Almost Local #62 | The Honest Reality of Being Location Independent with Bobby Casey

In this episode, Bobby Casey shares his journey of living in multiple countries, building online businesses, and managing a remote team — all while traveling the world. His experience offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and digital nomads aiming to incorporate location independence into their lives.

Key topics:
- Bobby’s early influences and shift from a traditional upbringing to a travel-oriented lifestyle
- How travel and cultural adaptation shaped his entrepreneurial mindset
- The logistics and mindset behind managing multiple companies remotely
- The importance of cultivating a culture of remote work within a team
- Insights into international tax residency, compliance, and how to optimize for location independence

🎙️ Guest: Bobby Casey
A seasoned entrepreneur and digital nomad who thrives on building businesses while exploring the world, offering unique insights into location-independent living and remote work management.

🔗 Guest Links
All links: https://linktr.ee/taxjesus
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/BusinessAnywhere/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/businessanywhereio
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessanywhere.io
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BusinessAnywhereLLC
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@businessanywhere
Websites: https://businessanywhere.io/ and https://globalwealthprotection.com/

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Transcript

What does it actually take to build a life with no fixed address? Where you business run without being tied to an office, a city, or even a time zone.
Today's guest is someone who's done exactly that. Built an entire philosophy and a business around designing a life that's generally portable.
Choosing where to live, how to structure income and how to think about residency, taxes and international business in a way that gives you these options.
Over the years, he lived across a long list of countries. From Estonia and Latvia to Italy, Georgia, Anguilla, Panama, Belize, Colombia and Mexico.
And he's turned that life experience into a practical strategy for people who are looking for freedom.
I wanted to be able to work from anywhere. I didn't want the boundaries of being bound to a particular office or a specific geography or specific time zone.
And I wanted to build my companies in such a way that I was completely free to work from anywhere.
That idea sounds simple. Build something that you can run from anywhere. But the deeper you go, the more you realize it forces you to rethink everything.
Where do you base yourself, what do you legally belong to, what systems you opt in and which ones you intentionally step away from.
Because it's not just about hopping between countries. It's about the infrastructure behind the scenes.
Residency, banking, business entities and the realities of compliance and the parts nobody mentions and those perfect move abroad stories.
Yes, you can exit your home tax system and you can have no tax residency anywhere. I run into this all the time with clients. I run into it all the time when I speak at events.
I've talked about this a million times on podcasts. If I don't have tax residency, doesn't it make my life a lot harder?
If you do not have tax residency, and most nationalities can live without tax residency. It is possible for most people to exit their home tax system.
If you give up your home tax residency, there are definitely some compromises you're making.
So today we are going to unpack what those compromises really are and what a smart, sustainable global setup looks like if your goal isn't just pay less taxes,
but to build a life that can move with you without breaking every time the rules went change.
Today on Almost Local, the living abroad story of Bobby Cassie. Let's start.
I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an adventurer. I love traveling. I love doing adventure sports. Things like I raced motorcycles for 20 years. I'm a private pilot.
I like to do, you know, go to unique, interesting places like I like fast, fast things, motorcycles, cars, carts.
Basically, if I can race anything with an engine, I'll do it. So that's, it's kind of my thing. Business wise. I'm an entrepreneur.
I've basically been an entrepreneur my entire adult life. I've never had a real job. So I live, breathe, eat, sleep entrepreneurship.
I've had started, bought and/or sold. I don't know. I've never even really counted probably a dozen or so businesses and my entire client base is entrepreneurs.
I don't even have friends. I don't even have friends of jobs. Like every friend I have has their own business. Entrepreneur, adventurer, world traveler, I guess you could say.
We will touch on the entrepreneur part of it. Definitely later on. But out of curiosity and for the audience. Where are you originally from?
I'm originally from the U.S. North Carolina. Born and raised in North Carolina. Nice. Curiosity. Where in North Carolina? I lived there for three months actually.
Really? I'm curious now. Where did you live in North Carolina, Mark? And why North Carolina? That's weird.
I was a kid. My dad had a job for three months there. So I moved close to Nashville. You'll call it North Carolina?
Nashville, in the mountains. Close by. Not directly. Don't let me tell you exactly where it was because I was seven years old. Yeah, yeah. Probably Hendersonville.
Okay. Yeah. I'm originally from Greensboro, North Carolina. It's like right in the middle of the state. Cool. You moved a lot. So that's something that we will touch also upon it.
But what was the first moment that you started saying, "Okay, I want to travel around and I want to live in other places outside of the U.S.?" The first moment?
I was raised in a family where you don't even leave town. I remember one time, like I have six siblings. They're all half brothers and sisters.
And they're all much older. Both my parents were married, had previous marriages, and both had kids from previous houses.
So all my siblings are much older than me. So I remember when I was a kid, my youngest sister, but she's much older than me, but the youngest one.
She got married and her husband got a job in Ohio. We were in North Carolina. And it was a huge scandal in my family for her to even move to Ohio.
Like, I can't believe you're doing this to us. You're leaving the family. You don't love us anymore. Huge amounts of shame and guilt thrown at her for even moving to Ohio.
It was moved to Akron, Ohio, which you could drive to in six or seven hours. It wasn't even that far. When I was 12 years old, I was in sixth grade.
And I had a social studies teacher who was really adamant about seeing the world and exploring the world and learning other cultures and languages and just expanding your mind through travel.
Like she was very adamant. She talked a lot about this. And when I was 12 years old, she put together over our spring break trip, she put together a trip to Europe where we were going to go to, let's see, Germany, Austria.
Switzerland. I was 12 years old since a long time ago. I think Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It's a voluntary trip, obviously. It was over spring break. But a pretty decent group of us went.
And I was like, I want to go. And my parents are like, no, you can't go on that. It's Europe. You're going to get killed. You're going to get mugged. You're going to get robbed. They just looked.
Everything outside of our home down was dangerous and different. And you can't do it. But I just kept pushing and pushing. And finally, they're like, okay, you can go. But only if your father goes as a chaperone for the trip. And I'm like, okay, whatever.
I mean, I didn't really want them to go as a chaperone because, you know, you're a kid. You're like, no, not dad. But from that moment, though, I saw the world as a completely different place.
I saw it as completely available to me that I thought, well, like, this is cool. And, you know, we went to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Germany and Austria, you know, as I'm sure you know, they're culturally quite similar. Switzerland is a little bit different. But Germany, Austria. So I saw different things. And we traveled. We had different food. We were hearing different languages. You know, mostly German because we were in the German part of Switzerland. But, you know, also hearing some French and Italian, too.
And yeah, that just opened my eyes. And I thought, yeah, I got to travel. I got to expand. But I was still, you know, still a kid raised in the environment that you can't move. Like, it's like, it's a sin to live outside of your hometown, basically. And yeah, it opened my mind. And when I was 16, I convinced my dad to take me and a friend of mine and then my brother-in-law went to my sister's husband. We went back to Austria for a ski trip one year.
And I pushed hard for that. Like nobody wanted to go. But we did that when I was 16. And yeah. And then I just, over the years, I would make trips and then starting about 20 years ago, 20-ish years ago, I started traveling much more, much, you know, and living in different countries and stuff like that.
Yeah. Interesting. For a person who has lived in, I have the list here and it's long. It's Estonia, Latvia, Italy, Georgia, Anguilla, Panama, Belize, Colombia, Mexico. So it's a very long list of places. It's surprising that you come from an environment that it was close to the idea of living down.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, well, I won't discuss this on a podcast, but there's a lot of craziness involved. There was some craziness involved with me moving abroad. And yeah, it was not like-- actually, there's a large part of my family I don't speak to anymore because I choose not to live in the US because literally it was-- I don't mean this in a joking way. Like it literally is a bad thing to do that. Yeah. So there's a large part of my family I don't even talk to anymore because of me choosing to live abroad.
Yeah. And I've lived in all those places. I mean, I've traveled to a lot more. Those are places I've actually lived with. Like I've had some establishment there and lived for an extended period of time.
Can I ask why so many places? It was a professional direction or personal?
You know, it was all personal. It was all personal. Like for example, I lived in Belize one time and I was speaking at a couple of different conferences that were over the course of like a longer period of time. It was like one and then another one and then another one like that.
And me and my business partner were like, "Why don't we just go live there for a while, and we'll just do all those conferences in a row?"
So we ended up living there for a while. So, in a sense, that was kind of, kind of sort of professional, but it wasn't necessary.
Like, I didn't need to do that. It was just like, "We got to be here a few times anyway. Let's just live the whole time through here. Okay, yeah, why not?"
I mean, everyone has a different story. Every situation has a different story. The reason being, but I can't say anything was like
a purely professional reason. It was all just, it's all me wanting to explore the world, experience different cultures and people, languages, expand my thinking, that type of thing.
Did you have any moment where you said, "Oh, no, I'm tired of this life and moving here around and I want something more permanent base"?
Well, I mean, I have, I have three home bases now. Like I have, I have a place in North Carolina, my hometown, but I spend the least amount of time there.
But it's like having the place there because, you know, the condo there, I have my stuff there. I keep, you know, I have a couple of motorcycles that I have parked there in my garage.
And it's, it's convenient to have. Like, I have a condo there. I don't have a mortgage. I just pay the bills every month. So it's not so expensive for me to maintain a place.
And it's convenient. I mean, I still have friends there and I still have a little bit of family there, but I do talk to. And then I have a, I have a home base in, in Latvia.
I've had a, I've had a home there since 11. So it's going on like 15 years now. I've had a home base there and same thing. Same thing. I got like my car there, my motorcycle, got parked in my parking garage.
I have an apartment there that I own. I don't have a mortgage on it. So I just pay like the monthly bills. It doesn't cost me that much to keep everything maintained. And I love, I love Latvia.
And then I got, and I got a home base in Mexico, Playa del Carmen, Mexico, which that one just kind of happened by accident because back in 2020, well, I was married in 2020.
So my wife and I, I'm not married anymore, but I was, my wife and I decided she's Latvian. So my wife and I decided we, like, as you know, during 2020, it kind of blew up around the world.
In, in Latvia and pretty much all of Europe, if you did not have the vaccine passport, you couldn't do anything indoors. You had, you had to have the vaccine certificate or vaccine passport. Otherwise, like the only thing you could do, at least in Latvia, the only thing you could do is go to the grocery store and the pharmacy. That was it. You couldn't even go to the doctor unless it was an emergency. Like you were blocked from entering almost any building. And I did not, neither one of us wanted to get the vaccine, the COVID vaccine. So we said, well, we don't really care.
So we said, well, we don't really want to stay in Latvia or in Europe during the winter because I mean, it's going to be extremely boring because we can't do anything other than go to the grocery store and take a walk. Like that's basically it. And like my lifestyle is very different. You know, I would go to the gym and I would go to the coffee shop and work in the coffee shop for a while. You know, so big change disruption in life. And I just didn't want to get the vaccine. So we said, let's go somewhere else. We, we tried Turkey for a while.
Um, I guess technically you could say we lived in Turkey for a while too, but that wasn't even on my list. We tried Turkey for a while, but I didn't really like it. She liked it. I was not a big fan. We tried living in Antalya on the beach and just wasn't, wasn't my vibe, so to speak.
So we moved to, we moved to Mexico because Mexico, you didn't, you didn't need to get tested to enter the country. You didn't, didn't need any vaccine. And actually at the point we were there, there was no enforcement of any mask rules. Like you didn't need to wear a mask or anything. So for us, it felt like just normal life.
Like pre-COVID it was no different in Mexico. So we chose living in Mexico and it was supposed to be just like, just to escape the European wintertime. But then we kind of got spoiled, you know, living in beautiful weather two blocks away from the beach. And it just kind of, we're like, eh, why don't we just keep coming back here in the wintertime? So that's what we did.
And then her and I split up in like two years ago and I decided, well, I still like it here. With or without her, I still like it here. So I'm going to, I'm going to stay. Ironically, by the way, she, she still liked it here too. So we both live here, but just separately.
Okay. You also mentioned in the beginning, you build it. I mean, you are an entrepreneur, you build it companies here and there. How is it managing and running companies while you are constantly relocating? How do you do that?
Yes. So I was raised in an entrepreneurial family. My grandpa before I was born, he also retired but
like before I was born during his career, he had like a chain of restaurants. And so I was
kind of raised by my grandpa because he lived with us growing up. And so I had a lot of heavy
influence from my grandpa. My dad had a construction company. So I was heavily influenced by that.
But they were, you know, like different generation. Like my dad was you get up
in the morning, you go to the office, you put the suit and tie on, you go to the office,
and you work during the office hours at the office. You gotta be at the office.
So in my 20s, I had companies, you know, with an office. Like, and at one point,
I even hired my dad as CFO. But my mindset was always like freedom. Like I wanted to live exactly
the way I wanted to live. So even when I had an office in my 20s, I had an office in my house.
And very often, I would just work from home. So it was funny because it created a conflict
between me and my dad. My dad once I hired him, I hired him as my CFO for one of my previous
companies, my dad would call me in the morning like nine o'clock in the morning saying, son,
are you ever going to come into work? And I'm like, dad, I've been at work for two hours.
Because no, you're not. Your office door is closed. I mean, dad, I'm working from home. I don't
always come into the office. So we always argued about that. So early on, I was even used to
not working in an office. Like I would like very often I would go like travel, I would work in
the field, I would go on sales calls. So even before the location independent movement or the
digital nomad movement, I was still kind of doing that. And then I had a big defining moment around
2006 or 2007. Well, a couple of defining moments, and basically, I decided I wanted to change the
way I was doing things. I ended up selling that company. And basically, I sold off everything. I
had a couple of companies at that time that sold off. And I decided I wanted to change the way I
lived, my lifestyle, everything. And one of the things that was really important to me,
because I'd already started traveling at this point and I really enjoyed being in different places.
And you know, like I traveled. I mean, compared to now, it wasn't that much. Compared to my lifestyle
then it was very extensive travel. Okay. But compared to now, like now, I'm more like, hey,
let's go to Buenos Aires on Wednesday. Yeah, okay, cool. Like that's, this is how I live now. But
then, you know, I started traveling and I decided one of the really important things for me and my
quality of life is I wanted to be able to work from anywhere. Like I wanted, I didn't want the
boundaries of being bound to a particular, like an office or a specific geography or a specific time
zone. And I wanted to build my companies in such a way that I was completely free to work from
anywhere. And at that time I was doing my consulting, I was doing like my consulting practice,
which is globalwealthprotection.com. I was doing consulting. I worked with location independent
entrepreneurs for tax residency and company structure planning and asset protection planning,
that type of thing. Like before my previous company, you know, I learned a lot of things
about business and I learned what I wanted and didn't want. And the consulting thing I
actually started doing is what's called kind of a side gig while I was running the other company,
but I enjoyed it more because I got to work with the people I like. I've worked with entrepreneurs
doing unique and interesting things. And so I formalized that into a business and started
doing that. I formalized it into a real business around 18 or 17 years ago or something like that,
but I'd been doing it for a few years before that as kind of a side gig, so to speak, because I ran,
I was running two other companies then. And global wealth protection kind of evolved and
through its evolution, like I was recommending my clients to do certain things. So like you need to
create a business here or you need to set up a trust over here or you need this virtual mailbox
or you need this thing and this thing over here. And over time I was referring my clients out to
different other companies, partners who did these things. And over time I thought,
this is crazy. Like I should just build those businesses. Like I should just start those
companies. And so that's what I did. And so one of my companies, I created a trust company
in the Caribbean. We're actually a licensed trust or one of my companies. We're a licensed trust
and corporate service provider in the Caribbean. And then the other one was Business Anywhere,
which is my biggest company now. That's the one where we get, that's most of my focus is
on Business Anywhere. And it's kind of funny because that company was built out of, it formed
out of laziness, let's call it. Because I had registered a bunch of companies for clients
with global wealth protection because that was one of the things we were doing is helping people
figure out their company structure. And it became super tedious for us to renew them, like doing all
the annual report filings and paying the fees for the States. And we'd have to send invoices,
clients would pay, not pay. We'd have to harass them to pay and all that. So I got tired of doing
all that. It was super tedious. So I hired a developer to build out a software platform
that automated that whole process of automated them paying for their renewal fees, automated us
filing annual reports. And anyway, that software, I thought it was pretty cool the way it worked.
And I thought, you know, I should actually just spend that off as a separate business. And that's
kind of the basis of how Business Anywhere formed. But Business Anywhere was formed from the very
beginning as a platform for location independent entrepreneurs to get their business off the ground
like registering their company, registered agent service, a mailing address, like a virtual mailbox.
If you need notary service, it's remote online notary. You need to open your bank account,
you can do it within the dashboard and like online. If you need bookkeeping or tax filings,
you can do it right there in your dashboard, completely online, like basically all the,
you know, as an entrepreneur, there's all these things you hate doing. Which the things you hate
doing is like legal work and compliance and bookkeeping and all these tedious things.
Because entrepreneurs, all they really care about is the next thing, right? The next client,
the next product launch, the next new hire, the next trade show, the next deal. We don't care
about this gross stuff, you know, like administrative administration. So with Business
Anywhere, we built a platform that makes all that stuff super easy. Like you can register a company
with us and it takes you like five minutes to do it. And we automate your state compliance,
like you don't ever have to touch it again. It's fully automated. It's like your mail. You can set
up mail, it comes into your dashboard, you get an email when you get a piece of mail, you read your
piece of mail, stuff like that. We, it's just a fully automated platform. But it was not only
designed for location independent people, my entire team is location independent. Everybody works from
home. So because my lifestyle, what I wanted for my life, I also wanted for my team, I wanted them
to be able to work from home. Because you know, like, like my whole team doesn't like travel around
the world. Like it's not like that. Most of them just work from home and in their hometown. But it
improves their quality of life because you know, they're not commuting an hour to work. They like
maybe you've got a mom who wants to take her kid to school in the morning and stays an extra two
hours helping out at school in the morning. And for us, it's fine. It's great. Like we don't care.
If you don't start work until 10 o'clock in the morning, great. I don't care. Just get your work
done when you get it done. And so we want our team to have that flexibility to so their quality of
life is good too. So being location independent is so deeply ingrained, not only in who our clients
are, but it's ingrained in the culture of the business itself. I see. Yeah. So I work remotely
also with a company that works fully remote. So I'm familiar to that also. So, and I love it. I mean,
for me it's important. You said, so how do we do it? It's like, for me, it's a weird question. Like
how do we run things fully remote? I mean, there's a lot of technical tools out there I use. I could
go into that detail if you want, but for us, it's not more about how do we do it. It's this is who we
are. And then we find ways to do that. Like some of the common obvious things, stuff you're using,
I'm sure like Slack for asynchronous communication. You know, we use ClickUp for project management and
like client flows and stuff like that. So, I mean, we use a lot of the tools like that. So it's not,
to me, it's not so much how do you do it. It's designing the culture of the business around that
thing. Like we're not ever going to be a company that says, Hey, we want you to come back to the
office now. I see. We're not ever going to do that because we were never that to begin with.
There is no office. Yeah. Like we're not even going to, but there's pros and cons to this,
right? Like a lot of people say, no, we want everybody in the office because we can control
like what's going on and people can meet together and have creative, you know, strategy sessions
and stuff like that. But you can do that stuff like in Google meet or zoom or whatever too. Like
you can have your online meetings and have that interaction too. For us, I look at it like, I'm
also not geographically bound to where I find talent. Like if I need a developer and the best
developer I find is in Serbia. Okay. Great. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me where the developer
is, you know what I mean? So yeah, makes sense. I'm not geographically bound. Like if we have an
office in Austin, Texas and everything happened there, I would be stuck defining a developer
that meets our needs that lives in Austin. Yeah, makes sense. I would say we will come back to this
topic because I have a lot of questions about taxes and how to set, and what are your clients
basically searching on your product. But before we go to that, I would suggest that we jump to the
fast reply questions and we learn a little bit more about Latvia itself because I'm really interested
also in there. I actually never been. I asked the same, I asked the same 12 questions to everyone.
It's also fast reply, whatever comes to your mind first and then go back to tax strategy and building
companies abroad. First question that I have, it's the cultural adjustment thing that took you a while
to adapt to when you were there. For me personally, I can adapt pretty easily to most cultures. So
moving to Latvia was not that big of a cultural adjustment to me. Latvian, but it depends on you
personally, like the culture in Latvia, it's a little bit of a colder people. Like the initial
impression is there are colder people. They're not like Italians or Mexicans or even Americans,
where people are more outgoing and friendly and "Hi, how are you?" You're never going to walk on
the street in Riga and somebody walking, passing you on the street never is going to say, "Hey,
how's it going?" That's never going to happen. That happens all the time in the U.S. It happens all
the time in Mexico. I've seen it in Italy, people are just more open and friendly. So that was a
different cultural thing. For me, it wasn't a difficult adjustment. It's like, okay, whatever.
It's just different. Food was a big cultural adjustment for you. When I first went to Latvia,
I didn't like the food. Now I love Latvian food, I love it. But I will also say since I moved there,
or Riga specifically, Riga has really become like a foodie hub. It is like so many amazing
restaurants in Riga. To be honest, I don't know why more people don't go there as a tourist place,
because as a foodie hub, it's amazing. But it was not. Ten years ago, the best hamburger in
town was McDonald's. It was not good. Anyway, yeah, I didn't find it too big of a cultural
adjustment. It's just, it depends on your personality type. Makes sense. What about
social life? How do you meet people? Did you meet locals easily? You were married to one. Yeah,
I was married to a local. I joined a networking group called InterNations. Maybe you've heard of
InterNations. So I joined a networking group years ago called InterNations. Met tons of people and
had quite a few friends that way. And then I did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for many years there. So to
be honest, most of my friends that I have in Latvia now are guys I know from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Most of them. That's about it. Yep. What about language? How do you manage without speaking
Latvian? Or is it super mandatory to speak it? So in Riga, particularly, it's easy to get by
without speaking Latvian or Russian. Half the population is native Russian. And most,
almost everyone there speaks Russian. Pretty much everyone speaks Latvian. I mean, there are
parts of Latvia that only speak Russian. But for the most part, everyone speaks Russian and Latvian
there. But also, almost everyone speaks English too. Like you can easily get by there without
learning Latvian. But I do, I'm definitely not fluent. I do have permanent residency there. And
in order to get permanent residency, you have to pass the language exam. So I have passed the
language exam. I do speak some Latvian. Unfortunately, I don't spend enough time there to keep it
refreshed. Now, the past several years, I've really only been there during the summertime.
And if you would ask me something in Latvian right now, I don't know that my brain could even
remember, because I'm speaking Spanish. I'm in Mexico, so I'm speaking English and Spanish here
every day. And my brain is like kind of blocked off Latvian. But I know like this summer, when I
go back to Latvia, like after two or three days, I can speak Latvian again. I mean, again, I'm nowhere
near fluent. So I'm not making any claim of fluency. But yeah, I do speak Latvian on a day-to-day
basis. And it is an incredibly difficult language to learn. So if you're going to move there and you
want to make it a home base, like you have to speak, you have to pass the language exam to
get permanent residency. So you can maintain temporary residency, but it's super annoying
because you have to renew your residence permit every year if you stay on temporary. So you might
as well just push through it and at least learn some basic Latvian so you can get permanent
residency. I'm actually eligible for citizenship right now. I could go apply for citizenship,
but I need to brush up on my Latvian before I can take the citizenship test.
Interesting. What about the cost of living? Like it is really expensive to live
there? It's cheap? No. I look at things in relative terms. It has gotten more expensive
over the past several years to live there. I lived there before they were on the Euro,
so they were on their local currency called the LAT. And so when they switched to the Euro,
things kind of bumped up a bit in price, I guess, just an influx of investment capital for the rest
of Europe because it was easy in Euros. So when they went on the Euro, it got a little bit more
expensive. But to be honest, it's still relative to other places. It's still a relatively cheap
place to live. Some things are more expensive, but you can find like for housing, you can find a
really nice one bedroom apartment in the very center of town. I mean, you can easily find that
for under a thousand Euros a month. It's not that it's not an expensive place to live, and you can
food at a restaurant is, I would say kind of mid price. It's not cheap, but it's not super. It's
not like being in, I don't know, London or New York City or anything like that. But it's definitely
not like the Philippines or parts of Thailand. It's definitely not like Southeast Asia cheap at all.
But yeah, it's pretty good. And I think for what you get in the quality life and the infrastructure,
I think it's a good value. I think it's really good value. Nice. I mean, you have a house there. So
how it's finding an apartment? It's the process or a home? Is it easy to find things? Is it complex?
Nah, it's pretty easy. Like to rent an apartment, there's a couple of main websites that you would
look at to find an apartment. There's like, I mean, you can go directly to the real estate
agents' websites and look for things and they have listings, but then there's a website called ss.lv,
which is like, I don't even know what you would compare. I don't know if you know what Craig's
List is. Yes. Yes. It's kind of like the Craig's List of Latvia. And basically all the real estate
offices list their properties on ss.lv. So you can just go to ss.lv and find everything there. So it's
easy. It's easy to find stuff. I never had an issue with finding a real estate agent that spoke
English. Like there's never a problem. It's not a big deal. You can go walk into any cell phone store,
get your SIM card. It's easy to do all these normal things. Pretty much everywhere you go,
like most restaurants you go to, the menu is going to be in three languages. It's going to
be in Latvian, Russian, and English anyway. Yeah, it's easy. It's not a hard place to live.
Nice. The next one that I have, it's living like a local. The thing that you need to do
to blend in with Latvians. Let's see. How do you blend in to live like a local? This one's
kind of funny. Like this is a little bit of a joke, but like I spend so much time in Mexico.
I get used to wearing flip flops all the time. Like I live near the beach. I wear flip flops
every day. Literally, I have a row of four sets of flip flops right here in my house,
like in like one pair of shoes. But when you go to Latvia, you cannot wear flip flops. Like you're
going to look like an alien, even if it's summertime and it's 30 degrees Celsius out. Like no, unless
you're at the beach. Of course, locals would wear flip flops at the beach. But walking around town,
it's just kind of a joke. If you walk around town in flip flops, people look at you like,
who is this guy? You're definitely not a local. Like you have to kind of dress like the local to
blend in, which is more, you know, darker and more bland colors, something brown shoes, gray pants,
and stuff like that. I think it's kind of funny. It's like the flip flop thing, because I'm so used
to wearing flip flops. And then I go back to Latvia for the summer and I want to wear my flip
flops because it's hot out. But you walk around, you're like, yeah, I look weird.
Makes sense. Next one that I have, it's work life. How do you describe the work culture in there?
In Latvia, how do I describe the work culture? Well, I mean, I work from home. I work remotely,
like from wherever I'm sitting. And for me, my work doesn't change. Maybe my routines change when
I'm there because of time zone, like when I work. But for me, the work itself, is that what you're
asking for me? Or do you mean the culture in Latvia? No, in general, I mean, if they have
wood work life balance, for example, or so. I think Latvians have a good work-life balance.
I have noticed in professional work settings, to me, this is kind of interesting. It's mostly
women in professional work settings. Professional meaning like you go to an office or a lawyer's
office or a doctor's office or a bank, or like any big office space, in this type of professional
environment. It's mostly women, which I find really interesting. The women in Latvia are
generally very highly educated. They're very hard workers. They're very productive, like really,
really good workers. The men are generally doing more maybe like construction or mechanics, like
the cars or trade skills and stuff like that. So they're not like in the professional setting.
Maybe they're plumbers and so they're like out in the field kind of doing those types of things.
I just think it's interesting. You go into like most of these professional work environments,
like you go into a building that's like cubicles or something. And it's like almost all women in
there. To me, it's a little weird, but it's cool. It's very different.
Very interesting.
But I think they have a good... I think they generally have a pretty good work-life balance.
Fia has very... because it's very cold in the winter time, you've got very like... it can be
very cold in the winter, but it gets like kind of gray and cold in the winter time. So people like
in the winter time tend to work a lot more. I guess what else to do, right? So you work a lot more.
And the culture, the work culture is like, there's like some holiday, it feels like every week in the
summertime. So it seems like every week in the summer, it's like a three-day work week.
It feels like that because there's always some festival. There's some celebration for something.
And like they have a very relaxed kind of summer and then they work really,
really hard during like the colder months.
Nice.
Very interesting.
It's all weather... it's just weather-dependent.
And it makes sense. It makes sense. You get the beautiful summers there. You want to take
advantage of it because it's going to be gray and cold in the winter time and you're not going to
want to be outside too much.
Yeah, absolutely. The next one that I have is getting around. Do you need a car in Latvia?
Do you have good public transportation?
Yeah, there is good public transportation. You've got trams, trolleys, buses in the city.
You've got buses that go city to city. There are trains that go some places. Now they have
the train that up until a couple of years ago, the trains were only inside, for the most part,
only inside Latvia. They didn't connect to other countries. But now they, you can take trains between
countries now, especially in the Baltic region. So you can take a train like from Riga to Tallinn
or something like that. So yeah, they have good public transport. You can live there without a car.
It's easy. I do have a car there, to be honest, and even when I'm there, I almost never drive it.
Like my assistant keeps telling me like, "Just sell the car. Why do you keep this car? Like,
this is so dumb. You'd never drive this car." But I like my car and I have it just parked in
a garage sitting there. I leave, unhook the battery and that's it. But yeah, you don't need
a car. Not to live in Riga. Like if you live in Riga, you do not need a car. If you live like in
one of the smaller towns outside of Riga or outside of the capital, yeah, you probably do need a car
because like if you lived in like Jormala or you lived in Jelgava or Sigulda or something like that,
the whole country centers around Riga. Like even if you lived in, I don't know, like Sasis, which is
a couple hours outside of Riga, you're still going to come to Riga on a regular basis because like,
when you want to go shopping, like if you want to have like a big shopping day or something to go
like clothes shopping or something, most likely you're going to come to Riga, even if you live two
hours away, because kind of everything happens in Riga. So if you lived like outside of Riga,
you would definitely want a car. But if you're in the center of Riga, yeah, you definitely don't. I
mean, I lived there for years. Cool. Next one, it's healthcare. Is the system easy to access? Is the
quality good? Well, if you are like, if you are a tax resident there, then you are in the like the
government system. And so you can go to the doctor, you know, like like a lot of European countries.
If you are not a tax resident there, so you're not kind of, you don't have a you're not paying tax in
Lethia, then you're not in that system. I mean, you would still be treated like for emergency things,
like you, you go to the doctor and after a car crash, they're not going to say, hey, we need your
credit card. They're not going to do that. But for the most part, like if you just go to the doctor
for a checkup, you pay in advance or you go, I don't know, for an eye exam or the dentist or
something. The quality of healthcare though, it, I'm not a tax resident in Lethia. So I'm in the cash
system there. I don't, I just pay out of pocket. And the quality for that, like in the private
health care is very, very good, like very, very, very good. And it's relatively cheap. Like it's,
it's pretty cheap. Nice to me that I, there's no point in having health insurance there because
like, it's so cheap just to walk in and pay for the things I need. I don't see any point in having
health insurance there. I see. Next one. It's the bureaucracy. Is it difficult to deal with
residents by the means of it used to be easier. I will say it's gotten more difficult. I think a lot
of the difficulty right now has to do with the war in Ukraine because there's such a heavy Russian
influence in Lethia. They're trying to kind of put up barriers to keep too many Russians from coming
in. I don't know that it's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. We could argue this point all
day and Latvians, you know, you got some Latvians and you got native Russians that live in Latvia,
that feel very passionately about this topic. Personally, I think some of the stuff is really
stupid. Like for example, when you go to any government office now, also, I think a lot of it
is violating some laws in Latvia, but when you go to any government office now, they passed a law
that says they can only communicate in Latvian in a government office. And so they're doing this to
kind of exclude Russians from being able to easily come in and get residence permits. To me that seems
really stupid because if you go to the migration office, the whole point of the migration office is
people from other countries getting residence permits, so they don't already speak Latvian.
Whether you're an Italian or American or Canadian or German, and you're moving to Latvia to get a
residence permit, that seems stupid that they won't speak to you in another language because
because they're trying to block Russians. Like it makes no sense. Like last time I went there
last year to renew my residence permit, a lady told me I can only speak to you in Latvian. I'm like,
okay, whatever. And I looked it up and yeah, by law they passed a law that says that, and it's just
kind of protectionism to make it more difficult for Russian speakers. I think that's against the
law there because in all your EU countries, one of the requirements is you need to be able to
transact and do business and interact with citizens and residents in any language that is an official
language of the European Union. So you need to make that available in some way or another.
I mean that doesn't necessarily mean you need to have like a German translator on hand at the
driver's license office every time, but if somebody comes in you need to kind of like try to figure out
how to work with them, either translate documents or something like that. And now they've made a
law that says we can only interact with you in Latvia. Like so all the documents now are like,
they are not, I don't think they changed all of them, but a lot of them, they change them to only
Latvian. So if you're going to go get a residence permit now in Latvia and you're just, you pretty
much going to have to hire somebody to help you with it, because if you're going into the country
Latvian is not an easy language and there's no, obviously no way you're speaking that when you
move there. So you're going to have to hire somebody to help you. So that created a little
bit of friction there. It doesn't make anything impossible. That's why I don't understand it.
Like it doesn't make it impossible. Like you can just hire somebody to help you. It just creates
unnecessary friction. So I don't really like that, but, you know, okay, it's a trade-off. You could
say it wouldn't be, for me, it wouldn't be something that says, well, screw that. I'm not
moving to Latvia. It would just be like, okay, I've got a budget for having a translator come
with me, you know, to deal with some of these things. So, but anyway, otherwise bureaucracy's not, not
too terrible. Like once you kind of, as long as you have the translator with you, when you apply
for a residence permit, I mean, it happens pretty quick. Like you're talking a couple of weeks,
whereas some of your European countries like Portugal or something, dear God, Portugal can
take like years to get your residence permit done. It's, it's insane. I got one friend right now who
did the golden visa. He bought a property outside of Lisbon. He paid over a million euros for this
property four years ago and he still does not have his residence permit. So there is worse.
That's for sure. There's much worse. Yeah. I mean, Italy is much worse. Spain is much worse. Portugal
is much worse. Yeah. I mean, those are the, I mean, those are the top three terrible bureaucracy
countries in Europe, for sure. Like I was in Italy with my daughter a few years ago and she got robbed
and they robbed her car and she has an Italian passport. She's a dual citizen, Italian and, and
American. And we, but she lives, but she lives in the UK. Okay. She has residency in the UK
and we went to like the police station to report everything stolen. We got the papers saying her
passport was stolen. And then we went to the, the passport office to try to get a, get her issued a
new passport. By the way, we were in Italy, her Italian passport was stolen in Italy. And we went
to the passport office with the police papers and the passport office said she cannot renew her
Italian. She can't get an Italian passport in Italy because she's a resident of the UK. She had
to do it in the UK. And we're like, but it was stolen and she was here traveling. How was she
supposed to go back to the UK without a passport? And they're like, yeah, that's your problem.
Figure it out. Like the bureaucracy in Italy is wild. Luckily she also has a US passport and they
stole her US passport also. They stole everything, but we were able to go to the US embassy and get
like an emergency passport so she could travel on it. But just some of the bureaucracy in like Italy,
Spain and Portugal blows my mind how crazy they are. Nice. I have two more of these and then we
will go back to Shirk business everywhere. The first one that I have is best and worst. The
best thing about living in Latvia and the worst thing about living in Latvia. Well, the worst is
easy. That's the winter weather. And people think it gets super cold. Like for the most part, it
doesn't really get super cold. It's coastal. So it's kind of a more moderate climate, but it does get
pretty cold like January. I mean, I have seen it get cold. If it gets super cold, it's usually
pretty quick. Like maybe a few days, like it could be minus 20 for a few days, which is really cold,
but that's kind of unusual. Most of the winter and Latvia is like it hovers around zero, like minus
two, three plus one plus two, zero minus two like that. And personally, I would prefer it to be a
little bit colder and stay below freezing because then it's, I think it's a little bit nicer. So the
downside is the weather. It's kind of in a zone that it's a little bit messy there. And you have
gray skies a lot of the winter time. So it's kind of a little bit depressing. So that will be kind
of the worst, the best. I mean, being there in the summer is incredible from about usually around
now, like around April, May-ish until like September, October. It is absolutely incredible.
The city is like Riga, all the cities, not only Riga, but I'm in Riga. So all the cities are just
alive. They're vibrant. There's things going on. It's exciting. There's music festivals. There's
food truck festivals. Like I'm telling you, every week in Riga, all summer long, there is some
festival that happens somewhere. And it's just so much fun just to be there like during the
summertime and just go do all these outdoor things. The nature is beautiful. A lot of really nice
hiking. There's just so much beauty there. So I guess you could kind of say the weather and the
weather is a good and bad thing about Latvia, but the weather in the summertime kind of it's like the
whole country wakes up and everybody's like, let's do fun things while the weather's nice. And so it
becomes such this amazing place to experience all these beautiful, wonderful things. It's weather
related, but it's not exactly the weather that makes it great. It's the things that people do because
it's nicer weather, I guess you'd say. The trigger, yeah. The last one that I have for this one,
it's the top tip, the one line advice, if anyone is planning to move there.
Top tip for moving there. I mean, I guess like digital nomads moving there, I think it's an
amazing place. If you have a remote job or you've got your own business and you're working
there remotely and stuff, it's an amazing place. My top tip, make sure you just live, I don't know,
top tip. I don't even know. I would just to counter that, I would say if you're moving there to
work, you want to get a job there, don't move there with the hope of getting a job. I would not
move there unless you had a job lined up. There's a big industry of tech business there. There's a
lot of high tech businesses, a lot of that going on. So there are some good paying jobs there.
But if you were just to move there with the hope, "Hey, I'll just get a job when I get there,"
I probably wouldn't do that because the jobs, they're not that high paying jobs.
You might have a hard time like that. But if you already have your own income, either remote job
or your own business or freelance or something like that, I think it's an amazing place. Just go
there, make sure you, as a foreigner, I would only live in Riga. I wouldn't live outside of Riga,
at least initially. If you embed yourself in Latvian culture and you learn Latvian and you
got a bunch of Latvian friends, maybe you could look at some of the other towns after that. But
if you're going to move there, you just want to live in Riga. If you were a foreigner and you
move to Yelga, you're probably not going to have a great experience because it's going to be a weird
thing as a foreigner living in one of the smaller towns. But Riga is an amazing place. Just live
somewhere in the center of the city. Yes, it's going to be more expensive. The apartments are
going to be more expensive. But your quality of life is going to be dramatically better by living
in the center of the city, especially as a foreigner. Perfect. Thanks a lot for all the
insights on Latvia, Bobby. It has been very nice. Before we wrap up a little bit of the episode,
I wanted to ask you a little bit more details about Business Anywhere and what services are
you offering especially for who really is the services. Do you specialize only on people who
are trying to build business without any location independence, but it's also freelancers?
Which are the main services that you're offering? Business Anywhere, we do US company formation,
registered agent service, virtual mailbox, remote online notary, and then we help with
bank account openings, setting up the bookkeeping, the tax filings, especially for non-US people.
We do tax consulting, tax structure consulting, like strategic planning, consulting, basically
everything you need to start your business. We register companies for people. So if you're just
a plumber in New Jersey, we can register a company for you. There's no problem. We're just in that
regard. We're just a registered agent who does company formation and we do the compliance and
all that stuff. So we can do that for you. We don't really like from our message like with our videos
and our blogs and all of our kind of marketing and stuff, that's not the audience we talk to,
but I mean you can register if you're a plumber from New Jersey or a, you know, freelancer living
in Baltimore, Iowa that needs an Iowa LLC. We do that too, but the message that we talk about a
lot is more geared towards two different categories of two different demographics. One of them is
real estate investors in the US. We talk a lot of two real estate investors because in the US,
if you want to go buy like an investment property for your portfolio, your lenders,
if you're borrowing money to buy it, so any lender that lends money on an investment property is
going to require that property to be in an LLC. That's just a protection for the lender as well.
They want it to be in an LLC, so we deal with a lot of real estate investors because they have
to register LLCs for their properties and our platform fully automates your annual report filings
and compliance and stuff and so for real estate investors, especially those that have a lot of
properties, you know, they might have 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 LLCs, one for each property. It gets
really tedious to deal with that annual report filing and compliance stuff for 10, 20, 30, 40 LLCs
and our platform fully automates it. So it makes their life much easier to deal with it in an
automated way. So we deal with a lot of real estate investors. The other demographic we deal
with is location independent entrepreneurs and that can be any nationality because very often
a US LLC is the best business structure for non-US people to register their company because it
is a very simple and tax optimized structure for most, let's call them digital nomad type people.
For example, let's say you're an Italian digital nomad and you kind of exited the Italian system.
You've registered in the IR system and you are no longer a tax resident in Italy and you're a
digital nomad. Maybe you don't have tax residency anywhere. By the way, it is possible for Italians
to not have tax residency anywhere. I've been doing this consulting for over 20 years and every
Italian I've ever talked to does not believe it's possible. I have hundreds of Italian clients that
are not tax resident anywhere. I was going to ask you that actually, but is it an Italian specific
thing or is it globally that you can be not a tax resident of any country? It's this famous 8-year rule.
Yeah, all right. Well, so that 183-day rule is bullshit. That's not a real thing. That doesn't
mean anything. I swear, somebody wrote a blog post like 15 years ago and people keep referencing
that blog post as like some resource or something. It's not real. For example, in Italy,
you know what the IR system is, right? The Italians living abroad system. If you leave Italy,
you have to basically register and tell them where you've gone. You don't actually have to tell them
where you're a tax resident, by the way. And this is where a lot of Italians get confused. They think,
oh, if I'm not a tax resident in Italy, I have to be a tax resident somewhere else. So if I tell them
I leave Italy, I am telling them I'm paying tax in this other country. That's not true. You're
actually just telling them where you left to. And you don't even need to stay in that place.
You just left Italy and that was your first stop you visited, right? It doesn't really mean
anything. All it means is you need to register with IDRA as a non-resident so that Italy stops trying
to tax you. That's basically it. And yes, for most, not all, but for most nationalities, yes,
you can exit your home tax system and you can have no tax residency anywhere. Now, I run into
this all the time with clients. I run into it all the time when I speak at events. I've talked about
this a million times on podcasts and stuff. And it's always the argument, yes, but if I don't have tax
residency, doesn't it make my life a lot harder? Doesn't it? I can't do this or I can't do this.
So I want to clarify a point. If you do not have tax residency, and most nationalities can live
without tax residency, it is possible for most people to exit their home tax system. Okay? There
are very few exceptions to that rule. Like Americans are an exception to that rule. Americans cannot give
up tax residency. They are a citizenship-based tax system. Okay. So if you give up your home tax
residency, there are definitely some compromises you're making. Okay? For example, if you don't
have tax residency, it means you're not filing a tax report anywhere, which means you're not paying
tax anywhere. When I say tax, I'm speaking about income tax. Obviously, you're still going to pay
property tax when you live indoors. You're still going to pay VAT or sales tax when you're consuming
things. You're still going to pay fuel tax when you put gas in your car or buy a plane ticket,
or get on a bus. You're still paying those taxes. I'm speaking only about income tax. And so,
obviously, if you're not a tax resident anywhere, you're not paying income tax. Okay? If you're not
paying income tax, you're not filing a tax return. If you're not filing a tax return or a tax report,
you don't have a government document that verifies your proof of income. And so, some of the trade
offs there is you want to go buy a house and the bank says, "I need your tax return from your income
to get the mortgage." Well, you're not going to have that document for a traditional mortgage.
Okay? That is a trade off you're making by choosing this nomadic lifestyle. Now, that does not mean you
can't buy a house. There are lenders that will loan on non-traditional mortgages. There's lenders in
every country that will do a non-traditional mortgage. You might pay a little bit higher
interest rate for that, but they don't require a tax return to prove income. They require things
like a year's worth of bank statements, or if you've got some investments, like a stock portfolio,
they might require your investment portfolio statements to prove you have assets and to prove
you have cash flow and stuff like that. They might require those things. Like I've done that before.
I've bought properties without providing a tax return where I've just shown like bank statements
to verify I have the income to support the mortgage payment. But I've also paid higher
interest rates, a little bit higher interest rates on the mortgage. It's not an impossible thing.
It's just a trade off. You're just making a compromise here. Is it worth it? I don't know.
That's up to the person. Is the lifestyle worth it? I don't know. Depends on the person. I mean,
it is a different lifestyle, right? Like there's a lot of things and people say like, for example,
this is a tricky one, and at least as it is today, this is how it is. But maybe you've seen this at
some point, Mark, like you log in to your bank account online and they give you like this
pop-up reminder that says, "Hey, please update or confirm your tax residency information." Okay?
So the one thing I want to clarify on that point, what they're actually asking you for is a tax
number. They're not actually asking for tax residency. I know the word on there says tax
residency, okay? But they're not asking for proof of tax residency. What I mean by that, there's only
two ways to prove tax residency. And they're not asking for it. One way to prove tax residency is
you get a certificate of tax residency from the country where you're a tax resident. You have to...
most countries will provide this. There's a form you have to fill to apply for it. And then they
send you a letter back confirming, yes, Mark is a tax resident, blah, blah, blah. Or the other way to
confirm your tax resident is to show your tax return or your tax report that you filed with
proof of payment. That is the only two ways to prove tax residency. So when you log into your
Revolut account and it gets that pop-up, we need to confirm your tax residency. And you created
that account while you were still in Italy, for example, and you log in and it has your name and
your tax ID number, your... what's it called in Italy? Yeah. And that is in there, but it doesn't
mean anything. It's just giving them your tax ID number that you had. So a lot of people are like,
"Yeah, but I don't live in Italy anymore. What if I don't live there? Are they going to tell the
Italian tax office that I'm making all this money?" But if you've already exited the Italian tax system
in the correct way, like we discussed, like you exit, you file through the audit system and that
you've moved to whatever, Mexico or whatever, who cares if the bank tells them you made money there?
They already know you're not a tax resident. Now I say this works right now. The reason I
said this works exactly right now, I can't predict the future. Who knows what's going to happen in
the future? Maybe they have a better way to connect this information going forward in the future,
but right now the bank really is only looking for a tax ID number so that they have you in their
system, in their compliance, connecting you to some country, but they're not actually asking you for
tax residency. So that's one thing that people get confused about, but if you really want, if that
freaks you out, you're like, "No, I can't give them my Italian tax ID, or pick a country, it doesn't
matter." There are countries where you can go get residency and even tax residency in what we call
territorial tax systems, residency-based territorial tax system. You can go get residency
and tax residency in those countries without actually having a tax obligation because they're
territorial tax systems, meaning you only pay tax on the income you earn within the territory of
that country. So if you feel really unsafe about it, like I've got a couple of clients, they're
usually Germans because they like to follow rules. They're usually Germans that really feel like they
have to get tax residency. They don't want to pay tax, but they want tax residency because they think
it looks better. Then yeah, you can do that. There are countries out there where you can do that
and get tax residency without a tax obligation. Does that mean that you can, for example, if I
would move now outside of Italy and I would go to Spain, for example, and I would live in Spain in a
more regular base without really being a digital nomad, be there without paying the Spanish taxes
at all? So that depends. This goes back to your question about the 183-day tax rule. So as I said
before, that 183-day tax rule, it's bullshit. It's not a real thing. I've read the tax residency
rules for almost every country on the planet now. I say almost every, I mean, not 200, but probably
140, 150 countries. I've read the rules on what it means to be a tax resident in that country.
Of the ones I've read, so let's call it three-fourths of the countries on the planet,
I've only found one country that has a clear rule where if you're in the country, 183 days,
you're a tax resident. It's Ukraine. That's the only country I've found that's like that.
And what I mean by that is some countries have a 183-day rule as one of their list of requirements
to be a tax resident. So for example, Spain, I'm glad you brought Spain up. Spain's a good example
for this. So Spain does have one of their rules about being a tax resident is if you're in the
country more than 183 days. But if you own a home in Spain, for example, and it's your primary
residence and you're only in Spain a month out of the year, you're still a tax resident. If you have
kids in school in Spain, you're a tax resident, even if you're there less than half the year.
So there's a lot of different little nuances to there. You can't just say like, "Oh, well I left
at 182 days. I'm not a tax resident." You might be a tax resident. Spain also has another situation
where if you're actually a tax resident in another country that Spain has a tax treaty with, you can
live in Spain all year and not pay tax in Spain because you're a tax resident of this other country
that has a tax treaty with Spain. So there's so many nuances there. You have to look at each
situation separately. It makes sense. I think it's a very difficult topic in general. And I suppose a
lot of people ask you a lot of questions, maybe to close up. Let me make one point real quick and I'll
let you do it. So it is a very complicated topic. The one thing I wanted to make a point here is
nowadays every single, from the consulting side, every single consulting client I get on the phone
with now, and I do mean every single one, comes to me with their chat GPT printout of what they
just did their research on, on chat GPT. Now I'm glad they're doing their own research for themselves
and I'm glad they're taking that research and coming to me with it because I love chat GPT.
Okay. I love Clot. I love Gemini. I love all these AI tools. They're huge time savers. They're huge
productivity tools. I use them every day. If you don't, just like anything else with any of these
AI tools, if you don't know the right question to ask, you're not going to get the right output.
Okay. And if you're asking about a tax situation, you may not even know the right questions to ask
on how to optimize your situation. So you're not going to get a good answer. And it gives a lot of
really bad information if you don't ask the right questions. Okay. So I think it's great if you're
coming to me or your strategic tax planner and you say, here's what I found. Can we talk about
these points? That's great. What I think is terrible is if you say, I got all my answers on
chat GPT. Let me execute this strategy because it's almost guaranteed you're going to screw
something up if you do that. Okay. And I don't mean chat GPT gave you bad answers. I mean,
you asked it the wrong questions. Therefore it didn't give you the detailed answer that would
give you the correct response. You just didn't know how to ask it the right question. So maybe
it gets better. Maybe I'm completely useless like three years from now and chat GPT can like dig
into your brain and figure out what you should have asked. I don't know. But as it is right now,
it's giving really bad answers when it comes to strategic tax planning in this way, because it's
a very complex subject. It is a very, very complex subject. And you got to remember chat GPT and
Cloud and all these tools, all they're actually doing is they're kind of like a Google search
on steroids. Right? I mean, they're basically doing a search of all human knowledge at that point.
And a lot of human knowledge is trash. So they're like searching blog posts that maybe have good SEO
rankings, but maybe the blog post was completely wrong. You know what I mean? So you got to be
careful on some of that stuff. It makes a lot of sense. So linking to that, actually, if any one
of the listeners is interested in digging a little bit more on this topic and presenting to you,
to any one of your colleagues, the specific situation they are on and what they want to
be doing, how can people find you and get in contact? So for our consulting business,
that's like, we have a couple of programs like coaching and a membership program for people
that are kind of in this location independence space. We deal with location independent
entrepreneurs that either live outside of their home country, or they have business or investments
outside of their home country. So that would be global wealth protection.com. That's the way to
find us. And then the business anywhere side, if you're just looking to register the company,
you want to get something in place so you can get your company off the ground and that sort of thing.
And we do some tax consulting there too. If you need more complex work, that's with the global
wealth protection side, but we do some tax consulting with business anywhere too. And that's
business anywhere.io. So if you're not finding that, of course, the links will be in the description
of the episode. Bobby, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing all your insights, not only on
tax and business, but also about Latvia. I think there is a lot of listeners who will enjoy this
episode and extract nice information and hopefully contact you. Thank you again for... Thanks for
having me, Mark. Cheers. Have a great day. You too. As always for the listeners, if you enjoyed
this episode, don't forget to subscribe, give some love to all the channels and also check
Bobby's links on social media. Until the next time, keep exploring, stay curious and see you in the
next episode.