We did it!
Thank you to my parents for inspiring me to seek out new challenges and international experiences, and for instilling me the confidence that with hard work I can accomplish anything I put my mind to. And finally, I'd like to thank my family for their wonderful support throughout this project. My wife and three wonderful children have always been there for me, and their love and support make me tremendously happy.
About the Author
Andrew Fisher is widely regarded as a leading wealth advisor to cross-border families. He frequently writes and speaks to the unique financial planning and investment complexities faced by international families, particularly when an individual is a tax resident of the United States.
With a broad base of experience in international investing, taxation, and wealth planning, Andrew enjoys helping clients find creative solutions to complex financial problems. More than having all the answers, he prides himself on being able to identify the most critical financial questions clients face and then build a team of experts to find solutions.
Andrew is the president and founder of Worldview Wealth Advisors, an independent wealth management firm advising globally oriented families – both Americans living abroad and foreign citizens living in the U.S. In addition to leading the investment team, Andrew serves as senior client advisor. In this role, he assists families with their complex, multinational affairs, seeking to optimize wealth, which is often located in multiple countries.
Prior to founding Worldview, Andrew was an international stock research analyst for Montgomery Asset Management in San Francisco. Previously, he worked in international research at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (now Credit Suisse) and HSBC Securities, both in New York City. He began his career with PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles.
Andrew graduated cum laude from Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo, with a degree in finance and a minor in Spanish. He also completed a year of study at the University of Madrid in Spain. He holds CFA and CPA credentials, and is actively involved with FPA and STEP organizations.
When out of the office, Andrew can be found enjoying the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.
PART I
The Financial Challenges of a Cross-Border Life
CHAPTER 1
Who Are These Cross-Border Families?
There remains little doubt that in the twenty-first century, capital – the factors of production and the resources that make it possible to grow wealth – has become fully globally mobile. Like water seeking its own level, capital invariably flows to where it will be most valued and provides the greatest returns. We tend to think of capital first and foremost as financial capital, but financial capital is not the only kind of capital. In fact, globally mobile financial capital is almost always supported by something else: globally mobile human capital, that is, cross-border professionals and their families – people with the skills, talents, and drive to succeed and rise to the top, and who are willing to go wherever in the world they find the most opportunity.
Put differently, the large, powerful international companies and interests who deploy their financial capital where it is most advantageous also know that the best and most effective professionals, managers, and other high-level employees for any given situation usually do not come from only one country, including the country the company is headquartered in. These companies regularly recruit, hire, and redeploy professionals to assist, enhance, and even anchor their efforts in different countries depending on the company's overall strategic and tactical needs and the situation at hand.
As a result it is increasingly common to find top-notch individuals who start with a company in one country (usually where they are born), then move to work in another country (often but not always with the same company), and then go on to yet another country or perhaps back to their country of origin. Over time (and sometimes very quickly) these individuals invariably accumulate assets of various types in more than one country; and, over a decades-long career arc, things can – and usually do – become very complicated.
International professionals have families, parents, children, and other relatives. They have dreams, goals, desires, and long-term plans. And like everyone else, they have personal responsibility for making many significant decisions regarding the long-term management of the wealth they accumulate.
But these individuals must also face a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, the spirit that led them to excel and become desirable professionals, thought leaders, and managers of all types is the very same spirit that makes them want to achieve the very best for themselves and their families in the financial long run. On the other hand, the desire to intelligently grow and manage personal wealth can be frustrated or outright quashed by insufficient information, overwhelming details, and a dramatic shortage of places to turn for help.
The purpose of this book, then, is to assist cross-border professionals and their families, and in particular those with a financial connection to the United States, to make better, smarter, and more optimal personal financial and wealth management decisions, both in the short term and long term. Managing wealth efficiently and effectively is never easy and always takes careful thinking and planning, but cross-border professionals and their families – even the best and brightest of a class of individuals who are by definition at the top of the international class – find themselves in a particularly tricky and potentially problematic situation.
In 10 or 20 years, perhaps, we will look back and wonder with amazement how it was that as late as 2014, when initial drafting on this book began, there was no comprehensive guide to help cross-border families with personal financial decisions and the long-term effective management of their wealth. That is, as made clear throughout this chapter, cross-border professionals and other globally mobile families wishing to align their financial assets and strategies with their long-term goals and life planning objectives currently face a distinctly uphill battle.
Not only do they face three unique challenges – lack of uniformity, complexity, and scarcity of helpful resources – but also, they find themselves smack dab in the middle of the rapidly changing legal, financial, and regulatory landscape described in the last section. And then, on top of all that, while the community of cross-border professionals and globally mobile families is growing dramatically, the number of firms and individual advisors qualified to help them is simply not keeping up.
More and more, talented professionals from all around the globe are found working – all around the globe. If nothing else, the increasing economic expansion of emerging nations in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and emerging Asia, as well as the continued long-term expansion of China and India, is only going to create more opportunities for education, advancement, and cross-border work scenarios for exceptional and successful individuals living in all those places.
At the heart of this trend, of course, we come back to where this chapter started: to the global mobility of capital, including the human capital that goes along with it. This growing global mobility of capital, then, is coupled with the fact that outstanding individuals of all types, whether they are from a small village in India with only dirt roads or from a privileged background in London, are being sought out by companies and organizations and asked to relocate – often to the United States, which is still the world's strongest economic engine. So then, just as there has never been more global mobility of capital, there has also never been more global mobility of talented individuals of all kinds, from programmers and coders to security experts to managers and marketers to entrepreneurs and those who support them.
At my firm, Worldview Wealth Advisors, we have long recognized the lack of good information, advice, and places to turn to related to wealth management for cross-border families. Given the growing need, we simply felt that now was the time to pull together what we've learned about all of these issues and put it in a place where successful cross-border people from around the globe can access it and benefit from it.
Put differently, the need for a definitive guide at this point in time simply felt obvious to us. This volume is our response to that need by attempting to pull information together and provide usable, practical answers for