Talking Expat Taxes #8

Alex, thank you so much for having me today. It's a pleasure to talk with you again and yeah, let me jump right in and give you a little bit about my background, which is a nice little niche in the industry that we work in, in financial services. So I am American by birth and additionally Swiss by choice, having put in over 20 some odd years living, full time in Switzerland and correct, I split my time now between the US and Switzerland, I have companies in both locations and we're specialized in doing financial planning and investment management for Americans overseas. We have several hundred clients living in Switzerland, many more in the US and elsewhere in the world. And, as you know well, because of the US tax code, Americans overseas are pretty much unique in the rest of the world in the fact that they are tax based not just on their residency, but also based on their citizenship. So with that, It seems to me, and I am not, if you will, a tax professional, even though I get mistaken for one often, um, I do like to read tax treaties and tax code, um, but this is much more to help people make good choices in their financial planning and investment management strategies.

And so with that, I find it much more interesting to hang out with people like you so we can actually talk interesting details on how to make good choices for people. So when I started 19 years ago, I was living in Lausanne, Switzerland, had at the time one child had 18 months of cashflow in the bank and decided I was going to start a business competing with Swiss banks.

I had no clients at the time, had just passed the CFP and went out there trying to find people who needed help in financial planning. And it became obvious very quickly that Americans in Switzerland, where I had already lived and worked for a while, were facing challenges opening investment accounts, maintaining investments, dealing with tax issues, and this was well before the FATCA legislation that made things even more challenging.

So, I worked in large industry outside of the financial services sector for about 15 years, was educated mostly in the U.S., but did move to Switzerland in 1991 after graduating college. A few other things that I've done, I've written for the Wall Street Journal for a few years on expat finance, for a few other publications as well, have been interviewed here and there, and then one of the big things I do on the outside is the volunteer work for American Citizens Abroad.

ACA was founded in Geneva, Switzerland over 40 years ago. But for over a decade, we've been based in Washington, D.C. And at ACA, we're non partisan, non profit, and our main role is to educate people in government, U.S. government, and Americans overseas about issues that they face, whether it be around citizenship, taxation, social security, or other matters.

So we spend a lot of time talking with different constituencies in DC and elsewhere, trying to understand the problems of overseas Americans. And of course, taxation often comes up as one of the big pain points for overseas Americans. So fast forward now, 19 years after starting the business, we have employees in five different countries. We have clients in over 15.

And one of the things you see in working with overseas Americans is even though they face the same tax code in the United States, where they happen to live and their circumstances make their situations often quite unique. So, one of the bigger mistakes I see with people moving overseas, say, in taxes, is saying, oh, you know, I've worked with John Smith as my tax advisor for 15 years.

My company's sending me overseas. And he's going to keep doing my taxes. And meanwhile, one of my observations was one big mistake Americans overseas make is thinking their domestic CPA happens to know something about U.S. tax compliance for overseas Americans. And this is where people like you are so important in that, you know, if your tax advisor has three overseas clients, you're probably not in the right place.

If they specialize in working with overseas clients, and they know what a Form 1116 is, and they know what a 5471 is, and they know what FBARs are, and they know all these various forms that are impacted, they can help keep you out of trouble, which is, I think, the number one goal, often as a U.S. taxpayer overseas.

Indeed, indeed. So, tell me, what else would you like to know about Switzerland or taxation?

And there's plenty, but I can cover some of the basics, I think, that might be interesting.

Certainly for Americans overseas, no. I mean, there are certain types of taxes that can be beneficial, but for most people who are employees or retirees, you're going to find, depending where you move in Switzerland, the taxation can be very, very different. And Tax Haven, it's really historically, like many other jurisdictions, any country can be a tax haven, right?

If you don't live there, oftentimes in the past countries were not so interested in telling on their, you know, depositors or, or other business that they did on a cross border basis. Of course, a lot has changed, but I would say from a compliance standpoint, looking at what we have to go through in Switzerland, it's far more strict in terms of anti money and laundering regulations than in the United States. And even, you know, a little fact about Switzerland. Anyone in Switzerland can more or less go to the local tax office and for about 50 Swiss francs, about 55 dollars, I could ask, what's my neighbor's income and wealth reported in any given year? So it's not, not all that secret, either.

So people will do this for business partners or employees or for a variety of reasons, but things are not quite as secretive and not quite as much of a tax haven. And in many cases, you know, penalties for doing the wrong thing can be far more strict.

Switzerland has a wealth tax as opposed to a capital gains tax in most cases.

And if the Swiss find that you have not reported a certain account or a certain asset, they'll go back 10 years with potential penalties and interest as well as the taxes do. Far more strict than say, an overseas voluntary disclosure program or something along those lines.

Well, this is the ironic thing is in the OECD, you have the what's called AEI, or automatic exchange of information. So let's say you have a French person living in France with an account in Switzerland. The Swiss bank is required to report income to the French government.

This automatic exchange of information goes on with so many different countries today. This happened post FATCA except the U.S. But even the U.S., the FATCA agreements say that the U.S. is supposed to share information with other countries. It just seems it hasn't started yet.

If you actually go into the agreements, I think it's whether the U.S. will share It seems to be held up somewhere in congress or not, but uh, it doesn't seem to be a high priority. Let's put it that way

So but back to Switzerland, like places like Geneva and the Canton of Vaux next to Geneva where Lausanne is, you, the tax rates are generally considerably more expensive than the U. S. So one surprise for people is not only Switzerland, a relatively expensive country to live in, if you're working and earning a good salary and have a bit of wealth, your tax rates can be considerably higher than in the United States. And so if you're thinking of moving there, having a good understanding of not just that you're moving to Switzerland, but where in Switzerland. So Switzerland, their government structure is the most similar of Europe to the United States, meaning it's broken down between federal, Canton or state and commune, just like more or less we have in the U S where it's you know, country, federal, state and local or municipal. And so one big difference is the income tax at the federal level maxes out at about 12% in Switzerland, but the local cantonal rates can go up well over 30%. So, you know, if you're self employed in the Canton of Vaux, you're, you know, top tax rates around 52 and half percent or so.

So it's you know, it feels more Nordic, or Scandinavian than it does a tax haven. And, but even as an employee, we have plenty of clients who have tax rates well into the 40 percent just on their income and, you know, dividend income is included. It's not, no special treatment there. And then on top of that, you have a wealth tax that can go up to, again depending where you live, up to about one percent of income per year, of wealth per year.

It is, an annual percent

Worldwide wealth except for real estate. So, real estate is taxed differently in foreign real estate will add to the total amount of wealth for the base, the rate that you pay, but you don't pay, the wealth tax on, on foreign real estate.

Real estate is treated a little differently in terms of wealth and income taxes. So the Swiss do charge a capital gains tax on home,

Potentially, but not necessarily. But if, if you were talking about an investment account, the Swiss don't tax realized capital gains, but they do tax wealth.

So there, there is a mismatch. And the wealth tax is, you, generally not seen as being able to use a foreign tax credit.

Though, depending on the way the wealth is structured, You may be able to get a deduction on Schedule A. And so if 50 percent of your wealth is an income generating investment account, then you can generally deduct 50 percent of your wealth tax on a Schedule A. To the extent it makes sense, right? If you're not in AMT and you have earned income, etc. So that the deduction actually matters.

Each situation is a bit different, and also where you move in Switzerland makes a big difference. If you're in Geneva or Vaux, your wealth taxes are really high. If you're in several of the other cantons, like Zug or Schwyz or Nidwalden, you may have a tax rate that's 15 times less than in Vaux or Geneva.

The joke about Switzerland always is It depends because each canton is quite different and even for tax advisors most of the tax advisors we know If they're in the German part of the country, they generally only work doing tax work in the German part of the country and the French part of the country the same thing. Estate planning is a little more universal but income tax filing you're almost always better off going with someone who is close to where you live in terms of the language group.

Why? Well, Switzerland is quite provincial, right? You know, the United States has 330 some odd million people. Switzerland has a bit over 8 million people. In Switzerland, if you file a tax return, somebody actually looks at it. Like everybody's tax return every year. And one of the things that you often see is when people first come to Switzerland, A tax advisor or an employer will estimate the taxes, and there seem to be these large variations that come in a year and a half or two years later when they get around to actually assessing or looking at your situation.

So the amount of times that we see people, where their professional tax advisor is off a considerable amount. It's not small and these big surprises tend to come up and it's often to the the detriment of the person having to pay and in switzerland you get this final notice so if they come back and say your 2022 tax year is completed it is extraordinarily difficult to get a tax year reopened when that notice comes.

Not easily not easily.

For the tax advice, and quite frankly, the Swiss tax returns are quite a bit easier than the U. S. ones, and the Swiss tend to invest a lot in automation and simplification, so you can actually go to the website of any given canton, and almost all of them will have a tax calculator, including the federal government, so that you can get a pretty good estimate, based on your situation, but where people will start to not understand things is, I don't know, let's take a typical American example.

You have kids, you have a few 529 accounts. You're like, oh, these are great. These are not taxable. Got a Roth IRA, no tax there. Well, in Switzerland, your 529s and your Roth IRAs are considered like normal investment accounts. They're taxable for wealth tax purposes and income tax purposes.

Almost universally in Switzerland, we'll have people file their local Swiss return first, and once that's done, they start their U.S. return.

A calendar year system, and most cantons, again, each one is a little different, most of them you get until March 31st to file your return.

It's one return and it all goes through the canton or the state, and they take care of distributing that generally. You get a separate tax bill that you pay for the federal, or a tax bill for the canton and the commune, but your tax return essentially goes to your canton.

Indeed. So, generally speaking, in Switzerland, if you're at lower income levels, roughly speaking, 100,000 or less, you may only be taxed at source or withholding taxes on your income and may not be asked to file a tax return. If you're a higher income earner odds are you're going to still have your tax withheld at source, but then you will be invited to file a tax return in which case you may end up paying more or less. It starts to depend on what type of permit you have. The main workers permits in Switzerland is a B permit.

Um, the, and there are several different other ones like an L and D and things like that, but the main one that most people, are ending up getting for a kind of a full time job where you transfer into Switzerland, it's often a B permit. If you've lived there for five years as an American and 10 years from some other countries, you can apply for what's called a C permit.

Which the tax differential is on a B permit you generally have tax withheld at source from your employer and on a C permit you don't have any tax withheld and sometimes people get way behind and all of a sudden they file their tax return and all of a sudden they have this huge, huge payment they need to make.

But yeah, when you're a Swiss citizen and or a C permit holder you're definitely filing a tax return and not having the taxes withheld.

What's that tax return prep?

You know, we do have a fair number of people who've been there. They know the language and they have pretty easy to use software. And in Switzerland, again, you don't have that many levers that you can pull like on a U.S. return. So it is feasible. It's also generally much cheaper to have somebody do your swiss tax return than your U.S. one and it reminds me of another kind of common mistake is someone will come into Switzerland and they're like, oh, I got to give my swiss tax advisor all this information and then I have to give my U.S. tax advisor. I want to go find somebody that does both.

I kind of compare that to let's say you have a problem with your heart and you have a problem with your vision. Do you want to go to a cardiologist and an ophthalmologist? Or do you want to go to a general physician who has studied everything? If it's me, I want someone who is a bit specialized.

And the firms that tend to do both, It's often like working with two firms. So, I generally don't recommend trying to find someone just because it feels convenient. Because, in any case, it's often like working with two separate companies. I would say, find someone, if you want to hire a Swiss Tax Advisor, who works with other expats, where the people speak English, if you don't speak French or German well, and where you're not.

Well, really, this comes to any advisor. If you're working with an advisor where you're a typical client, that tends to be a reasonably good thing. If you're, oh wow, you're the only American we have, you end up costing your advisor a lot more time, and the chances for mistakes are pretty high too.

Rarely do I see that being a cost savings.

Right, so let's cover a little bit retirement savings and investment. So Switzerland's retirement savings system consists of generally, of three pillars, which I like to call a table with with three legs because I think it's missing a leg. So the first pillar or pillar one is Social Security very similar to U.S. Social Security. In the U.S. we have Medicare as well. In Switzerland, you don't. One thing I will note is the U.S. social security is a lot more social than Swiss Social Security, especially for a non-working spouse or, or for a decedent spouse. Switzerland is not particularly generous to the non-working or less working spouse. So that's pillar one.

Pillar two is similar to a 401k in the U.S. It is an employer pension plan which is generally a savings vehicle with a, in most cases, a pretty conservative investment profile. So I like to say the second pillar is mandatory. Each company has a slightly different one that they have basic requirements in the system and it's age based. Oftentimes the employer contribution goes up from ages 35. It goes up where it starts at 25. It goes up at 35. It goes up again at 45 and again at 55.

The kind of adverse effect of that is you see a fair number of large employers starting to try to push people out the door well before 65 because the pension costs become quite high. So it's not abnormal at all for people at 54, 55, 58 to suddenly find that they're not interesting anymore for their employer.

So again, second pillar, a lot of times people do build up a pretty big savings amount. One of the challenges is, of course, this is not considered a qualified plan in the U.S. so most tax advisors, if they would do it, What I would consider more or less the correct way would be the employer and employee contribution into the second pillar is reported annually as taxable income in the U.S. as well as any growth. Now, a lot of people say, oh, double taxation, this and that. Well, the plus side of it, especially if you track your U.S. tax basis in your Swiss corporate pension, your second pillar, is you can build up this big retirement asset that's already been taxed and so in Switzerland, when you withdraw that second pillar you get very favorable tax rates like in the neighborhood of five to twelve percent as opposed to the income tax rates, which are much higher And that often makes a lot of sense...

Yeah, no in Switzerland, well in Switzerland one of the big differences of the the second pillar is where in the US you might roll it over into an IRA account or start taking withdrawals and invest it. In Switzerland, you have to re decide in retirement, whether you take an annuity or whether you take a lump sum and manage it yourself. And if you take that lump sum, it's all taxable at the same time, but at a very low rate.

Exactly.

Exactly. And then, the second pillar has a voluntary component, which we often recommend Americans not to do. Because generally, things that you do that reduce your Swiss taxes end up increasing your U.S. taxes.

Yes, exactly. So, there's a statutory minimum amount that you have to contribute. But if you do more than that, it can often backfire in terms of it lowers Swiss taxes, but it only increases your U.S. taxes at the same time.

Right. So you brought up a good point, which is a second reason not to move voluntary contributions, especially if your employer contributions are the same as you as an employee, is the grantor of trust treatment. Now, as you get older, oftentimes the employer contributions are a fair bit more, but these numbers are not easily available. So that grant or trust treatment, it's like, I have yet to hear of anybody from the IRS trying to go track 25 years of pension contributions and demanding, you know, that you prove that this is a grant or trust or not.

And this is a really good example, and, you know, I'm going to show my age, I think, a little bit compared to you, but back in the early 2000s, a lot of tax advisors in the U.S. are like, huh, don't report your FBAR. Nobody ever looks at them. You know, if you go back and look at the stats in 2000, 2001, and 2002, maybe the IRS is issuing four or five FBAR penalties a year. Okay, FATCA comes around, and the UBS case that drove a lot of the legislation, and all of a sudden, everything is compliance, compliance, compliance. All these people that weren't filing, and often with the blessing of their domestic tax advisor. And so, one of the problems is you've got all these rules on the book.

And they might not enforce them for 20 or 30 years, and all of a sudden some case comes up, or some directive changes, and all of a sudden it's being enforced. And this is one of the problems, like with the Grantor Trust, issue on foreign pensions, is, you just don't know. You have the same issue on, you know, the estate taxes, if, on, for non Americans who don't live in a treaty country, who invest in, say, Apple stock.

You know, they don't get a 13 million dollar exemption on their federal estate tax in the U. S. They get a 60,000 dollar exemption. So, if you're an investor in U.S. securities, and you happen to be using a U.S. custodian, well, you pass away, that custodian's not gonna release your funds until you get an IRS transfer certificate.

If you happen to hold those shares in a non U.S. institution, most of them, to my experience, don't enforce this and they just, you know look at local probate documents and they pay out the account. So you have all these kind of hidden traps and as a tax preparer your hands are kind of tied because when you know what the rules are you got to tell your client, this is what you need to do and what they need to do is often a lot more work for you and cost for them to comply. And they're like, why am I paying all this money and time? I don't even owe any taxes in the U.S. and so that cost of compliance is one of the biggest headaches for overseas Americans.

So I think this goes back to tax treaties which are a horrible way to have to deal with the system but the model treaty language exempts foreign pensions, but when treaties don't get updated for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, you have all these, oh, the UK treaty is a good one. The Canada one is a good one, but the Swiss one needs some improvement.

The Swiss one was renegotiated after FATCA around 2000, I want to say 13 or 14.

Well, except when they updated then, this was all about FATCA and they didn't fix the retirement issues.

Rumor has it that the Swiss US 1 is being negotiated again, but these are really slow processes. And, you know, when you get certain people in Congress who like to hold these things up, for no other reason than to hold them up.

It's just a horrible way to have to try to deal with these issues Yeah, so, you know just thinking another form out there the 3520 when you receive a foreign gift or a foreign inheritance, there have been some pretty brutal automatic penalties coming out of those forms recently. We hear that that's lightening up a bit.

But yeah, you have all these special requirements as an American overseas and yeah, it can be a challenge.

Right. Well, and I would say there's two components. One is you as the tax preparer saying, listen, I've seen hundreds of international tax returns. I know what to look for. But the other is on the client side, knowing what to give you. Right you the tax industry likes to prepare these organizers where everybody feels like they're doing their own tax return for the tax advisor. They're filling in all this information. But you see a lot of times people just make mistakes like we've had plenty of people, hey listen, I was told in the U.S. Embassy in 1987 that I didn't have to file a U.S. tax return if I only had Swiss income. So, for the last 35 years I've been a school teacher and I haven't been filing in the U.S.

Exactly. So, now, The IRS, depending on the administration and the mood, sometimes it seems they look at everyone overseas as a criminal first, and you have to prove your innocence. And at other times, you get people that are much more reasonable and are like, Okay, we accept that this was willful, uh, or non sorry, accept that it was non-willful.

They didn't mean to make all the mistakes. And, you know, this is the challenge. And, and there's a lot of Americans out there that didn't grow up in the United States and they don't know the tax culture. Like when I first spoke with people from the irs when I moved back to the U.S., you know over 15 years ago, they'd be like, well, how can Americans not know that they have to file a tax return?

And it's like well if your parents are American and you were born in France, or maybe they're not even American, but you were born in the United States. And when you were three they moved overseas, please, how are you supposed to know that, you know, IRS is not sending you a postcard as an American citizen saying happy 18th birthday. Now you have a tax burden. So It's not unrealistic that people don't understand their filing requirements.

Well, the strange thing is if you look at the overseas american population. Just like in the U.S., a huge percentage of overseas Americans don't end up owing any taxes. And one of the things we work at on ACA is trying to make this, the system more fair, but also it would be a big burden lifted off of the IRS not to deal with millions of tax returns that generate no revenue.

So, ACA has spent a fair bit of time researching and scoring, getting scored the costs of different levers, that first came out in a bill back from Representative Holding. ACA's involvement in this has been very much behind the scenes, but really, Some of the research that we did into this, we actually, I don't know if you recall, but the U.S. government used to come out and say that there's, you know, about nine and a half million Americans overseas...

Yes, by Mary Louise, I'm sure. And because of that, you know, we actually went and, tried to find the source of this number and the IRS would come in and say, well, there's this huge gap of overseas Americans not filing because we're only getting a few million tax returns. Well, it turned out that nobody really went and counted the overseas Americans.

And when we actually started looking at it, the number of overseas Americans was closer to four and a half to five million. And it seems that the quote non compliance from overseas is about the same as about the non compliance from inside of the United States. So that in itself what was it? An issue that wasn't an issue.

The foreign earned income exclusion, what we're aiming for is, you know, a system whereby, you know, it has to be tight on abuse. You can't have people like moving overseas for six months, realizing a bunch of income and then coming back in the U.S. and lost that way. So the system has to be fair to the United States. It has to be fair to the overseas population. It has to be fair to these, what are called accidental Americans who have never lived in the U.S. or were there as a young child and went out. And so we have a lot of momentum right now in Washington for bipartisan support.

Of legislation to improve the lot for overseas Americans, but, there's a lot going on in Washington right now. So we just hope that it gets the appropriate amount of attention in Congress.

Right. So it's funny because a lot of institutions in the U.S. or in outside of the U.S. will use, oh, you live in this country, we can't work it with you as an excuse. And sometimes that's legitimate, and sometimes it's the compliance department that says we don't want to deal with people outside of the United States or we don't want to deal with people who live in these jurisdictions and they have their reasons for it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, the funny thing is that, there are a number of U.S. institutions where their procedure is the same. We can't work with Americans living in Switzerland, but if the numbers are big enough, a lot of institutions find a degree of flexibility. Now, that being said, it can be tough because we've seen U.S. institutions like mail people a check from their IRA account and say, sorry, we're not working with you anymore, and you've got 60 days to get that redeposited or you're in big trouble.

So certainly one of the challenges is which U.S. brokerage firm will work with people in a given country? So, for example, Charles Schwab has a list of countries that you can see on their website that says if you live in this country, you can keep an account open, say Switzerland.

If you move to France, you can keep your accounts, but you can't open new ones. If you move to Italy, you can't keep your accounts at all. Whereas Interactive Brokers or Pershing or others will have different rules for different countries. So one of the key things that you're looking at is, will my financial institution just custody, hold in custody my accounts when I go overseas.

The next level is, if you work with an advisor, will my advisor work with me going overseas?

Well, absolutely. So that becomes a big challenge for the, you know, our clients for firms like ours, which is, you know, thankfully we've worked with custodians that have been pretty stable, but when we get a client that says, Oh, we're moving from country A to country B, one of the first things we're doing is checking with the custodian and seeing, okay, can they still work with this custodian?

And that becomes an issue. One of the things we check as advisors. Are we allowed to work with clients in a given jurisdiction? So, for example, I don't work with clients in Canada because I don't want to go through the registration process in each province just because I happen to have one client in Quebec or one client in Saskatchewan or wherever.

And so a lot of countries will allow an advisor to work as long as they're not soliciting business on a cross border basis. Other jurisdictions like Switzerland get a lot more strict, and they have done in the last few years where if you're not registered in Switzerland, you may well be as an advisor breaking the law.

So as a client, whether you're doing it yourself or working with an advisor, that compliance issue is something that you're facing that you rarely face when you're a domestic, uh, client and e rest...

Mostly no problem except once you move overseas and they know it, they won't let you buy mutual funds. They'll restrict you to individual stocks and ETFs because mutual fund distribution is regulated differently than ETFs and individual stocks.

So here are the problems we've seen with that. One is a lot of these brokerage firms track those things. Like if they have mail returned or they see a change of address even if they know you're, we've seen just domestic clients in the U.S. kid moves to college and you know the brokerage firm comes and says you don't live at this address anymore with mom and dad.

So the brokerage firms have a fair bit of ability to find out if someone really lives at a certain address so if they find, oh Alex, you're living in Iran and we know that because even though you use your U.S. phone number, our phone software says you're calling in from there, you might find your accounts closed rather quickly.

One is the brokerage firms do have the resources to figure this stuff out. Sometimes they enforce it, sometimes they don't.

Let's say your client's in California. And, they're moving to Switzerland and they decide to use their Uncle Bob's address in L.A. Where do the 1099s get sent to? They get sent to the client. They also get sent to the state of California. So all of a sudden the state of California is coming and saying, Where's your state tax return?

We have all this investment income. You're using the California address. Prove to us that you don't live here. So we see state tax issues with using that address or you see, okay, Uncle Bob decides to, he's sick of California. He decides to move to Las Vegas and he says, you know what? I don't want to receive your mail anymore.

And so, you know, that can be a temporary thing, but it has its pitfalls. And if, if I'm in a financial institution and I'm in the compliance department, And I find that my clients are lying to me. How much am I going to want to help them if I suddenly find out? So definitely we see brokerage firms have their clients lie about their address.

That has a degree of risk. Now, okay, if you're going overseas for six months or 12 months, maybe not going to be much of an issue. But if you find yourself four years later or five years later, still using the U.S. address. In most places, there's ways that you can comply, and get around.

And, you know, I'd like to say it can be difficult as an American overseas investing, but I still have yet to find a situation where we can't find a solution.

And, you know, sometimes you have to be persistent, sometimes you have to be creative, and yourselfers or working with an advisor. A lot of times, you know, people in the advisory industry don't want to lose a client, so they tend to look the other way or turn a blind eye. I think that can be dangerous practice.

The State Department Federal Credit Union. Get a membership.

Yeah, if you sign up for one year for ACA, I mean, it's only 70 and it goes to, to, you know, fund, the general operating expenses of ACA. But ACA members can open a State Department Federal Credit Union account. It's not a government account.

It's just the name of the credit union because they started serving State Department employees a long time ago. But yes, any member of ACA can join the State Department Federal Credit Union. So as a place of last resort to get a U.S. checking account, to get a U. S. credit card, even to get car loans for your car overseas. The State Department Federal Credit Union has some great services and we're happy to be partnering with them.

Almost always you can find a solution and you know, there are more and more firms popping up that, you know, are working in this expat place. I still consider ourselves pretty small. I mean, we manage something around 800 million or so, but we work with normal, ordinary people, trying to help them make good choices in their financial planning and investment management. Every day is different when you work in this cross border world.

Well, as far as I know, I'm the only Jonathan Lakowitz on the internet. So a Google search is how a lot of people, or the name of our company is White Lighthouse Investment Management. So pretty easy to find online. There's lots of free articles on our website and presentations as well that people can browse through. And um, yeah, we get a lot of contacts every week. We try to see if we're a good fit for people and if we're a good fit and it makes sense we're always happy to to try to work with people and help them.

That'd be great alex, so yeah, let's plan to do this sometime again. Maybe we'll do one focused on just investments for overseas Americans or something along those lines.

Okay, good luck with your softball.