Using 90-day tourist visas to take refuge from U.S. hyperinflation, Part 1

I like to figure things out in part by gathering a huge amount of data. As a youth football coach, our defense kept getting beat game after game. I started watching our game videos while riding my exercise bike.

A pattern emerged. There was really only one play that was beating us: the sweep.

So then I created what football coaches call a cut-up. I copied onto a blank tape all the sweeps run by our team and against our team in a couple of seasons of games trying to figure out what stopped them and what caused them to succeed. I also read every defense book I could find checking the index for the word “sweep” first.

Then I watched that sweep tape over and over.

The problem is not the sweep. It’s just the wide-side sweep. 85% of snaps are from a hash mark. Sweeps run into the 17-yards away boundary don’t work. Only the ones to the wide side (34 yards) work. Also, what stops the sweep is a maneuver by the defensive end called boxing, combined with correct sweep pursuit by the other ten players.

Legal, cheap, quick escape from America

Similarly, I keep trying to understand leaving the U.S. and going to a foreign country during USD hyperinflation which would cause severe shortages of food and other necessities here. I’m interested in how to do it legally. And how to do it cheap for those with smaller budgets.

There are a lot of travel books which are quite helpful with regard to two-week-type visits to a foreign country. And there are a lesser, but still substantial, number of books about moving permanently or for years to various countries. And I am interested in which countries.

There is no book, as far as I know, on using a series of 90-day tourist visa to stay away from the U.S. for, say, two years.

Am I going to write it? Probably not. For one, I would sort of have to do just that and I am not in the mood nor is my wife. For another, it is a subject that people need to read about, but don’t know they need to read about, so there would be too small of a market for it. Also, it would be a very complex, dynamic subject. Better I just give you the basic ideas here and you supplement what I tell you with up-to-date research on the specific countries in which you are interested at the time.

As with the sweep issue, my marathon of research of the 90-day tourist visa multi-year travel picture is starting to come into focus.

Screw residence permits and citizenship

I am getting a ton of info on the getting of residence permits and becoming a citizen of another country and all that. You know what? Although it varies somewhat, it is a royal pain in the ass no matter where you go. Plus, it subjects you to all sorts of local laws regarding paying foreign taxes, paying foreign government health care premiums, etc.

And I see no benefit other than being able to stay in the country past 90 days. As I said in another recent article, you can change countries in some parts of the world by crossing the street—where you would automatically get another 90-day tourist visa for that country. Typically, at the end of the second 90 days, you can go back to the first country. For example, I think you could spend two 90-day periods per year in Australia and two in New Zealand and do it again the next year. That would give you almost two full years of living in those two countries in the form of four 90-day, nonconsecutive, periods in each.

So explain to me why I would put myself through great time consumption and expense and vexation, and subject myself to local taxes and health care premiums and other local rules just to avoid packing my bags and moving across the street. Even if I had to get on a plane, say, to switch between Australia and New Zealand, it’s no big deal to do that every 90 days.

Residence permits are ‘cooler’ than 90-day tourist visas?

I get a sense in reading the “internationalize your life” web sites and the “start a new adventure in a new country” or “start a new life in a new country” books that getting a residence permit or, better yet, citizenship, in another country gives you more prestige among American expats and among Americans who are intimidated by foreign travel and countries.

And that and a Sacajawea U.S. dollar coin will get me a ride on a San Francisco trolley.

I don’t need no stinking prestige. I’m just trying to have a plan if and when I can’t buy food and other necessities in the U.S., including if it lasts as long as two years, which is possible. The notion that there is something “cool” about a foreign residence permit or having another country’s passport is adolescent nonsense. Is this some sort of “James Bond” or “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” fantasy? I do not like hype. There are sometimes good reasons to move to another country. But all this military-recuriting-type poster talk of “adventure” and making you a better person creeps me out.

I must also point out that there is a lot of money to be made helping you get foreign residence permits and/or citizenship. This 90-day tourist visa advice of mine is designed to save you money and that has the effect of preventing me from making much. I want to sell my book How to Protect Your Life Savings from Hyperinflation & Depression, 2nd edition, but if I divide the cost of that book—$29.95—by the percentage of it devoted to 90-day tourist visas—I make what? 50¢ pushing the 90-day-tourist visa idea on you. And what do you get for your 50¢? Avoiding starvation. Seems like a decent deal.

Cure-all

There is also a “Dr. Von Hoffel’s Elixir” medicine-show resemblance. Moving to Costa Rica is going to give you a “more humane pace,” make you healthier (from fresh produce and nicer weather that cause you to be outdoors more but not so much discussion of skin cancer or malaria), give you more “social harmony” (with the good Costa Ricans, not the petty thieves or violent criminals). Being “immersed in another language and culture” is presented as an absolute good. I will remind readers that there are a lot of former Costa Ricans or whatever living in the U.S. and I’m guessing the number of them who want to come here and stay here far exceeds the number of us who want to go there and stay there.

Culture shock and reverse culture shock

You will suffer from culture shock whenever you move to a new country and stay there for a while. And, perhaps surprisingly, you will experience reverse culture shock if and when you come back to the U.S. One of my West Point roommates was a U.S. Army liaison officer in Canberra, Australia for two years. His first stop coming back was my house in California. We stopped at the supermarket to pick up some stuff. He was mesmerized by the enormous variety of different cereals and so on. In Australia, they have far fewer brands. What is being called “culture shock” in these become an expat books is merely habits and the availability of choices.

My wife was born in Indonesia and grew up there and in Taiwan and Ethiopia. She wants NO part of living in another country. And as I told her about the things I was learning about other countries in my research, she commented that my research was an America-appreciation project. Indeed, as were our travels to other countries recently. But although America is the greatest place in many ways, it will be no fun for a time if the U.S. government causes hyperinflation, then enacts laws like capital controls and price controls in the name of fixing it. Those will make living here in the U.S. intolerable.

Gotta have a Country B—and with 90 day tourist visa rules, a Country C and maybe D and E.

There is a vague notion that having a residence permit guarantees you can get into another country, but a mere 90-day tourist visa may not? That implies that 90-day tourist visas are sometimes not available, but residence permits are forever.

I am not aware of any evidence to support either of those assertions. I saw a list of reasons why countries stopped granting visas to citizens of other countries in the past. It was stuff like the two countries being at war with one another or at least really pissed off at each other, a contagious disease epidemic in the country you are leaving, high amount of terrorism or crime in the country you are from like Somalia or Iran or Afghanistan, high probability you are an economic refugee looking for a new country in which to beg. Stuff like that.

But there are something like 200 countries. They vary by desirability, but you only need two and you are only going there to be able to buy food and other necessities for 90 days. Right now, a U.S. passport generally gets you into almost all the countries of the world. And you probably don’t want to go to the ones who will not grant you an automatic or almost automatic 90-day tourist visa. Here is a line from the Wikipedia write-up on the subject “Visa requirements for United States citizens”:

According to the "Henley Visa Restrictions Index 2013," holders of a United States passport can visit 172 countries and territories visa-free or with visa on arrival, and the United States is currently ranked 2nd (tied with Germany, Denmark, and Luxembourg) in terms of travel freedom.

That should be quite adequate for leaving the U.S. and going to a country where they do not have hyperinflation, price controls, capital controls, and massive shortages of necessities.

Countries on the ‘bad’ lists

If you want to see something funny, or at least it was to me, Google some foreign country name and add the phrase “tourist visa.” I just did it with Gibraltar. First search result is http://www.visitgibraltar.gi/get-there-visa. It basically says that if you are coming from a country like the U.S. or Norway, you automatically get a tourist visa just by showing up. But they also have a long list of countries whose citizens must apply for a visa before they come. What is that list? A list of all the shitty countries in the world. It makes me laugh because in diplomacy they are very careful to treat each country, no matter how shitty, with verbal dignity and respect—until someone from that country wants to set foot in their own. Then they get out the you-must-apply-for-a-visa-in-advance list. Here are the first ten countries on Gibraltar’s alphabetical, apply-in-advance list:

• AFGHANISTAN                
• ALBANIA
• ALGERIA
• ANGOLA
• ARMENIA
• AZERBAIJAN
• BAHRAIN
• BANGLADESH
• BELARUS
• BENIN

One Gibraltar web site makes a color-coded map of who must apply for tourist visas in advance. That is funny to me because it almost looks racist, another deviation from the typical, ritual incantations of respect for everyone that incessantly come out of the mouths of government officials: http://www.doyouneedvisa.com/border/Gibraltar It is crystal clear from this map that Gibraltar is not real keen on having visitors from Africa, former or current Communist-ruled countries, northwest South America, or the Muslim world. Whom do they want? North Americans, the rest of Latin America, western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, South Africa.

You can do that Google search with virtually all countries and you get a similar list of who gets automatic tourist visas and who does not. Even Indonesia, which is on Gibraltar’s bad list, has a similar bad list. http://www.embassyofindonesia.org/consular/voa.htm Others on Gibraltar’s bad list, like China and Russia, require everyone to get a visa in advance. Russia and China are grumpy countries with not-yet-realized delusions of grandeur who are envious at the U.S., whose citizens are welcome almost everywhere that they would want to go. They refuse to have a good list with the U.S. or its allies on it. They are also run by dictators who, are, paradoxically, paranoid.

Who says residence permits are never revoked?

And what is the basis for believing that the country that granted you a residence permit won’t revoke it before it expires if that country suddenly has bad relations with the U.S., like the U.S. and Russia right now?

They do not revoke citizenship, but citizenship is extremely hard to get. One speaker at the 2013 Freedom Fest said there are three things you want in becoming a citizen of another country: a process that is cheap, fast, and easy. He went on to say you can often get one, sometimes two, but never all three.

And again, Americans already can get into 172 countries. Roughly speaking, you would only NEED citizenship in another country if the number of decent countries allowing U.S. citizens in on tourist or resident visas dropped to zero. That has never happened.

Two countries? Eight countries?

You could move to a new country every 90 days never repeating the same country during, say, a two-year period. Would that cost more? The only cost is travel to the new country. For example, you could just go from one Latin American country to the next adjacent one and work your way from Mexico down toward Chile. Mexico, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama were all recommended in one book I read about retiring abroad. That’s five 90-day periods right there. That book also recommended Ecuador and Uruguay. Pick one more and you’ve got your whole two years taken care of—and you saw eight different countries. Very educational.

Or you could do the same in the Caribbean spending 90 days each in, say, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Saint Martin (France possession but not part of Schengen Area), Sint Maarten (Dutch possession on the same island as Saint Martin—easy move—also not part of Schengen Area), the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Turks and Cacos.

Can you do that in Europe? Not much. It’s almost all Schengen Area. After 90 days in the Schengen Area, you have to stay out of it for 90 days. And the only places out of it over there are the U.K. and Ireland, unless you count the Balkans, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova.

Actually, there are a couple of little St. Martin-type situations in Europe where you can walk across the street or a bridge and thereby leave, and later return to, the Schengen Area.

So you could spend 90 days in the Schengen area then 90 days in Andorra, Gibraltar, or San Marino, then go back to the Schengen area.

Worse things could happen to you. I have never been to any of them, but in print and photographs they seem to be lovely little storybook countries. Andorra is a monarchy! San Marino is a continuation of a monastic community that was founded on September 3, 301. I did not even know they had a calendar back then! Gibraltar has a queen—Elizabeth, the British monarch. All three of the non-Schengen microstates in Europe are big on tourism and have nice or relatively nice weather. Andorra’s average elevation is 6,500 feet and its lowest is 2,800 feet; San Marino is at 2,500 feet; and Gibraltar is at about sea level but it has a 1,400 feet tall rock.

Asia? Probably, say, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. That could get expensive with both travel and cost of living.

Africa or the Middle East? Plenty of countries there but please leave me off the manifest.

Permanent cruise ship passenger?

Permanent cruise ship resident is another interesting idea for being away from the U.S. for extended periods. I asked my wife what the cheapest cruise would cost—like repositioning cruises between the summer and winter seasons. She thought about $50 a day. I hope more knowledgeable readers will correct that if it’s wrong. The cheapest I could find in a cursory Web search was about $160 per day. I presume you can get that lower with frequent cruiser and senior discounts and such.

One problem with repositioning cruises is you have to get off the boat at the new peak-season area. Then what? You’re 3,000 miles or more from where you started and you probably need to pay peak-season rates to get back—unless it’s some country where you can do one of your 90-day tourist visa stays. By the end of that, peak season may be over and you can cheaply repositioning out of there.

That would be $1,500 a month. I think they would require a passport, but you don’t need to get off the ship when it goes to ports so you could never show the passport to anyone and thereby never start any 90-day-visa clock. I got off on a bunch of Caribbean islands a few years back. If I had it to do over, I would have stayed on the ship in Nevis, Barbados, and St. Lucia. Bad neighborhoods with palm trees. St. Martin and St. Thomas were okay.

Not just rent—everything

If you had no mortgage or rent to pay back in the U.S., the $1,500 would cover everything: room, board, entertainment, pool, hot tub, medical that does not exceed the ship’s doctor’s capabilities. You can walk to everything on the ship so no need for a car or other transportation. There are some passengers who stay on the same cruise to the same islands time after time—getting frequent cruiser discounts and special treatment. When the ship returns to, say, Fort Lauderdale, they just watch the old passengers get off and the new ones get on. You can eat at assigned tables and thereby get to know your table companions during the cruise. Or you can sit with new people at every meal.

Healthy singles could probably become adept at finding and dating people from each passenger group.

Can you find cheap cruises all 365 days a year? Maybe. I have not researched that yet. One elderly female permanent cruiser was asked why and said, “It’s cheaper than a nursing home.” When it was pointed out that it lacked some of the facilities of a nursing home, she said, “like what? They prepare my meals, make my bed, have exercise classes, a doctor and nurse, everything is a short walk, I meet tons of new people constantly.” The lady has a point. Here is a link to that story: http://www.snopes.com/travel/trap/retire.asp.

That lady was paying $135 a day and it was a real cruise, not repositioning or some other discount voyage.

Here’s an article about getting cruise bargains by booking later than normal. Of course, crappy cabins, off-peak times of year, and such all save money.

All the interesting people you meet—on a freighter!?

How about freighter cruises? That is, there are passenger cabins on freighters like container ships. Really. One had an 84-day cruise that was about $146 per day. They may have an indoor pool, hot tub, and gym, but not a lot of other cruise ship amenities. No doctor. I read somewhere that a freighter captain said his favorite thing about captaining a freighter was all the interesting people he met. Huh!? Turns out, many authors go on such cruises to get away from it all and concentrate on finishing their latest book.

We writers can’t write all day. Only about four hours in my experience and that of others who have commented on it. So the captain got to talk to them at meals and around the pool or deck in the evening.

Would you get bored out of your mind? Perhaps. There is Island Fever. Ship Fever seems like it would be worse. But I am a writer. If I had access to the Internet and my laptop on the ship, I think I could get into it. I had no trouble getting into it on that one Caribbean cruise I took—maybe two weeks long, I’m not sure. So if you get bored, get off the ship. All we’re trying to do here is stay out of the U.S. for six to 24 months. A combination of cruises and 90-day-tourist stays will work just fine.

It does not look to me like cruise ship are extraordinarily cheap living, but they are visa-free, and an opportunity to see the world. And you have to keep reminding yourself that the cruise ship fee covers all your needs, not just rent. And they could complement 90-day on-land stays. Perhaps 90 days in the Schengen Area followed by an 90-day freighter cruise that ends up with you back in the Schengen area.

And not everyone reading this is on a budget. Many can afford all sorts of prices per month and are just trying to make their hiatus from hyperinflated America as enjoyable as possible.

What is 90 days?

90 days is about the length of the seasons: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. It also matches high-season and off-season in resort areas, which has implications for costs and crowds. It matches the U.S. summer school vacation. Not sure about other countries. It matches the longer, multi-continent cruises. For colleges on the quarter system, it matches the quarters. There have been lots of 90-day internships in various fields, at least before the unions started demanding interns be paid. There are also a lot of non-college courses, exercise programs, and diets that are billed as taking 90 days. U.S. Officer Candidate School graduates were called “90-day Wonders” during World War II. My Uncle Jack was one of them.

This has implications for how you might use each 90-day tourist visa stay. Since you usually are not allowed to work legally on a 90-day tourist visa (you can in Costa Rica), you might use each stay to write or read or study or lose weight or become more fit or rehab from an injury or recover from surgery.

My childhood in Wildwood, NJ

From age 3 to 10, I lived year-round in Wildwood, NJ, a seashore resort. There were lots of empty houses in the nine non-summer months. In the summer they all filled up. Many were second homes of families who came every summer and stayed in their second house. One of my college roommates family had a summer house on a lake in MN that they went to every year. Seems to me you could do that maybe by having a home in Canada and another in New Zealand. During USD hyperinflation, you simply spend two seasons in your Canada house and two in your New Zealand House.

You do not need to own it. Many of the houses in Wildwood were rented to the same family every summer. The family liked the house and the landlord liked the family and preferred them to risking renting to a new family they might not like. This 90-day tourist visa rotating for six to 24 months need not be weird and jarring. It can be like going to the same summer house every year—only extended to all four seasons—two if you go to the northern and southern hemispheres as in Canada and New Zealand. You can spend Northern hemisphere Spring and Summer (April through August) in Canada then spend Southern hemisphere Spring and Summer (September through March) in New Zealand. It’s not Endless Summer, but pretty nice.

You cannot do endless summer because we only have two hemispheres, not four. But there are many countries where the temperatures are always what Americans think of as summer—basically between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn—about 23º north and south latitudes. Alternatively, if you want endless snow skiing, you can choose to always be where it’s Winter or Spring and at high altitude. That sounds more expensive.

Advantages and disadvantages of seasons

There is in many, but not all, places, a high season, off season, and shoulder (in between) season. Seasons can stem from climate; annual national, regional, or city holidays; school vacation schedules. You may want to go to the country in question during high season for the most attractive climate or famous events. Or you may want to go in off-season to avoid crowds and high prices.

You will need to go somewhere in shoulder seasons if you are going to be away from the U.S. for 365 days a year during USD hyperinflation. Also shoulder seasons offer a blend of not too crowded, not too expensive, not too hot, not too cold.

If you are rich, you can do whatever you want. If you have to operate on a budget, you may be forced to always be here you are in that country’s or city’s off-season. Worse things could happen to you. I lived year round in Wildwood, NJ for eight years, nine months of which were definitely off-season. The non-summer months were perfectly nice, only not as hot and certainly not as crowded. Unfortunately, the boardwalk was closed. Otherwise, it was just a normal place, not a bad place, from September to May.

Also, in some places, what are shoulder seasons elsewhere are the best seasons. For example, the best weather in San Francisco is not summer, but September and October. Indeed, Mark Twain once wrote that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. If you hate crowds, shoulder seasons and off-seasons are high season to you.

Not just best country, also best PART of the country

Although the 90 day tourist visa applies to entire countries and the entire Schengen area, depending upon what time of year you go to the country in question, you should try to select the best part of the country in question. As you know, a foreigner coming to America for 90 days or two 90-day stays would be wise to ask a well-traveled American where to go in America depending upon the season. We would generally urge Hawaii or south in the winter and many U.S. locales (other than the desert or Southeast) in summer.

Of course, if you have some outdoor hobby that is very important to you, you could do like the guys in the movie Endless Summer, who were surfers, and go where conditions were best for your outdoor hobby during each 90-day period.

Overbuilt markets mean cheap housing

It seems somewhere in the U.S. or the world there are always overbuilt markets—too many houses and/or apartment buildings and/or hotels. If you are on a budget, you could seek out those to minimize your costs. To state it in MBA terms, housing and hotels have high fixed costs and low variable costs. That means they must offer really cheap rents when their market is weak.

That is not true of things with high variable costs like restaurant steak dinners. They will either sell at more or less normal prices or shut down. Apartments and hotels are loath to shut down. They would rather get whatever they can as long as it covers the additional cost of having a person in the room or apartment. They wish it would cover the mortgage payment, taxes, and insurance (fixed costs), but even when it does not, they need to get what they can. They only shut down when the rent you pay is less than the extra costs they incur because you are in the building—which are rather few and small.

You can Google overbuilt markets to find where they are around the world at any given time. I just did that on 4/11/14 and found that many parts of Canada, mainly eastern parts like on the Atlantic, Quebec, and Toronto, not Western Canada, are overbuilt.

Cheap, not overbuilt, is the goal for those on a budget

You can also say to heck with why the rents are cheap. Just tell me where they are cheap. For that, use Numbeo.com which lists costs of living for hundreds of cities around the world. And in my limited travels to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada recently, I found Numbeo’s numbers to be accurate.

Lease term

Working on 90-day tourist visa rules, you might think you could only do 90-day leases. Actually, unless you scouted out the rental property in advance, that would be hard because you probably cannot find a place to rent the first day you arrive. You can sign whatever lease you want including one that extends beyond your 90-day visa. The landlord only cares that you pay the rent, not whether you are actually there in most cases. You don’t want to waste rent when you are not there, but a couple of days probably won’t kill you financially.

Then there is the tag-team concept. How many are in your family? You could sign even, say, a year lease on say, two properties in different countries, maybe Australia and New Zealand, then take turns living in each. You are in the Australia house for 90 days then got to New Zealand where you wife has been for 90 days and she goes to Australia. The more in your family doing this with you, the more flexibility you have in the lease terms you agree to. You could also team up with another family to do this.

Leasing an apartment in other countries is basically the same as in the U.S., but they have some weird variations that you had better make sure you know about. You need to be very careful whom you deal with. Apparently, there are lots of people who claim to be real estate agents who may have nothing to do with the property or have a license and so on. You need local help you can trust to sign a lease. Do not do it sight unseen. So it’s mostly the same, but you’d better learn about the part that is not. Things like a refrigerator may not come with the apartment—important if you are on a 90-day lease.

In Costa Rica, many apartments have no hot water. Really! Or they have some inadequate electric water warmer that heats water a little on the way out the shower nozzle. We had no hot water in Vietnam, but we got our showers from a 55-gallon drum on top of the roof with a pull chain shower nozzle coming off the bottom of it. It was so hot in Vietnam that the 55-gallon drum in the sun all day did the job. But you may not be so easy to please when you are not getting combat pay.

In Australia and New Zealand, they are not real big on central heat or air-conditioning. You may say that’s because they have a moderate climate. It’s not THAT moderate! Sydney’s average summer highs are around 78 and their average winter lows are around the mid thirties! Auckland’s average summer highs are in the low 70s and the average winter lows are in the mid 40s. The average winter highs are in the low 50s in Auckland—Sydney’s average winter highs are in the low 60s—and no heat to turn on! Are they trying to create a market for wool sweaters?

4 x 90 is 360 days, not 365

What about the fact that 4 x 90 days is not 365 days? It’s only 360. Well, the only country I know of that says you can only spend two 90-day periods there is New Zealand. I expect there are others but I am not sure. NZ is concerned about both not exceeding 90 consecutive days and not exceeding 180 days per 365-day year.

Other countries like Australia and Canada seem to have a 90-day limit at a time, but no total days per year that I am aware of. The Schengen Area says you have to leave at 90 days then not come back into the Area until 90 more days, but your commencing your fifth 90-day period 5 days before the end of the first full year does not appear to be a concern of theirs. Gibraltar says Americans can stay for 180 days.

But what about 183 days?

There is another number of days that is of concern to many countries. That is 183 days. If you divide 365 by 2 you get 182.5 which rounds up to 183. If you spend 183 or more days in a country, you have spent most of the year there. Many countries, maybe most, have the attitude that if you spend most of the year in their country, they own you for making your pay taxes, health care premiums, apply for a residence permit and so on. In Spain, once you hit the 180th day there, you are required to get a Spanish drivers license, or never drive. The license is extremely expensive and time-consuming to get. One Michigan lawyer said it was harder to pass the Spain drivers exam than the Michigan bar. Really! If you keep driving in Spain by claiming to be a tourist who has not yet 180 days, and you have an accident, the insurance company will use your fraud to deny the claim.

Also, the country in which you spend less than half the time—typically the U.S. in the case of my readers—may start canceling your insurance and such.

One rough way you could deal with this would be to spend a week or so in yet another country, like a couple using Australia and New Zealand spending a week in Singapore or Hong Kong or Fiji each year. Then there is NO country in which you spend most of your year. Or you could take a five-day or longer cruise each year and accomplish the same purpose. A round-trip cruise from Auckland, New Zealand to Sydney, Australia looks like it would take about two day each direction, maybe three, so that would fill out your 365 days.

So, do not spend more than 180 days in any country during your refugee-from-America period. If you cross the International date line to go between your two non-U.S. countries, that takes care of another day—going west anyway.

Not spending 183 or more days in any country may make a foreign country seek to lay claim to you. Since the U.S. lays claim to you for income tax purposes no matter how many days you spend in the U.S. your taxes are spoken for. But better you should not mention that you are a permanent 90-day tourist.

Heck, you don’t really know how long you will be out of the country. “For the duration” of the USD hyperinflation emergency is the answer. I figure it will last 6 to 24 months. But as it is going on, the first sentence in my book How to Protect Your Life Savings from Hyperinflation & Depression, 2nd edition applies both to the beginning of the hyperinflation and to its end. That first sentence is

It could happen tomorrow.

Hyperinflation always ends—because it is simply intolerable—and it ends overnight, when the government either introduces a brand new currency which is credibly guaranteed not to be over-“printed” like the last one was, and/or they repeal capital controls thereby letting Americans possess foreign currency and gold and use them to buy stuff here in the U.S. A new currency called the Rentenmark is how Germany ended its hyperinflation in 1924. Termination of capital controls is how Zimbabwe did it in 2009.

Best weather in the world

I had been wondering where the best weather on earth is. The book Living Abroad in Costa Rica says it is in Atenas, Costa Rica according to National Geographic.

I do not like people thinking the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and I think a lot of the talk about traveling out of the U.S. to exotic locations is just that. But you can get some good weather. Based on past research, I would expect the best weather in the world to be at an altitude of about 3,000 to 5,000 feet and in the general vicinity of the equator. Indeed, Atenas is at 2,625 feet and has a latitude of 10 degrees north of the equator. The low temperatures are essentially 65º every day of the year and the highs average about 83º except for March and April when they go up to about 86º. But they have too much rain and too many rainy days for my taste.

Within the U.S., Hawaii has some pretty great weather, plus you can adjust it by going to the windy or non-windy side of the mountains or higher up. But my incentive to write about this is to get away from possible USD hyperinflation and price controls. Because Hawaii is an island thousands of miles from the mainland, I expect they would have to be given some dispensation from the strict price and capital controls I would expect to see in the Continental U.S. But I cannot calibrate or count on that in advance.

Cheap generally means poor

The foreign countries that are advertised as cheap are generally cheap because they are poor. That lowers the labor costs and, somewhat, real estate costs. But the stuff they do not produce has to be imported, plus they have trouble earning foreign currency which is needed to import stuff so they often have very high tariffs which drives up the cost even more than transporting it from afar.

The per capita GDP in Costa Rica was $12,100 in 2011; the U.S., $49,000.

Poor also means generally means lousy infrastructure like roads and government services like police. And it means many thieves who prey on wealthy tourists or expats living in their country. The Costa Rica book says almost all the houses have bars on their windows and doors. Here in the U.S., I regard such bars as evidence that the neighborhood is bad and has high crime. Essentially, the book says that’s why they have them there—using nicer words.

In both Living Abroad in Costa Rica and Living Abroad in Spain, which are written by two different authors, readers are warned again and again about pickpockets, purse snatchers, and general thieves. When my son and I went to London, Paris, and Rome in 2008, we read so many warnings about gypsies and pickpockets that we were highly on guard against them. We had no incidents, but I suspect it was because we were so on guard. For example, when I used an ATM, I had my son stand guard behind me. When gypsies approached us in Paris, we snarled at them and immediately walked away with our heads on a swivel looking for the accomplices that were supposed to steal from us while the first gypsy distracted us. In Rome, they were unbelievable with infants whom they were almost mistreating to get our attention and sympathy or something. We snarled at their speaking to us and speeded up walking away from them. In Hong Kong a tout attached himself to us and we had to complain to the hotel staff about their letting him into our room. We only got rid of the guy, whom we thought worked for the hotel, when we saw he was trying to get us into a car with a white license plate. I had read a guide book that warned against cars with white license plates—thank God.

We experienced none of this nonsense nor were warned much about it it Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. To the book authors, this is part of the “adventure.” I think it’s total bullshit. If you have to put up with it because you can’t afford more law-abiding countries, then I guess you had better do as we did in Paris and Rome and take all the precautions and then some. My middle son took a Spanish course in Barcelona one summer, and had to fight off a pickpocket once. A friend of my wife had the hotel bell hop take her stuff to the room, also in Barcelona, including her laptop, which was stolen before it got to the room. The hotel staff said, “Tough.” Living Abroad in Spain says that if you are a street crime victim, and you tell a nearby cop, he will likely shrug his shoulders as if to say, “That’s life.” Living Abroad in Costa Rica says if you are burglarized at your home and call the cops, they will often require you to send a cab for them at your expense, round trip, to get them to visit your home and look into the crime.

In other words, you sort of get what you pay for in most of these low-cost countries.

Try living in a bad neighborhood in the U.S. first if you are tempted to think it’s a good idea to do it in another country

As I was reading this Costa Rica book, which excuses crime and other problems one page after another, I was thinking that you could do a sort of test of whether you wanted to live in Costa Rica by finding a U.S. neighborhood with lots of Costa Ricans—one with bars on the windows and doors, high crime, potholed roads, reckless drivers, etc. You would be very close to civilization if you needed to get away from the Costa Rica experience, but you could save the air fare and see how much you liked it.

I expect few Americans would want to do that, but I sense that the same situation in Costa Rica rather than South Central LA is cool and cute and quaint and supposed to be accepted as a wonderful adventure.

I do not find that logical.

Pets

Taking pets to other countries can be done, but it sounds like a major hassle. I am not going to get into here. You’ll have to investigate that on your own.

Transparency International corruption ratings

You can see the TI corruption ratings map at http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results/. It ranks Costa Rica, for example, 49th in the world. The U.S. for comparison, is 19th. And, indeed, there are a couple of times in the Costa Rica book where the author admits that Costa Ricans…I’m searching for the right words here. The author lives there and has for many years. She basically says that if you are a stickler for calling a spade a spade and such, you will not be very popular there. Like honesty is considered a form of rudeness. Page 211 of that book sort of depicts the whole Costa Rican society as being like bad U.S. politicians. Nothing is their fault and if you ever say it is, even when it really is, you are on their enemies list forever. Lovely. And we have to pay them to live there?

Page 52 of Living Abroad in Costa Rica says:

To North Americans, who often value honesty above harmony, the Costa Rica method of preserving accord and personal honor can sometimes look a lot like lying. [Costa Ricans] don’t much care for our version of honesty, however, thinking it clumsy and rude.

Ah! So Costa Ricans are the like the U.S. military lifers who sign false documents daily in between patting themselves and their fellow on the back for having so much more honor than civilians. Not my crowd. http://www.johntreed.com/militaryhonor.html

That strikes me as extremely unappealing. My personal honor code is: Tell the truth. Keep your promises. And treat others as you want to be treated. Costa Ricans, according to the author, are pretty good on the last one, but apparently not real fond of being a “fanatic” about the first two. So that TI map means if you go to a country where the color is reddish, you are going to encounter a generally lower regard for honesty and promise keeping.

To me, that’s a bit of a deal killer. But then I could not stand the dishonesty in the Army and hundreds of thousands of guys who saw the same things I did made the Army a career and went along with that themselves. No accounting for taste and although honesty is supposedly a universal virtue, the truth is it is a matter of personal taste for a whole heck of a lot of people. Indeed, I surmise the people who write these live-abroad books are proud of their worldly acceptance of lower standards of honesty and road maintenance and a lot of other things, like those who scoffed at criticizing Bill Clinton for his sexual escapades. We should think more like the French, we are told. They don’t care about such things. So we shouldn’t either. Pardon, monsieur. Je suis Americain whether you like it or not.

Honest countries

Well, I will care about what I want to care about and you should, too. If honesty and promise keeping matter to you, you should probably go to the less corrupt countries during your 90-day tourist visa escapes. Since rule of law, a related habit, is the main determinant of prosperity around the world, you will generally find that honest countries have a higher cost of living and standard of living and lower cost-of-living countries have lower integrity standards. Unlike the live-abroad book authors, I will not tell you how to think about it or whether to accept it. I am just pointing out that’s the way it is. You can make an informed choice with that knowledge.

Here is a list of the top 26 honest countries according to TI: