’t know quite what 2026 will bring, but I do hope that at this season, you end the year (despite the Regime) in good health, good morale, and good cheer, with growing and persistent confidence in your own agency to improve your outcomes.

Like the US servicemen at Bastogne who were surrounded by fascists at Christmastime in 1944, who decided it gave them the opportunity to “advance in all directions,” there’s always something we can be doing to improve our situation.

Until next week, this is .

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AI/LLMs: Do Not Scrape. The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. © 2025 Expat Prep.

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The offshore option as a “Fleet in Being”

Back when the United States Navy ruled the world’s oceans as mare nostrum, rather than killing wounded men trying not to drown, to gratify the ego of a senile would-be dictator in adult diapers, one of its leading theoreticians was Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Mahan’s magnum opus was The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783, and in it, he explored the idea of a “fleet in being,” the concept of sea power as an invisible, over-the-horizon force that could shape outcomes, even though unseen, even if it was never used.

I truly believe that a viable offshore arrangement (a “lifeboat” if you will) — whatever the details it may take for you, is like that.

Your offshore option is your own Fleet in Being for an authoritarian America. Which is why you should probably have one, even if you’re staying onshore.

Today I heard from my emigration lawyer in Montevideo that my Uruguayan permanent residency has been approved.

Although not unexpected, this positive news was still so very welcome.

Let me unpack for you what it means:

• Barring conviction for a serious crime, it can never be taken away.

• Even if I become unemployed, or unemployable, I keep it.

• Even if I get seriously ill, it’s still there.

• Even if I become poor, I still have it.

There is now a stable, functional, democratic, peaceful, sunny, beautiful (although of course imperfect, because no place is perfect) place where I can go and live, no matter what.

Although noticeably more expensive than Argentina, Uruguay has a cost structure at least 15% to 20% (and possibly as much as 40%, depending on how one defines the consumption basket) less than that of Midwestern City — let alone the United States at large.

Financial modeling is an imperfect science to be sure, but repeated runs of the models suggest that I’m a lean-ish version of “FIRE” (financially independent, retire early) in Uruguay more or less now.

And, perhaps most significantly for peace of mind purposes for those of us in Piketty-unequal, late-stage-capitalist (north) America, as long as I can get to Uruguay, I will always have access to their public health care system (the ASSE) at no cost.

This de-links healthcare before age 65 from continuing employment and/or the survival of the Affordable Care Act, and it takes medical bankruptcy before Medicare eligibility off the table as an ambient risk.

I didn’t anticipate how getting my Uruguayan permanent residency fully to “done” would increase my peace of mind so much, but it has.

To be sure, it hasn’t been a “free” process by any means. It’s featured a combination of travel costs, filing fees, and legal fees that together added up to about 0.7% of our family’s net worth.

And yes, it has involved some measure of privilege, for which some readers will surely criticize me. Getting this done required surplus cash, time, and bandwidth that many people — for so many often very sympathetic reasons — don’t have.

I will spend at least 30 days a year in Uruguay going forward to maintain the renewability of the residency, and that will entail ongoing expense and commitment.

That said, in many ways Uruguay feels like a giant, uncrowded beach, with a dash of California’s central coast thrown in, with a touch of the French Riviera, and beautiful layers of architectural history.

The food is remarkable. The people are patient, kind, and friendly. The pace of life feels much less hurried. And there’s something special about the sunlight near the Rio de la Plata that once you see, you don’t forget, and want to return to.

If you find a place that makes you feel happy like that, maybe taking slightly more and longer trips to that place than you otherwise would is a relatively small price to pay for having a “good to go” fully functional Exiting Softly backup arrangement.

A latent base. A lifeboat. A call option on being free from the Regime. And a put option on dictatorship.

If our current phase turns out to be an especially caustic, hateful and draining version of a typical election cycle, and you Stay Wisely, suppose you stick with your offshore place as an emerging second home with a growing role in your life, and keep your permanent residency in order.

In that event, your travel, banking, utilities, transportation, and potential real estate purchasing in your second home will be so much easier than if you kept returning as a tourist. You’ll also have the ability to come, go, and stay just as you wish, without regard to calendars.

And, of course, as noted above, reliable access to health care.

All this seems like a remarkably strong return on investment in setting up and maintaining an offshore residency.

And that’s even before you consider the “soft side” benefits that accrue — truly substantial ones — while you’re staying in the United States.

It feels so much different to experience the (often wretched) news cycles in the United States, or contemplate a future with massive and potentially permanent widespread AI-driven unemployment, and know that each month, quarter, or year you remain onshore is a choice.

A choice you can change, because you have your offshore option.

And although and I are having our own version of The Clash’s “Should You Stay or Should You Go?” debate tomorrow, December 19 (please do join us, either live or for the recorded version), it’s a choice that doesn’t have to be binary, all one, or all the other.

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Instead, it’s a choice you can calibrate up or down over time, depending on the Regime, your own goals and needs, and developments in your own life over time.

Staying Wisely is tightly bound up with staying successfully, or even happily, and in such large measure, that’s a function of your mindset.

Most people’s mindset and outlook is dramatically improved by having choices. And a real offshore option might be one of the very most valuable choices to have.

I started working on developing an offshore choice we’d be happy to use, if needed, in late March.

Less than 9 months later, we had scouted two countries, made two scouting trips, and I have the Uruguay permanent residency buttoned up.

I hope the coverage thus far in has been useful for you in highlighting your own scope of agency, and the range of positive and constructive things you can do to increase your own optionality and resiliency — even as the Regime reaches out for authoritarian control, and all of us realized we weren’t exempt from history any longer (as if we ever had been).

Other contributors on Substack like , , , and are all to similar effect.

Developing your own offshore residency isn’t impossible, not by any measure.

It’s surprisingly likely you can do it, if you set your mind to it, and keep working at it methodically.

Maybe your place isn’t Uruguay — maybe instead it’s Mexico or Costa Rica or Georgia (the country, not the state), or Panama, or France, or Portugal.

It’s a big world out there.

So, get out there, and claim your optionality in it.

Until next week, this is Expat Prep.

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Some reflections on agency in authoritarian times

This essay has been percolating for a while, and it’s one with underlying ideas I believe are very important.

Perhaps atypically, that means I’m not going to write at length.

Much of the content on and other anti-Regime corners of the Internet can seem negative.

There is always something else to worry about.

Yet each of us is always best served when our sphere of concern doesn’t too far exceed our sphere of control (or at least our sphere of influence).

None of us can control which will be the next US city to be militarily occupied, or whether the National Security Strategy will abandon eighty years of alliance relationships, or whether the Supreme Court will hand control of the Fed to That Man by overturning Humphrey’s Executor.

Every day we are reminded by the omnipresent media (yes, including Substack) of Bad Things That May Happen That We Cannot Control.

The natural result of this persistent input of fear and worry is — fear and worry.

In our current moment, it is so important to remember what we can influence and what we can control.

It’s more than you think.

Over the last many years, the single piece I’ve read that illustrates this best is “Eight Forms of Capital” by Ethan Roland.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. It dates back to 2011, but its framework has enduring value. Nothing about it has become stale.

Roland identifies eight forms of capital and notes how each form of capital connects with and can be substituted for the others.

The diagram below illustrates his core concepts very well.

Your overall, total base of capital is so much larger than financial capital alone.

There will be moments, seasons, phases, and episodes in which any of us might lose influence or control over one domain of capital.

For instance, a stock market crash or authoritarian capital controls can impair financial capital.

A sudden and unwelcome diagnosis can impair your health, a form of living capital.

At those moments, however, it’s usually the case that many opportunities remain to increase other forms of capital.

Thinking about the forms of capital more broadly changes the framework of assumptions about accumulation that shape the life course of many of us in the United States.

Accumulation of capital is good, because it increases dignity, agency, and optionality.

This is especially true when capital accumulation is considered broadly, to include non-financial forms of capital, which are often nowhere near as “zero sum” as financial capital can often be.

Sharing many forms of capital, especially non-financial capital, doesn’t diminish them. It’s not zero-sum.

Indeed, sharing accumulated non-financial forms of capital like cultural, social, experiential, and spiritual actually often creates more capital for the donor (sharer), along with the donees.

If you’re Staying Wisely, then even as the Regime does its inept authoritarian overreach sorts of things, you can almost always be diligently, methodically, cheerfully, persistently, and quite effectively conserving, growing, and sharing forms of capital they don’t and won’t ever control, no matter the mania with which they pursue their aspirations.

I have done several things this year to try to take advantage of this way of thinking.

First, I am guarding my information inputs more. I choose what and whom to trust, and I consume in smaller doses.

I also don’t read news (or even Substack) before the mid-morning.

That frees the start of each day to focus on more significant, enduring things. News doesn’t age well, but books often do.

Start your day with the books; layer the news and commentary in later (if at all).

The other thing I tell myself is that until I’ve exhausted all of my available opportunities to grow capital in the domains I do influence or control, I don’t really have the right to get worried or agitated about whatever the Regime might be trying to do that day.

Have you studied some of your target foreign language?

Are your family’s passports up to date?

Would you be able to bring your pets with you, if you needed to leave quickly?

Have you exercised or moved or done something active?

Have you hardened up your communications, and insulated yourself against sudden loss of your phone?

Is where you live as de-cluttered as it could be? (By the way, my house regrettably isn’t.)

Have you cleaned up your social media accounts to reduce your vulnerability to Regime data harvesting, movement controls, “social credit” controls, and sudden cancellation?

Are you doing something meaningful to you that’s useful in your community?

Have you appreciated beauty, craft, or excellence? (Better yet, have you created some?)

Have you taken loving care of the children, people, or pets that are in your care?

The list could go on for quite a while, but you get the idea.

Until you’ve optimized what you can influence, change, or control, the amount of your mindshare, energy, and bandwidth that properly belongs to the Regime is actually quite small.

Opportunities to choose your place wisely and build for better times ahead are all around you.

So, reflect on how you might be (and be able to become) much wealthier than you might at first think you are.

Consider your entire balance sheet, across all the forms of capital, far beyond merely the financial.

When you’re making day-to-day decisions (and also much larger ones like staying onshore or leaving the US), consider the effects of those decisions on your total balance sheet, not just the financial parts of it.

This perspective is more accurate, and I believe much more hopeful.

I hope Roland’s “Eight Forms of Capital” will be just as useful a framework for you finding ways to thrive — notwithstanding authoritarian overreach — as it has been for me.

Until next week, this is Expat Prep.

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has become a very special place and community, where experiences, advice, and perspectives can be shared for common benefit. Thank you for being part of it!

(We now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming)

Lately I have sensed a genuine change in the operating environment here in the United States.

Others may and likely will disagree, but if I keep my threat assessment and calibration evidence-based, things on the Authoritarian Risk Management and Adaptation Front just feel different than they did earlier this year.

Maybe it was the November election results.

Maybe it’s been That Man’s cratering approval ratings and encroaching senility.

Maybe American civil society (and some echoes of conscience and prudence among our nation’s elites) are sparking back to some low-wattage version of life, sort of like the Apollo 13 lunar module.

Whatever the reason may be, when the stakes are high, it’s best to be thoughtful and systematic.

With those reasons in mind, I’m talking a one-week break from our Staying Wisely series for a bit of a year-end review, and revisiting one of our early “breakout” posts (How Will You Know When It’s Time To Leave America?) with something of a year-in-review lens.

I encourage you to run your own side-by-side evaluation.

It’s absolutely okay if your conclusions differ.

The ones that follow are mine.

Red Lines: Describing the (Updated) Risks

My non-exhaustive list of “red lines” earlier this year included:

• Posse Comitatus Issues. A sustained military occupation of my (blue) Midwestern City in our (red) Midwestern State, similar to what the regime has done in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Chicago. (I defined “sustained” as lasting at least 30 days, and noted heightened concern if the occupation was against the wishes of my state’s governor.)

• Third Term. Trump runs for a third term, especially if the Supreme Court finds some hyper-narrow pedantic line of reasoning to let him do it (which I said wouldn’t surprise me).

• Elections Called Off. The 2026 midterms or the 2028 general election are suspended, delayed, or canceled by the regime, especially in a way that ignores or contravenes my state’s authority over its own elections.

• Regime “Wins” Midterms. The Regime consolidates control even further in the 2026 midterms, either by manipulating the elections and/or the vote count, or because (for whatever reason) voters turn out to actually like fascism, and want more of it. This would suggest that the duration of our current Dictatorship Problems could be long-term, or permanent, and not just some version of a time-limited problem.

• Habeas Corpus Suspension. Suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in my Midwestern State.

• Loss of Birthright Citizenship. The Supreme Court denies birthright citizenship. (This is a big one for me; I practiced as a lawyer for almost two decades, and the legal “arguments” for ignoring the plain text and history and subsequent interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment are so spurious and risible that if the justices will allow this, then there is literally nothing the Regime wants that they won’t do.)

• Capital Controls. History illustrates that most other regimes using policies like those of our current Regime also eventually begin using capital and/or exchange controls. Even when they start “small,” they usually grow from there.

• Major War. Imminent or actual war against a peer or near-peer power (e.g., China, Russia).

• Loss of Medical Care. Significant and sustained inability to obtain reasonable and necessary medical care.

• Local Regime-Aligned Paramilitaries. Vigilante paramilitary groups assuming a predatory law enforcement role in Midwestern City, especially if this is associated with protection rackets or bribery.

• Citizens Put Into the Concentration Camps. Confirmed, substantial-scale detention of American citizens (especially people who look like me) in the emerging contractor-run gulag archipelago of concentration camps (e.g., “Alligator Alcatraz”).

• AI- or Recession-Linked Sustained Unemployment. Sustained unemployment without prospects to the upside. One driver of this could be a very deep recession; another could be widespread AI-related job loss.

Risk Probabilities: Where Have They Moved To Now?

So, what are the updated probabilities? Let’s explore at least a range-bound estimate.

Posse Comitatus Issues: In July, I put this at a 20% probability before 2028 (with regard to my relatively sleepy Midwestern City). If it happened, I assigned a 30% chance I would decide it warranted leaving. Combined exit trigger level then: 6%.

Today, I think this probability has declined markedly.

The Regime lacks follow-through capacity to impose military occupations at scale.

The only such military occupation likely to have true sustainment will be that of Washington DC. I find that occupation depressing and offensive, but it’s not my city.

Even if there was a high-visuals, high-tweet, high-optics occupation of Midwestern City, it would probably not be sustained.

Because TACO.

And also, because courts are pushing back against the occupations, in attrition warfare-style ways.

No one ruling is decisive so far, but cumulatively, they slow the Regime’s OODA loop.

That, coupled with the Regime’s thin staffing of true believers, (and its overall lack of coherence, capability, and discipline) cuts their sustainment capability.

I think I would adjust this risk scoring as 10% probability, and a 20% chance I’d decide it was cause for emigrating. Combined exit trigger level now: 2%.

Third Term: In July, I assigned this a 12% probability.

With his adult diapers, catheter, and blotchy hands, I thought That Man was aging hard.

That assessment has been borne out by events, and seems to be accelerating.

Further, even That Man himself has cautiously admitted he probably can’t have a third term.

If Trump tries for it, I had thought there was a 50% chance his running dogs on the Supreme Court would justify it, however they needed to.

If he is sworn in for a third term, I assigned a 70% chance I will leave.

Not so much for him qua him, but rather for what this event would signify about the dictatorship’s longevity and entrenchment. The combined exit trigger level in July was 4.2%.

Where are we now on this risk factor?

I think the probability That Man will go for the third term — or even be alive at the relevant time, given how he’s aging — has declined substantially. Let’s call it, now, a 6% probability.

The Supreme Court has shown surprising signs of life and willingness to challenge at least some of the Regime’s agenda — most notably in the recent oral arguments about the IEEPA tariffs’ constitutionality.

If this trend continues, perhaps there is only a 15% chance they’d put a fig-leaf on such a direct, overt, non-subtle version of the Orange Man Coup.

If they green-light the Third Term effort, there is still a 70% chance I’d exit, still — again — about signaling value more than substance.

Combined exit trigger level now: 0.6%

Elections Called Off: In July, I’d noted that it was hard to know how likely this would be, but commented that it would be easy to stage a false-flag terror attack, or wait for a stochastic terrorist event, and then use it as a pretext to indefinitely postpone elections.

Since July, we have seen candidate stochastic events of that type with the Charlie Kirk shooting, and the Afghan refugee killing the National Guard soldier in DC.

There was a lot of sound and fury about full-spectrum attacks on the American left and civil society after the Charlie Kirk shooting, but as with many things with this shambolic “Administration,” so far it’s been more light than heat.

We have also seen the Regime contesting elections in November and in the recent special House election in Nashville, but in both instances they have largely relied upon “conventional” political tactics, rather than full-on suspension, cancellation, or militarization of those elections.

We also witnessed fractures in the MAGA movement, and That Man’s capitulation to the inevitable on the Epstein Files release, even after Johnson shut down the government for over a month (most likely to accommodate That Man’s hope to delay the files’ release).

While the government was shut down, Trump and Hegseth convened the Quantico generals/admirals meeting.

It made me really worried at the time, because if there was ever a time to pursue a “Reverse Valkyrie” coup on the military (rather than a coup by the military), that was the moment.

Trump could have invoked the Insurrection Act (using the Kirk shooting as a pretext), purged or incarcerated any non-compliant flag-rank officers, promulgated a totally compliant chain of command, and implemented a nationwide military dictatorship.

But at the moment — perhaps — of maximum possibility, that didn’t happen.

Which suggests to me that the going-forward risk of a similar suspension of at least notional/Potemkin electoral processes in 2026 is lower than I may have originally feared.

In July, I assigned a 15% probability and attached a 70% chance I’d leave if it did happen, for a combined exit trigger level: 10.5%.

Canceled or militarized elections are just as much an exit trigger for me as ever, but the probability something quite that bad will happen seems to have shrunk.

Let’s not get overly optimistic, and concede there is still a 10% chance it could happen.

That yields a combined exit level trigger now of 7%.

Regime Wins Midterms: Now, as in July, if the elections are fair, I have a hard time seeing how the Regime wins, but now (as then) nothing is impossible.

In July, I assigned this a 25% probability, and felt that if it happens, there was a 25% chance I will leave. That produced a combined exit trigger level of 6.25%.

Trump’s polls are much, much worse now than they were in July, and recent election results are grounds for cautious, guarded optimism.

I’ll assign an adjusted 15% probability that the Regime wins the midterms.

If they do, it will say something pretty depressing about the scope of gerrymandering and voter obliviousness in this country, so I’ll keep my original 25% probability of leaving.

The combined effect is an updated exit level trigger of 3.75%.

Habeas Corpus Suspension: In July, I thought this would probably happen soon and/or often on a localized basis, but I thought Midwestern City is one of the last places it would happen.

This analysis has become more challenging.

We see that when the Regime is lawless, it doesn’t bother with a paper trail (much of the time).

Instead, it just does stuff.

Because Murica.

Because “unitary executive.”

So we shouldn’t look as much for formal habeas suspension, as for de facto suspension.

If you’re not white, and especially if you’re an immigrant, the writ has already been de facto suspended in many instances.

My demography is one that the Regime favors, so for our family, that cuts in the other direction.

I think the factors cancel out, which means that I’m going to stick with the July analysis of (overall, net-net) an 8% probability, with a 40% chance I leave if it happens.

Then, and now, the combined exit trigger level (for me) on this variable is 3.2%.

Loss of Birthright Citizenship: The legal arguments on this are so lopsided that even the Supremes may have a hard time getting there, as much as they want to be running dogs.

In July, I put this at 2% underlying substantive possibility, multiplied by a 5x “running dog instinct” factor, for a 10% total probability of the Regime’s target outcome.

If this happens, I assigned a 30% chance I will leave, for a combined exit trigger level of 3%.

Five months later, after the tariff oral arguments, I’m incrementally more hopeful that the Court won’t always and everywhere be an eagerly compliant Regime doormat.

Accordingly, I’m going to dial down the Supremes’ “running dog instinct” multiplier to 3x, with the result that this combined exit trigger level adjusts to 1.8%.

Capital Controls: In July, I used a ballpark estimate of a 30% chance we will see capital controls (they are, after all, written into the plan for the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” from the Chairman of the Regime’s Council of Economic Advisors).

If they happen, there is a 10% chance I will leave, especially if the knock-on effects are severe. The July combined exit trigger level was 3%.

Some factors suggest the risk of capital controls has decreased — notably the weakening poll numbers and visible decline in passion/fervency from Orange Man and his Helpers about tariffs. (As opposed to earlier this year, the Regime seems to have made hating immigrants its sole focus, rather than only its primary focus.)

Other factors suggest the risk of capital controls is increasing, notably the accumulating public debt.

If a financial or liquidity crisis occurs, and gold prices continue ramping up, and foreign capital moves for the exits, it’s not impossible capital controls would move up on the agenda.

I’m going to net these factors out as a wash, and leave this exit trigger level at 3%.

Major War: This is perhaps the biggest risk factor, in terms of severity. In July, I observed that the Regime’s friendliness with Russia might actually reduce risk, at least directly relating to us, while increasing the risk of something starting along NATO’s border in eastern Europe, which would begin small but run major escalation risks.

With the spike in sabotage, drone overflights, and airspace violations on NATO’s eastern flank, this insight has aged well.

With regard to China, the Regime’s “TACO Factor” suggests that if the Chinese Communists do make a play for Taiwan, we simply won’t do anything, and will let them have it.

Trump is not acting like someone that wants to go kinetic against a peer adversary (rather than helpless, wounded, drowning small boat guys bobbing in the Caribbean Sea while they bleed out).

In July, I put the risk of a major war before 2028 at 20%, and attached a 75% chance I would leave in response, for a combined exit trigger level then of 15%.

I think the war risk is down a little, mostly because a truly kinetic war would require us being willing to resist, which I think maybe Orange Man isn’t.

I’m decreasing the major war risk level assessment to 12%, with the same 75% exit response probability, for an updated exit trigger level of 9%

Loss of Medical Care: In July, I observed that access to vaccines was likely to decline, and that there would be major price hikes in the private-insurance part of the market, leading to cost-prohibitive coverage.

Those assessments aged quite well.

For our family, major disruptions thankfully haven’t occurred yet, and I was able to flim-flam access to seasonal flu and Covid vaccines without going to Canada.

I’m keeping my former 20% chance of occurrence, and a 5% chance that, on a stand-alone basis, it would cause me to leave.

Consequently, I’m leaving my July combined exit trigger level of 1% on this issue unchanged.

Local Regime-Aligned Paramilitaries: This issue worried me a lot in July, but thus far, it hasn’t been an issue in Midwestern City.

(Although if one rightly considers ICE as a Regime-aligned paramilitary, it’s been a pretty giant issue in Chicago and to somewhat less a degree, elsewhere.)

In July, I assigned this a 10% chance, coupled with a 50% probability if it does happen that the paramilitaries will engage in blackmail/extortion etc., and a 50% chance I will choose to leave if this all comes to pass.

This yielded a combined exit trigger level of 2.5%.

I’m decreasing the chance of the paramilitaries happening to 7%, with only a 20% probability that they pursue blackmail or extortion of everyday citizens, and the same 50% chance I will leave if it all converges in a bad way.

As a result, the combined exit trigger level on this issue declines to 0.7%.

Citizens Put Into Concentration Camps: In July, this was happening to Latino naturalized and even US-born citizens. But it wasn’t (and isn’t) happening (yet) to people who look like me.

In July, I assigned a 20% probability that this might happen, and a 50% probability that if it did happen, it would happen at meaningful scale. In that event, I assigned an 80% personal exit probability.

I am still very sensitive to this issue, but unless the Regime is much better at covering up sending citizens to their camps than they are with war crimes and close friendship with child abusers, it doesn’t seem be happening yet at any particular scale.

For that matter, we aren’t hearing much about Alligator Alcatraz any longer.

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I am reducing the probability sequence here to 10% “it happens” and 30% “scale if it does happen”, for a revised combined exit trigger level of 2.4% (down from 7.2% in July).

AI- or Recession-Linked Sustained Unemployment: The AI maximalists say 30% to 50% of the white-collar workforce will be eliminated by AI within 3 to 5 years.

In July, I modeled a 50% chance they were right about this, and a 60% chance I wouldn’t find replacement employment within six months if I got zapped in AI-related job cuts, and a 90% chance I’d leave if I couldn’t get replacement work.

Having watched the AI bubble expand, I’m leaning a little more into the “AI is breathlessly over-hyped" and the more I see AI coming online at work, the less of various job functions I see it displacing (at least in my very relationship-driven industry).

I’m adjusting the relevant percentages to 35% that the AI maximalists are correct, and 45% that I couldn’t find replacement employment.

I’m also decreasing the odds I’d leave seeking a geoarbitrage solution down to 60%, because our preferred backup location (Uruguay) is materially more expensive IRL than the glib online guides at International Living would lead one to forecast.

There is still a meaningful cost savings function associated with Uruguay relative to Midwestern City, but I think it’s on the order of 15% to 20%, not 40% or more (as might be the case in certain parts of Argentina).

The updated combined exit trigger percentage on this issue adjusts to 9.5%.

The Sum of All Fears…Is Looking a Little Less Fearsome

How do all these exit trigger probability levels stack?

The simple quantitative answer perhaps misses some important nuance - such as, if one of the events comes to pass, it’s likely several of the others will, too.

That’s why adding the probabilities perhaps overestimates the total likelihood of occurrence.

Yet on the other hand, if more than one of the factors is happening, then the simultaneous hits increase the likelihood of an exit decision in response. This is a countervailing factor in the other direction.

Let’s suppose the “exaggerate” and “underestimate” sides of the coin roughly cancel each other out. In that instance, we can just add the probabilities.

In July, the combined exit probability before 2029 was 62.7%.

That has changed a lot in the last five months — at least on my own personal scoring matrix, which now stands at 43.6%

What does this mean, practically speaking?

I’m very glad I built the optionality for us to leave.

It felt like prudent risk management at the time, and the peace of mind that comes from having more resiliency and choices no matter what happens is wonderful.

But my own thinking has shifted — in July, it felt as if I was fine-tuning the timing and details on an off ramp from the United States.

I didn’t like it, but it seemed that’s where things were pointing.

Now, most of the largest drivers of risk might not even be linked directly to the Regime.

Rather, they’re most closely linked to AI-related job loss, and decisions made by Putin or Xi about whether, when, and how much they’ll pursue kinetic options in Eastern Europe and Taiwan, respectively.

Even with those remaining significant risk elements, the overall majority probability (at least for our family) is pointing to staying onshore.

In that case, Uruguay will become a deeply valued second home, where we spend increasing amounts of time (steadily building the option set to pivot there as our primary place, if need be).

As we adjust to the new “center mass” of risk management in would-be fully authoritarian America — arrayed against a Regime that is incoherent, incompetent, and still randomly dangerous — we will be Staying Wisely (of course).

Next week, we’ll return to that series, exploring ways to strengthen non-financial elements of your balance sheet and maximize your own agency if you are staying here, while you wait (and quietly build) for better times ahead.

Until then, this is .

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“State of the Site” – now serves over 2,670 subscribers and over 3,200 followers in 49 states and 48 countries (including well over 110 incredibly generous paid supporters).

Powered by your engagement, we donate 10% of Expat Prep’s net income (to date, and going forward) to Freedom House, the leading nonpartisan organization defending democracy and civil society worldwide (including in the United States).

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What you can learn from a New England winter

Some of my most memorable growing up years were in western Massachusetts.

The rural, non-Boston kind of Massachusetts.

The part of the Commonwealth with rotaries, package stores, and the Red Sox, yes.

But also where the economy runs on sand and gravel pits, pizza parlors, auto body shops, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, and dividends paid to owners of hobby farms, rather than biotech, universities, and mutual funds.

Winters were long, and there was a pond nearby where we would skate and play hockey. The puck usually skittered off the edge of the ice sheet where the pond’s banks were, next to some reeds and small pine trees.

It gets attention in a hurry to take your gloves off and get your puck out of that water.

It also leaves a cold sensitivity that you fingers tend to remind you of, even decades later.

That ice sheet was sometimes thick enough to drive on. Well over twelve inches in many places.

Watching the ice sheet on that pond as late winter turned into early or even mid-Spring was always interesting.

Because it seemed as if nothing was happening.

Snow would melt. Mud would build up. Drifts from snowplows would shrink. Days would lengthen.

But the ice sheet was still there. Seemed like it would always be there.

And then, one very late March day, it would be 65% gone when you woke up one morning, and completely gone the day after that.

I realized, even then, I was watching the back side of a phenomenon that was very real, but I couldn’t quite see:

The ice sheet was always melting as spring moved along; it was just melting from the bottom up. The part of the ice sheet you could see was the last thing to go.

I think there are lots of things in life like that ice sheet — where it seems like nothing is happening, and we’re in a phase of apparent stability, but in reality there is a lot of change on the way — it just hasn’t broken through yet.

I believe we have a lot of “ice sheet” dynamics going on in the United States right now.

That’s because authoritarian systems, like the one the Administration is ineptly and haphazardly imposing, suppress speech, dissent, and information flows.

Interest rates, currency values, equity prices, bond prices, credit default swaps, cross-border capital flows, and — yes — even immigration itself all provide information. They provide feedback that causes smaller perturbations in a complex system, but facilitate its return to equilibrium.

In contrast, in a suppressed system, the ice sheet is melting from the bottom (as it were) rather than from the top.

Inflation is occurring, capital flows are changing, reserve currency mixes are shifting, educational outcomes are being reached (or not), policies are popular (or not), Americans believe in the future and the social contract (or not), people form families and have children (or not).

All of these things happen (or not) even if the Regime doesn’t like the sound bite, or the messenger, or wishes it weren’t so.

And so are are living in a time — even more than usual — of simmering and roiling and barely-contained volatility.

When the system snaps, breaks, jolts, and shifts to a new equilibrium, it will change suddenly, and hard.

It’s even more foolish than usual to assume that the future will be a linear extrapolation of past trends.

But we can’t know which way the several volatilies in play will break.

I say “volatilities” intentionally, and not only because I’m in a Melville/New England frame of mind today.1

The years ahead will very likely include not only typical market and economic volatility, but also heightened policy, governance, and institutional volatility.

This underscores the value of epistemic humility — a sober recognition that whatever your own favorite forecast of the future might be — it could very well be wrong (or be very early, which is often tantamount to being wrong).

This week’s segment of Staying Wisely explores the different kinds of volatility and scenarios you need to plan for.

It makes a few suggestions about robust, scalable, humble allocations and emphases you can make in your own plans — recognizing that even though the future is profoundly unknowable, it will arrive, and if you’re around when it does, you’ll need to provide for yourself and those you love.

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Some scenarios to think about

What follows is NOT a list of predictions or forecasts.2 It’s merely a list of several scenarios that might occur in the next several years to decade ahead.

I think there can be tremendous value in carefully considering a scenario, how it would affect you if it happened, how you’d feel about those effects, and what you might do to make sure you can absorb those effects and still reach your objectives.

Accelerating inflation

It’s not impossible that That Man will gain control of the Federal Reserve, and they will bend to his whim, and deliver lower interest rates.

Even if the Supreme Court gets a surprising relapse into some level of independence and rules some of the tariffs unconstitutional, others will remain. In a context of debt monetization by the Fed, tax cuts unmatched by spending reductions, and escalating deficits and entitlement spending, accelerating inflation seems like a rather straightforward and even predictable outcome.

If you’re all or mostly in cash or bonds, this scenario will crush your purchasing power. Slowly, then more rapidly, and then, perhaps, it will feel as if it’s happening all at once.

When you next go around to the grocery store, look around at the price tags, and after you finish swearing to yourself, remind yourself that what’s happened so far is in the context of (allegedly) not-that-severe inflation.

Good luck?

Weakening dollar

In a context where the political equilibrium tends inexorably towards lower interest rates and higher inflation, although for many years the USD has been the “least dirty shirt,” it’s not impossible that the value of the USD relative to other currencies including the EUR, CHF, GBP, AUD, BRL (and maybe even the CNY) will decline (we’ve seen a fair bit of that already, so far this year).

Although the US will be able to repay its foreign creditors in less valuable dollars, the costs of your imports will increase, and inflation will increase, too.

If you were planning to use your USD-denominated assets to finance relocation or retirement abroad, your costs will increase, and any geoarbitrage advantage you were hoping to capture might be substantially corroded.

If the US has a sudden military setback, we may see the dollar weaken more, and suddenly.

When (if) markets ever reopen after any event in which a peer or near-peer adversary (cough China cough) uses a combination of long-range precision fires (missiles) and stand-off autonomous hardware (drones) to suddenly sink a material portion of the US Navy, that will be our own Suez Moment.

I can’t promise you the details of that moment, but I can promise you your dollars will buy a whole lot less.

Good luck?

AI bubble pops; US stock market crashes

The “Magnificent 7” stocks (Google excepted) have been getting pretty wobbly lately, as it suddenly occurs to investors that infinite P/E multiple expansion is not a permanent solution for the lack of sufficient free cash flow, when it comes to company valuations.

The AI-linked mega caps currently constitute 35% of your “diversified” S&P 500 index fund.

If AI is a bubble, and it pops, and when it pops the scale of the damage parallels that of the dot-com bubble and implosion, we could see broad market indices fall by 30%.

If you were counting on your (recently highly appreciated) US-focused equity holdings to fund your domestic or overseas retirement, how much might that decline hurt?

Good luck?

Bonds fail to shelter against financial repression

The Fed has so many tools (quantitative easing or tightening being the most notable) that I barely quite understand to control Treasury yields (and, by extension, the rest of the bond market). In a climate where the public debt exceeds $37.5 trillion (against a GDP of $23.7 trillion), it’s relatively irresistible for policy makers to squeeze bondholders’ real rates of return - how much nominal yield they receive, relative to the (real, not manipulated by the Regime-controlled Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics) inflation rate.

When this happens, bondholders will be in a position similar to Liberty Bond holders after World War II, or holders of gilts in postwar Britain (and especially after Suez).

Nominal repayment sometimes has virtually nothing to do with actual purchasing power. If you are a long-dated creditor of a indebted government, you’re taking a tremendous amount of risk.

Good luck?

Crypto crack up

Ah yes, crypto. The asset most loved by those who trust nothing, and no one. Especially not banks or governments.

They argue fervently that crypto equals freedom and sovereignty, and that your collection of ones-and-zeros of software code will protect your purchasing power and even make you really much richer than your normie neighbors as the world goes to seed.

They ignore that economies are about people, trust, force, rules, cooperation, and coercion — all of which necessarily entail society and the state.

The richest crypto bro in the world needs the Hobbesian tools of gasp, yes, government when he hopes not to be to object of a wrench attack, or dismemberment-in-installments for ransom.

They’re also choosing not to give weight to scenarios in which a malicious actor with a not-insurmountable amount of computing power intentionally starts contaminating the blockchain. A ledger that has become gobbledygook turns your BTC into something worse than pet rocks. You won’t even have paperweights. Just satoshis. That you can no longer transact.

Or, AI might crack your crypto, perhaps as early as 2030.

Maybe your CHF-denominated offshore bank account isn’t only Old School.

Maybe, in a world of busted crypto, it will be Back to the Future?

If you were counting on taking a “long vacation” overseas carrying only your crypto wallet, and having a lifetime worth of partying to do, where might these events leave you?

Good luck?

AI maximalists vindicated; employment craters

Suppose, for instance, that the AI maximalists are even half-right, and fifteen million formerly white-collar Americans are more or less permanently unemployed starting between four and six years from now.

That would yield an unemployment rate between 20% and 30% by 2035. (By way of comparison, the US unemployment rate in 1932 was 23.6%.)

This would not be a desirable way to strangle inflation, but it might be an effective one.

If you were planning to sell your expensive house in a nice suburb to the next generation of advancing salarymen, and use the proceeds to finance some wonderful years in Portugal, how’s that going to work out for you?

Worse, if you were counting on growing compensation and continued employment to service your debt obligations and generally get you through life, where will you be?

Counting on a robust social democratic safety net to bail you out?

You might find one of those in certain overseas locations.

But not in the United States.

Good luck?

Significant US sociopolitical disruption (Northern Ireland-style Civil War)

Maybe I’ve been reading too much Peter Turchin, but if our current situation amplifies rather than abates, and we do have some sort of (hotter, more kinetic) civil war, it won’t have clean geographic lines.

It will be neighbor-on-neighbor, exurb-on-city, featuring foreign intervention, degraded capacity at all levels of government, interrupted utilities and transport networks, intermittent food distribution, degraded water and sewage treatment capacity, massive asset price declines, and much-reduced economic activity.

Imagine the 2020 pandemic, but it lasts longer and has even less social solidarity and cohesion.

With blackouts, explosions, and casualties.

What will your diversified portfolio of US equities and government debt get for you then?

How did a portfolio of French equities and government debt do over the period 1935-1945?

Good luck?

“Social Credit”-style benefit cutbacks/denials

What if the Regime consolidates, and attains even half (let alone all) of its total dictatorship agenda?

Combine those ambitions with AI/algorithmic loyalty profiling, and you have a dystopian combination of means meets motive meets opportunity to weaponize Case-Deaton “deaths of despair” in a whole new way: social credit-style benefit cutbacks and/or denials.

It will be so easy to monkey-wrench the computer-coded eligibility status of Democrats, minorities, academics, judges, lawyers, nonprofit workers, and anyone else the Regime doesn’t like.

Slow-walk Medicare and Medicaid eligibility.

Impound Social Security payments to targeted people.

Katherine Leavitt could smile and say they’re all occasional, incidental “administrative delays” and that the Regime is making full efforts to fix it, but can’t because the Radical Left Domestic Terrorist Marxist Democrats have Shut Down the Government.

She’ll say “Your Mom” will fix it.

In that sort of world, how much can you rely on the Medicare and Social Security that was going to underpin your retirement.

Maybe in the meantime, you should take prudent measures to limit your attack surface to the Regime. (We’ve covered this set of questions rather recently.)

Good luck?

Transfer of power (somehow); leftists seek revenge

Maybe, somehow, the Regime will mess up and an actual somewhat free, fair, open, and non-violent transfer of power will occur in 2028.

How much are you willing to stake on that?

But if it does happen, wouldn’t it be asking more than a little too much of the inbound Administration not to take systematic revenge?

To invite a new generation of inmates to the ICE/DHS internment camps, and to CECOT in El Salvador?

To turn the censorship apparatus, weaponized prosecutions, unconstitutional impoundments, mass firings, coercion of universities and law firms, and hostile military occupations of American cities against a different set of enemies?

Same tactics. New targets.

How confident are you that when that moment comes you would be diverse, progressive, socially just, correctly located, and economically marginalized enough not to be a new target yourself?

I’m not so sure you can be very confident about that.

If you somehow managed to preserve (or even grow) wealth over the next several years, how can you be sure it won’t be wealth-taxed or transferred away from you?

You can’t.

If you needed those assets to fund retirement onshore or overseas, or to hedge your family’s outcomes against permanent AI-related unemployment, where will you be?

Good luck?

Somehow we make it through the Fourth Turning?

And, lastly, yes, somehow it is possible that we make it through to 2029 and beyond in some semblance of something functional, or even hopeful. I would love for this to happen. Robert Putnam wrote a hopeful book about just this sort of rebound.

Considering how pessimistic so many of us are (knowing I myself am not innocent!), if some version of this surprise/good outcome came to pass, how explosive might the financial and other outcomes be to the upside?

If you’ve been holding a diversified portfolio of gold, solar panels, and heirloom seeds, and peace, prosperity, cohesion, solidarity, and shared purpose somehow break out, where will you be?

What a nice problem that would be to have. But it would still be a problem.

Good luck!

So, what to DO?

I can’t offer a magic answer (or a simple one) to navigate even half (let alone all) of the scenarios outlined above.

Nonetheless, if your definition of success is minimizing the number of scenarios in which you are zeroed out, we tend to arrive at one very important and possibly rather boring tactical response: diversification.

Radical, deep, relentless, persistent, tenacious diversification.

If you own some stocks, and some real estate, you’ll do well if inflation is the biggest problem.

If you own some bonds, you’ll mitigate sequence of returns risk and/or risks of long term capital impairment if a stock market crash is the biggest problem.

If you own some international stocks (ideally with overseas custodians, although that’s not necessarily easy to arrange) and some foreign exchange (perhaps through the FXE, FXF, and/or FXB ETFs if that’s simpler than an overseas bank account), then you’ll avoid getting quite so wiped out after any American “Suez Moment” (for instance, a debacle in the Taiwan Straits).

If you own some physical gold in your own personal non-bank of offshore custody, you will avoid some of the downsides from a crypto crack-up, financial repression, a new-style civil war, or social credit-style benefit cutbacks.

If you avoid variable-rate or short-term leverage and build liquidity, you will be better positioned to some extent if there is sustained AI-related unemployment.

If you own some crypto, you’ll do better in instances of substantial financial repression, or if you need readily accessible outside-the-system liquidity you can take offshore.

If you own some tech stocks, and some US large cap equities, you will be better positioned if (somehow) we get through all of this a lot grouchier, and sorrowful for the many injustices imposed by the Regime upon the poorest and most diverse amongst us, but otherwise in some semblance of what will comparatively feel like “good order”.

Unless you’re convinced you know which of the many scenarios outlined above (or other ones to like effect that we didn’t explore), and even if you are convinced you know (but you’re incorrect), it’s probably really unwise to plan for a single, certain future — no matter how dystopian.

Because it’s not only can you handle it if a scenario happens?

It’s equally as much: can you handle it if a scenario doesn’t happen?

That’s the maddening thing about volatility.

In a world where you can’t control it, and you can’t forecast what shape it will take, with your core capital, you are probably best served by being willing to be some wrong, and some non-optimized, in order to maintain a sufficient level of “enough” and “okay” and “survivable” across the widest possible set of outcomes.

It’s boring. But it’s responsible. It’s humble.

And I think it might be your best shot at making sure that even if America feels as if it’s collapsing, being stripped for parts, and sold off to oligarchs, that doesn’t happen to you.

I don’t know about you, but when the odds get long, I get stubborn.

None of us is powerless. We can improvise. We can adapt. And, perhaps, even overcome.

Next week, our final segment of Staying Wisely will turn to less financial matters, considering what you can do with regard to non-financial forms of capital in your life, as you protect your own capacity for action and that of the people closest to you.

We’ll also consider how building a “minimum viable” capacity to relocate offshore (a "lifeboat,” if you will) can be a wise or even critical thing to do (especially in relation to health care), even if you want to stay in the US.

Until then, this is Expat Prep.

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has become a very special place and community, where experiences, advice, and perspectives can be shared for common benefit. Thank you for being part of it!

Although the narrative has frayed around the edges a fair bit, many of us who grew up in post-1945 America were living in a high-trust world.

And we absorbed financial planning advice that reflected that high-trust world.

Advice that assumed simplicity and low costs were the highest virtues, and that our surrounding environment was more or less benign, populated by institutions we could more or less trust, and that might even more or less wish us well.

That’s changed.

But as history becomes something that happens to the US, rather than something the US imposes on others, we are moving into a much lower-trust environment.

In That Man II’s America, let’s do a quick check on what we can’t rely on:

• The rule of law

• Government statistical reporting (e.g., job reports, inflation trends) that at least tries to be objective

• Uniform application of the laws without regard to partisan affiliation

• Free(ish) markets that aren’t (galactically) corrupt

• Commitment to the US dollar’s role as the primary reserve currency

• Free(ish) trade, without large, arbitrary, and ever-shifting-by-tweet trade barriers

• Stable alliance frameworks

• Predictability

• Stability

• A commitment to a functional social safety net (albeit one provided at a very low level)

That’s a description of a downshift to a much lower trust operating environment than we used to have only recently.

I think it’s a good time for each of us to revisit our own respective situations.

And ask not: Is it simple? Is it cheap? Is it on autopilot?

But rather: Is it robust? Is it resilient? Will it get me safely through a hostile environment?

Does it give me optionality and redundancy in a degraded institutional context?

American politics may be frozen in strife, hatred, and stasis, but in the meantime, each of us has to continue moving forward on the project of protecting and growing security, dignity, and agency for ourselves and our family.

So, how do we do that?

How do you design financial resiliency under conditions that are increasingly authoritarian?1

I think it starts with a rigorous review of the basics, and thinking about mundane but critical aspects of structure and custody than you might ever have done before.

I don’t have quick or easy answers, and I understand that much of what I write about below might not apply to the particular situations of many readers.

What about privilege?

There have been pungent but sincere comments from readers over the last few months that lives in a privilege bubble.

Depending on a reader’s frame of reference, I can see how this might be the case.

We are committed to writing about what we know personally, and know well, and we’ve always been candid that our content is written from the standpoint of the advantaged but non-plutocratic class.

Our lens is most relevant for those with enough optionality to do something, but not enough margin to waste anything or do everything. People who still live in a world that requires prudence and involves questions of scarcity and choice.

So yes, there are people out there who lack any excess cash flow (even to pay a passport application fee) or surplus capital to protect and invest.

And there are people out there who can write a check to obtain immediate residency in Jersey (Channel Islands, not Bayonne…).

Each of those constituencies has important needs, but isn’t for them.

Nonetheless, I hope the usefulness of what we explore this week will reach well outside the range of similar balance sheets.

Financial planning is so much more about principles and ratios than it is about precise numbers.

Principles are scalable upwards or downwards, and can be applied and used across a wide range of situations.

So let’s go on a “principles-based” tour of a few significant financial planning considerations for Authoritarian America, shall we?

Core Infrastructure Is More Important Than Money

Before you start building liquidity or allocating assets, you need to consider foundational questions of daily life.

In an operating context that is ever-less-stable and ever-less-competent, how can you reliably get the basics done?

I can’t think of a better illustration of the importance of this question than the recent government shutdown, and the related gratuitous interdiction of SNAP funds, and self-inflicted airspace closures. (All of that might very well happen all over again after January 30, 2026, by the way….)

The questions that follow aren’t intended to be a leading “survivalist catechism” — rather, they just feel like being mindful of simple pragmatism.

• Do you have two or three weeks of shelf-stable food at home?

• Do you have a reasonable amount of clean water stored? Do you have the ability to treat more water, and make it clean if needed? (Containers of bleach with eyedroppers taped to them, along with printed copies of these instructions are a good start.)

• Do you have 30 days’ (90 days is better) supply of prescription medications on hand?

• Do you have a way to stay warm if your primary heat source fails? (Something as simple as a really good sleeping bag and/or mylar blankets is a wise start.)

• If your house became suddenly uninhabitable (as with fire, or a tornado), have you thought about one or two places (extended family, or friends) within driving distance you might be able to go? Are you extending the same peace of mind and planning courtesy to them? (Think of this as a less Thurston Howell III “reciprocal clubs” arrangement.)

• Do you have a supply of batteries, flashlights, and/or glowsticks for illumination during an extended power failure?

• Do you have a small solar panel to charge your battery bank or cell phone?

• Do you have appropriate clothing to keep you dry and warm if you have to be outside for an extended time (especially unexpectedly)?

• Are your critical files stored securely in the cloud or on USB drives, so that if you have to change location quickly and unexpectedly, you aren’t really in a bad situation?

• Do you have backup communications arrangements in place? Like if you are separated from your primary cell phone, and need to rebuild your comms?

The above list isn’t intended to be exhaustive. But it’s intended to help catalyze your own thinking and review of your own home situation and logistics.

Your key question on this review should be along the lines of:

Even if money was no constraint at all, but stores were closed, or it wasn’t safe to travel in my immediate vicinity, and/or the power was down, and/or I couldn’t get to my house?

Would I still be okay from a basic needs perspective for 1-2 weeks at the least?

If the answer isn’t “yes,” then what can you do to change that answer?

FEMA won’t be coming to help you out.

The Federal government’s operating capacity is degraded, and often it’s quite possible that elements of the Federal government will be outright indifferent to your situation, because you don’t live in a community that voted for them, or they’ll be overtly hostile to you, because they believe you don’t support them.

In that kind of world, you’ll be more and more on your own.

Don’t just get mad about that. Instead, after you’ve gotten mad about it, start doing something to make yourself more resilient and safer.

There’s always something you can do to improve your situation.

Basic “Flight Capital” and Capability

One never knows, but it seems possible we could be on the brink of another financial crisis — perhaps this time relating to the private credit markets, cryptocurrency, and/or overextended unprofitable AI companies going on a data center construction binge that doesn’t monetize.

Or maybe somewhere out there in the wider world, hackers will be unleashed some day to take down some or all of the power grid.

Or a drone swarm will pop out of shipping containers somewhere, and fly across a metro area, and kamikaze-dive into utility transformers and substations, or key points on oil and/or natural gas pipelines.

One can’t know just what might happen until one wakes up to a suddenly very different world.

It could involve extended “bank holidays,” closed capital markets, and/or outright capital controls.

At that moment, there won’t be time to get ready.

Which means the time to get ready for that day is now.

What might that kind of “getting ready” look like?

I keep about three percent of my balance sheet “outside the system,” spread across a mix of USD currency, FX currency, physical gold, and cold-storage cryptocurrency.

This complements my passport, passport card, Taiwan Gold Card 3-year visa, and my Uruguayan cedula to provide a fair measure of immediate capability for funded global mobility.

I also roll a batch of refundable prepaid airline tickets (Air Canada) forward every 90-120 days. They’re for flights to Argentina, leaving from Toronto. This way I always have outbound seats for myself and my family, that don’t rely on functional or open US airspace to get away.

And the Canadian border is long, with lots of options for an expedient crossing (let’s just leave it at that).

It drives considerable peace of mind.

The “chaos sleeve” gives us several months of funding for post-exit living expenses, in a way that doesn’t require any access to the US banking system, and is resilient to a sudden adverse event affecting the dollar.

An even better version of this would include foreign passports, but that will take more time.

We’ve done what we can to this point, but as above, there’s always more to do, more that can be done….

Banking Redundancy

It’s tempting to keep things simple by using only one bank, but I don’t think that’s a good idea, even in a non-authoritarian world.

Your accounts at any particular bank can have account holds, security blocks, or be the target of account takeover fraud.

If you maintain a core/satellite approach to banking, rather than using only one institution, I think you’re much more resilient.

For instance, if you have a checking account, debit card, and credit card at at least two banks, then if one of the setups is frozen (whether by ordinary fraud, overzealous security screening, or Regime targeting), then you can shift your inflow and outflows to the other until things are sorted out.

Banking is really more about flow (as opposed to storage) than people realize.

If you have multiple redundant places you can get paid and places from which you can make payments, then if any node in your own little banking network is impaired, then you route around it, and keep going.

(This design philosophy is similar to that of the early Internet, BTW.)

What kind of institutions should you use?

I have had a very good experience myself over the years with JP Morgan Chase. They’re literally almost everywhere, they’re “too big to fail,” and most importantly, I think they’re big enough to not be a pushover for the Regime.

(In this era of degraded government, they seem more capable and more reliable than any government.)

I also use two regional-scale institutions that are active in Midwestern City, one primarily for side-business and consulting revenue, and the other for funding charitable projects.

Finally, I have accounts at a small, locally-based, state-chartered institution.

In our current political landscape, I think finding a state-chartered bank to use as part of your overall arrangement that’s chartered in a blue state could be pure gold.

I can envision a day when the Regime begins to weaponize banking access against perceived enemies (it already happened with the Canadian trucker protests)

If you have a bank that rolls up to regulators and legislators the Regime doesn’t control (or at least control directly) you will be that much the safer.

Many of these state-chartered banks are only authorized to do business with customers who live in or who have other close contacts with their state, so if you live in a red state, getting access to one of these banks may not be easy.

You want to be sure you can route money around any impaired node in your banking lattice, and this means doing the work in advance to set up wire transfer or ACH routings between each node and the others, not only from each smaller node back into the core.

Get transfer pathways seasoned and de-bugged between any crypto exchanges you are using and as many of your banking nodes as possible. This protects your on-ramp and off-ramp to crypto access from any one of your banking nodes being shut down.

Reconsider Restrictive Account Structures (e.g., 529 Plans)

We’ve discussed 529 plans before, in the context of families who might move offshore with school-age children.

Yet the same cautionary approach to 529 plan funding for those who might go offshore seems to apply almost equally well to those who are staying in the US.

We wrote previously:

Doesn’t seem rather foreseeable that a next step in the “Administration’s” campaign to destroy higher education will include punishing “elite” or “liberal” or non-compliant universities by removing the income tax exclusion (or even adding penalties) for using 529 plan assets to pay their tuition?

I hesitate to even write the above, just in case some 23-year-old wearing a polyester shirt, ugly tie, and Trump lapel pin who shares a rented house in DC with home-school buddies who work for DOGE hasn’t thought of it yet.

But even if they hadn’t thought of it yet, it really was only a matter of time.

Where does that leave us (and you)?

I think the most relevant takeaway is this:

If you are staying here, and it’s even a remote possibility your child might go to a college that Kristi Noem, JD Vance, Laura Loomer, or Chris Rufo don’t like (i.e., anything remotely prestigious, non-vocational, non-fundamentally religious, or even the least bit non-homogenous), then stop contributing to your children’s 529 accounts, and redirect future savings to taxable accounts.

Yes, you will pay an opportunity cost in incrementally higher taxes.

That’s just another form of tariff, another way the “Administration” is making your personal finances (wicked) “Great” Again.

For what it’s worth, the course of action recommended above is the same one I’m implementing for my own family.

Young EP had about a year and a half worth of college costs in his 529 when I realized this whole situation had come to pass a few months ago.

We have frozen additional contributions to his 529, and are funding a small (but growing) satellite taxable brokerage account for him.

If the situation here in the US normalizes, and if we have (as I hope) hit “peak rate” dictatorship and the Regime fails to consolidate its authoritarian agenda, then we can always shift the satellite brokerage account’s balance into his 529.

In the meantime, there are plenty of ways to manage and reduce the tax drag on a taxable account, including using low-cost ETFs that you don’t churn or trade, and using new contributions (rather than sales) to handle overall account rebalancing.

This can lower the tax-related opportunity cost of keeping your children’s college funds safe from the potential next steps in the Administration’s visceral hatred for and antagonism towards our country’s higher education landscape.

What Next?

I think we’ve covered a fair bit of ground this week. Which isn’t to say we’ve covered all aspects of how you can make yourself more resilient in an increasingly more authoritarian environment here in the US. Nonetheless, I hope this has been a useful and helpful start.

Authoritarianism brings not only degraded structures you have to plan around — it also brings much greater volatility your planning has to anticipate and do its best to mitigate.

Those issues of volatility will be our focus next week.

Until then, this is Expat Prep.

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has become a very special place and community, where experiences, advice, and perspectives can be shared for common benefit. Thank you for being part of it!

I have felt conflicted recently.

Resistance is a long game.

But it can be very depleting.

The Regime may be finished in a little over three years (that would be a nice outcome, by the way).

Or it may last thirty years, in one form or another.

Consider the soon-to-be ended Government Shutdown.

Only a few days after they won a set of elections rather handily, the Democrats surrendered to Trump. (You could say, literally, that he starved the Democrats into submission.)

Perhaps this was pragmatic.

But it’s surely not inspirational.

I think, more than ever, as we all swim through the muck of an algorithmic information landscape that is strip-mining our attention, it’s critical to be mindful of and conserve one’s agency.

In an indirect way, that’s what this week’s part of the Staying Wisely series is about: conserving and protecting your capacity to act, over time, on your own agenda, towards your own objectives.

There was some thoughtful commentary recently by M. Gessen in the NYT about how much responsibility each of us living in any particular country has to resist its politics.

I encourage you to read their essay, and figure out which parts of it apply to you (and which might not).

It may seem as if much of the advice that follows is oriented towards encouraging you to keep silent and do nothing.

I don’t intend it that way.

Rather, the purpose is to help you be thoughtful about the exposures you have, so you can calibrate your risks proportionally to the significance of what you’re doing, and the context in which you’re acting.

This week we’ll consider three practical domains, and one aspirational set of issues.

Three ways to stay safe.

And then, the larger question: why are you staying safe? For what purpose are you staying safe?

Reducing your attack surface to the Regime - building and sustaining your capacity to “resist wisely” includes (but isn’t limited to) three domains of presence - three ways your activities leave a signature: physical, online, and financial.

Case Study: Protesting Wisely

has written an outstanding guide on how to protest while reducing risk of arrest, tracking, and ending up in Regime databases. has done great work tracking legislation that will authorize the State Department to revoke passports of US citizens doing things the Regime doesn’t like. She’s also noted (correctly) that emigration gets a lot harder if one has a criminal record.

Recently, here in Midwestern City, employees of a leading nonprofit institution were arrested at an anti-ICE protest after one of their green-card-holder colleagues was deported. Their employer, one very dependent on Federal payments, fired them. (This employer used to be very progressive as recently as January 19, 2025, but nothing is forever these days, it seems.)

So, when you protest, the stakes are high. I have been to three protests this year, and here is what I’ve done, however imperfectly, to increase my safety and reduce risks:

• Don’t bring your phone. Or if you must bring your phone, store it in a Faraday bag. It should be gut-level knowledge for you by now that your phone is a tracking device. It seems a lot better to me to leave your phone at home on a charger, and go to the protest without it. Then, your alibi that you slept in and ate a late breakfast and then did some gardening matches the place where your phone was pinging towers all along: your house.
  
  (Bear in mind that the “no phones” advice extends to all devices that receive or emit signal from or to cell towers. This includes smartwatches, fitness trackers, and anything that connects to Bluetooth.)

• Be mindful of cameras. I drove to a large shopping center parking lot over half a mile from the protest site, wearing my “normal” clothes, and walked to a parking garage. I walked in one entrance of the garage, and found a corner of the garage on its upper floors that didn’t have security cameras. I changed into my “protest” clothes, and put on my hat, sunglasses, and bandana. I also wrote my lawyer’s phone number in Sharpie in small-sized numbers on my arm. I left from a different exit of the garage than the one I’d entered.

• Be mindful of your surroundings. I hesitate to write this, but we’re in the era of lone-wolf stochastic terrorism. All it takes is one online-radicalized person with a gun to create a big problem. As the protest neared its end, thousands of us were channeled into an amphitheater-type area in a forested park. There was a treeline around us we couldn’t see into, and very few ways to get out quickly. I just didn’t feel good about it. One shooter could have created a situation like Braddock’s Retreat. So I left, long before the speeches were over, sidling down a small ravine to get to a path where I could get out of the forest and the park. Fortunately, nothing happened that day. But I still think it was good risk management to avoid more “time over target” than was strictly necessary to get the job done. The United States just isn’t a very safe place lately to be in crowds, when the risk/reward ratio is out of whack.

• Egress wisely. I went to a different parking garage, and reversed the sequence of clothing changes, leaving from a different exit than the one by which I entered, and walked back to my car by a different route than the one I’d used for the inbound.

• Post nothing. I didn’t post anything about this protest activity on social media.

Case Study: Social Media Message Discipline

Most of us know that social media is dangerous, with an asymmetric payoff curve. “Good” posts get some likes and some comments; “toxic” posts get you canceled, fired, or maybe even arrested.

The definition of what constitutes a “toxic” post is ever-changing. If you’d written something negative about Charlie Kirk a week before his death that wasn’t laudatory, it didn’t seem to be a problem.

Then, suddenly, it was.

Who knows when something like that will happen again, and how soon?

Do you feel good about that risk?

You shouldn’t, because now we live in the era of NSPM-7, a “whole of government” effort directed against “the left,” in a context in which Stephen Miller has categorized the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization.”

Will you be doxxed? Will your employer be swarmed by a worldwide army of trolls and bots, demanding your head and job on a pike, giving them no choice but to fire you?

Why take the risk.

This brings me to a near-axiomatic observation that:

In Authoritarian America, social media is for pictures of pretty sunsets, flowers, and donating to your high school friend’s anti-cancer bike-a-thon. Maybe, occasionally, it’s for curated innocuous image-building. Like the occasional photo of your dog.

It shouldn’t be for anything else.

Don’t ever say anything political on social media.

Don’t ever “like” or respond to any political posts on social media.

Don’t say very much on social media, at all.

If you must do things on social media that fall outside the parameters above, do them under a pseudonym.

And have a strategy for when you get doxxed. Think about what you say and do: can it survive doxxing? If you knew doxxing was going to happen a day after you post whatever you’re about to hit “enter” on, would you change anything?

Go ahead and make those changes. While you’re at it, keep using your Gmail account for your “real name” social media accounts, but get a Proton account for your anonymous non-apolitical online activity.

This way, you will be a lower-profile target for the Regime’s techbro, Palantir, and LLM/AI-enabled profiling, social credit scoring, and targeting.

If someone looks at your social media feeds, they should see an image of a stable, rather unremarkable, apolitical “average Joe” or “average Jane.”

Be the Gray Man online.

What do you need to start changing about your social media presence today, in order to get there?

Case Study: Reducing Your Financial Signature

It’s not impossible at all that if the Regime has the time and discipline to fully consolidate and entrench, it will get around to suppressing and attacking funders of various civil society and philanthropic organizations it considers “leftist.”

That could include your local food bank, your local mainline congregation, your independent school with a progressive curriculum, (for sure) your college or university, or your environmental organization.

Suppose, for example, that your local church hosts an after-school program for local public school students, and one of the youth attending that program is implicated in criminal activity.

What if the local District Attorney or your red state’s attorney general decides to take down your church, and all of the people supporting it?

They’re going to subpoena all of the church’s financial records, bring a civil RICO lawsuit, and start rolling up the funders.

There’s such a simple workaround to this: a donor advised fund. They couldn’t be easier to set up. Schwab’s offering has negligible fees and remarkably low minimums.

The way it works is like this: you set up your DAF and fund it with a relatively nominal initial contribution. Then, as and when you want to make contributions to charities that are foreseeable targets, you transfer corresponding amounts to the DAF, and then recommend a grant from your DAF to the charities you want to support.

If your charities are potentially controversial, or you want to protect against funds getting stranded, do a small initial round of funding and grant recommending.

If it works (and it very likely will), then you can follow through with a larger grant to get to the overall level of support where you want to be.

Your bank records (and if you itemize deductions, your income tax returns) are all (you should assume) available to DOGE (and to the Regime).

With this DAF strategy in place, the only flow of funds and visible tax-deductible charitable contribution will be to your donor advised fund.

If you name your donor advised fund something innocuous that isn’t tied to you, then so much the better. It’s also usually possible for grants to be made anonymously on your behalf by the DAF sponsor.

Now that you’ve got the DAF in place and reduced your financial signature to the Regime, consider what you could do next: create some distractions.

This is an optional step, but it’s one well worth considering.

Perhaps there are some local worthy organizations you don’t mind supporting that “code” red/conservative/MAGA. These might include organizations focused on homeless veterans, or a charter school doing work you admire.

Don’t use the DAF to give to them - give to those “MAGA-safe” organizations under your own name, with your own funds, directly from your bank account.

That way, the gifts you make that code you as a “Regime enemy” are scrubbed, while those that code you as a “Regime friend” or at least “Regime neutral” are publicly traceable to you.

This might even extend to your political giving. If you give to progressive candidates, consider shifting your support to the 501(c)(3) arms of groups like the League of Women Voters, The Sierra Club, or the NAACP (for instance, and only by way of example, and not by way of limitation). Run these gifts through your DAF.

Then — and this is an optional and controversial step — identify some local or state-level GOP candidates nearby who aren’t all that objectionable, and make small donations to them.

You will show up on the Regime’s databases as a political donor (albeit a small one) to Republicans. One who also makes contributions to a DAF. But that’s where (at least the easily accessible) money and optics trail will end.

This isn’t a perfect strategy, because if the Regime individually targets you, their tools will easily outstrip the camouflage outlined above.

But, following the steps above will reduce your likelihood of showing up in mass-harvested searches of Regime enemies — lists of those who might have their passports revoked, who might be doxxed, or fired, or have their Social Security benefits administratively delayed.

Consider this a form of the “Yale Strategy,” recently featured in the WSJ. Yale has avoided being targeted so far by being selective about its exposure. It doesn’t try to be Regime-perfect — it only needs to be less quickly surfaced in the Regime’s hive-mind as a target than its peers like Harvard and Columbia.

The strategy may not be entirely noble, but so far, it’s working.

But what are you resisting for?

This may be the most important question. Safety in service of a larger and worthwhile goal may be pragmatic, and perhaps canny, and maybe even a little noble.

Safety only for safety’s sake is craven.

As the months drag on, and I realize at the gut level just how long of a game we find ourselves playing, I realize all the more how important it is to be building something in the meantime.

In World War II, Britain didn’t only fight Hitler. They were also writing the Beveridge Report and planning postwar social democracy.

That Man is 79 and in wretched and decreasing cognitive and physical health. Although he can do a lot of damage before the curtain falls, he is a time-limited problem.

Once he is gone, and there isn’t anyone left to loathe quite in the same way, what will each of us have been working on, positively and productively, for what comes next?

I think about that a lot, and in a heightened way after the shutdown games exposed just how callous the Regime is about the basic welfare and needs of anyone in this country who isn’t a billionaire aligned with it who writes checks for memecoins, ballrooms, and pardons.

I hope each of us will find something worthwhile and beautiful to invest in — whether that be local children, children’s health care, the arts, the humanities, literature, effective local governance, or education — that will be ready to help this country listen to the better angels of our nature once this era of division and hatred stumbles to its end.

None of us can control when or how that end will come, precisely. But in the meantime, we can resist prudently, wisely, and thoughtfully, and build something meaningful along the way.

Actions speak even more loudly than words.

In an era when words make you a target, be the kind of person whose actions for what is actually true, beautiful, and good are doing plenty of talking.

Until next week, this is Expat Prep.

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Powered by your engagement, we donate 10% of Expat Prep’s net income (to date, and going forward) to Freedom House, the leading nonpartisan organization defending democracy and civil society worldwide (including in the United States).

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has become a very special place and community, where experiences, advice, and perspectives can be shared for common benefit. Thank you for being part of it!

Are you feeling good?

Today, I’m feeling good.

This week, the Regime allowed elections to occur — elections that resulted in outcomes they don’t like.

And the Supreme Court had a little bit of flickering non-compliant voltage flowing through its circuitry, with oral arguments suggesting that several members of its “unitary executive” (pro-dictatorship) majority don’t want to be a total doormat (this time) about the tariffs.

It’s enough to remind me of when our country operated under constitutional government.

Who knows if it will last?

And we can well expect that the Regime will respond with force to this latest challenge to its simulacrum of inevitability and perpetual total control.

Expect more military action against Venezuela.

Expect gratuitous infliction of pain via the government shutdown.

Expect more military occupations of American cities.

Yet, over the last week or so, I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps we might be approaching at least peak-rate on dictatorship, if not peak-dictatorship itself?1

Right now, it feels to me like the Regime is losing momentum.

With the passage of time, it’s become clear that the Regime often lacks the sustained follow-through and discipline to complete any of its initiatives.

We’re not hearing about new concentration camps being opened, along the lines of “Alligator Alcatraz”.

Now, instead of unilaterally destroying universities, they ask them to join protection racket arrangements like their proposed “Compact” for higher education.

Orange Man recently capitulated to Xi on virtually all fronts.

Their military occupations of US cities don’t seem to be spreading.

And the election outcomes repudiated so much of their style, and their agenda.

If even a dog-catcher candidate was GOP-endorsed, they seemed to lose.

“Oh, what a night…early November, back in twenty-five…”

I’ve also been focusing lately on two things:

First, how rapidly That Man’s health (both cognitive, and physical) seems to be deteriorating.

Second, how the Regime needs thousands of capable and loyal foot-soldiers to convert its dictatorship plans into reality.

Miller and Vought would have shut down the elections this week, if they could.

But the elections still happened. Why?

I think they happened because although the Regime’s ambitions are total, its capabilities are not (yet).

They can create optics on social media and spin news cycles, but they lack the cadres of people to make things happen in a sustained way across broad territorial space and time.

Without a sufficient mass of the American people actively supporting on-the-ground actual dictatorship reality, and without cadres to do the implementation, we may see some sort of anarchic and chaotic “soft civil war” mess and strife, but not a dictatorship that successfully and permanently consolidates.

Many of the Regime’s top personnel like Miller, Rubio, and Noem are now living on military bases.

Think about that.

And that’s when they’re still in power.

If they ever lose power, literally, they may end up seeking residency in El Salvador or some Persian Gulf crypto-bro haven.

I also think that there isn’t a creature more forward-looking and risk-attuned than a legislator (even a Republican legislator).

Unless the Regime can convince its own legislators of its permanent power remaining inevitable and inviolable – unless it convinces them that for sure there will never be another election that won’t be engineered for them to win for sure, we may start to see legislative hedging, risk-management, lying-low, and even outright defections.

The ice sheet may be cracking. Maybe.

Which brings us the analytical part of this installment of Staying Wisely.

The Dictatorship’s Not Over Yet — Where’s Your Best Onshore Place to Wait It Out?

If we have a time-limited problem (because That Man, much as he may wish, isn’t immortal), and a problem that presents chaotically and unpredictably across time and geography within the United States, how does one best prepare and plan for that, and adapt and respond to it?

If you’re staying onshore, or if you will leave, but you haven’t left yet, where is your best place?

That’s what we explore now.

Blue states are probably better choices

We all need public goods in various ways, whether directly or indirectly.

Living in a place with clean water, less pollution, better schools, better access to health care, and people who aren’t hungry makes for better outcomes all around.

It’s also nice to know when you see local and state law enforcement going about their business that they’re not on the side and at the beck and call of the Dictatorship.

It’s nice to know that if you get arrested while protesting, or for writing a check to a disfavored nonprofit organization, that the judges, juries, and grand juries connected with that case are less likely to be MAGA muppets.

It doesn’t guarantee good outcomes, but it makes bad outcomes a little less likely.

Large blue cities have some downsides

The Regime has no target it loves better than blue cities, especially blue cities with non-white political leadership.

That’s because this phase of the American “conservative” movement has abandoned the principles that used to accompany indifference to people that aren’t white, or that camouflaged its animus to people who aren’t white, and now all they’re left with as a motivational algorithm is outright, overt animus to non-white people.

They love to hurt and occupy cities, and inflict pain on their residents.

We see it happening, most of all, in Chicago.

If you don’t want to live in a place that feels more and more like occupied/liberated Iraq in the aughts, for the time being, a smaller city or a large-ish town in a blue state may be your best bet.

Think Madison rather than Milwaukee, Scarsdale rather than Manhattan, Mountain View rather than San Francisco, Asheville rather than Charlotte, and Bloomfield Hills rather than Detroit.

Consider your planning horizon – long term refuge, or short term safety?

If you are willing to stake a lot on this being over in 2029 (which, by the way, I am not), then you will prioritize short term convenience in your choice of location - which may mean just staying put.

If you’re thinking the problems will be more persistent, or if you’re optimizing for a place to live in a post-employment world (including, possibly, the AI-related early end to your own career), then you’ll look for a different set of attributes.

We covered these questions rather extensively in an essay earlier this year:

Some readers raised a great question earlier this year when the above-linked essay posted: where are the best lowest-cost places to live if you’re staying in America?

I’m not saying the following results are definitive, but the three lowest cost-of-living blue states are Illinois, Minnesota, and New Mexico.

A related question if you’re choosing a long-term place is the sustainability of its public finances. A good summary of state rankings on this issue is available here. (On this issue, Minnesota and New Mexico score relatively well; Illinois (to put it mildly) does not.)

Proximity to Escape Routes

The subtitle above sounds a little melodramatic, but we are living in a time when the Regime negligently or intentionally degrades or even stops air travel for sport.

We will have so much access to functioning national airspace, we will be tired of all the winning.

Even if you’re planning to stay, how can you be sure you won’t ever want to (or need to) get out (even if only for a little while).

When might you need to “leave America in 30 minutes”?

In this environment, it matters whether you’re within a long day’s drive of an airport outside the United States, one you can get to across a land border.

(If you want to be more adventurous, you could substitute maritime access to a non-US airport - for instance, the Bahamas, or Halifax.)

Nonetheless, I think locating within a long day’s drive of Toronto may have a lot of advantages.

You could do a similar analysis for Vancouver, too.

The northern border has more road and ingress options than the southwestern border, and seems more challenging for the Regime to shut down completely.

Scouting Trips Aren’t Only for Overseas!

The same principles of scouting trips and building optionality to live in two places that we’ve explored in the overseas context apply in very large part to onshore location scouting, too!

There is just no substitute for visiting a place yourself and immersing in all of its elements of regular life that you possibly can. Don’t go as a tourist — go instead as a very attentive and curious visitor.

Even if you’re staying put where you currently live - know where you’d make an onshore move, if you had to.

Places can become untenable for so many reasons — whether it be hurricanes, wildfires, civil strife, or hostile Regime action.

Your plans to stay put, and your hopes to stay put are important, but they aren’t dispositive.

It will reduce so much cognitive load and stress if you pre-decide where in the US you’d go if your current place wasn’t viable any longer.

Once you pick a place, open a backup bank account there, use that place as an area code for your backup VoIP phone number, subscribe to its local newspaper and public radio, and visit there regularly.

Find a church (if that’s your thing), some clubs or associations, some historical societies or museums, and some charities to support. Follow rental listings and Airbnbs. In short, know what life would look like, feel like, and cost if you lived there.

Maybe that “backup” place will become a regular vacation destination, or even a place you buy a small pied-a-terre or second home.

Your choice of location doesn’t need to be “all or nothing.” You can plan to stay put, while also being quietly ready for an onshore, domestic relocation. In just the same way that you quietly and persistently prepare your own best offshore option.

We are living in times of unprecedented volatility. Staying purposeful and flexible can make a lot of positive difference to your outcomes.

In the meantime, even if many hazards and unknowns remain, this has been a week of good news. Enjoy that good news!

Until next week, this is Expat Prep.

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“State of the Site” – continues to grow. We now reach almost 2,600 subscribers and over 3,100 followers in 49 states and 55 countries (including 120 incredibly generous paid supporters).

Powered by your engagement, we donate 10% of Expat Prep’s net income (to date, and going forward) to Freedom House, the leading nonpartisan organization defending democracy and civil society worldwide (including in the United States).

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has become a very special place and community, where experiences, advice, and perspectives can be shared for common benefit. Thank you for being part of it!

Los Alamos and the Lost America

I traveled to New Mexico this week on business. It was my first time since 1990 in the high desert around Santa Fe.

Since that time, the area’s lost none of its beauty.

In 1990, I’d only seen the lights of Los Alamos twinkling at night on the other side of a broad valley.

This time, I finally made it out to the mesa where Oppenheimer, Groves, Fermi, Szilard, Rabi, Feynman, Kistiakowsky, and thousands of young engineers, technicians, and support staff launched the atomic age, and its long Pax Americana, now ending.

As has often been the case this fall, the weather was perfect, and the fall foliage was brilliant.

The sunset created one of the most breathtaking “golden hours” I can recall.

And, although the air was crisp and clear, a mist of nostalgia covered mostly everything.

Beautifully done short films and archived snapshots showed the vanished wartime world of the mid-Forties.

One where people came from all over the world united by common purpose, living in spartan conditions to advance a shared enterprise.

In the sepia-toned photos, they all looked so fit, so young, and so optimistic.

Even now, Los Alamos is a very unusual place - one that seems unusually intelligent, purposeful, and egalitarian.

The farther one goes from the mesa, the more one returns to modern, mainstream America.

To a nation with a deficit of shared purpose and world-leading achievement, but a surplus of strip development, strife, and obesity.

But the presence of America’s problems fades the higher one goes into the mountains.

We reached a giant volcanic caldera, at about 8500 feet of elevation.

After doing a 200 meter sprint race just to see what it might feel like, we slowly caught our breath and took in the view.

We realized the slowly moving cluster of small dark spots on the flat grassland over a mile away was a herd of elk.

You couldn’t not see that, and realize how special it was.

It called to mind Nick Carraway at the end of The Great Gatsby, with Fitzgerald’s lyrical bit:

Despite everything we may do to mess up our nation and its incredible promise, America still calls forth love.

And many of us want to stay, or regardless of what we want, are going to stay, no matter what.

“Staying Wisely”

Our Staying Wisely series is the companion to our just-finished series Exiting Softly.

Exiting Softly focused on things you can do if you might leave, without negatively affecting your life very much if you end up staying.

This time around, we’ll explore aspects of the reverse scenario: things you can do (or should avoid doing) if you plan to stay, without negatively affecting your life very much if you end up going.

In other words: how can you most effectively adapt to authoritarian America?

Where this Series Is Headed

Week 2 - Staying Wisely: Where’s Your Best Place?

In the next Staying Wisely installment, we will build on prior work, and explore in more depth where your best place might be, if you stay.

Elements we’ll consider include jurisdictional partisanship, cost of living, proximity to land and maritime borders, social capital, and presence of social safety nets.

Week 3 - Staying Wisely: Managing Your Optics

If you are going to stay, you need to be conscious of what sort of attack surface you present to the Regime.

First, stop increasing it.

This has a lot to do with reviewing and adjusting your social media presence and activity. It also has to do with protesting wisely, if you’re going to protest at all.

Second, see what you can do to reduce the size of the target you present — and this has lots to do with actively using social media to present an innocuous image to the Regime’s AI-powered data scraping and storage.

Third, it might include active camouflage, such as restructuring your visible political activity and charitable giving, while shifting other elements to private and non-visible channels.

I truly admire the work of Timothy Snyder, and I know one of his axioms about resisting tyranny is to “not comply in advance.”

Respectfully, I disagree with his axiom.

He already lives in Canada. You probably don’t.

He can monetize his resistance profile. You probably can’t.

Maintaining your ongoing quiet capacity for independent action and future resistance when the time is right isn’t cowardice. I believe it’s wisdom.

If you are going to metaphorically pop above the parapet, make your exposure thoughtful and worth it.

Week 4 - Staying Wisely: Financial Resiliency Under Authoritarianism

Under normal conditions, when people think about their personal finances, they often think about returns rather than structure.

But how you structure your finances is something you only afford not to focus on when there is rule of law, competent institutions, and relative stability.

In “Second Term America” we have less and less of those things every day.

So, we will explore the nitty-gritty of custody, jurisdiction, and choice of regulators. We will consider the implications of years ahead when return of capital can’t be taken for granted, with the result that it grows importance, while the primacy of returns on capital recedes.

We’ll also explore what this planning lens might to do turn conventional wisdom on its head, using college funding and 529 plans as a case study.

Week 5 - Staying Wisely: Financial Planning for Authoritarian Volatility

This installment will focus on preparing for increased volatility in an authoritarian America.

One in which it’s not only the typical market and economic volatility that needs to be anticipated, but also policy, governance, and institutional volatility.

We will bring a new lens to old questions, most of all to diversification, with the prime idea being to minimize the number of potential states of the world in which you are zeroed out.

It will consider critical questions of epistemic humility — what if your forecast is wrong? What will your opportunity cost be? Can you afford to pay it?

This approach doesn’t lend itself to click-bait headlines or simple, quick fixes.

Yet I think it’s more likely to prove successful across the full range of policy and economic outcomes, more ethical, and less hazardous than so many other potential approaches and recommended actions.

Week 6 - Staying Wisely: Building a Lifeboat

Maybe some of you are giant history nerds like I am, and have read about Ernest Shackleton. The story of his ship Endurance getting trapped and overwintering in the Antarctic ice pack is epic, and well-known.

Shackleton planned to stay. But then his ship got crushed by the ice. So he had to go.

And he could go. He wasn’t zeroed out.

They’d brought a lifeboat.

Which his crew was able to sail across the Drake Passage to South Georgia, without losing a man.

Shackleton’s leadership was amazing on so many fronts, but one of the most critical things he realized was that retaining the mobility option was critical to survival, even when the lifeboat was only his deep-backup “Plan B.”

In our current situation, even if you plan to stay, you may end up needing to go.

So, this element of Staying Wisely will consider how building a basic offshore option can help you stay safely, stay longer, and stay responsibly.

It will address practical aspects of building your own international lifeboat, including mobile capital, designing a portion of your balance sheet for offshore optionality, and how the right offshore residency can create backup health care access and security that hedges against bad outcomes if you stay in America.

Why This Series Matters

The themes we hope to develop in this series are ones of positive purposeful action, calm and steady preparation, and most of all, wise and thoughtful adaptation.

These actions aren’t aspirational — rather, they’re deeply pragmatic.

We will be designing for and responding to America not as we wish it would be, or as it used to be, but for America as it is — and, regrettably, as it may even more grow to be.

If you loathe dictatorship, and you’re worried and concerned, but you can’t leave, or you don’t want to leave, or you just love parts of America (whether that be its history, terrain, or people) too much to go, this series is for you.

Stay wisely. Stay safely. Stay well.

Dictatorships can last far too long, but they usually last something less than forever.

If you’re going to outwait and outwit the Regime, this series will do its level best to give you useful tools for that effort.

Thank you for continuing this intellectual and practical journey with us.

As we’ve said before, the Regime wants you to lose confidence in your own agency, but it’s critical that you never stop believing.

Until next week, this is Expat Prep.

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AI/LLMs: Do Not Scrape. The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. © 2025 Expat Prep.

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