FINANCE WITHOUT THE NONSENSE
Building an emergency fund is a crucial part of financial planning regardless of whether or not you’re an expat. It is one of the foundations of the ‘Financial Planning Pyramid’ that need to be in place before you even begin to look at investing and retirement planning. You can read about the ‘Financial Planning Pyramid’ in this post. What is an emergency fund? An emergency fund is basically a bank …
If you don’t track your monthly income and expenditure, you’re not alone – it is estimated that less than half of all working people in the Western world ever bother to budget. (Asia is a different case.) But if you’re currently living as an expat and you’re in a position where you could potentially get ahead financially, it makes sense to set up a budget and track your finances in …
The issue of debt is not something from which expats are excluded. There is a common belief that all expats are earning great money and are very secure financially, so it might surprise some people to hear that I have met many expats on a professional level over the years with quite alarming amounts of debt. And this is debt racked up both before and after becoming an expat and …
Anyone can make mistakes that cost them financially and we, as expats, are not immune either. In fact, there are often more pitfalls to negotiate when you are living as an expat than when you are back home. As with so many things in life, a lot of potential issues can be avoided with some preparation, so I have compiled my Top 7 Financial Expat Mistakes in order to help …
There’s a term called ‘lifestyle creep’, which is used to describe the situation when somebody’s living costs increase with (and sometimes extend beyond) rises in their take-home pay. You’re making more, but you’re also spending more. Things that were formerly luxuries are now seen as necessities and coupled with the modern culture of instant gratification, it becomes easy to fall into a spending trap. I think it is a natural …
If you have decided that you need some help with your expat financial planning, knowing where to begin to find a good expat adviser can be a daunting task. There is no shortage of information available online, but the difficulty is, sometimes there’s just too damn much information. Filtering through it all can be a tedious and time-consuming task to say the least. And more often than not, you’ll come …
Offshore banking might be something you only associate with the super-rich and highly-sophisticated investors, but the fact is, most of us can open such an account when living and working away from home and the process is actually relatively straightforward. What is an offshore bank account? An offshore bank account, which is often also referred to as an international bank account, is simply a bank account that is not domiciled …