The following transcript was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Hugo: Welcome to everyone who’s joining. We will wait a couple of minutes, give everyone time to come in before we get started. I’m here today with Shane Clark from Euro American Financial Advisors. Where are you today, Shane?
Shane: I’m in Spain.
Hugo: Have you been living there a while?
Shane: I’ve been here going on eight years now. I’ve been an expat almost 18 years, living in Spain for about eight. I started in the UK—I had my fill of the rain and we moved south.
Hugo: Right, yes. You can see I’m well wrapped up in the UK. I can see your short sleeve. Good call. Where are you from originally?
Shane: From Detroit, in the US originally. Michigan—worked there for a few years and then moved over to the UK in Glasgow.
Hugo: Goodness. So I should specify Scotland.
Shane: Yes, still the UK just about, but definitely the deep end weather-wise. Some good years there, but the weather certainly wasn’t one of the redeeming qualities.
Hugo: What took you abroad in the first place? It’s always interesting—what takes people abroad?
Shane: They usually say work or love. For me, it started as work. I went to do a master’s degree—I got quite interested in currency trading and what’s called the carry trade, when you borrow from one country with a low interest rate and then invest in a country with a higher interest rate in the bond market.
The school that I went to had a pretty good program in currency trading, at least I thought. I wanted to do that, so I left my job, moved overseas, and then I stayed for love. Here I am 18 years later.
Hugo: Congratulations, by the way. I know you have a new family arrival. Thanks for making the time for this.
Shane: Yes, thank you. We have our third daughter. You can see the bags under my eyes are serious. If I have a long pause today, it’s not normal—it’s just a lack of sleep. Thanks for doing this.
Hugo: Let’s give people another minute to join. Lots of people are still joining. We can see EAFA (Euro American Financial Advisors) in the background. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the firm?
Shane: We’re headquartered in and licensed with the Spanish investment authorities. We can passport our license under MiFID to 11 different countries, mostly Western Europe. We added Greece as well because we like Greece—it’s a nice destination. It’s got an interesting visa right now as well, so it’s attracting more and more people in recent years.
Hugo: Excellent. Well, let’s get started. I’ve just got a little intro to read here and then I’ll hand over.
Hello, welcome everyone to day two of the 2025 US Expats Financial Conference, sponsored by Expat Focus, the web’s favorite destination for anyone moving or living abroad, and Wise, the leading provider of fast, low-cost international money transfer services and multicurrency accounts for individuals and businesses.
We have a great schedule consisting of nine sessions over three days, covering multiple aspects of financial information for Americans living abroad with perspectives from some of the world’s leading experts in their fields.
Today is the second day of the conference, and for this, our second session of the day, I’m delighted to be joined by Shane Clark, President of Euro American Financial Advisors, who will be discussing financial planning considerations for Americans living abroad in 2025.
Before we start, please bear in mind that the information presented is for general educational purposes only, and you should always seek your own personalized financial advice. While the conference is free to attend, if you’d like to leave a tip for the organizers, you can do so using the PayPal link I’ll drop into the chat window at the foot of the screen.
Shane will be answering your questions at the end, so please add them in the Q&A popup at the foot of the screen throughout whenever you think of them, and we’ll try to answer them all, time permitting. Without further ado, over to you Shane.
Shane: Thank you, Hugo. Thank you for having me and thank you for organizing the conference. Thank you to all the attendees. I’m going to try to have some useful information today. Let me share my screen here—I’ve got a presentation prepared.
Here we go. A little bit of background on myself and the firms. We have two firms. Our mothership, if you will, is called International Asset Management. It’s located just outside San Francisco in California. It’s been around 22-plus years, founded by my business partner, Tom Zachystal, and it caters to US expats—Americans living abroad in any country in the world.
With the relationship with this firm, the US firm does the portfolio management on the accounts, the trading, and then our Spanish entity—we set up around four years ago to focus on our existing clients living in Europe and for new clients as well. We’re licensed with the Spanish investment authorities, headquartered in normally sunny Seville.
We provide the investment advice and financial planning from this firm. A little bit of background on myself: I’m originally from the US, from Detroit. I’ve been an expat for 18 years now, living in Spain for around eight.
We’re not only looking at investment advice with the firm, but we also have relationships with people on the tax side for the US returns, for your local returns as well. Help with real estate—we can put you in touch with anyone else you might need.
Jumping into why is it so complicated being a US expat? Where did all these problems arise from? Really the center of the little pie chart here is citizenship-based taxation. The US is one of two countries in the world that still has citizenship-based taxation. That means wherever you live in the world, if you’re from the US, you’re still going to have to file a tax return in the US every year.
Let’s look at an example. If you’re from the US and you move to Spain, you’re going to pay taxes in Spain. Once you become a tax resident in June, file an extension for the US until October 15th, and then you’ll file a return in the US before October 15th.
What you’re going to use is either a foreign tax credit or the foreign earned income exclusion. That means in the joint tax treaty, you’re not going to be double taxed usually. That’s how it works. Most countries have residency-based taxation. Hugo, for example, is from the UK—if he were to move to Spain, he’d just be paying taxes in Spain. But the US has their own system.
The next one is FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It’s quite a mouthful. That originated around 2010, and it was to limit people hiding money abroad, people not reporting foreign assets, avoiding taxation, things like that.
The idea is that financial institutions need to collect information from you when you open an account, and then they need to report that to the various tax authorities. If you move to Germany, you open an account in Germany—if you can, a lot of banks and brokers won’t work with you—but if you can, then that institution needs to report to the German tax authorities and the US tax authorities.
This is one of the reasons why US brokers won’t work with you anymore. A lot of people who come to us receive a letter—Wells Fargo told me, “Hey, now that I’ve become an expat, they’re not going to work with me anymore.” That’s because of FATCA. It’s just too much compliance for such a small portion of their revenue to maintain a department to manage this. Places like Fidelity, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch—these firms typically won’t work with you once you tell them that you’re becoming an expat. That’s why we’ve specialized in this.
FBAR is the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts. This is a form that you have to file every year for your US taxes. If you have over $10,000 abroad, cumulatively across multiple accounts—you can have $5,000 in one, $6,000 in another, that’s still over $10,000—you have to report that to the US IRS every year.
PFIC—this is an important one—Passive Foreign Investment Companies. When you invest your money, if you choose to do it abroad with a foreign bank or brokerage account, they’re probably going to put you in funds, mutual funds, or exchange-traded funds locally, which are going to be called PFICs because they’re passive foreign investment companies.
They’re going to be distributing dividends, and it’s going to be treated negatively and punitively on your US tax returns every year. Our tax advisor friends tell us that to complete the PFIC form for each PFIC you have—if you have a portfolio of 10, they have to do one for each—it takes 40 hours to complete, and they’re going to bill you the whole time for their work.
Also, you’re charged a penalty in the US every year, and it can be as high as the ordinary income rate on any gains in the fund that you have to pay out every year.
The next one is MiFID—Markets in Financial Instruments Directive. There was MiFID I, which is an EU law EU-wide for all the member states stating what the financial regulations are. Then there was MiFID II, and now MiFID III is going to come out either in 2025 or 2026. It states what your rights are as a client and what our responsibilities are as a firm.
Firms who are not regulated or licensed in the EU don’t have to comply with MiFID. We do, and it’s an additional layer of information but also protection to you as a client.
The last one is PRIIPs—Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance-based Products. If you’ve done some research looking online to see what types of products you can buy, you’ve probably come across that you can’t buy US exchange-traded funds once you live abroad. This is why.
PRIIPs states that if a fund, a US exchange-traded fund, is being offered to somebody in the EU, it has to have a Key Information Document, a KID statement. The problem is these US exchange-traded funds can’t produce this document. It’s against the rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission because they’re forecasting performance. The SEC says you can’t do that. So they don’t produce this, and there’s no way they can offer you these exchange-traded funds.
As a retail client, you’re left with having to have an all-stock portfolio. There’s a solution—I’ll tell you later.
Questions I think you should ask yourself if you’ve moved abroad or you’re looking to move abroad and you have a financial advisor in the US: if they’re a US-centric financial advisor, what value do they add to you?
What do they currently do for you? Do they invest your accounts? Do they provide tax optimization advice—invest in a 529 plan or an IRA or a Roth, or rollover, different things like that? They might have questions for you as a client, like, “Have you thought of X, Y, and Z?”
When you move abroad, there’s a whole other layer of complications. Then you have to ask yourself: is my previous advisor licensed to have clients in the country I’m moving to?
If you live in the US, you have a US-centric focused advisor, and you move to Spain, for example, you have someone who understands the Spanish aspects—taxes, investing products—but then as an American, the issue is the cross-border element. There’s three pieces in play: one country’s law, the other country’s, and then the elements of how they interact together.
What we do, what we specialize in and have set up our two firms for, is to offer cross-border investment advice. We offer investment advice on how to structure your investment portfolio to optimize the tax situation, understanding the joint tax treaty between the two countries, and then maximize your returns at your given level of risk.
Something else we do is coordinate with your financial team. If you have a complicated situation—you’re from the US, you live in Germany, you’ve got assets in the UK, you have people that you’re going to leave money to who live in a fourth country—this is quite complicated. To get it all right, you need parties working together. You need your US CPA, your local tax advisor, and estate planning attorney all coordinating with your investment advisor as well. That’s something we do.
Also, we have knowledge—years of doing this, we’ve seen a lot of different situations. We know questions to ask—maybe your lawyer, your CPA, your tax advisor might not know—because we’ve seen a similar situation before and we learned from it. We thought, “Ah, next time we do this we’ll know this key information that saved people lots of money.”
The other service we offer is financial planning. We create three personalized financial statements: a balance sheet, statement of cash flow, and an income statement. We incorporate any goals or life events coming up and we project it all into the future.
We can have different milestones—retirement, through retirement, maybe five years before retirement—and we can run different scenarios to get an idea of the probability of you achieving those goals given your level of assets.
When you move abroad, it’s very important to have a cross-border advisor. In our case, our firm EAFA has a MiFID license with the Spanish investment authorities, and we can passport to 10 other countries outside of Spain.
In my case, I have the European Financial Planning designation, which is like the CFP in the US—Certified Financial Planner—except it’s on the EU side. My partner Tom in the US has the CFA—Chartered Financial Analyst—and the CFP—Certified Financial Planner. Between the two of us, we’re specialized in each country and the cross-border element. Also, we’re expats as well, so we’ve seen all of these issues personally and lived them ourselves. We understand the frustrations.
Something else we do—I won’t stay too long on this one—is a checklist. When you move abroad, there are issues before you move that you need to get right, just after you move, and then ongoing issues. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s something that when clients first come on board, we like to go through to make sure they haven’t missed something.
For example, selling a house. Different countries in Europe have different rules on capital gains for primary residence sales. Spain, for example—if you were to sell your house after you become a tax resident in Spain, you are going to pay capital gains on it in Spain, whereas usually you probably wouldn’t have in the US. You want to avoid that.
The best thing is to speak with an immigration attorney or a tax attorney here on what your options are. If you didn’t know that and you’ve already moved and you sold your house, you have some options. If you reinvest in a new primary residence within 18 months—there’s lots of these little rules that make a big difference on the tax side.
We like to go through this checklist to make sure everybody’s aware of different things that you wouldn’t necessarily know about living in the US.
Now we’re going to do top five financial issues for expats: cross-border financial planning and investing, custody—what to do with your money—tax issues both domestic and in their country of residency, some portfolio considerations, we’ll talk about all of the myriad elements around currency—how to avoid risk, best way to move it—and then some portfolio considerations or pitfalls to avoid.
This first one, if we’re looking at financial planning: a financial plan is a comprehensive look at your current and financial future. The plan has two parts. One is a numbers part—we create the three financial statements, we project them into the future. We can also run different scenarios.
Everyone has these questions: is it better for me to rent or to buy? Is it better for me to live in the US for five years and then move over, or to live over in Spain now? What do I do about Social Security?
We can do a lot with the financial planning software. By no means is it magic, but we can run a lot of different scenarios. We can change the tax codes and see which jurisdiction makes more sense and help you make a decision based on that.
The non-numbers side is—oftentimes people ask me, “Do I have enough money to retire?” That’s more numbers-driven. “Does it make sense for me to move to Faro”—that’s always going to be a personal decision, but we can provide a foundation based on the numbers to help you make that decision.
Or to know peace of mind—you’ve got enough money to retire. Or if you don’t, we need to make changes. It gives us information on the investment side—maybe we need to be more aggressive with your investment portfolio, maybe we need to be more conservative.
Some examples: buying a property versus renting, how to fund children’s educational accounts in the future, what to do with a planned inheritance coming, maybe estate planning—those types of issues we can help with.
Second issue is custody. What I mean by custody is where your accounts are going to be held. For example, if you have your accounts with Merrill Lynch, they’re custodied in the US at Merrill Lynch. So where to put assets.
It’s common for people to think, “If I’m moving abroad, I should take my assets abroad,” or “If I’m living in the EU, I should have my assets in euros because that’s where my expenses are.” These are pretty common questions people have, and we work through the different risk and rewards of each.
Custody: if you’re from the US, you always have to keep your retirement accounts—IRAs, 401(k)s, Roths—those have to stay in the US. There’s only two custodians who will work with you as a US expat. I guess there’s three now—StoneX is a new one—but the two longstanding ones are Charles Schwab and Interactive Brokers. There are benefits to each of them.
Interactive Brokers—you can have multicurrency accounts, so it’s nice to exchange money and also to wire out in euros. Charles Schwab has Schwab Domestic and Schwab International. Once you move abroad, you go into Schwab International.
Then there’s two other layers. There’s a retail client, which means you open the account yourself and manage it yourself, or an institutional client. If you’re an institutional client—remember earlier when we were talking about PRIIPs not being able to hold US exchange-traded funds? Well, this is the loophole.
The way Schwab views PRIIPs is they’re not offering US exchange-traded funds to you in Europe. If you work with a US advisor, they’re offering them to the US advisor. What that means to you is you can hold US exchange-traded funds by working with a US advisor because you’re an institutional client of Schwab.
Both of these are much, much less expensive than foreign options. If you go into a bank in Europe and open an account and ask to do investments, the fees from the funds, the custody, the platform, the advisor, the management—it’s probably going to be around 5 to 6% per year.
Whereas keeping your money in the US, the fees are much lower. With Schwab, for example, there’s no platform fees and they don’t charge you for trading. The only way they make money on your account is on your cash balance. Like any traditional bank, they don’t pay out interest—they loan that money out. That’s how they make money. What we do is keep a low cash balance and invest in a money market fund. Your expenses are quite low.
You have to think about why you are questioning moving your money out of the US. If it’s to get access to foreign markets, we can do that from the US. If it’s to get access to the euro, we can do that in the US. If you want to have your money diversified from the US, you have to think, “Why am I doing that?”
In the US we have SIPC insurance if something happens to the bank account. A lot of foreign brokers don’t have that. Our advice: keep your money in the US.
Also, tax reporting—this is huge. Every year you have to file the US tax return. If you have a taxable account, it’s going to produce a 1099 every year. If it’s a US-custodied account, you give that to your US CPA to file your taxes. Foreign accounts aren’t going to have that. It’s going to be a lot more muddied when you have to file these returns. I already mentioned the SIPC, the reporting—if you get audited, you want all of these forms. It just makes it a much cleaner process.
When we’re looking at tax issues, a lot of people when they come to us say, “I’ve used my tax guy for years. I trust them. I don’t want to change.” That’s totally normal.
The issue is most of the time coming from the US, your tax advisor is going to be a US-focused tax advisor. But the key part is someone who understands the joint tax treaty—how things are treated on both sides. Especially the first year, you want to make sure that you speak to someone who specializes not only as an expat tax preparer, but specifically, say, Germany to the US, and they understand that country’s joint tax treaty.
There’s usually one or two in each country in the EU who does tax filings for US citizens on the US tax return.
Things to keep in mind: you have to file that every year. And then you also have to file in your country of residence, which in Europe usually is where you’re going to pay your taxes. Avoid PFICs—don’t buy foreign funds.
Something that we do specifically is we often use an all-stock portfolio because we can manage capital gains and the taxes, dividends and interest, depending on how they’re taxed in your country of residency. We can manage them better than funds. We manage all of our portfolios in a very tax-efficient way, which is a very different approach than necessarily used by US-centric advisors, but also it adds a lot of value.
Portfolio considerations: currency. If you’ve always lived in the US, you’ve only had to deal with US dollars. Now you move to Europe, all of your expenses are in euros, all of your investments are in US dollars. This is a risk, and it’s something that you need to manage. There are lots of ways to do it.
You can manage it directly, where you physically own euros, or indirectly, where you own companies that derive their revenue from the eurozone. Lots of different approaches there, but it needs to be something that is addressed.
Moving money—what’s the best way to move money? If you go to a bank, it’s typically going to be 3% of the total that you move, plus a wire fee. If you go to a currency broker, it’s usually going to be between 0.3 and 0.5%, so half of 1% of the money you transfer. If you go with Interactive Brokers, it could be as low as a quarter of 1%.
There are lots of ways to do it. Depending on how frequently and how much money you’re going to move, Wise is a very good currency broker. We have a partnership with them—they sponsored the event as well. They do a good job. If you have a large amount, you can now call in and they can walk you through the transaction themselves.
Also, they’re great because they have two different bank accounts within the app. You can have a basket that’s a US dollar account with US dollar banking codes and account numbers, and then also for euros or pounds—wherever you live in the EU. That’s quite nice.
As a recommendation, we advise investing in a diversified multicurrency portfolio of global assets. Oftentimes from a portfolio management standpoint, when we see people coming over from the US, it’s S&P 500—mostly US companies, which have done great in the past 10 years. But right now we’re also at all-time highs. Whenever we see that, it’s time to be a little bit more cautious. Our portfolios are typically global portfolios, so we have much more diversification there.
Speaking of diversification—different types of assets. What types of assets can you hold? If you are living in the EU and you don’t have access to mutual funds anymore and you have limited access to exchange-traded funds, then it does tend to be an all-stock portfolio with some exchange-traded funds from the US as well.
How do we manage risk? There are lots of different risks that you would’ve already had—market risk coming from the US—but then now there’s the currency element, the cross-border element. We need to look at expenses.
What we do when we look at expenses is—this is important—you need to take a holistic view of expenses. If you look at someone’s advisory fee versus another firm’s advisory fee—if one of them is 1.5% and one of them is 0.8%, you think, “Ah, I’ll go with 0.8%. It’s much lower.”
It might be much lower, but what about the other fees? If the 1.5% has an all-stock portfolio, there’s no embedded fees there. If the 0.8% has a money manager who charges 1.5%, then this one’s actually more expensive. We always say look at all the fees, ask your advisor about this.
What can you control? You can control risk and fees in terms of portfolio management. It’s good to have a conversation with your advisor and see what they’re going to do. The things that you can control and we can control are those things. The market—unfortunately we can’t control it. We can have a good strategy, but we can’t control what’s going to happen. We can control tax management as well.
We advise building a long-term strategy and sticking to it. Whenever the market bottoms out, everybody panics. That’s when we say, let us take the stress of that—you stick to the strategy.
Here are some questions if you’re thinking about hiring a new cross-border investment advisor—put them through the ringer. Questions are:
- Are you a MiFID-compliant advisor? A lot of advisors are only in the US—they don’t have a license in the EU. They’re not licensed to work in the EU. It’s a good question.
- What regulatory body are you licensed under?
- How do I check? Can I see if you’ve got things in your past that I should know about?
- What is your background?
- What are your licenses?
- What are your designations?
- What’s your investment philosophy?
Another important one is: how do you get paid? Are you pushing products, or are you independent? These are both very important. Do you have performance-based fees? I would ask your advisor all of those things.
Another important one is: who are your clients? Are they expats? Are they institutions? Are they high-net-worth clients? These are important for what type of experiences your advisor’s going to have.
If you’re a high-net-worth individual and you’re working with an advisor who doesn’t have experience working with high-net-worth individuals, they’re probably not going to have access to some of the products you might be accustomed to, some of the solutions. If you have concentrated positions or things like that, they might not be able to help you.
Also, being an expat specialist. Things like: how do you manage currency risk? In Spain we have wealth tax—what are your methods for optimizing wealth tax? All these types of things should come up.
What level of service can you expect? Is it an annual meeting? Do you get statements delivered quarterly? How frequently can you call your advisor? These are important questions.
We often get clients from a large institution where they have an initial sales call with an advisor who understands what’s going on, and then they offload all their clients to a salesperson who just doesn’t understand the investment cross-border aspects. They just answer basic questions in email.
I think it’s important to know what is the life process here. If you’re working with Shane, am I going to be able to call you and work with you, or am I going to get sent to somebody else? Whoever you’re thinking about working with, it’s important to ask those questions.
Mistakes to avoid:
Don’t buy PFICs. These passive foreign investment companies—they just create a problem, and there’s no reason to buy them.
Non-compliant US insurance. This is an important one. If you have a life insurance policy written in the US, does that cover you if you live in Portugal? Important to ask your provider, and maybe a lawyer or an estate planning person. Also, health insurance. A lot of times people think, “Oh, I’ve got health insurance in Germany. I’m going to go back to the states and visit my grandkids.” Make sure that it covers you.
Over-investing in your country of residence. This one isn’t as common, but sometimes people think, “Oh, I’m moving to Italy. I’m going to invest in Italian companies.” That’s a concentration risk—you’re not diversified enough if you do that.
Not understanding the underlying currency exposure of your portfolio. Sometimes people think if I’m in the EU I need to own euros to be diversified. But this is what I was mentioning with the indirect currency exposure—if you own companies in the EU and those are denominated in your account in dollars, they’re still getting all of their revenue from the euro. So you’re indirectly having euro exposure.
Contribution to a non-qualified foreign pension. This is more of a question for your tax advisor, but it could have these passive foreign investment companies—PFICs. Avoid that.
Not using an expat-specific tax preparer. I already mentioned it’s important to have somebody who understands the joint tax treaty. That’s the paramount part of it.
Paying high fees on foreign investments which you could have bought in the US for less. Again, just invest—keep your accounts custodied in the US.
Failure to report foreign assets on tax returns. If you use a US-specific tax preparer, they won’t miss that.
Failure to properly report on US returns a foreign business entity. This one gets a lot of people. You move overseas, you set up a company in the country you live in. You don’t think you have to report that on your US returns. You do.
Do nothing is another common one. Everybody feels overwhelmed. It’s too complicated. Everybody in our profession agrees it’s far too complicated, but nevertheless, that’s the state of the world. It’s completely normal to feel overwhelmed, but doing nothing isn’t the best solution. Speaking to people who know what they’re doing, who are professionals on this, and taking it in chunks.
In summary: do some research on your situation. Do some Googles—but now I guess it’s more ChatGPTs or whatever else you do to find information—and then make informed decisions. Speak with different people, see who you feel comfortable with. The most important thing is you enjoy being an expat. It’s an adventure and we’re lucky to have it.
That wraps up my presentation. I think we’ve got some time for questions.
Q&A Session
Hugo: Thanks very much, Shane. That was a great presentation, really informative. Got lots of questions, so we’ll just dive in. For our audience, just like to say if your question’s tax-related—a direct tax question—perhaps reach out to a tax advisor. We have three during the conference: taxsamaritan.com, myexpattaxes.com, and onlinetaxman.com. Let’s focus on the financial planning questions that have come in.
Let’s jump in with a relatively straightforward one: Are foreign pension funds considered PFICs?
Shane: It depends. I should also preface—I can’t give tax advice—but it depends on what’s in the joint tax treaty between those two countries, but then also what’s in the pension fund.
In Germany, for example, there is a type of life insurance pension account, private pension account that isn’t considered a PFIC. But here, for example, they’re often PFICs in Spain. I think it’s important to ask your tax advisor—or we could look at it and see if it would be or not. Usually public pensions are not PFICs. It’s going to be private ones typically.
Hugo: Shelley asks: What currency risk hedges might you recommend for dollar-euro risks?
Shane: It depends. It’s more complicated than just what are the solutions. We need to know what is the timeframe, what are you planning to use this money for? Then we can have a conversation about the possible solutions.
If you’re looking at buying a house in the next three months, we’d be much more aggressive on protecting that exchange rate than if you’re saying you want to retire in 20 years.
The three basic options: you can go aggressive with having some type of contract—a futures or a forward contract to lock in a rate. That’s the most aggressive, but it’s also the most expensive. If you do that, you’re going to pay a lot of money to lock in that rate today, so you wouldn’t want to do it for a long time period.
Indirect currency exposure, which I mentioned before, and then direct is owning euros—converting the currency, owning a percentage in euros.
Hugo: Question about issues with US banks—and I think the same applies to brokerage firms. What solutions are there for having a UK address versus a US one, and how to deal with that situation?
Shane: There’s a couple issues there. If you use a US address on your investment accounts and your bank, if you don’t tell them that you moved abroad, the issues that might arise are state taxes.
If you live in a state that has a state tax and that account produces a 1099 every year, that’s going to go to the state tax authorities and they might call you up and say, “John Smith, why aren’t you paying taxes?” That’s one of the issues.
The other one is not too many work with expats. If you call them up and tell them, “Hey, I’m moving abroad,” then it’s hard to open a new bank account.
There are a few options. The State Federal Credit Union maintains bank accounts for expats. I also believe that United Nations Federal Credit Union does, and then Wise—you can open up a Wise account and have a US and a foreign account that you can exchange currencies in as well. Those are the big options there.
Hugo: Someone says: Is it true anyone designated as a professional investor can buy US ETFs while a resident in Spain, and that Spanish tax authorities don’t differentiate between US or EU-based ETFs when calculating tax liability?
Shane: They don’t differentiate. Say the last part again.
Hugo: Is it true that Spanish tax authorities don’t differentiate between US and EU-based ETFs for tax liability?
Shane: That’s much more complicated. I’ll answer the first part: that is true. If you have a firm designate you as a professional investor, then you can hold US exchange-traded funds.
The second part—what you’re asking is, EU funds often are distributing, meaning they’re paying out dividends and interest every year, or they’re accumulating, which means they’re holding that in and it just grows tax-free. Whereas US funds, we don’t have that distinction—they typically just pay out dividends and interest when they’re accrued.
How the Spanish tax authorities view that is more complicated, and I would leave that to a tax professional.
Hugo: Minimum dollar requirements to be a client with yourselves?
Shane: Our minimum is $200,000 assets with us.
Hugo: Rich says: I’ve struggled to get a US account of any kind because I’m no longer a US resident. Are there banks or saving platforms that will work with me despite not being a resident?
Shane: Yes, there are. The credit union Wise, which I just mentioned. And then on the investment side: Interactive Brokers, Charles Schwab, StoneX—those are all expat-friendly custodians as well.
Hugo: Somebody in Switzerland just said: I just bought ETFs on Schwab International. Is that legal?
Shane: I’m not sure. I’d have to know more details on that. It’s probably legal, but I would have to see how you’re going to be taxed—that’s probably more of the question. I’d have to know what nationality you are and all those types of questions.
Hugo: Can you look after clients in the UK?
Shane: Kind of. We’re not licensed in the UK. If you come to us—if you’re an unsolicited client—then we can look after you. If you’d prefer working with somebody who specialized in the UK, we can refer you to somebody as well.
Hugo: If somebody’s a dual citizen, does that complicate their financial situation?
Shane: They can. I mean, it isn’t necessarily complicated, but there’s different points. Taxes drive everything. When things get complicated, people are usually referring to their taxes.
If you’re a dual citizen with the US, there’s probably going to be quite a few additional layers of complications because you’re going to have to have US taxes—there’s no way around that. So you’re looking at estate tax versus inheritance tax, filing a tax return in both places.
If you’re a US citizen, you’re living in Spain, for example, and you’re thinking, “I can get citizenship through Italy from my grandparent”—that doesn’t necessarily complicate your tax situation further than it already is, if that’s the question. But I would speak to an attorney about that.
Hugo: How would you recommend transferring 529 funds to adult children?
Shane: That’s probably more of an individual case. We’d have to see where they’re a tax resident as well, and more information on that specific one.
Hugo: Does your firm provide advice-only services rather than managing investments?
Shane: Our fee structure is based on the investments we advise on. Our clients are typically in it for the long haul. We charge based on assets we advise on, on an annual basis. We don’t do a one-off fee-based consultation.
Hugo: Can you have clients in Mexico or Colombia?
Shane: The US firm can, yes.
Hugo: You mentioned there are sister firms.
Shane: Yeah, the US firm, International Asset Management in San Mateo, California—they can help US people in those countries.
Hugo: Can you cover Switzerland again?
Shane: It’s that gray area if you come to us, but we work with other partners you can work with in Switzerland as well.
Hugo: Any advice for US-based FAs looking to move to Greece? We would like to continue working with expats.
Shane: Probably reach out to me. We can have a chat on that. That’s a longer conversation.
Hugo: What about life insurance or other insurance products bought abroad? One bank said US persons can, another bank confirmed that US persons can’t own life insurance products abroad. Does that make sense?
Shane: You can. It certainly depends. This is where we go back to the holistic view on fees. Why are you buying the life insurance product and what kind of a product is it?
In the US, there’s term policies where you pay a couple hundred dollars a month and then if you die, your family’s taken care of. That’s a lower cost. It’s not an investment product—it’s a true life insurance product.
Whereas I think probably you’re talking about investment products that are structured in a life insurance wrapper. Those typically have fees between—at least in the EU—between 5 and 9% per year. In some cases, you won’t even pay taxes on the gains for 10 years. But if you’re paying 6 to 9% a year in fees, you’re just going to lose money slowly.
We think it’s very important to take a holistic view on the fees.
Hugo: Do you offer an initial consultation just to review a portfolio?
Shane: We do. We do initial consultations. We could review the portfolio. You could reach out, we could take a look at how you’re currently invested, put together a proposal.
Hugo: There are lots of questions—if we don’t answer them, reach out to Shane directly. The email address is [email protected]. I’ll drop that into the chat.
Is it best to invest in individual global stocks in various currencies for an investment portfolio versus investing in funds?
Shane: You want to be diversified globally. If you open an account with, say, Interactive Brokers, you can trade on global exchanges. You could hold physical stocks denominated in local currencies all over the world. That’s a lot of work, and you’d have to do a lot of research to make sure that you’re buying the right funds, but that’s an option.
Hugo: How much—what percentage of my assets would you suggest keeping out of stock bond markets to be used as an emergency fund or cushion income cushion during market downturns?
Shane: There’s two parts to that. Usually the rule of thumb is six months. Whatever your expenses are for six months, you want to keep that amount of cash—that if something bad happens, you can live for six months before you can find another employment situation.
If you’re retired, keeping six months in cash or something quite liquid isn’t a bad idea.
Hugo: What inheritance planning do you provide for expats who still have TOD accounts in the USA?
Shane: Inheritance planning is quite complicated. We do the financial aspect of that, but the estate planning and tax and legal side of it, you need to speak with tax attorneys and estate planning attorneys—who we can put you in touch with.
Typically how that works is we would form a little financial team where we would work with the attorney, you, and potentially a CPA in the US to make sure that everything is streamlined for your situation.
Hugo: Mitchell says: Do you have any thoughts on how expats living abroad plan for inheritance taxes? I have two children that live abroad with me. Both have dual citizenship.
Shane: It’s pretty situation-specific. I don’t want to go into too much detail because which country you live in makes a big difference. Even in Spain, which region you live in makes a big difference on what the inheritance taxes are.
In general, it’s very complicated. If you come from the US, they tax at the estate level, whereas in many EU countries they tax at the inheritance level—so who’s inheriting the money. It’s also more complicated in the joint tax treaty where the person dies, who’s leaving the money.
For anything like that—the legal aspects—you need to speak to an estate planning attorney who understands the joint tax treaty as well. We know these people.
Hugo: How do I transfer large amounts of money from my US bank to an EU bank or notary for purchasing a home or car and not have to show up in person at my US bank for a wire transfer?
Shane: Using a currency broker is probably the best, easiest way to do it. MoneyCorp, Wise—there’s lots of different ones out there. I would compare rates and see who offers you the best rate.
Essentially what they’re going to do is give you a call. You say, “I want to transfer a million dollars into euros to buy this house.” They give you a quote on how much it’s going to cost in terms of fees, and then they do the transfer for you.
Hugo: Just to say again, Wise is one of the sponsors of the 2025 US Expat Conference and they can help with that over at wise.com.
Stuart says: What about precious metal accounts or physical precious metals held in an allocated segregated offshore account—reportable, or is it just capital gains on sale that would be reportable?
Shane: That’s part of a tax question. I have a view—I won’t go into the tax aspects of it—but we hold around 10% of the portfolio in gold. It evens out excess volatility in the markets and tends to appreciate when there’s a market downturn. It’s a good way to take out some of the volatility.
Hugo: There are lots of questions about different countries—can you help with expats in those countries? The answer is that if you can’t solicit clients in those countries, but if somebody comes to you, you can work with them. These are some European countries you’re not covering—Serbia, for example. We talked about Switzerland and the UK. If you reach out to Shane directly, yes, is the answer.
Mr. Part on ETFs: Can a US person abroad buy all ETFs or just particular ones, and how to know if a certain fund or ETF is SEC approved?
Shane: If you’re living in the EU, generally speaking, the answer is no—you cannot buy US ETFs because of this PRIIPs legislation. The way around it is if you work with Charles Schwab as an institutional client, meaning you also work with a US-based advisor, then Schwab’s view is they’re not offering this ETF to you in the EU—they’re offering it to your advisor in the US.
So you can, if you work with a US-based advisor. If you’re a retail client and you open the account yourself, no you can’t—unless you’re a professional investor. So you have over a high level of assets and you get deemed a professional investor by an EU financial institution.
There’s an EU rule that prevents Americans in the EU buying US ETFs, other than those circumstances I mentioned.
Hugo: Can you offer tips on avoiding inheritance taxes if you’re a resident of France but have IRAs in the US?
Shane: My tip would be speak to an inheritance tax attorney and make sure that you plan ahead of time in case there’s structural changes they advise you to make or things like that.
Hugo: A few people are asking—could they get a copy of your presentation? Email Shane directly. I posted his email in the chat—he’ll be happy to share those.
Someone says: If they live in Spain and it’s a tax question about how they get that information from the Spanish tax authorities about the taxes they paid in Spain so they can file a US tax return?
Shane: You just ask the Spanish tax authorities if you don’t have that information already. Or your accountant in Spain would be able to provide that too. Typically you pay taxes in Spain in June. You file an extension for the US until October 15th, and then you file there. You file in Spain first, and then yeah.
Hugo: What if the American ETFs are in a traditional IRA in the USA—can you then buy them as an American living in Europe?
Shane: Usually, yes.
Hugo: Would being an institutional investor with Schwab once abroad allow you to hold just US ETFs or also US mutual funds?
Shane: Mutual funds, no. Mutual funds have to be registered where they’re offered, and none of the mutual funds from the US are registered in the EU. So it’s just going to be ETFs.
Hugo: Do you have clients living in Canada?
Shane: With the US firm, we do. Yep.
Hugo: I use my US credit card to pay my international expenses. Is this cost-effective or is there a better way?
Shane: We’d have to see what the rates are on your credit card. There’s going to be two things: what do they charge you for converting currencies? That should be on either your statement or you could call them and ask them.
Hypothetically it would be more expensive if they charge you more than if you were to get a better rate converting dollars to euros and then just spending in your euro-based local bank account.
Wise is—coming back to Wise—they have these multicurrency accounts. You can transfer into US dollars, they convert them cheaply, and you get a debit card you can use abroad. It’s quite a cost-effective way of doing it. They mentioned you don’t want to keep a large balance in that account, but in terms of currency conversion, it’s quite a good solution.
Yeah, they’re very good. I personally use Wise, and then we also recommend using Wise professionally as well.
Hugo: Which 10 EU countries do you work with? Just to state again, those are the countries that you can solicit clients in, but you can work with clients in other countries if they come to you.
Shane: It’s all the countries in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Sweden, and Portugal.
Hugo: A few people are asking—could they get a copy of your presentation? Email Shane directly.
Someone says—they live in Spain and it’s a tax question about if they can get information from the Spanish tax authorities about the taxes they paid in Spain so they can file a US tax return.
Shane: You just ask the Spanish tax authorities, or your accountant in Spain would be able to provide that. Typically you pay taxes in Spain in June. You file an extension for the US until October 15th, and then you file there.
Hugo: The minimum requirement for working with Euro American is $200,000 US. Is that right?
Shane: That’s correct, yeah.
Hugo: Here’s one on the whole topic of this conference. President Trump last year said he was going to end double taxation for expats. We’ve got a couple of presentations on that coming up in the conference. What is your take on that?
Shane: It’s hard to say what’s going to happen with a lot of the things President Trump has discussed. I think it’s important to have a plan that’s going to be future-proofed regardless of what happens based on what Trump does or what he doesn’t do.
In terms of what he could do—it’s a little bit unprecedented in the sense that if you look at traditional methods for solving problems with legislation, Trump doesn’t always use them. So it’s anyone’s guess.
I think it’s important to work with an expat tax advisor for the time being and make sure that you’re compliant in both jurisdictions. And if things change, we’ll be prepared.
Hugo: Someone says: I use my US credit card to pay my international expenses. Is this cost-effective or is there a better way?
Shane: The Wise card—they have these multicurrency accounts. You can transfer in US dollars, they convert them cheaply, and you get a debit card you can use abroad. It’s quite a cost-effective way of doing it.
Hugo: Which 10 EU countries do you work with?
Shane: It’s all the countries in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Sweden, and Portugal.
Hugo: I think we’re on the hour and that’s the majority of the questions—60 questions.
Shane: For all of the attendees, we’re offering a complimentary consultation. If you’re interested, if you have any further questions, you can go to our website, contact us, and you can schedule a call with me. We can walk through your situation in more detail, and I’m happy to help.
Hugo: Just in case there’s an issue with the chat, the email address to get in touch with Shane is [email protected]—that’s EAFA for Euro American Financial Advisors, [email protected].
And with that, thank you very much, Shane, for taking the time. Great presentation. Thank you to everybody for joining us.
We have one more presentation coming up in just under an hour, which is on investment environments and themes for US expats in 2025—continuing similar themes. If you haven’t already registered, you can do so at usexpatconference.com.
Thanks once again, and we hope to see you very soon. Cheers.